searching for words

I watch the news—a lot. Too much, really, but not this week. The death and suffering of so many children is heartbreaking. Coverage of conflict in the Middle East has never been good but what I’ve seen lately is appalling. Normally I watch a number of channels (Sky, DW, Al Jazeera, France 24, NBC, PBS, Amanpour & Friends) so I can see what’s being covered, which story leads, and which countries are being ignored. I keep thinking about Nat Turner’s rebellion and how anxious (mostly White) abolitionists were about Blacks arming themselves and killing enslavers in their fight for liberation. African Americans and Indigenous people here in the US know what it’s like to be called “savage”—and we know what happens when your oppressor declares you to be subhuman. The title of Patrice Cullors’s memoir also keeps coming to mind: When They Call You a Terrorist. It puts you beyond the pale. It makes empathy impossible and critical thinking unnecessary. I’m limiting my news consumption and only following certain folks on social media: Jewish Voice for Peace and Social Justice Books. I appreciate their posting of this link for educators looking for books that affirm the humanity of Palestinians.

It has been a stressful couple of weeks on the book front and I was congratulating myself on not letting the stress manifest as a migraine but apparently I spoke too soon. This is Day 3 and it’s been raining for hours with more rain forecast for tomorrow. Luckily I have a surplus of medication and refilled my prescription so I’d have extra pills to take on my trip. I leave for the UK on Monday and 3 of the 4 books I hoped to publish are now available on Amazon (the paperback editions can be ordered in bookstores). I’ve used KDP for almost ten years (since it used to be CreateSpace) but I won’t be working with them again. Not after they refused to publish Blue Boy until I changed the cover and fixed this “problem.” Can you see it? Neither could I, which is why we wasted two weeks trying to follow their instructions to adjust the book’s margins. I finally wrote an irate email and learned they were holding up publication because the paint in this one illustration doesn’t reach the edge of the page. This so-called problem wasn’t flagged in the paperback; for that edition, they insisted I change the cover design. Now, the paperback and hardcover are the SAME BOOK. So if there’s a problem with one version, it should be flagged in the other. The whole point of self-publishing is to have control over the book-making process but now their reviewers can stop publication for idiotic and inconsistent reasons. Which is just the nudge I needed to part ways with this platform…

I decided to write a poem a day for the month of October; the poems from this past week are fairly grim. But it feels good to be writing again after so many weeks of dealing with annoying administrative stuff. And good things have happened—my sensitivity reader sent me an affirming three-page report on my representation of Kaylee, a transgender teenage girl in The Ship in the Garden. Since I selected the UK as my primary market, I was able to order and ship books to folks in the UK quickly, often for free, and without filling out the customs forms required by USPS. I meant for the libraries to get hardcover copies of Blue Boy but until KDP gives their approval, that can’t happen. At least the paperback got approved in time. I heard some good news last month but wasn’t able to share it until last week: The Enchanted Bridge has been selected for the Illinois Reads Program! That’s one thing I can say about war—it puts your petty problems in perspective and makes you appreciate all that you have…