Do You Have Something To Say? (Change: part 8)

So far each of these posts have dealt with changes that happened in 2015, but this one is dealing with a current change. Some of you might have noticed? Probably not, though, which is why this change is happening.

Let's revisit the topic of blogging. Or, more specifically, commenting.

Since I started my blog way back in... wow! That was five years ago! Suddenly, I don't know how I feel about that...
Anyway...

When I started my blog, it was with a dedication to being interactive and all that goes with it, but that was mostly because the rhetoric around blogging (still) says that that's how you grow your followers and your audience and all of that. And it might be true for when you're first starting out with absolutely zero followers; I don't know. Part of that, the being interactive, at least for me, has included always responding to comments. I've sort of taken some pride in that...

But!

See, the thing is, most people, as in almost all people, who comment never come back to see if the blogger responded. Which is fine... except when people comment with a question or a lead into a discussion but never check back about the answer to the question. That's like when one of my kids (especially my daughter) asks me a question and, while I'm answering it, will start talking about some other subject entirely, usually to some other person. Annoying, to say the least.

What it really all boils down to is a matter of focus. If I want my focus to be my blog, spending lots of time on comments and commenting totally makes sense, but I am not my blog, and that's not supposed to be my focus. The blog is only here to support the writing, and responding to all comments, even if it doesn't take a huge amount of time on an individual basis, is not really profitable. Time-wise, that is. I mean, it doesn't make sense to respond when that response is never going to be seen.

So, from now on, my responses will be... well, let's say "at my discretion." If the comment is interesting or there's a question that I feel is worth answering for its own sake, or if I just feel like it, I'll respond. And I get that that might seem... uncouth to some people, but most people don't comment at all, so it's not going to affect them one way or the other.

It's all about finding what works and finding what works best.
And not doing the same thing over and over again if that thing isn't working.
Change can be good...

All of that to say, "Don't be offended if I don't respond to your comment. It's not you; it's me."

A to Z and the Final Change (Change: part 7)

Okay, so it's probably going a little too far to say that the thing I'm about to talk about was the final change of 2015 (there were also art projects and a multitude of smaller things that got passed over as I was writing this series); in fact, it was one of the earlier changes of the year, but it is the final one I'm going to talk about. The final change of 2015, at any rate.

When I started writing, I chose a very specific style of writing, because I was writing with my kids in mind as part of the audience. In fact, they were my primary audience for The House on the Corner, seeing as how I wrote that book for them. After that, because my kids wanted to be able to read what I was writing, I made sure to keep whatever I was working on kid-friendly. Which is not to say that there aren't mature themes, but my current published works (minus one) were written with my children in mind as part of the audience.

[Fun fact:
Shadow Spinner actually has a 1-star review because of all the sex. All the sex? Did I miss something? I don't remember writing any sex in that book. Like I said, my kids were in mind as part of the audience, so I'm pretty sure I didn't include any sex or anything else that would be inappropriate for a normal 12-year-old. I mean, I've read the book in public schools and there have never been any complaints about me reading "sex" to middle schoolers.]

But speaking of sex...
Oh, wait, I'm not there yet.

I've always had some decidedly adult projects in mind when I started writing, many of those being in various planning stages or beginning phases, right now. It's part of how I work. I do try to stay focused on the actual project(s) I'm working on, though. Theoretically, that's supposed to be Brother's Keeper, the sequel to The House on the Corner, but various things keep sidetracking me from getting that finished. In 2015, it was a deliberate change in tone in my writing.

Basically, I decided to write some things that were not kid-friendly, meaning that I decided to work on some projects that would get at least "R" ratings if they were movies. One of those is a collaboration with another author, one of those is the current novel I'm working on (and am very excited about (but more on that later (much))), and the last of those is my A-to-Z project.

The project for A-to-Z actually came to me back in 2014 and is why I didn't do A-to-Z last year: It wasn't ready. It's still not ready, but I'm not willing to wait another year to start this thing off.

What is it, you ask.

Well...

Actually, I'm going to skip the long explanation and let the product, eventually, stand on its own. Let's just say that I wanted a topic that would lend itself to a series of related short stories. After much thinking, I settled on Angels & Demons. The idea was that there would be a free story each day for and Angel and a Demon for that letter of the alphabet but, well, I haven't finished the stories yet. By a lot. So some days there will be free stories and some days there will only be a brief character description. The stories will only be free the day (and the day after) they are released, though, so be aware ahead of time. And this year is just the Angels (with, maybe, one exception).

But what does that have to do with change? Well, these will be the first (very) adult works I will publish. So far, the people who have had a chance to read any of these have pretty much all responded with, "Wow, this isn't like anything you've ever written before." And they are not like any of the work I have currently available. By a lot.

I hope you will stick around and check them out.

The Dating Change (Change: part 6)

Who here likes dating?
No, I don't mean going on dates; I mean that period in your life when you have no significant other and you are "dating."
No one?
Good, because that's not what I'm talking about.
You wouldn't want to listen to me talk about that anyway except to learn the ways not to do it. It was never my strong suit.

What I am talking about is dating your significant other. That can have it's own special set of challenges. Just by the way in case you haven't figured that out.

My wife and I figured out a long time ago that we needed to set aside time together on a daily basis to keep our relationship strong and stay connected. Probably, as you read this, you're thinking, "Well, of course! Everyone knows that." But, really, how many of you do it?

No, I don't mean that each of you are in the same room together while you both do your own things. No, I am not talking about watching the same TV show together from your separate places while you mindlessly stare. Or even sitting next to each other while you mindlessly stare.
No, I am not even talking about working together on some household DIY project where your attention is on the project and telling your partner how s/he is doing it wrong.
I'm not even talking about going to the movies, because that's usually about as engaging as watching TV together (seriously, guys, ask your women if they consider that a "good" date; I think you're going to be surprised when you get a bunch of "no"s).

What I am talking about is time together when you are actively engaged with your partner.

So, yeah, we do that.
But sometimes even that is not quite enough. Let me explain:

For years, my wife and I have made it a priority to spend time together each evening. Sometimes, that even includes watching a TV show on DVD, but we don't do it mindlessly or ignore each other while we're watching. However, as my daughter has gotten more involved in softball and we spend about eight months of the year with softball practice two to three days a week (mostly on weeknight evenings) plus games and tournaments, our evenings became rather... routine. Which means through 2014 and the first half of 2015, most of what we did was watch a DVD on the nights we were able to do anything because, on softball nights, I generally get in too late for us to have time to do anything significant, including watching a DVD. And, honestly, during softball, I spend a lot of the time just being tired (it's not all because of softball; there's also the part where I get up at 5am everyday).

As I said in the first post, I'm pretty good with routine. My wife? Not so much.

So it was that I realized sometime last spring that my wife was bored with what had become the softball routine. I don't actually think she realized it herself, to tell the truth. In her (paraphrased) words, everything was fine. And that was true. It was "fine." But she was bored with it just being fine. Maybe I was too, although I think it all really had more to do with the fact that everything in our lives had gotten to be where it all revolved around softball.

Those of you who have been reading for a while may have noticed some changes in the blog through the second half of last year in relation to things I was doing, like seeing new bands, or going to roller derby, or taking my wife away for the weekend, or going to the opera. Well, all of that was to shake up our lives a bit, our dating life specifically, and make things more interesting. It was all a big deal.

It was all a big deal, because I did a lot of the planning for this stuff, something my wife has traditionally been responsible for. It changed the dynamic and has allowed us to, together, expand our horizons and be more free to do and try new things.

There was a moment when we were away for that weekend when we were sitting at dinner and discussing, I believe, dessert, but not just dessert, because the conversation involved something about the kids... I suppose it doesn't really matter what. The point is that while we were discussing whether we should do whatever the thing was we were discussing, I looked at my wife and said something about how we were away with no kids and no other responsibilities for that one twenty-four period and finished the statement with, "We can do whatever we want." Whatever we want. It was a big moment. When our schedules are so often run by what our kids are doing and we are putting things that we want to do aside because there is a softball tournament or a choir rehearsal or whatever, it was very freeing to acknowledge, "We can do whatever we want."

I suggest you try it.
Really.
Even with being back in softball and everything else right now, that one statement has continued to change our lives.

Other Firsts (Change: part 5)

We went to IKEA.

I mentioned that before back when I was talking about getting the espresso machine and all of that, and I see from looking back that I said I was going to do a post about the whole IKEA trip thing. Well, I never did that. At this point, I'm probably not going to, either; this will have to serve as that post.

I think the IKEA thing is interesting because of the sort of cultural significance of what IKEA has become, i.e., a relationship testing grounds. My wife and I talked about that a surprising amount on our first trip (yes, that means there has been at least one other trip). She was worried that we would get into some kind of fight or argument in relation to the item we were going to purchase (yes, the "red thing").

At any rate, the whole trip felt like some weird kind of rite of passage for us, like, even though we've been together nearly 20 years, we weren't a "real" couple because we hadn't been through the IKEA fire of purification.

Personally, I don't really get it. I don't get the whole fighting at and over IKEA. I understand why it happens, but I don't get it. See, the problem is that couples go to IKEA with no real plan about what they're doing or what they're getting, so they end up getting into arguments about that there in the store. And everything related to it. But my wife never does anything without a plan, so we've always already looked at all the options and come to decision about it before we ever buy anything so, when it comes to the purchase, we just go and buy the thing.

Which is not to say that we just have the argument at home, because that's not it, either. We're actually pretty good at just discussing things and knowing what's actually important to each of us. What's important is, well, an important thing, and it's important to know those things going in. For instance, we could have had a fight over the color, but that's not really important to me, but I think that's the kind of thing a lot of people would get into a disagreement over. Not because both parties felt passionately about the color but because there was a mild preference for something different for each person that ends up becoming a fight.

Anyway...

Learning how to discuss things and come to agreements is something that many people never learn how to do, and we had our years of learning those things, but those were a long time ago.
Mostly.
heh
But we made it through IKEA, and that's what's important, right?



We changed Christmas.

As I mentioned in my first "Change" post, people have a hard time with change, especially if it has to do with family traditions and more especially if it has to do with family traditions dealing with the holidays.

When I was a kid, my whole family, including my dad, hated going to my paternal grandparents' for Christmas. It was horrible. Everyone sat quietly in the living room with the poor lighting and watched TV that was barely audible. That would last for hours before there were presents, which we were never allowed to open or play with while we were there. There were also no toys at their house, which is why the kids just sat and watched TV with everyone else. Nothing to do in the house, and we weren't allowed outside, because we always went over there one evening during the week leading up to Christmas. Oh, and there was no food, either. My grandparents would always get one of those store bought deli plates; you know, the one with the meat and cheese on toothpicks. One. It never lasted more then 10 minutes into everyone arriving, and we (the kids) were always told not to get more than one meat and one cheese until everyone had had some. That meant there was never any left because the adults didn't follow that rule.

We all hated it, and, yet, we went every year.

Until we didn't.

That was my fault. I don't remember how old I was, but I think it was sometime during middle school when I stated, "I don't want to go." Of course, I didn't want to go anywhere when I was in middle school. But I didn't go. I guess that kind of broke the whole thing. Not right away of course, because my parents and brother still went but only for a couple or few more years. The fact that I started refusing to go over there and sit on the couch for four hours (or more) staring at the wall eventually allowed everyone else to stop going, too. Or something.

And sure, you could say I was (or am) just a bad person for refusing to go to my grandparents' house for Christmas, but really? Family obligation only goes so far and should be two ways.

But that's not what this is about. It's just an example.

When my wife and I prepared to spend our first Christmas together, we actually sat down and had a long talk about how to do it. I really had left all of my traditions back in the South, so it was all about looking at what was important from each of our childhoods and working out what we wanted to do. And that was great. But...

The food was not great. We've been doing the very basic ham, mashed potatoes, etc thing for nearly two decades, and the ham ends up sitting in the fridge for days after being eaten pretty much only by me. Not because I like it that much but because I don't want it to get tossed. But, you know, tradition. And my daughter especially gets ruffled whenever any tradition thing gets changed (just this week she was bemoaning the loss of a sandwich shop (the shop shut down at least five years ago) where we used to get sandwiches every year for Independence Day firework show).

However, in part because of all of the other changes during 2015, just after Thanksgiving, my wife said to me, "What would you think about doing something different for our Christmas dinner this year?" I, of course, was all for it. And, surprisingly, my daughter (and the boys) bought in, too. So for Christmas, we had a big "traditional"-ish Italian Christmas dinner. It was really great, and we decided to do some different ethnic theme every year from now on.

In fact, we have actually worked that into our food routine. January was our month for exploring Indian food, and we learned how to make several different dishes (and my wife made the most amazing naan!). March will be Moroccan cuisine. February, due to travelling, has been a carryover of Indian. It's a lot of fun exploring foods this way, and it never would have happened if we hadn't messed around with our Christmas tradition.

And there was no leftover ham this year!

Well, not until New Year's when we did Cuban food and needed ham for part of that, but oh well...

Firsts Changes (Change: part 4)

One of the big deal parts of 2015 for me is that it was a year full of "firsts." As we get older, "firsts" tend to trickle away into nothingness. Part of that is just part of the dynamic of being older. I mean, it's easy to have first events when you're a kid, because everything is new, so it just gets to be more difficult to "find" things you haven't done before. Or so it would seem to our "logical" minds. You can't have pizza for the first time if you've been eating it for 40 years, and throwing some broccoli on it hardly counts as making it a "first."

That said, there are so many things under the sun that, mostly, it's just because we get used to how things are and the way we do things and quit trying to try and do new things. As I said back at the beginning of all of this, change is uncomfortable and most people don't like to do it. But I set out in 2015 to do new things; I just didn't know some of the ways that was going to happen. So, in no particular order, things I did for the first time in 2015:

1. I fixed a toilet!
This is actually a big deal. I'm not the handy guy around the house. I don't really fix things beyond clogged toilets (Yes, I know how to wield a plunger.) and things of about that level. We don't have one of those people in our household. We lived in an apartment complex for nearly 10 years, and that was fine when we lived there, because we could just call maintenance if there was a problem with anything.

But, when you can hear your toilet leaking, you need to fix it or call a plumber. Or, well, lie awake all night listening to it. Yes, the door was closed. I have good ears and am a light sleeper.

Now, I'm not going to get into the details of this, but, actually, this should have been a pretty easy fix. Should have been. But... Let's just say things deteriorated. One thing of note: Our house is full of the DIY projects of the previous occupants, none of them done well or with any kind of materials you'd call "quality." So what should have been an easy fix turned into something much more... complicated... and took most of a week and three or four trips to Home Depot to accomplish.

But, hey! I fixed the toilet!
No, I don't care if you're not impressed.

2. Opera!
My wife has loved the opera since she was in high school. It was a field trip that did it. And the spectacle. And the costumes. And the singing. Maybe if I'd been to the same performance that she went to, I would have developed a love for opera, too.

Instead, my first experience with opera was during college and was with a travelling opera company that came to my college. It was less spectacle and more foreign film, and I didn't love it. Or even like it. Seriously, it was like watching a French film with no subtitles. One of those where the people only sit around and talk. Maybe the talk is fascinating but, if you don't know French, you'll never know.

So, due to my stated dislike of opera, my wife decided that we would just not ever go to the opera rather than go and have a bad experience of it with me. Through the years, I've tried to change her mind about trying it out with me, but she has been resistant to that. Finally, last year, I changed her mind (I think I said something like "You could continue to never go to the opera and never get to go to the opera, or you could, at least, just give it a try with me."), and we went to the opera! Four times!

Yes, it's safe to say that I like it.

We have one more coming up in June, and we're looking at next season, right now, trying to decide what we're going to see.

3. Camping
Despite the fact that we go camping in the Trinity Alps every year, I have traditionally not been a fan of camping. You can blame that on some childhood traumas, things like being hit in the face with a fishing pole and getting a fishhook in my eye during a trip with a friend's family and having my tent flooded due to bad instructions from my scout master on my one and only boy scout camping trip. Plus there's the fact that I hate not having access to a bathroom. The compromise to get me to go willingly to Trinity was that we rent cabins for that trip (which is awesome!).

My wife, though, likes camping. She grew up camping with her family and has positive memories of it from her childhood. You know, we actually sort of went camping on our honeymoon, but I look at that as more of just sleeping in a tent, because we were at a music festival and didn't cook or anything. We just bought food at the event.

I think this might have been the most surprising thing I did last year from my wife's perspective: I told her, "I want to go camping with you." To say the least, there was some amount of discussion after that one as my wife tried to figure out if either I'd gone crazy, been kicked in the head by a horse, or been replaced by an alien or replicant life form.

The problem, then, was that we didn't have any camping gear because why own camping gear if you don't camp, right? Also, you don't want to spend a bunch of money on something that you might never use again so buying a bunch of new camping gear wasn't exactly practical. We decided on a method of car camping which is actually pretty nice. Set up is quick and easy and the car is quite cozy. Of course, you have to have the right kind of car.

It was a great trip, even the night it rained. Many of the pictures I've been posting recently are from that trip, in fact. We plan to do more car camping, at least a couple of trips a year. Car camping allows us to be more mobile and spend more time doing things other than making and breaking camp. And, of course, there is no tent to clean out and store when you get home. I did actually intend to do a post about the trip but, at this point, that probably won't actually happen, so you'll just have to enjoy the photos.

Changing Life (Change: part 3)

Weight:
Some number of years ago (no, I don't remember when, but I'm sure my wife could tell you), my wife and I dropped sugar from our diets. This was a significant change, especially for me. I grew up drinking soda and, when I say that, I mean I grew up drinking only soda. From a very young age, actually. I moved from apple juice to Coca~Cola, and soda was pretty much the only thing I drank for the next 30-odd years. Cutting sugar meant cutting the soda, which was one of the hugest changes I've made in my life. Ever.

The immediate result of that change was that I lost weight. A lot of weight. About 100 pounds in less than a year. At the time, I dropped to under 200 pounds for the first time since I was in high school. I kept all of it off for a while but, over time... well, you have to really stay focused, I suppose. At any rate, at my physical last year (during January or February), it finally hit me that I had let myself creep back up to about 245.

Well, that was enough of that.

So I started exercising again, something I'd let slide for a couple of years. [Seriously, why does exercising have to take up so much time?] And I started monitoring my portion sizes. When you don't eat sugar, it can make you feel justified with eating more. Well, me, anyway.

The short of all of that is that I am, now, under 200 pounds again, for only the second time since high school.

Coffee:
I think I have probably come off as a coffee drinker on here for years. I mean, with posts like this, I totally sound like a coffee drinker, right? But I was only barely a coffee drinker as I would only drink coffee if it was in chocolate. It took my wife a while to work me up even to that, because I grew up sans coffee. See above with the soda thing.

Basically, we could go to the cafe together because I could get a mocha, but my wife insisted that that wasn't the same thing. I... really didn't understand.

What we couldn't do, though, was sit around having coffee together when we went out for breakfast. My wife would have coffee, but I would just have water. (And, then, go to the cafe after for a mocha. heh) Again, I didn't get the big deal, but she assured me it wasn't the same as us sitting and having coffee together.

Well, she was right.

Long story short, I finally agreed to to try having coffee (just plain, old coffee) with my wife when we were out for breakfast one Sunday morning. No, I don't drink it black, but, I did buy her an espresso machine, something she has always wanted but didn't feel like it was worth it if she was going to be the only one using it. Now, we have coffee together every morning.

Beer:
As with coffee, I also grew up not drinking alcohol. Of any kind. My wife spent some number of years converting me to drinking wine (it was a slow process), but I still stayed away from beer. No, not on any kind of principle or anything; mostly, I just didn't like the way it smells. And not that my wife wants or likes to go hang out in bars but, every once in a while, she likes the option of going to share a beer in a bar. Except you can't do that when one of the people won't help share it. But, you know, I've been open to trying and tasting things over the years but, really, nothing ever really did it for me. Well, there was this one time years ago we got some blackberry beer at a local brewery, and I liked that, but they never had it again, and you can't buy it at the store or anything.

All of that changed this year. We were at an open mic night (probably the one where we first saw Parcivillian), and my wife got a beer... with the understanding that I was going to taste it. She got something called a Bitch Creek (because she liked the name). Well, we both loved it. Yeah, it was the first beer I ever really just liked. Or liked at all, but I liked it from the first taste. What we've discovered is that I like dark beers, especially stouts, which Bitch Creek was. That was not ever a thing we'd ever tried before. As it turns out, my wife tends toward darker beers, too, so that has really worked out, although she does have a broader palette than I do when it comes to beers and ales.

At any rate, we can now share a beer over dinner or grab a beer to share when we're out or whatever, so that has been a whole new thing for us, too, sort of like with the coffee.

Also, I have a new appreciation of the fact that some of the best breweries in the country are right here where I live.

Changing the Blog (Change: part 2)

The blog is tricky business. It's tricky business, and I could go into a lot of detail about how and why it's tricky business, but I'm not going to do that. For one thing, some of my blog history and why I blog is here on the blog in older posts, especially since blogging about blogging was not uncommon in my earlier days of blogging, that being a common theme on blogs (or, at least, writers' blogs). blah blah blah presence blah blah blah branding blah blah blah

What it boils down to, though, is that the blog needs to generate traffic which needs to generate sales, and the blog wasn't doing that. Also, I was spending an inordinate amount of time on the blog in comparison to the non-existent sales it was generating. Spending time on the blog included spending time visiting other blogs. Obviously, something needed to change.

I announced the first change last January (that would be January of 2015). So many blogs, especially the blogs of writers, try so hard to be non-offensive, and I decided I was through with that. And I have been through with that. During 2015, I did a series about racism and started a series about the Church (which will be picked up again sometime or other fairly soon). I'm not sure if any of that, specifically, has increased traffic, but it certainly hasn't hurt it. I'm not planning on changing that approach any time soon. It just feels more real.

I cut down on the essay-type posts I used to do three or more times a week. They take a lot of time that is more productively spent on fiction writing, so I tend to not do more than one of those a week.

I do more reviews. Book reviews, movie reviews, other reviews. Reviews seem to be a good way to drive traffic. At least based on my page views for review posts, I'd have to say that's true.

I started covering more local events and artists and doing interviews. Those, also, have done very well. One of my interview posts with the guys from Parcivillian is one of my top 10 most viewed posts. This year, I'll be picking up again with interviews with the women from one of the local roller derby teams, the Cinderollas. I've done the interviews; I just haven't gotten them transcribed.

And I've started doing picture posts. Those have surprised me most of all. Every once in a while, a particular picture will generate a lot of page views or comments, like this recent one.

The final analysis is that I have been doing more post with less effort without losing any traffic. I don't have enough data, yet, to know if the traffic has increased or if it's just regular fluctuations. That it has not decreased, though, is significant. Probably, this year, the blog will continue in this pattern. I do have some other changes planned that are more geared toward actually increasing sales, but those aren't quite ready yet.

The take away for you? Well, if you are a blogger, why do you do it? Is what you're doing right now with your blog meeting that goal? If it's not, you should look at making some changes.

The Philosophy of Change (Change: part 1)

On the whole, people don't much get along well with "change." Most of us just don't like it. Change is something to be fought against and conquered, not embraced. Change is the enemy.
To most of us.

To be honest, I am one of those "most of us." I do well with routine. I don't get bored easily. I'm not always looking for the "next, new thing" or anything like that. However, I am not necessarily averse to change; I just forget about it. Forget about doing it.

That's really the core of the issue with change: For most of us, change is something that happens to us, not something that we instigate. We become victims of change, and that is really the thing we don't like. That and things are different afterwards. Most of us would rather bad things stay the way they are than risk any kind of change. Change could, after all, make things worse.

But let me remind everyone of Einstein's definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different (or better) result.

Look, I am fairly anti-tradition, mostly because tradition is the antithesis of change. Being locked into tradition (or doing something the same way) for the sake of the tradition (or doing something the same way) has always been (well, since middle school, anyway (yes, "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson had a huge impact on me)) mostly foolish in my eyes. Tradition (or doing something the same way) should always be evaluated to see what purpose it's performing and held up against the purpose it's supposed to be performing. For instance, Christmas gatherings are supposed to be joyous and fun occasions but, if gathering with your family doesn't not meet that goal (like if it's a thing you dread every year but do anyway because of tradition) then you shouldn't do it. That's a bad tradition. But I digress...
(And, no, I am not talking about my family with that example. It's just a thing you see a lot of at the time of year we just came through (that being Christmas (as I'm writing this)).)

So...

A thing I try to do every so often in my life is to look at the things I'm doing to see if they are meeting the goals they are supposed to be meeting. I don't want to be one of those people who just keeps doing the same thing, only harder, over and over and hoping for a different result.

Now, before I go on, I need to say a few things:
1. My wife says that I missed my window for writing this post, especially since it's not going to post until some time in February.
2. I disagree with my wife because, as I write this, it is technically (and by "technically" I mean that it is (by almost a week)) still January, and this kind of thing can be done any time during January. (Traditionally (heh heh))
3. My wife says this post (series of posts) is for me. You can read it, but it's not for you. I think I agree with that. This place has become a good one for sort of keeping track of what I'm doing in my life at any given moment, so it will help me remember the changes that took place last year, a year of more than the normal amount of changes. Remember, I sometimes (frequently) forget to make them, so there aren't always changes. At least not ones initiated by me.
4. If you choose to read it... well, I hope it's helpful in some way, but it's not meant to be. I'm just putting out there what happened and, probably, some context so that it's understandable.

All of that said, 2015 started out with change. I spent the last month or two of 2014 looking at where I was and what I was doing and deciding on what things were working and what things weren't. So January of 2015 started with change.
But I guess we'll get to that next time.

Tiberius, "The Shadow Place," and Change

Well, this is it, the day of change. I'm  not actually a huge fan of change; I tend to like things to stay the way they are even if I don't like the way things are. Which is not to say that I don't want to be on the other side of the change; I just hate the process of the change itself. I blame my mother.

No, seriously, I do. When I was a kid, especially when I was in middle school, she used to like to move the furniture around all of the time because she'd get bored with the layout. I was the furniture moving guy. My brother was to little (I'm six years older than him), and my dad just wouldn't do it. There was a point early on when I think she was asking him first, but he would always say "later" until she'd get frustrated enough to make me do it. Eventually, she wouldn't bother to ask him anymore. My assumption is that the furniture moved so much during those years was because I was finally big enough to do the heavy lifting and it was before I quit being home all the time. That is to say, once I was a sophomore in high school, I was never home anymore, so she no longer had anyone to help her with the furniture, so it went back to staying put.

I just want to say, here, that if it had just been the normal kind of rearranging the furniture, everything would have been okay. But it wasn't...

See, when I was in 7th grade, we moved into a two-story house. There was a spare room that ran the length of the back of the house that connected to my parents' bedroom but could also be accessed through one of the bathrooms. My mom had a crusade to put that room to some kind of use beyond just being a spare room where stuff paused on the way to the attic and, then, never left.

Her first big plan was to make it into the "family" room. That meant moving the entertainment center we had in the "family" room up to the spare room. This thing was huge. It was, like, seven feet tall or something. It only just fit up the stairs with less than an inch to spare, but it wasn't the trip up the stairs that was the problem. It's just that it didn't really take all that long, a couple of months, at most, for my mom to realize that sleeping in on a Saturday morning would never be possible with the TV right outside of her bedroom (it didn't bother my dad; he could sleep through anything), so the entertainment center had to go back down the stairs. That was the hard part.

Then, she decided she would make that room the laundry room. It would be more convenient, she said, to have the washer and dryer right there in that room rather than lug the clothes down to the back porch and back up again. Yes, I had to move the washer and dryer up the stairs into that room. We won't go into the altercation my parents had over the issue of getting water to the washing machine. Eventually, though, the washer and dryer went back to the back porch; I'm pretty sure it had to do with the fact that my brother and I were travelling through my parents' bedroom all the time to get to our clothes.

And I'm not even gonna start on the time she wanted to move the piano up the stairs...

So, yeah, me and change... not hand in hand. Just ask my wife.

But here I am changing things up. Today is the release of the first collected volume of Shadow Spinner parts:

"Shadow Spinner: Collection 1: Tiberius (Parts 1-5)"
Yeah, that's a lot of colons, but what can you do? You try taking a colon out of a place where it's needed and see what happens. But, anyway... the biggest process of change is recovering the 38 reviews I have scattered over the first five parts of series. It's kind of like moving furniture except that I have to ask other people to help out. "Collection 1" is only two bucks, which is less than the five bucks it would have cost to get the parts separately, so I hope you will pick it up, read it, and leave a review. PLUS! There is the excellent bonus story by Bryan Pedas, "Like An Axe Through Bone," which is actually longer than five chapters I have in this collection. It's worth the price all by itself.

[Oh, and just a note: I'm still looking for at least one more author to feature at the back of one of these collections, so let me know if you're interested in writing an Imagination Room or House on the Corner related story!]

So, now, after asking you to spend money, I'll give something away, because today is the FREE! release of "Part Twenty-eight: The Shadow Place." And, remember, there will be a new chapter every Monday until the serialization is finished. And, hopefully, the second collection will be ready in a few weeks as well. Here's the list of today's FREE! offerings:
"Part Twenty-eight: The Shadow Place" (also FREE! tomorrow, Tuesday, August 20)
"Part Twenty-seven: Leaving"
"Part Twenty-six: The Bitter Fruit"
"Part Twenty-five: The Light of Knowledge"
"Part Twenty-one: The Chase"
"Part Twenty: The Sword of Fire"
"Part Nineteen: Lost in the Garden"
"Part Eighteen: The Angel"
"Part Seventeen: The Tree of Light"
"Part Fifteen: Food of the Garden"
"Part Fourteen: Anger and Laughter"
"Part Thirteen: The Clearing"
"Part Twelve: The Gash in the Floor"
"Part Eleven: The Kiss"
"Part Nine: The Shadow of the Tree"
"Part Eight: The Cold and The Dark"
"Part Seven: The Moth and the Shadow"
"Part Six: The Man with No Eyes"
That's 18 parts for FREE! today. You can't beat FREE!, right? Well, unless someone is paying you take it...

Chapter One

Today, I'm going to take a little time out to talk about my book. I haven't really done a lot of that, actually talking about it, although I mention it from time to time. However, there are some changes coming up with it and a new tab, so I thought I'd talk a bit about what's going on  there.

I made my book available for purchase back in January. That was probably a little earlier than I should have, but I'm glad that I did. I'll go more into how all of that came about sometime later, just in case any of the information is valuable to anyone. At any rate, I thought I'd done a fairly good job on the editing here at my computer, and, to a certain extent I did; however, when I got my proof copy and started back reading it in my kids' classes at their school, I started picking up mistakes that I had missed on the computer screen. I was fairly horrified. None of them were horrible enough, though, to prompt me to pull the book from availability, as many of them were only recognizable as mistakes to me. Except a homophone early on  the book, which I decided to ignore, for the moment, and the inclusion of the wrong name for a character late in the book (that was the one that really horrified me).

Anyway... none of that is what I really want to talk about.

There are several things that are unconventional about my novel, but, then, I'm fairly unconventional, so what can I say? One of those things is changing. I'm not really sure how I feel about the change, though, which is why I'm here talking about it.

One of the things I wanted to do with the book is give it the feeling of a story that's being told by a group of kids, 3 kids, to be exact. Now, if you've ever tried to listen to multiple kids trying to tell you how something happened, you will realize that what you don't get is a nice, steady stream of information. What you do get is a lot of interruptions and arguments. I wanted the book to feel like that. To do that, there are flashes of arguments and fighting between the siblings as they tell the story. The flashes switch from the 1st person narrative of whomever is speaking at that moment to 3rd person. I kind of like the feel of it.

However... it breaks the flow of the story. Of course, this was, actually, the intent. Again, if you've ever tried to listen to a group of kids tell a story, you frequently have to guide them back to the point from whatever disagreement they are having. And here's the conflict: the kids I read to seem to really like those parts. They're funny. They get lots of laughs. A few of them have told me those are their favorite parts (including my own oldest child). Adults, though... well, those parts don't really seem to be working for the adults. They're too jarring. Break up the flow too much.

I waffled on this issue for a long time. Is it a book for kids? or is it a book for adults? Well, hopefully, it's a book for both. I think it is. If it's a book for both, what do I do with those bits? In the end, I decided that, although the kids love those parts, they'll still like the book even without them in there. Adults, though, may not like the book with them in there, so out they go. Of course, this should also serve to drop my word count, not that I think my word count is too high, but it's certainly too high by industry standards.

All of that to say, if you want to really see my editing process, I'm making that available to you. The new chapter 1 for the 2nd edition of The House on the Corner is available via the tab up there at the top of the page. The old chapter 1 from the 1st edition of the book is available to read here. If you feel like you have the time, read them both, and let me know what you think. Once I'm ready to release the 2nd edition, however, I will be removing the old chapter 1 preview.

That being said, if you're interested in the 1st edition of the book, it only has a couple more weeks of availability. I should be finished with my revisions for the 2nd edition soon, and I'm going to pull the 1st edition about a week ahead of releasing the 2nd.

Thanks for indulging me! I hope you enjoy the read. If you do, let me know. If you don't, let me know that, too.