Years ago, while working for a rare book dealer, I had the opportunity to catalog a collection of letters that John Steinbeck wrote to his family. He was young, just starting out. He spent a good part of a year living at Lake Tahoe alone in a cabin while he worked on his first novel. His letters talked about the struggles of living at Tahoe in the winter time in the 1920s with no electricity. He shoveled snow to get around and rowed across the lake for supplies.

He talked about writing and revising. He finished the book then started immediately into writing a  second draft. At the time, I didn’t understand why. If it was finished, it was finished, right? He worked his story until he got it where he wanted it. Can you guess the which book it was? I doubt it. It was called Cup of Gold, a pirate story. Steinbeck went on to become a great writer, but that first book? Not so much. I’ve never read it, but I have to believe that there’s a reason that it’s not on his Best Hits list.

I spent last week snowshoeing around the Tahoe area. I thought about Steinbeck a lot. I thought about him slogging through the snow and chopping wood to get the stove hot to warm up. I thought about him standing on the side of the mountain looking down on the lake like I did. It made me smile. I was encouraged that his first book wasn’t a great success. I was encouraged because he didn’t let that stop him. His best work came later, after Cup of Gold. We should all take heart. Just because your work doesn’t shine now, it doesn’t mean that it won’t later.

On one sunny day, the sun radiated off crystalized snow like diamonds. As I followed that path strewn with gems, it felt a little corny, but I knew I was following  good footsteps.

When I have questions about what to do with my writing, I take any ideas I get in the shower seriously. It’s the Left Brain/Right Brain thing. The Right Brain is the Control Freak and the Left Brain is the Wild Bohemian. The Wild Bohemian can get a little silly, or uncomfortably creative, but not all the ideas are excessively wild. There are gems in there as well. Gems that should be studied and acted upon. The Control Freak, however, says, “Not on my watch! Have you seen what goes on over there!” Slam! The steel door that divides the two worlds crashes down, and with any good control freak, the door controls are only on one side.

Activities like taking a shower, driving, or doing dishes lull the Control Freak into a bored stupor. He stops paying attention because he thinks he can control taking a shower in his sleep. The Wild Bohemian waits for those times! As soon as he sees the Control Freak nod off, out come all the crazy and wonderful ideas that have been dancing around the divide. And they’re not all crazy or wonderful. Sometimes they are smart and insightful. Stuff the Control Freak would claim for himself but would refuse to allow if it came from the Wild Bohemian.

The trick is for you to know that the creativity and inspiration that you need for what ever it is you’re doing is in you. You just have to pay attention when your Control Freak is nodding off. Don’t write off those ideas. Sometimes the Wild Bohemian gets so frustrated at not getting out that he crashes your dreams at night. Pay attention to them too. Remember, you are gifted to do specific things and the tools you need are in you. You still need to develop and refine them, but you also need to know how to access the gems when you need them. Just remember to put your clothes on before you rush out dripping wet with your new idea.

I love  being a writer, but I also love eating, and paying my bills. Fame and fortune are coming, I’m sure, but for now I’m looking for work. I’m not really interested in going back into marketing for the kind of companies I’ve worked for in the past. I’d really like to work for a nonprofit. There are so many organizations out there doing great stuff for the community locally and the greater community globally. The problem is, even nonprofits want experience. That’s a problem, because I don’t have nonprofit experience. So I decided to volunteer for a while and see if I could add to my resume.

I found a company called Benetech in Palo Alto. These guys are awesome. They have a three-fold mission: to support the environment, human rights, and literacy. The literacy program is called Bookshare. Books are donated, scanned, and made available to people with print disabilities – that is, people who can’t read from a book, be it from blindness, physical inability to hold a book , or learning disorders. I’m working to help get new books uploaded into the system. After a book is scanned, it has to be formatted for the software to read it correctly. I went through the training to format a practice book and now I’m going to be writing instructions for volunteers to use a new practice book. It’s been a very interesting few days talking to the folks about how people with different disabilities will be using this so we know how it should be written.

I have to say that I was a little appalled at first when I watched the process in action. The cover of a book is literally torn off, then the spine is cut with a very scary looking blade. The stack of loose pages is fed into a high-speed scanner and the file is ready for formatting. For my initiation as a volunteer, I had to push the button to cut up a book today. I didn’t want to do it! My love for books forbids that kind of destruction, but the more I thought about it, I realized how selfish it is to value the book over the person who needs it. OK, I can do that. I had that book cut up in a nano second.

I’m looking forward to doing more with  Bookshare at Benetech. The people are wonderful, and patient, and folks all over the world are being blessed. If you’d like to help, anyone can scan books from home, or format them. Go to www.benetech.org. It’s a good thing.

I kind of lost the month of September. My father went into the hospital with pneumonia then went straight into heart surgery. At 84 years old with other serious complications, it was a very scary month. I spent many nights sleeping in his room at the hospital and grilling doctors about treatment. Amazingly, he is recovering very well. Still in a nursing home to regain his strength, I think he’ll finally be home in the not too distant future.

Watching a parent struggle precariously on the fine line of mortality is a very sobering experience. You drop everything that is not absolutely necessary and focus on the daily challenge of helplessly watching someone stay alive. Your world narrows to the width of hospital hallways and drop into exhausted sleep at night. And it’s not just the parent in the hospital who is suffering. The other one needs support and protection as well. The rest of the family wants to be updated and kept in the loop. Your life, your real life, fades into a distant, obscure past that you have to struggle to remember.

How odd to be home and back into a normal routine again. I still take trips to visit, but not with the former urgency. Now I can think again about what I’m about. My writing, oh yeah! Where was I? Something about editing my novel and marketing for my children’s book. I feel itchy and excited to write again. Perhaps the month of September has given me new insight, perhaps a new discipline that will benefit my work. That probably remains to be seen. I just know that life is precarious and precious and all the decisions that we make should be made with conviction and wonder.

Being an author/publisher can be daunting, and by that I mean daunting. You are yourself responsible for the writing and editing. You are responsible for the layout, design, artwork and illustration, printing, distribution, marketing, and late night staring at the ceiling wondering if it’s all worth it. Yes, you will probably have help in the form of people who know what they are doing in each of those steps that will take your idea and make it into a book, but the buck stops with you, mister.

As a small press publisher, you don’t get the attention that the big publishers get. The chain stores don’t want to talk to you. You don’t have the easy access to reviewers and media. The reason is because self published books can be really dreadful. Unless you work with awesome editors, no one is there to tell you that your book is not yet ready for prime time. Unfortunately, too many of those books try to get out anyway and the whole genre of “self published” books gets a bad name.

Yea for Midwest Book Review! This organization is very open to reviewing small press books. And God bless them! One of the first things I did when I got my copies of Where the Jewels Are is send them copy. Happy dance, happy dance. I not only got a review by them, I got a wonderful review. Not only is the review on their site, it is used by Wisconsin’s public school systems and community libraries and Book Review Index, which is published for academic, corporate and public libraries. This is wonderful for a little book with very little wind behind it.

I need to mention one caveat about the review. There are ten books in the series Tales from the Throne, but Where the Jewels Are is the only one in print yet. Please stand by for the remaining titles.

It’s a happy day for this small press publisher. Of course I’m interested to see the sales that come of this, but more than that, I’m happy that my book has been recognized as a “real” book and it was all my effort to make it so. Kudos also to Brianna Scott, the illustrator, who was recognized for her delightful artwork.

Ok, sleeves rolled up, now it’s time to get the next on out.

I’ve always liked people who are smarter than me. As much as I think I know, there are more people who know more. They’re challenging. They make me think. They make me realize that I’m not always right, and that’s a healthy place to be. I have a friend, Tad, who is a physicist. We used to have conversations about where the soul is. If you slowly replaced all the pieces of a human body with prosthetics or robotics, at what point do you cease to be human? What if your brain could be transferred into something electronic? Does you soul go with it? These days, Tad invites me to lectures at Stanford or NASA where I listen and try to keep up. I love being mind-boggled.

I also love finding writers who are better than me and I just found a winner–Susanne Lakin. I met her in passing at the Mt Hermon writer’s conference. Turns out that the editor that I met with about my book is her editor. He encouraged me to work with her because he likes her style and that’s what they’re looking for. It also turns out that she belongs to the same writer’s group that I joined in San Jose. I made the decision some time ago to get to know the dozen or so published writers in this group by reading their books. When Susanne had copies of her new book The Wolf of  Tebron, I was excited to read it.

Susanne’s book is a lyrical fantasy-allegory. She also writes contemporary fiction, but The Wolf of Tebron is more in line with what I write, though miles apart. I love falling into a book filled with lush description and wonderful dialogue. Her allegory is along the lines of C.S. Lewis, but her writing is far more beautiful than his. She challenges my writing. I want that effect in my work. I read better writers and I write better as well. 

People who are smarter and better than me don’t make me feel stupid. They make me want to be better at what I do. There will always be someone smarter, someone who will find more truth in a sunset, more vision in a hero. Those are the people I want to keep up with.