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.
Open Letter to An Alleged Adult
For the purposes of this short letter, the subject will be addressed as “Mandy”. -Ty
Dear Mandy,
We were never that close, and looking back I can see why we probably never could have been.
It’s not because I discovered you through the internet. I have met several decent people whom I still call friends in that way. Only with them, I’ve actually gotten to meet up with them in person.
And it’s not because I don’t like your writing, (though I didn’t love it either; much of it struck me as “please look at me while I write this edgy vampire story in the back of study hall” kind of feel to it.)
No, I realize now we could have never been particularly good friends because you are crippled by a self-centered nature that isn’t compensated for with any tact.
You’d vanish for weeks at a time, and then conveniently show up again when you had something you wanted my thoughts on. I read your samples willingly, because that’s what writers try to do for one another. That’s what mature writers do, anyway. Mature people in general try to reciprocate. But after a few weeks/months of you being too busy to read over the samples I sent you, it was pretty clear you had no interest in investing the same amount of time in offering thoughts to me as I did to you. And the one thing you did read from me, you replied with mostly negative assessments.
Yet god forbid I should mention that imbalance. Or any other imbalance in our dynamic. God forbid, in fact, that I ever make more than a passing reference to anything you said or did throughout our three-years-long yet casual acquaintance that may have bothered me. I was either being “too sensitive” or “taking things too seriously.” And yet, as with most self-centered (and if you ask me, narcissistic) people, the moment I stepped somewhere with my comments or actions that you deemed inappropriate, you sounded the alarm.
Why exactly did I continue to communicate with you, when it was clearly such a one-sided affair? Truth be told, I’m not sure all of the reasons. Part of it though is probably due to the fact that often months would go by without any contact from you, and I’d really just not think about it. Well, once in a while I would think about it, wonder how you were and send you a message. Of I would think your new hair do would look nice in your profile picture and say so. If you could be bothered, you’d reply, but. mostly you didn’t. And when you did, I got weird shit like, “I’ve been avoiding you because I haven’t been writing as much as I should be lately, and I didn’t want you to judge.”
As though I’m prone to that? As though there are no other topics about which we could converse other than writing? As though I posses the time, energy or inclination to construct an admonishment to you the next time I spoke to you for not having written enough? The very notion that you and your undertakings in writing fiction affected me to such a degree during the months-long periods of hearing nothing from you is almost suffocating in its presumption. You’re pretty, but you’re not magical.
Still, there you were. Sometimes. I do feel the need to connect with writers when I can. I like to have that camaraderie, all be it briefly, with those who have the slightest idea what all this is like. And you hadn’t done anything overtly offensive.
Until the last few days we “spoke”. If you don’t remember when that was, I will refresh your memory-I hadn’t heard from you in weeks (again) and you wrote me, saying you’d decided to try Twitter, and wanted any pointers I could give. In other words, once again, you wanted something. So I helped you out as best I could. Even followed you on Twitter that day.
Eventually something I either tweeted or posted on Facebook (I don’t recall which one now) got under your skin. And it was about the use of a word. A damn word usage was the issue you got steaming about. So much so, it elicited a response from you that offended me. And I mentioned it to you. And your ultimate response to my concerns?
“Calm down, and change your tampon.”
Looking back, it’s about as considerate, intelligent and deep a response as I should have expected from you. Nonetheless, it’s an expression I myself have never used. Some people are lighthearted about those kind of things, and some people take great offense to them, but I avoid them. Obviously, I figured, you used the terms lightly, and that was fine. Pretty ninth-grade for a college graduate to resort to using it, but that’s how it is with you I suppose.
I also realized that how it is with you when the next day I went to tweet something to you, and found you had blocked me on Twitter. No warning. No explanation. And none needed, honestly. It was clear what happened; you had had to spend more than five seconds doing something you found inconvenient. So you confirmed just how shallow I had suspected you were for sometime, and blocked me on Twitter because I had the audacity to put limits on the things you said to me, and demanded a bit more respect from you.
But you forgot Facebook.
So I wrote you that message there, about your sophomoric display:
“Blocking me from Twitter just because we had an argument? Sounds like someone is on the rag today.”
Allow me to say that is the one and only time I have ever gone there with someone, even in a fight. That’s because, it’s foul, misogynistic and irrelevant to 98% of the circumstances under which it is brought up. But you’d gone into that arena as it were, so I did. To put it bluntly, I did it on purpose to see just how open you were to receiving what you sent out. Though not a woman, I was offended by your tampon comments, and I frankly didn’t think you were entitled to make them, if you weren’t willing to take them.
I saw, with no shock or remorse whatsoever, that you had unfriended me on Facebook within the hour.
The best part, however, was about two weeks later when I went to your Twitter page to see out of curiosity, if you had yet posted anything of merit. You hadn’t posted much at all, in fact. But you had tweeted something along the lines of, “When you use comments in an argument pertaining to menstrual cycles, it just confirms you really are the dick I always thought you were.”
So you got pissed and indignant because someone said to you the exact same sort of thing you said to them a few days previous, and tweeted about it. Sort of defines hypocrite, there.
And if you “always” suspected I was a dick, I’d be curious to know why you continued to write to me, albeit infrequently. I suppose so you could get feedback on your writing. But if I am dick, I have to wonder what my opinion mattered to you in the first place. Unless, in general, I was among the few people that was willing to talk to you or invest time in your writing. Given your overall attitude, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that was and remains the case.
But do the next “dick” that has the backbone to call you out and stand up for himself when you use him a favor…stop contacting him right away. It will save you, and certainly him, a great deal of time he could have been spent doing other things. I speak from experience on this one.
Good luck with that magical vampire sex novel, or whatever it is.
-Ty Unglebower
This post is part of the Open Letter Continuum.
“Thank You For Ten” Update
My short story collection, Thank You For Ten: Short Fiction About a Little Theater, moves ever closer to self-publication. The last few weeks I’ve been teaching myself the basics of manuscript formatting for such an endeavor. (If you have never done it, it’s probably quite different from what you know about typing for printing on your printer.) I can report that though their are nuances left to be tackled in this area, I’m probably closer to the end of the process than to the beginning of same.
I say this, of course, not knowing what a final automated check of my manuscript will review once I submit it to the proper website. Though of course I’m hoping that all is as it should be, I am mentally preparing myself for the possibility that my formatting will be rejected by the system on the first try and require more work. I’m betting most of that reworking, should it be required, will be in the form of page breaks and hyperlinks.
Still, I can tell you that some of the aspects of formatting for e-publication have not taken as much time as I’d initially feared. It’s a whole new way to look at typing in some regards, but in other ways it’s instinctual. Almost like baseball and softball; those two are distinct sports but have obvious similarities and comparable goals and strategies. If you are able to follow the former, you will have little trouble following the latter, after some exposure. I feel that is how things are progressing with this formatting for e-publication thing. The biggest thing to keep in mind is that what you see is not what you get when it comes to this.
As for the stories themselves, I will probably give each of them one more proofreading pass at least before I send them off to the e-publication system for review. (I’m using Smashwords and its meatgrinder.) I went over each story several times carefully before I even began the formatting process, but something is almost always missed. As for content, I think each story is where it needs to be. I don’t want to edit the content and the story arcs into oblivion, which is something I have no doubt I could do if not cautious. So any remaining editing is going to be for spelling, punctuation, and in this brave new world of formatting, carriage returns and tabs.
From a technical standpoint, that leaves a cover file. I have some ideas about what I’d like the cover to look like. Various sources online teach one how to design and produce one’s own cover. I’ve not looked into those yet, and indeed most people, including the good folks and Smashwords recommend against designing one’s own cover. Yet I’ll probably look into the process, and perhaps experiment with some images. Truth be told, I’m leaning against attempting it myself, but in case I can’t locate anyone affordable to do it for me, (say 100 bucks or less at this point), I need to keep my options open on that front. I have some time to ponder that.
Marketing continues to be based here on the blog and on Twitter, with hopefully useful tags in full force. Not every day and not constantly on the days I do it, but I’m making the presence known to both my 400+ followers there as well as my personal friends on Facebook. Hopefully that will make a good foundation for some word of mouth to begin. I have not yet formed a seperate Facebook for the book or for my author presence. That still seems strange and extraneous to me, but I haven’t ruled it out yet, either.
I also hope to make use of some of my local theater connections, modest as they are, to spread the word about the collection, once it’s published. I can’t afford to go all out with marketing as some people do, (spending thousands of dollars for banner ads, press conferences, radio show interviews, etc.) I simply have to start with what I have and work from there.
Business concerns, such as pricing and release date are still undetermined. I can say I want it available to the public no later than the middle of June, this year. Right now that seems feasible, but I won’t dare announce a date for release until such time as I know it’s going to be ready.
Guessing how far along I am in the process is barely more than a parlor game at this point. But for the curious I would say that the entire operation, the end game of which is a professional looking product being available for download onto e-readers, is about 50% complete. Yes, right down the middle. Now some of that remaining 50% will go quickly as it is just a matter of doing it. Other aspects of it could take a while, such as the next level of formatting. There are x-factors involved in all such things as well. But given that I’ve made steady progress so far in areas where I thought I’d be drowning, I think about half way there is a good estimation to share with you all as of now.
I can say it’s close enough to being ready to launch that I can now feel anticipation for it. It’s no longer merely, “someday”, but rather a tangible moment that is approaching in the near to intermediate future.
So stay tuned, please. It shouldn’t be long now!
Ty Unglebower 