I Fall to Pieces

Okay, I remained disappointed with my first two essays.  I think I was overly influenced by the sad, but otherwise excellent essays in the textbook.  This week’s assignments are a nature essay and a segmented essay.  Nature makes me sad these days, with all the destruction, so I went above and beyond to the super-natural!  Ha!  There’s nothing I like better than playing fast and loose with a writing assignment.

The segmented essay, though, drove me to despair.  Three times I thought I had a concept; three times it fell apart on me.  I finally cheated.  (Well, that’s what I get for sitting in the back of the class!)   I went through our family newsletters, of which I was the chief editor, and picked out various short articles that I thought I could string together.  The ones that worked, but only after I added subtitles and an introduction, were some conversations that I’ve had with men.  I think it’s pretty funny, so I’m happy with it.  Naturally, once the pressure was off, I thought of an original segmented essay that I could have written!  Typewriters!  I learned to type on a manual typewriter, and progressed with technology (electric, IBM Selectric, word processing, Microsoft Word [boo, hiss!]) to my present state of slitty-eyed resentment of any new iteration.   Don’t keep changing things, that’s what I say!  But it’s too late to write it now; I’ve already uploaded my essays.

Meanwhile, realizing that I am too easily influenced by the textbook and the excellent essays written by my classmates, I have decided to start my next two essays without benefit of instruction.  I.e., I have quickly scanned the definition of “literary journalism,” and started writing before I read the assigned examples.  This essay is going to be a lot of fun, incorporating an unwelcome change in my Blue Cross health insurance policy with enlivening examples from literature.  Dorothy Gale of Kansas and Saki come immediately to mind.   And I’m pretty sure I can work in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

Meanwhile, I received some excellent advice from Professor K about my Kindle project.  I was bemoaning the lack of oomph in the titles of two of my stories.  One of them, “Sook’s Cake,” I felt would be particularly meaningless to anyone who is not familiar with Truman Capote’s childhood, and I was wondering about changing the title to something like “A Fruitcake on Hallowe’en.”  Professor K immediately wrote back and said, “Make it ‘Hallowe’en Fruitcake,'” and of course that was perfect.   Prepositions only weaken the horror.

The Omen!

Amazing superCATural evidence of direct literary link between Truman Capote and Bonnie Furlong

A Sign! An Omen!

This is the week that I have set aside to begin exploring Kindle publishing, and I think I have received a favorable omen for the enterprise! The window in my bathroom is beside the shower, so I keep it covered with a makeshift curtain (plastic trash bag) to keep the wood from rotting. On Monday I was startled to see six or seven silver-dollar-sized holes in the curtain. From my vantage point, four of the holes spelled out the word “B O O.”  I immediately thought of To Kill A Mockingbird and Boo Radley, which led me to Dill, which led me to Truman Capote, which led me to Capote’s aunt, which led me to fruitcake. My ghost story, “Sook’s Cake,” was inspired by a newspaper article about how young Truman would help his Aunt Sook make her famous fruitcakes, and it is one of the three ghost stories that I am hoping to publish on Kindle!

Well, okay, I’m pretty sure that my cat made the holes when he was running around crazy the other night; I wouldn’t claim that this is a supernatural manifestation. However, I defy anyone to fault my subsequent chain of literary reasoning.

Today I listened to a video of how to upload to Kindle, and it sounds pretty straightforward. Most importantly, it won’t cost me anything. I need to think of a title, design a cover, and write an enticing blurb, but those will be fun to do and give me an opportunity to play with Photoshop.

Ain’t Got that Zing!

I’ve finished my two essays, the 500 word memoir and the personal, and I’m not totally happy with them. I like my stuff to have a kind of zing to it, and I’m not seeing it. They’re not due until tomorrow evening, so I have time to do some more revising. The memoir is about my father and the personal has cats in it. I know, I know, cats are a big no-no in the blogosphere.

I’m supposed to upload the essays to this blog, so I’ll do that after I’ve made any changes based on the workshop comments. I’ll post the essays on a separate “page,” so I’ve got to figure out how to do that. Also, I want to put in a link to a good article on why writers need to tweet, blog, and/or Facebook.  I’m on Twitter, but I’ve been too shy to tweet anything, so I just retweet stuff that I think is interesting.  I have three followers, two of whom are complete strangers. Why are they following me? It freaks me out.

I’m new to this public blogging and I’m only doing it because I want my trilogy, if it’s ever finished and published, to have as wide a potential audience as possible. We’ve got to self-promote these days; the publisher won’t do much. Hardly any champagne book launches anymore. In case anyone’s wondering, the trilogy is a campus caper set in a place very much like Lord Fairfax Community College, only with ghosts. There is a sly (and very brief) allusion to Professor K.

Honors Audit

Just because I’m sitting in the back of the class, getting a free education due to my advancing age, doesn’t mean that I can’t try to over-achieve. I don’t always go for the Honors classes because, let’s face it, they’re a lot of work. But Professor K’s are usually fun. Since I’m not doing this for a grade, I’ve made up my own Honors course. In addition to creating this blog, which is part of the regular Honors assignment, I am going to try to self-publish three short stories on Kindle. I understand it can be done easily, so I hope that’s true.

Self-publishing has become more acceptable these days, although I’m of a generation that believes it’s not published unless it’s a first edition hardback with a four-color dust jacket. Still, I haven’t been able to move two of my three ghost stories (one was published online a few years ago, but I kept the rights). I’m going to package them and see what I can do with them. The two that have not been published (in fact, have been rejected more than once) were written while I was attending some of Professor K’s classes. I’m sure that’s just an  unfortunate coincidence.