Thank You For Ten Update, Again
Here’s what’s going on lately with Thank You For Ten: Short Fiction About a Little Theater.
To begin with, I’ve narrowed down my cover choices to three. in theory that could go on forever, and more covers could show up all the time. (I’m going with a pre-made one of a kind cover for this project.) But at some point I need to cut off the considering, and make a choice. Narrowing it down to three finalists will expedite that process. Two of them are just designs and one of them has an image on it. I’ll make that decision by next Monday.
A word on pre-made covers. I don’t know if I will use them with every project, but my impression of them is that if you go to the right place and do a little homework, they can work just as well as a custom design, and for far less money. I don’t agree that in order to show the world I’m serious about my project i need to prove how much money I’ve invested in it. How much money I invest is my business, not the consumer’s. Besides, the true investment is time and attention when it comes to a book, isn’t it? The day may come when I hire a designer for a cover. But for this first self-published venture, I find that any of the three finalists I’ve chosen, plus many others, would work. Covers are important because they are what grab the attention of a reader as they scroll through their electronic device of choice, looking for a book to get lost in. But the fact that they are important doesn’t mean that they have to be the most expensive and time consuming aspect of your book in order for them to be effective.
If you’re pondering self-publishing for the first time, don’t get caught up in book cover elitism. If you can design your own, or can afford to tell someone else exactly what you want, that is great. But if not, you can do worse than solid an effective. I don’t think the entire nature of the book has to be revealed by the cover, and i think that’s an unnecessary but increasingly common bar that the community has set for authors. If it’s balanced, eye catching and professional, and doesn’t stand in direct conflict with the type of book you’ve written (a vampire cover for a book with no vampires) you’ll be fine. Come back next week to hear more about my final selection.
I’m also in the process of giving each story another proofreading pass. This is I believe the fourth pass, and I am on the fourth story. (Out of ten, of course.) It can be tedious, but of course necessary. So far I’ve not had to correct much, and what I have corrected has been structural. Wrong words or two many spaces, etc. I think it unlikely at this point that I will edit any of the stories for content or plot at this stage. They are all set in that department. My bigger concern, as I’ve mention in previous posts, is whether or not my epub formatting stuff will look right. Again, you can’t really check for that before you upload something to a site to sell it. I can check links, make sure there are no tabs in the document and that sort of thing, but in the end it is going to be an act of blind faith as to whether the document will looking like a readable ebook or not. That truly is the second most nerve wracking thing about this.
The most nerve wracking is of course the marketing angle. I’ve been sharing my adventure in producing this collection here on the blog with all of you. (Hoping my followers on this blog will be checking out a copy. Let me here from you guys, please!) I also tweet about it quite a bit. I have a few other things here and there up my sleeve. But I know I won’t be able to do the massive marketing campaigns that some fellow indy authors have done. Not yet, anyway. Perhaps in the future. But even if I had more money to do more things, there are certain tactics I’d never be good at. So I am working to compensate for that by finding alternative ways to go about it. I don’t quite have to worry about all of that yet, but I have been dipping my toes in here and there.
It all starts with an official launch of the book. I hope to have selected that date to announce to you in the next two weeks. A price for the collection as well.
Am I excited for all of this? I don’t think that is the word yet. There is so much to do still, and so much to figure out. And much of it is so new to me, even though my scale of operations is no where near as big as that of some authors. But I’m hoping that the excitement for releasing the volume will build. I believe it will.
In the mean time, I’d like to hear any thoughts or advice you have about my endeavor. So please, if you’re reading this, leave me some comments. Or if you don’t want to do that, email me at tyunglebower@gmx.com or tweet at me @TyUnglebower. I could use the support as I continue the journey.
An Open Letter to a Victim of My Wrath
For the purposes of this open letter, the subject will be addressed as Margaret. -Ty
Dear Margaret,
I apologize, and ask your forgiveness. You, a stranger I had never seen before, nor have seen since, were the victim of my wrath on a day when I had to be angry. I will go one further. It was on a day, in fact during an entire era of my life where I had to hate someone.
Actually I had to hate several people. Many people. All people, I suppose. It was people I had loved that had done such damage to me that year, so how good could people be as a species? There was zero hope in my life at that point. There was virtually nothing in the world that I found redeeming. Humanity was filth to me in most cases outside of my own family. Motivation was non-existent. Pain and destruction were everywhere and no matter how loudly I cried out for help when it all started, nobody was there to show me a way out of it. That makes a person hurt, angry, bitter, and any number of other things that can and do slowly destroy the soul. Though I no longer, thank god, feel as I did when I attacked you, I can’t help but wonder if I was in some sense permanently damaged by the feelings and perceptions I held back then, or by the attack I launched on you.
Still, that is of no matter to you, who had merely the misfortune of being on duty when I and my hell came to your place of employment.
To be honest, Margaret, I don’t think you were performing your job particularly well that day. Maybe it was a bad day or time in your life as well, or maybe it just wasn’t the job for you. Maybe you were new, I don’t know. And I didn’t care then, I assure you. Whatever the case, things seemed to take longer when it was my turn than they should have. Longer than they had for other people there that day. Longer than I, in my impatience was willing to wait.
You see, when someone is as far down as I was, without friends, hope, decency to cling to, every misfortune is magnified. You get to thinking that if every significant thing in life has to go wrong each and every single solitary day, the little moments should at least be able to fall into place. Little moments like buying things in a place of business without incident.
So when even the smallest of things don’t go right, (like having to deal with a cashier that is confused about something for more than a moment or two), hell breaks loose. You can’t rage at the big things which are killing you, so you rage at the small things that are right in front of you, chipping away at your ability to do go even an hour without melting down. And when that happens, you call someone a name. I qualify, when that happened to me at that exact moment in my life, I called someone a name. I called you a name. A name I won’t repeat here, but one that I assure you, in that moment, was designed to hurt. To anger.
In my head, Margaret, your perceived incompetence was making me quite angry, for all of the reasons I explained above. And since I couldn’t get you to stop doing the thing that was making me angry, I resorted to evening the score. If I had to be upset, I was going to make damn sure that you were quite upset as well. So I called you a name. These many years later, I regret it, even though at that moment I did not.
I of course have no idea if what I did had the desired effect. For all I know, you got called that half a dozen times that day. It might have bounced off of you with no impact at all. You certainly didn’t seem more than momentarily surprised by what I said. You didn’t retaliate. (A testament to your professionalism.) In a way I hope my attack was ineffective, because then I could at least live with the fact that I was an asshole among many you dealt with in that job.
However, the chances are equally good that it did not just bounce off of you. I imagine that it doesn’t bounce off of most normal people when others verbally attack them in public as I did you. And it is that possibility, even nearly thirteen years later, that keeps the incident alive in my head and my heart. You deserve this apology even if what I said meant nothing to you, because the act of saying it was wrong. But if you were affected, (as I designed it back then), I doubt I will ever fully atone for it within my own morality, as a man far removed from what I was that day.
If only you worked a regular shift at a place I visited on a frequent basis. Then by the time I thawed from my overall hatred of life I could have sought you out directly and said this years ago. If only years worth of coming back to civility and decency as my gaping wounds finally began to scab over could have happened in the course of an hour, and allowed me to say these things that same day. Actually, if only that healing, or at least some degree of peace had come to me sooner than I had come to your place of business, I would have never attacked you in the first place.
But I did say something in the first place. Never will I have lived a life wherein I did not say it. Part of what is perhaps karmic punishment for my behavior when I was lost is that I see myself attacking you again and again sometimes, and I have to concentrate to gently remove it from my mind. (Sometimes I succeed.)
My only recourse after all of these years was this open letter which you will never see. But should you see it, and know who I am even now, there are two two things that may or may not make you feel better about my attack on you. The first being, as I have said, that I am sorry just about every time it comes up in my head, which is often. I have never, looking back, fully gotten over my choice. Perhaps that satisfies you.
Secondly, though I still loose my patience with poor service at places of businesses from time to time, and I still have no problem letting people know I am annoyed with it, I have never again been that angry about it. Never again have I called someone the name I called you. And even in my sometimes justified anger over poor service, I see a shadow of you standing nearby, to remind me that I am not that man anymore. I’m not the man that needs to attack people even if they are poor at what they do. Even if in fact they are not decent people. I am better than that now. Perhaps knowing that satisfies you in some way as well.
You will forever remain anonymous to me, so I’ll never know directly if you have forgiven me or even remember this incident. But I am not anonymous. My name is Ty Unglebower, and I willfully, verbally attacked you in public without justification. I own it.
sincerely, Ty Unglebower
This post is part of the Open Letter Continuum.
The Audience for “Thank You For Ten”
Unless you happen to have stumbled across my blog or my Twitter account for the very first time today, you know what Thank You For Ten: Short Fiction About a Little Theater is. As I get closer to the summer launch of this self-published collection of my stories, I want to share more about it.
Why did I write these stories? (All of which take place here. ) There are multiple reasons why a writer writes anything, I dare say. But perhaps the biggest reason I wrote this collection, (along with my upcoming novel, Flowers to Dionysus, set in the same location), was to both exhibit and explore everyday creativity, craftsmanship, art.
I’ve explored this topic outside of this collection before and will of course continue to do so in future works. But in composing these stories, I set out to take my readers on brief but deep journeys into the original, undiluted concept of the “amateur“.
The word “amateur” is rooted in the Latin word “amator”, which basically means “lover”. Applied directly in this fashion, an amateur is one who pursues an activity or discipline because of a love for same. A passion. In other words not to receive monetary gain, but out of strong affection for the thing in and of itself. Note that strictly speaking this does not preclude someone from making money from the activity. Money is just not the impetus for pursuit.
You’ll find some official definitions that nearly match this. This dictionary has as its prime definition; “a person who engages in a study, sport, or other activity for pleasure rather than for financial benefit.” Almost… but it lacks the hot-blooded urgency that is endemic of the Latin root; “lover”.
The very same dictionary gives a secondary definition of amateur as, “a person inexperienced or unskilled in a particular activity.” The Oxford Dictionary goes even further with its own secondary definition; “a person considered contemptibly inept at a particular activity.” These secondary definitions I feel are becoming, if they have not already become, the primary association most people make with the word. From political campaigns to football matches, the term “Amateur Hour” is far from a compliment.
Combine this tendency with the overwhelming notion in many Western nations that the procurement of money is the true indicator of individual value, and you have a social tendency to dismiss anyone who pursues anything without monetary compensation as somehow inferior. True, do it long enough or in an odd enough way and you may be lucky enough to be labeled “hobbyist,” a term that carries somewhat less of a stigma. Still most amateurs, especially within the arts, are met with pity and condescension at best, and disdain at worst.
I speak from experience however when I say that some of the best art comes from those who pursue it with love as their sole purpose. Some of the best writing, sculpture, dance, acting and singing can be found within the ranks of the amateurs who not only don’t make money doing what they do, but may in fact make themselves less effective at their jobs the next day because of how much they have poured into their passion the previous night.
When such lovers buckle down or band together to present their efforts to a skeptical world, the result is often transcendent. Not everything is a masterpiece, but the same can be said for “professionals” who get paid for what they do. But art begets art begets passion begets more art. And while professionals can certainly still be artists, there is something about those who make spare time for it that ought to be admired, not ridiculed.
That’s what Thank You For Ten: Short Fiction About a Little Theater is about. That’s why I wrote these stories. Whether you dance, paint, play the flute or play Mary in your church’s annual Christmas pageant, I offer the characters in this collection and what they experience outside of their professional lives as a reflection of your own artistic endeavors. Some are meant to be funny, some thoughtful, some are just a Chekhovian slice-of-life, but all are there to offer a communion to my fellow amateurs of the purest kind. You don’t have to know theater; you only have to know a love of your particular art or craft to find something to enjoy in this collection.
Of course, the creative process can be a long, messy one. I’ve included plenty of warts and false-starts and straight-up bumblings for the amateurs in these stories. My goal, however, was to enhance and not degrade the process by including the missteps and confusion that make up any given day in the life of an artist. We become afraid of that aspect of the creative life at times, but we know it’s all part of the adventure, and that’s why it’s in my stories as well.
An agent or business-oriented person may ask me of this collection, “who is your audience?” I like to think people from all walks of life would find something in this collection to enjoy. Yet if I had to answer this question in front of a board of some kind, (and thank the Divinities I do not), it should be clear to you by now what my answer would be. My audience is the artist in all of us who will give up time, sleep, energy, sometimes even food and money in order to create or pursue that which has welled up inside of us from a place that a career or business simply cannot extinguish.
My audience is the amateur. Actually, my audience is the amator.
Ditches Worth Digging
I get peeved at writers, (especially the ones already lucky enough to have made a name for themselves) say things like, “if, in your wildest imagination, you can even for a minute see yourself doing anything else in the world other than writing, go do that thing. Writing is not for you.”
I don’t protest the idea that some people feel they were meant to be writers, or even that some people are gifted writers. No, it’s this writer as cosmic conduit or prophet that I disdain. It’s a quite common sentiment in interviews and blog posts and tweets, yet the concept is as damaging as it is irritating. It discourages people from exploring writing, and it’s an insult to those who do so while pursuing other things at the same time.
To begin with, though it’s often couched as sage advice about how much persistence is required to even have a chance of surviving the difficult and exhausting world of writing, what it’s actually saying is, “I finally became aware that I am a very special type of human being on this planet, unlike most of you. I’ve been set aside by my genetics and by heaven to make a living doing this sort of thing. Now that I am making money for doing so, I discourage you from doing it as well if you are not also tapped on the shoulder by all of the gods at once and asked to do this. Because if you’ve not been called, as I have been, you need to forget it.”
Okay. Do I genuflect in front of the table at your book signing, or is a simple bowing of the head sufficient, given that the line is getting long?
I’m a writer. No secret there. But here’s a shocker; I’m also an actor. A sometime journalist. I spend a lot of time taking pictures as well. My political analysis skills are fairly sharp and I have a TV/radio presence more solid than lots of professionals, so I’ve been told. I’m not merely listing hobbies here, folks. I’m saying, in fact declaring here and now that I could easily see myself doing any and all of these things as a career. Luck, money, location and circumstances have prevented me from achieving high career status in any of those endeavors in that list as much as they have for writing, but not only can I see myself doing any of them, I can see myself happily doing any of them. Thus by definition, I am not qualified to be a true writer?
My being a writer is only part “destiny” in that I have a talent for it, and of course I’ve sought to make use of it. But it’s also something I have chosen to do for any number of reasons. It’s portable, for example. It’s easier to find places to do it than it is to find places to act, or broadcast. I often get high praise for doing it. It’s free. I can be as old and as homely as possible and still do it; the work speaks for itself, not my image or my fashion sense or my weight any given year. And not to put too fine an edge on it, but it’s one of the few things I have been given the chance to do by a society that has done a fairly decent job in not allowing someone like me to achieve what he wants.
I’m not where I want to be with my writing career at present, but I have options that I built for myself. I have some control. You can’t say that about a lot of fields, editors notwithstanding.
Plus, words get to the heart of people in ways that other media can’t. It may take longer for them to take effect or to reach the proper audience in this day and age of smart phone streaming content, but when words hit the mark, they hit it like few other experiences can. I appreciate the power that words still have to touch people, and I want to know at the end of my life that I did something that touched as many people as possible. So I choose writing.
I don’t think I’ve chosen by writing, however. When did the pursuit of writing take on this almost supernatural exclusivity? You either want to do it at any given time, or you do not. I’ll even go so far as to say you either have talent for it or you do not. But when we say, “if you can picture yourself doing anything other than writing, choose something else to do with you life,” what are we saying about the “something else?” Are we saying that “something else” is less noble? Less important? Requires less divine inspiration?
I’ll always write something, but if I had the chance to change lives and touch people through a career that was not based on writing, yes I would do it. I’d be an actor or a radio presenter tomorrow if I had the chance to do so. Not because I view writing with any less esteem than other things, but because I view service to people through communication of stories and truths as paramount. And by whatever means I do that, I hope to not be crammed with so much hubris as to suggest that you can only do what I am doing if you are positive you can’t do anything else.
Similar though somewhat less elitist are those who say that from the moment they wake up in the morning until they drift off to a fitful, dream-filled sleep at night, their compulsion is to write. Pages and pages, thousands of words. So consumed by the need to produce words that before they know it nine hours have gone by and they’ve allowed the dog to shit on the floor twice. That’s fantastic if this is you. What I won’t accept is the notion that this is what makes you a writer, because sometimes writing for me is like digging ditches.
You get to the site in the morning, and you’re not at all consumed with an unquenchable desire to shovel dirt for the next 8 hours. You take a look at the tools laying around and see all of the ditches yet to be dug. You rub the crink in your back one more time as you say, “I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to do any of this. I’d rather be doing just about anything else today.” Then you summon the stamina to grab the tools, break the first few inches of dirt with a grunt, and let inertia take over. It’s grueling, dirty, sweaty, back-breaking work but you do it, because you dig ditches, and something of social value will eventually be built over top of or because of your ditches.
Then at the end of the day you crawl out of your last ditch, your back aching, exhausted, and you take a look at all the dirt you’ve moved that day. And you think, “these are ditches worth digging. And I dug them.” And if anyone tells you that you shouldn’t be digging these ditches or working with your hands if for a moment you can imagine doing anything else, you’re tempted to shove them into one of your ditches and leave them there.
Taken as a whole, writing is hard, people. Writing worth reading, (and yes, you actually do want people to read it, don’t pretend otherwise) can sap you any given day or any given week. You want to not have to do it anymore. You want a job sometimes in an office where you file folders in alphabetical order all day. Or you want to try your hand at landscaping, where nobody tries to tell you your work has to be more commercial. Or you wonder if you could have been better than the kooks on TV now had just one person who marveled at your broadcast presence had given you the chance to be a part of their team. You tell yourself that you’d jump at the chance to do radio even today if it revealed itself. And you assure yourself that none of these thoughts you have, and none of the alternatives you keep your eyes open for makes you any less of writer, because most days you’re still out there exhausting yourself doing it. By choice, not Providence. And sometimes the end product is a post, a story, a novel that you find worth reading, and that other may find reading as well.
And if they do, and tell you about it? They were pages worth writing, despite everything else. Ditches worth digging.
Thank You For Ten Update: Got It Covered….Almost
I’m getting closer and closer to self-publishing me short story collection, “Thank You For Ten: Short Fiction About a Little Theater”. I mentioned in previous entries that I want to have it up and ready for purchase by June, and that I have done everything i know how to do in regards to formatting. Unfortunately I haven’t found a way to test my formatting without uploading the document, but I feel that I have got it. I will of course double check a few times between now and the official zero hour. (And if you know of anyway to check my formatting for e-publishing before I actually publish, please let me know.)
As for content, I plan to do another proofreading pass over each of the ten stories sometime this week, though that feels fairly tight at this point.
That means my attention lately has now turned mostly towards the non-writing aspect of this collection.
I won’t beat around the bush about this, my friends; I don’t have a lot of money. That means I can’t afford to invest in some or even most of the publication assistance that many self-publishers avail themselves of. I’m not saying I am cutting corners in regards to quality, but I have to be frugal. Resourceful. Willing to accept solid over fancy at times when it comes to issues outside of my actual writing. Nowhere is that truer than with cover art.
No doubt it’s a crucial decision. One could argue a cover design is even more vital for ebooks than it is for standard books. I’m inclined to agree, and I’m giving the decision due diligence. But I don’t want to hold up everything else forever as i try to decide the cover. As I’ve blogged before, there are various options.
To begin with, there are many tutorials about how to design ones own cover. As I’ve mentioned before, I will probably give them a cursory look without actually committing to that extra labor. I have friends who have done it successfully despite not being trained in graphic design, but such friends have a more artistic eye than I have in general. So that means turning to a professional.
A custom design is tempting, and if I had the funds, I’d explore it. Truth be told I will almost certainly take that route for my novel. But for this first foray into self-publishing, I have been researching pre-made, one-of-a-kind templates. I’ve already seen several that would work nicely for my collection and are in my price range. None of them scream “perfect match”, but even with a customized cover designed by a professional I hire, perfect matches are no guarantee. In regards to something I myself have little control over other than “yes” and “no”, I don’t want the perfect to be the enemy of the good. Several of the templates would work, and I’m not too proud to use them.
But which one? I’m looking at stylized covers, with art but no images. Those will fit with just about any book I imagine. I’m also looking at a few with images of buildings that could perhaps pass as the setting of my book, even though there are very clear differences between said images and my setting as described. I wonder if that matters? Much like a trailer that doesn’t match the movie tone exactly, can an image on a cover differ from the content of the book?
Same goes with one cover that features a fancy light that looks like it could be in the lobby of an old time theater. Then there’s one with an image of a wooden floor. Originally, stages were constructed of wooden planks and to this day being on stage is sometimes still referred to as “walking the boards”. The theater in my collection isn’t built like that, but again, on the cover perhaps a symbolic representation works. Any of you have opinions on that?
The most important things about a cover of course are to stand out visually while still setting the tone for the piece they cover. I can pick a good-looking cover that stands out, but picking something that reflects the tone of the collection may be more of a challenge.
Ideally one would have a picture of a small stage, but I was surprised to find no such covers so far. I will keep looking but again, I don’t want to obsess. Obsession over detail is the modus operandi of many authors, especially independent ones, and that’s fine. But for me, I don’t think it’s a prerequisite to success. Vigilance and attention to quality, yes. But I can attain those without getting twitchy about every single thing that doesn’t go 100% ideal.
Nor do I wish to rush this important decision. The biggest complaint about those who self-publish is that they rush things into production. I’m working to not do that. I’m taking my time with these decisions. I will give myself a week, and maybe two to pick this cover. I want to investigate some more options. But if right now I were limited only to the options I have seen this week, I’d be satisfied.
Next up, pricing, marketing, and launch date declaration.
Ty Unglebower 