Tag Archives: writing

Blank page…

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Some days no matter how hard you squeeze, the old brain just doesn’t have anything to give. That’s when you end up with one of these rambling posts that doesn’t seem to say anything and ends without ever coming to a satisfactory conclusion. Maybe it’s not true for every blogger, but for me, I don’t think there’s any greater enemy than the blank page… except maybe when that blank page coincides with a completely empty bucket of ideas. Maybe I should just embrace the nightmare and take a day off every now and then, but I can’t shake the feeling that it would be cheating somehow. Even a habit as deeply engrained in my schedule as blogging every day enjoys a perilous place on my much-valued daily schedule. Miss it for a day, or two, or five and God only knows when I’ll get it back in the lineup. One of the many joys of being a creature of habit, I suppose.

So yeah, there’s plenty going on in the world, but to continue with what seems to be the theme of the week, the worse the news gets, the less I care about the world and the more I care about me and mine. Maybe that’s a character flaw… or maybe it’s a thousand generations of human history screaming that the best any of us can really do is making right by our own circle of family and friends. Then again, I’m just a half-assed blogger so you might want to take that with a grain of salt. I, on the other hand, will be taking it with a cool refreshing rum drink.

Hometown boy makes good (or possibly evil)…

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It’s not the post I had planned for this evening, but it always seems best to strike while the iron is hot. I’d like to thank the Cumberland Times News for picking up my press release and giving this hometown boy a little bit of publicity today. I’m not quite sure if I’ve “made good” or not, but if nothing else I like to think I’ve “made interesting.” It’s been my experience thus far in life that interesting trumps good on most occasions.

CTN Article - May 17, 2013If you’re looking at the print edition, the article is right there in three short columns on page 2C below the fold. I’ll take all the help I can get and I appreciate them helping me get out the word.

Apparently I’m a slice of life… Who knew?

Hits and misses…

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One of the most frustrating things about running a blog is that some of the posts I think will go like gangbusters end up falling flat while others that were more offhand seem to spark the most interest. Even when posting about a normally popular topic, there doesn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason for why some posts get a large number of views and others languish more or less unseen. Such is the life of a blogger – always chasing after the next “hit.” Come to think of it, that description makes it sound a little like blogging is the nerd equivalent of being a smack addict. Maybe the two aren’t as different as they seem except for the part where a blog only tends to ruin your life by sucking up all your free time and possibly getting you sued for slander or libel.

If I ever find the secret formula that’s probably just the perfect combination of topics and timing, I’ll be sure to let you know. Actually, I won’t. It will become my most closely guarded secret as I let the number of visits reach into the stratosphere. It’s more likely that I’ll continue bumping along at 20-120 views a day indefinitely, because really I’m more interested in writing about whatever catches my interest on any given day than I am writing random crap just for the sake of driving web traffic.

Recycling…

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If you spend any time reading the recommendations about “how to be a bestselling author in 978 easy steps” one that they come back to time and again is how important it is to get new material in front of readers as quickly as possible. That sounds well and good until you really start to think about the sheer amount of time and effort that goes into something as seemingly simple as publishing a “short” 150 page book. The reality is that I don’t see any way to do it in less than 18 months that doesn’t involve either giving up my day job or not sleeping. While one of those options would be temporarily awesome, it would inevitably lead to poverty and starvation. recyclingThe other would probably lead to some kind of REM-deprived psychosis. Neither is an option I find particularly attractive for the time being.

There is another option I’ve been kicking around for the last few weeks. I’ve got a blog just sitting here with seven years worth of more or less untapped material. Most people read a post once, maybe twice if it’s really epic, and it’s never seen again. With a little editorial effort, a few thousand words of fresh content, and some flashy layout, I could conceivably have two new books set to press in short order. It’s extraordinarily tempting, if for no other reason than it buys me time to work on something completely fresh while I’m editing these together.

It’s an idea still very much in its infancy, but I’m starting to outline two lines of effort:

1) What Annoys Jeff this Week: 2012 was a Bitch. This would be an anthology of 52 weeks of what is generally the most viewed posts I publish each week. Some I’d freshen up and expand a bit from what appears on the blog, but mostly they could be plucked root and stem and used shamelessly for retail purposes. It has the decided perk of also being a self-licking ice-cream cone – as long as Thursdays each weak feature WAJTW, every year I’ll have popping fresh new material for the next edition.

2) Epic: The Best of jeffreytharp.com. Over the last seven years I’ve posted more than a few epic rants covering everything from work to neighbors to random people at Home Depot. I haven’t dove into the research yet, but I’m betting that there’s more than enough here to turn into a respectable ebook maybe something in the neighborhood on 25-30,000 words. It’s definitely going to require some polish – if you haven’t been reading the Sunday archive updates, take my word for it; some of the early work is pretty rough hewn. Still, I think there’s plenty of meat on the bone.

So will either of these ideas come to pass? Honestly, I don’t know yet, but it does seem like a waste to sit on what’s got to be upwards of half a million words of content and not do anything with it. It would be like running my own personal recycling program… and that’s a good thing, right?

Buzz…

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Now that the initial buzz (and corresponding sales) for Nobody Told Me: The Cynic’s Guide for New Employees has died down, it’s time to start getting serious about the long term marketing plan. The big push this week is to get press releases to the local newspapers here in the greater Ceciltucky area (local resident does good), in Western Maryland (hometown boy does good), and to the Baltimore Sun, Washington Post, and New York Times (because my ego clearly knows no bounds). I’m willing to concede that this whole thing may just be an exercise in vanity, but a bigger part of me still feels like there’s plenty of room in the marketplace of ideas for another snarky, sarcastic jerk who you’d probably still enjoy having a beer with.

As for what comes after that, well, to be perfectly frank I don’t really know. Writing and marketing are two tremendously different skill sets. I have some raw skill in one and a touch of formal education in the other, but I’m not anywhere near a master of either. The part of me that writes because it’s what I enjoy doing would be happy to get back to doing that and ignoring everything else. Of course the part of me that wouldn’t mind making a few coins from the effort is still chomping at the bit to sell, sell, sell. As usual, reality is going to land somewhere in the middle and be guided at least as much by the limits of available time as by anything else.

For my next trick…

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We all know I like to write. You don’t blog for seven years and publish a book if you’re adverse to putting words on paper. Writing is the best sub-minimum wage job I’ve ever had and it more than makes a run at what I’d do full time if I didn’t have pesky concerns like rent and groceries. For all practical purposes that’s a complete pipe dream, but it’s a happy pipe dream at least.

Since I took on the bureaucracy in my debut effort, the question I’ve been struggling with for the last month or so is what comes next. I’m toying with giving my short-lived teaching career the same treatment. I think there’s enough distance between me and that aborted attempt at a career that it could be fun. I worry that two and a half years over a decade ago might not give me quite as much source material as I’d like to have. I wasn’t as good at keeping notes of all the stupid things that happened back then as I am today.

Another option I’ve been kicking around is taking on the whole concept of leadership and management. God knows my brief tenure as a manager left me with enough material to at least get started on something interesting. Plus there’s the whole parade of good and terrible bosses that you encounter over the course of any career. That’s a rich mine of ideas right there, though I’m not entirely sure I want to stick with the business and career genre for another round.

Then there’s fiction. Maybe everyone who writes thinks they have the great American novel in them somewhere. I’m not sure I even have a proto-idea of what that might look like, but fiction is something I’d love to tinker with eventually… but I’d rather start out with the ghost of an idea rather than just a blank sheet of paper.

What’s the point? Yet another thing I don’t know. Something’s going to be next, but what’s that is just hasn’t occurred to me yet.

Fooling myself…

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After a day of working in the yard, doing laundry, running errands, and making a passing effort at starting dinner, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that we’ve entered that time of year where some activities are going to have to get thrown over the side. I’ve talked before about some of the unique challenges of being a one man show, but the simple fact is if there isn’t enough time to get to everything, the stuff I don’t particularly like doing is going to be put off indefinitely – I’m looking at you here vacuuming, mopping, and dusting. Frankly, I never much liked you anyway and since you’re in head-to-head competition with working in the yard, you never really stood a chance.

It’s one of those times I wish I wasn’t quite so OCD about things being “just so,” but I’ve pretty much given up on ever letting things slide with being good enough. So what’s really going to happen for the next five months is a cycle of ignoring the interior dust and dirt until I get twitchy, launching an all-day cleaning binge about once a month, and repeating as necessary until the grass stops growing in the fall. Sure, I could hire it out… but then I have to deal with the awkwardness of having strange people wandering around in the house. I’m sure you can guess how anxious I am for that to happen. So in the spirit of spring, here I sit trying my best to ignore every rug that needs vacuumed, every stray bit of dust and dog hair, and don’t even get me started on the wood floors that need mopped.

OK, so I could have probably spot cleaned the kitchen in the time it took me to tap this out, but let’s face it, writing isn’t one of those things that I’m very likely to give up in favor of cleaning now is it?

Best of breed…

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I’ve been using the blog a lot lately to hock my own merchandise. I’m going to spare you from a round of that this evening in the understanding that as much as I wish it might be otherwise, you might be interested in hearing a voice other than mine from time to time. In that spirit, I wanted to take this opportunity to feature three blogs that I read and enjoy on a regular basis because they’re some combination of funny, inappropriate, or informative.
I’m listing these in no particular order other than the way my bookmark folder has them organized:

1. ChowderHead – Wildly funny and decidedly inappropriate. Do you need more reasons to click over and give it a read?

2. 25ToFly – Commentary on life, blogging, and the hilarity that ensues. She’s good stuff.

3. Break Room Stories – I did a four year hitch with McDonald’s, but I was always mercifully protected from the general public by two or three flat-top grills. This blog confirms what a good idea staying in the kitchen was.

One of the things about blogging is that you tend to do a lot of reading of other blogs in your travels around the internet. Some, obviously, are better than others. If you don’t have quite as much time to wander around the internet looking for the good bits as I do, these three blogs are some of the best of breed. Give them a read. I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.

It’s a kind of magic…

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Paperback ProofOK, so the alternate title for this post was going to be “The post in which the author gets sentimental…”, but in deference to Queen, I decided to steal their title shamelessly. Regardless, haggling over the title isn’t the point of this particular post. What the point is, however, is what an unexpectedly intense feeling it is holding a book your slavishly worked over for eighteen months in your hands for the first time. Sure, I’ve been dealing with the electronic version for the last few weeks, and with what feels like dozens of Word drafts for months before that, but there is a certain reality to having the physical book in your hand. Having mostly gone “all in” to the electronic world for my own reading, I’d be lying if I said this didn’t catch me off guard. I’d been looking at it mostly as one more avenue to reach people who hadn’t adopted e-readers yet and maybe talk it into a few local book stores as just an ego rub. What I found is something altogether different – after cutting away the brown cardboard wrapper, what I had wasn’t a collection of files, cover art, and a sales pitch. I had a book.

I don’t have any point of comparison for what standing in the kitchen holding the proof, tired from working all day with allergies making life miserable, was really like. Not being a particularly expressive guy at the best of times, all I can say is that I had a moment yesterday. It was one of those across a crowded room, golf shot, lighting strike moments. All I know for sure is I want that feeling again… and again… and again. It’s gotta be what that first line of cocaine is like. It’s an incredible, intensely personal high. I’ve got to write more. I’ve got to get that high again. Maybe it’s never as good as your first, but I get the feeling I’m never going to stop chasing it. I don’t know that I can stop chasing it now even if I wanted to.

Take Out the Trash Day…

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In an episode of the West Wing, Josh and Donna have a conversation about why Friday is called “Take Out the Trash Day.” To boil it down, Friday is the day that the week’s bad news stories get released to the media. That’s mostly because except for a few hard core news junkies, people don’t tend to pay much attention to the news over the weekend. What little attention a bad story gets in the weekend press is swallowed whole by the new cycle before anyone logs in to the Washington Post on Monday morning.

While the chances of breaking a national scandal wide open here by yours truly is pretty slim, blogging faces much the same hazard as most other kinds of media – namely that Friday and Saturday tend to be low-volume events. It generally means what you’re reading on those days isn’t exactly “A” level material. When you throw in the fact that it’s a fair size portion of the country will be acknowledging Easter this Sunday, the viewership statistics drop right through the floor. Apparently, people spend Easter doing something other than tending to status updates on Facebook and catching up on the blogs they follow – to each their own, I suppose.

Don’t worry though, I’ll be right here posting my regular updates throughout the weekend, like some kind of evil, godless heathen. It’s ok, you can thank me later. I hope you didn’t mind this little bit of inside baseball discussion. It’s Friday after all and it only seemed fitting in celebration of Take Out the Trash Day.