As of today we have succeeded in tilling the garden, planting out potatoes, greens and some peas, mulching most of the blueberries and moved about half of the horse manure to the pile in the north field from the horses' fields below the sheep fold. The garlic has made a great start and the hay mulch should keep the weeds back for a month or so.
As one of my early farming mentors told me about 20 years ago, (has it really been that long, Francie?) most of farming consists of moving things around from one pile to another. It's called nutrient management. I wish I had a tractor but I don't. What you can do with a wheelbarrow and a plank of wood is pretty amazing, add a trailer and a vehicle, in my case a Kia Spectra hatchback, folks, yes I am talking making do, and you are good to go.
Now that it's half way through May, the only way I can work outside is with the full body armor, head and upper body netting, with tight collars at bottom and sleeves to prevent entry for the blackflies which invade at this time of year and swarm around faces and eyes and anything moist and heat giving. Their bites can inflict an amazing dose of toxins given their minuscule size, and the irritant can be so bad that infections develop and blood poisoning ensue. That's how bad they are. One of the confounding things about nature for many folks is the sheer itchiness of being outside in it. Why did God make blackflies and mosquitoes? That's easily one of the key questions to be able to answer for all the doubters in our offspring. For an answer just point to the sky at evening and the swooping blue and white arcs of gravity defying beauty known as swallows. Their aerobatics are more than just pleasurable, although they are surely that as well. It's feeding time for them all spring and summer long, payoff for the long trek up from Central American as they make nests and prepare for breeding. And the moist fields and swamps of New England provide the insect life they count on to live.
Coming out of the tunnel of book marketing for SAVIOR, it's an opportunity to take stock of where we are.
The book seems to be selling. It hasn't snowballed into best seller status, but has held its own in the Kindle rankings over a month period. Yay. Thank you reviewers, in particular Diane Bylo of Tome Tender, Stacie Theis of Beach Bound Books, Dianne Nelson of Sand In My Shoes Reviews, Roberto Mattos, and Diane Donovan of Midwest Book Review.
I doubled my readership on the blog here during the April A to Z challenge, a byproduct of having daily posts on a current subject and flagging that subject beforehand. Like weapons technology that produces positive spinoffs for the civilian market, so book marketing has taught me a thing or two about blogging. I need to set up a schedule to get out more blog posts. So, presuming there is a readership that cares and takes note of these sorts of things, and you have to presume that there is or you'd go virtually crazy, here is what that schedule will look like going forward:
Farm and Country Monday (posts on land, sustainable living, farm life, animals, vegetables --including myself, etc.)
Fishbowl Thursday (looking out at the panorama of the world through the lens of my little life)
Writing Weekend (reflections on The Process, guest posts from fellow writers, reviews. etc.)
Suggestions for posts, submissions and rants can be sent to me in the comments section or if you prefer and find email easier, then by all means have at it:
tcaplan (at) mcttelecom (dot) com
The sun is out after heavy rains last night. I can feel the current picking up. The tunnel of love is calling again. Gotta go.
Bonus:
(Overheard at Edmund's this morning.
Tourist: When exactly do the blackflies go away around here.
Shopkeeper: When the mosquitoes come out.
Me thinking to myself: Just in time. LOL)
This is the end, my only friend, the end. Of our elaborate plans the end, of everything that stands, the end.
Jim Morrison
Zeta is actually the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet. If this were a Greek blog we would be doing Omega, which stands for the end of all things -- being the last letter of that more classic and hence weightier alphabet. Zeta is actually a sort of frilly letter which reminds me of a fraternity house on a treelined college campus oddly quiet after the keg party the night before, the party to end all parties, the beer blast, raided by the campus police, you now only dimly remember although your pounding head is proof of living large for the moment, a moment now gone.
Speaking of living large for the moment, you can now pick up a free copy of my book, an appropriate end to the A to Z Challenge Book Launch Series for the publication of the new dystopian thriller about the end of the world, SAVIOR.
Yes. It is being offered free today through Sunday on Amazon Kindle as a promotional feature by Harvard Square Editions, the publisher, who hopes, as I do, that in this way you will spread the word and perhaps even be compelled to offer your feedback and insightful and praising comments on the Amazon page for SAVIOR.
So this is really not the end. It is just a beginning, possibly, as you pick up your free copy and begin a new adventure. I will quote now from a reviewer, who said of SAVIOR:
"Savior is a quest, a story of survival, a thrill ride, an exploration of youth finding the kind of truths parents dread … the kind that transform boy to man when the template exists outside the realm of normal and everyday." Diane Nelson, Beach Bound Books
And a heads up is in order here also. There will be a sequel. I'm working on it now. So do something good for yourself, pick up a free Kindle of SAVIORand prepare to be amazed as you share a father's and son's journey to the end of time and back again.
Voice is the quality in writing that lends authenticity to the experience of reading and compels a reader to trust that what he is doing is worthwhile. Like singers, a writer's voice gets stronger with training. Almost all writers have a sense of what their voice is; it's that combination of story setting and characterization that fits the author's range of authority, knowledge and expertise. Although voice can be confused with character, because usually an author speaks through his characters, either through dialogue or interior monologue, voice is more than just finding the intonation, accent and authentic mood to fit a specific character. It is about having the competency to range above and beyond the character's diction and mental frame of reference. After all, an author is the creator of a world, and that world has to be seamless and apparently boundless in all directions in the reader's imagination. The trick is a type of illusion, a leading of the reader's attention with smoke and mirrors elsewhere while the stage is being set.
As citizens of a liberal culture in which we are urged towards self-actualization, we are all supposed to find our true voice in our actual lives. What does that really mean, when someone is said to have found his or her voice? It is a proxy for achieving a place in the world. Most adults need to feel useful and accomplished. In Maslow's hierarchy of needs, acceptance and recognition come just below the apex of moral development. Acceptance and recognition from peers is usually reserved for people who have a voice, a say in what is being done and how it is being done. But as many people strive to have their voices heard, sometimes a cacophony results that leads nowhere. Look at Cliven Bundy in the news today as representative of a faction in adult America today that have lost their voice and never will find it again, seemingly.
In SAVIOR, I worked hard to get the voices of the characters right. I had the most fun with the villain, Samael Chagnon, whose voice is strong and compelling, and frightening in its lucidity. Al's voice is calm and sure and honest and therefore sometimes despairing. Ricky, Al's teenage boy, is hopeful, sometimes angry. For me, the greatest compliment so far in the reviews for Savior has come from a reviewer who had some difficulty with the book, but loved all the characters, even the minor ones, because they seemed alive and true. As a writer, that tells me I am on the right track.
SAVIORis available as an Amazon Kindle Ebook. Go to SAVIOR and pick up your copy, and then check back here throughout the A to Z challenge month to learn more about SAVIOR and additional publication month details.
Underground is the region below the Earth's surface. It is dark and therefore considered lifeless, although in truth the soil teems with microbes and insects, a community of living organisms with as many as 170,000 species. But generally underground is represented as the land of the dead, where human souls were once thought to reside and where the damned must spend their eternity. Not many people work underground, but miners still do, spending their days in cramped tunnels, and subway workers maintaining the underground transportation system in cities such as New York must sometimes descend deep into the Earth to carry out their jobs. Sometimes they are attacked by rats in the subway tunnels. Other hazards of being underground include getting lost in caves, which sometimes happens to spelunkers exploring labyrinths deep underground.
It's one of my recurring fears, getting trapped underground, cut off from all possibility of rescue, and so when I wrote SAVIOR, it was the worst fate i could imagine in which to place my character, Al Lyons -- in a prison complex deep below the Canadian oil tar sands, where he could die and never be found. The pressure cooker of isolation is one of the worst feelings we know. People are social creatures by instinct, although sometimes we wall ourselves off intentionally or unintentionally from others out of our very anxiety to escape the ultimate fate and evil of death. We sometimes hope that some unknown power or destiny will ride in to our rescue, but in the end, most of the time we have to save ourselves by tunneling until we see the light of day. How do we keep going? Where do we find inspiration? That is a question I think I am always trying to answer.
SAVIORis available as an Amazon Kindle Ebook. Go to SAVIOR and pick up your copy, and then check back here throughout the A to Z challenge month to learn more about SAVIOR and additional publication month details.
Time travel is the idea that humans will one day master the technology necessary to bend the space-time continuum and break the observable laws of physics by traveling back in time. Although theories of space and time don't necessarily preclude time travel, many skeptics point to obvious paradoxes that could arise, namely that a time traveler could alter the course of events by acting in the past to change the way things happen. In this way, someone could for instance go back in time and kill their grandfather before he could procreate, rendering his/her own existence impossible. The way to solve this paradox is by using the quantum theory of multiverses. Under this theory, a time traveler would not alter the course of events in the world by acting in the past. Instead his actions would trigger the formation of an alternative, parallel universe, branching off and forming its own reality.
In my book SAVIOR, Los Santos Muertos are attempting to build a doomsday machine, the Resonator, which uses the ratios of sound waves present at the creation of matter to set off cataclysmic earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and threaten civilization, The Resonator also has the capability, harnessing the power inherent in the sonic ratios, to bend space-time into a wormhole that allows time travel.
SAVIORis available as an Amazon Kindle Ebook. Go to SAVIOR and pick up your copy, and then check back here throughout the A to Z challenge month to learn more about SAVIOR and additional publication month details.
Savior is the book I just published. It took me a year or so to write, and it's been getting some good reviews in its first couple of days out. One of the early reviewers, well not really a reviewer, a reader on a website called Library Thing, didn't get why it was called Savior. So I thought I'd take the opportunity to explain here and defend the book against what are some early misconceptions that I think are a sign of lazy reading. First of all let me say this is not a Christian book. What I mean by a Christian book is an act of apologetica for the Christian religion, a defense of the institutional structure of the faith. I am a practicing Catholic, and today being Easter I am happy with the coincidence that this gives me to defend my work. Because, despite not being an overt and formal exposition of Christian beliefs in a story setting, there are Christian elements that are an important part of the story. Except they are not obvious, which to me is one of the hallmarks of true religion, to fight against the obvious, tired, trite ideas that become a prison for the soul instead of a liberation. Jesus fought against the stereotypes of his day, that the faithful could not work to heal on the Sabbath, that the son of Man could in no way consort with the lowly and the rejects of society, that worldly success meant to be blessed by God. The new ideas he brought forth were hard to understand, and some of them have never been accepted. The idea of non-violence, for instance, continues to be a struggle for Christians as we speak.
In my book Savior, Ricky takes on a mission, to find his father who has been kidnapped by Los Santos Muertos, a criminal cult that wishes to replace Western civilization with the practices and devotion to a death goddess called Mixtecacihuatl. All right, so there is a Christian idea, a defense of life against the death wish and evil in the world, which by the way does exist. Also, Ricky's mission is a difficult one, and it does not come easily. He is waylaid by the world and its temptations on his journey, and some reviewers have complained that the plot loses steam when we see through Ricky's eyes. For me this is a defense of truth and the main point of storytelling against the stereotypes and conventions which dictate that the eye can never be taken off the ball of the main plot, good guys vs. bad guys. But what about the internal struggle that goes on in the soul of a fifteen year old boy. Doesn't that make the story more interesting? Apparently not for everybody. But again, these are the lazy readers, in my opinion, who want their reading to push the buttons that always get pushed. A book doesn't have to be for everyone, and Savior is no exception. Ricky is a hero, but he is a human, a boy with flaws and doubts, like all of us. He is not your typical hunk of a guy who conquers through brute force and comes through in the end unscathed. And if you like your reading like that, to be brought through to the end through the brute force of conventions and stereotypes, so you end up unscathed, then Savior is probably not for you. If on the other hand you like to challenge yourself to a rare pleasure, a book that crosses genres and defies convention for the sake of a truer sort of story, then you might want to check Savior out.
SAVIORis available as an Amazon Kindle Ebook. Go to SAVIOR and pick up your copy, and then check back here throughout the A to Z challenge month to learn more about SAVIOR and additional publication month details.
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