On the Shortness of Life

A little over a week ago, I learned of the death of a fellow indie author. I did not know Laila Doncaster, except in passing. We exchanged a few words now and then on Twitter, occasionally retweeted each other’s tweets, and that was that.

Her first book of a projected series was published on May 1st. Her bio on Amazon speaks of looking forward to an early retirement. And now she’s dead.

I am saddened. Very much so. A person looking forward to the future, an exciting future, and now there is no future. She’s gone.

Every now and again someone will chasten me for my attitude towards my writing. The sense of intense urgency I have to put pen to paper.

I am driven to produce as much as I can, as fast as I can, and get as many copies of my books into as many hands as I can.

I’m told I shouldn’t feel so driven. I’m told I shouldn’t be looking over my shoulder for the Grim Reaper, while my pen is scratching out page after page of words.

All I can say in response to these well-meaning folk is to quote Seneca: “The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.”

Or to paraphrase: I might die tonight — I need to write today. After all, only I can write my books; and I have many score begging to be written down.

Seneca’s essay, On the Shortness of Life, needs to be required reading. It is the antidote to the carelessness with which most of us approach life and live life — which is the most non-renewable of resources.

I’m 67 years old, and I’m somewhat ashamed to admit I’ve wasted most of the time given to me in this thing we call life.

Ever since I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a writer. However, it wasn’t until I was 37 that I actually, in all seriousness, began to act on my desire instead of just dabble. And it was another 11 years before I began to see the fruit of that action.

According to the actuarial tables, I have another 10 years to live. That’s not a lot of time. And anything can happen between now and then to shorten those 10 years.

Seneca wrote:

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.

There’s some comfort in that advice, yet how many of us know how to use our time and not waste it? I confess I’m still struggling with that one. But here, too, Seneca has some advice for us:

No activity can be successfully pursued by an individual who is preoccupied … since the mind when distracted absorbs nothing deeply, but rejects everything which is, so to speak, crammed into it. Living is the least important activity of the preoccupied man; yet there is nothing which is harder to learn… Learning how to live takes a whole life, and, which may surprise you more, it takes a whole life to learn how to die.

In other words, it is unproductive busyness, unproductive worry and anxiety, unproductive lack of focus, unproductive preoccupation with things that don’t matter that rob us of the one thing that does matter — irreplaceable time.

It is the life lived deliberately that is the fruitful life. It is the focused life that is the productive life. As Rainer Maria Rilke advised the young poet: once you’ve decided you must write, then you must structure your life so that nothing gets in the way of writing. Harlan Ellison put it more cryptically: “Writers write.”

I might beat the actuarial odds. My mom was 80 when she died. My dad is 87. His mother died in her 90s, although the last few years she was debilitated by a stroke, and his father died a month shy of his 103 birthday. But I can’t bank on it. Which means I have to write today.

As Seneca noted:

…the man who … organizes every day as though it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the next day… Nothing can be taken from this life, and you can only add to it as if giving to a man, who is already full and satisfied, food which he does not want but can hold.

Living deliberately is the key. And when we do, life — no matter how long or short — is time enough to accomplish great things.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy and productive living!

Two Year Anniversary

This month I celebrate two years being an independent author/publisher. Since November 2014, I’ve published 11 novels, 2 novellas, 2 collections of shorter works, and 6 short stories. Plus one flash fic was published by One for a Thousand ezine. I’ve had over 220 downloads of my books and stories and have made a wee bit over $500. Certainly not bestseller status nor am I making a king’s ransom.

However, I am published and I am selling books. If I’d gone the traditional route, I very well could still be looking for an agent. And most likely would be, as traditional publishers accept less than 300 new fiction authors each year. If one thinks the competition is stiff being an indie author/publisher, at least we’re competing for sales — not the “privilege” of being allowed entrance to the “club”.

So I’d have to say that my numbers are pretty decent. Especially considering I’ve done little advertising. And another thing to consider is that a mere 15 years ago, viable self-publishing on a large scale didn’t even exist. Thank you to Amazon and their Kindle and Apple and their iPad for making all this possible. Today we truly have desktop publishing.

However, as one can also see, if anyone is thinking self-publishing is the path to riches, think again. I know of indie authors who sell one or two copies a month. A lot of work for very small returns. As with any self-employment venture, it takes time, hard work, money, and patience before you begin to see a return. One writer recently told me it takes 5 to 7 years before a self-employment venture takes off — if it’s going to take off. Given that, I have 3 to 5 years of work ahead of me.

Aside from publishing books, I’ve spent the past year boning up on marketing. I had a bit of marketing in an economics class in high school some 50 years ago. Needless to say, I don’t remember much. I sunk over $600 into Mark Dawson’s Facebook Advertising for Authors course and I learned a lot. I think the course was worth the money. I’ve also taken numerous free courses and read a few books.

What I’ve realized is an indie author/publisher is a business. A self-employed business. A self-employed direct marketing business. Therefore I must think like a self-employed direct marketing businessman. Not as an artist. Otherwise, I don’t stand much of a chance of succeeding. And I certainly don’t want to not succeed. At the very least, I hope to recoup my initial costs and be able to break even on the ongoing costs. Sure I’d like more, but I’ll be satisfied to at least break even.

What does the next year hold? I’ve been giving it a lot of thought. Certainly more writing and publishing.

Early in the new year, I’ll bring out the seventh volume in The Rocheport Saga. I’m also hard at work on the next Justinia Wright novel. In addition I have two adventures for Lady Dru I’m champing at the bit to get written. Plus I have a partially written time travel adventure I’d like to finish. That’s on the fiction side.

Over the past year I’ve been thinking about non-fiction. My sister racks up at least 10 sales a month on her art therapy book without fail. And she does absolutely no advertising. Statistically (data from AuthorEarnings.com) non-fiction is the second largest category after romance for book sales. Very old advice from back in the day before the internet said non-fiction was the way to go if one wanted steady income to put food on the table, pay the rent, and buy clothes. Apparently that advice is still valid.

So I’ve been thinking about writing some non-fiction. What would I write about? That is a good question. For many years now I’ve been fascinated by the concept of simple living and how groups and individuals have gone about simplifying their lives. I’m also very much interested in silence and solitude, both as a spiritual exercise and one to simply bring tranquility to one’s daily life. And ever since high school I’ve admired Stoic philosophy. Stoicism not only touches on simple living and inner tranquility, but I believe holds the key for how we in the 21st century can best realize our potential. I think Stoicism is a far better practice for we Westerners than the eastern philosophies and faiths.

If I decide to go the non-fiction route, I’ll probably write on what I’ve noted above. Self-help books related to silence and solitude, simple living, and Stoicism for the 21st century. Stay tuned!

The past two years have been fun, a bit frustrating, an educational experience, and very rewarding. There is nothing that can beat being your own person, in control of your own destiny. 

Mark Dawson started publishing a year before I did. He now pulls in seven figures. That’s a lot of cash. He’s worked hard and invested a LOT of money in his self-publishing enterprise. So the rewards are out there, if one is willing to work at it.

I’m also going to work on the business end. Because that’s what Dawson did. He wrote books and advertised the heck out of them. But first he built up his mailing list. So that is my next step. Grow my mailing list from the 21 it’s currently at to… Well, as high as I can. Two, three, four, ten, twenty, thirty thousand. However high it gets.

Write and publish books — keep the product coming, build the mailing list, and market. That’s what’s in store for me for next year.

And I’m very excited about it!

As always, I look forward to your comments! Until next time, happy reading!

Cozy Catastrophe Review: Ray Bradbury’s “The Highway”

Good things often come in small packages. A surprisingly delightful cozy catastrophe can be found in Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Highway”, which appears in his 1951 short story collection The Illustrated Man.

The story is very short, only seven pages, and basically has no plot. However, don’t be fooled. Bradbury, by a masterful use of character portrayal, tells a very effective story. In fact, the story is a perfect illustration of Bradbury’s dictum: create your characters, let them do their thing, and that’s your plot.

I am going to forego summarizing the story because I don’t see anyway to do so without giving away the ending, which would be a shame if you wish to read this delightful and thought-provoking little tale. I will point out why I think this story falls into the cozy camp and in doing so give you a bit of a feel for the story.

The Catastrophe

First of all, the catastrophe is quick and there is little discussion of it. A nuclear war has occurred.

The Amateur

The main character, Hernando, lives on his farm with his wife near a river and a road. The road is a main north-south highway, but isn’t a freeway. From the description, we are safe to assume it is a two lane road. One on which lots of tourists travel.

Where Hernando lives exactly is not specified. But because Bradbury also makes clear Hernando’s first language is Spanish, we can again assume his farm is probably in Mexico or Central America.

Contrary to the so-called cozy stereotype, Hernando is not middle-class, nor British. It’s obvious he’s poor. He has a burro and a wooden plow. His wife grinds corn with a block of lava rock. Aside from his farm, the highway provides him with important things which enable him to live apparently  somewhat comfortably. The highway provides him money from tourists who want to take his picture, it’s provided him with a shiny hubcap that he and his wife use for a bowl, and the highway provided him with a tire, which he cut up to use for the soles of his shoes.

Clearly, not all cozy catastrophes are about middle-class British blokes who hate the working class.

The Setting

The setting is recognizable. It is a rural place south of the US border. The story focuses on Hernando and his wife. He is going about his everyday tasks when the disaster hits. What tips him off to something going on, is the highway has no cars on it. Something big has happened.

A Survivable World

Suddenly, a stream of cars appears all going north and when the stream is finally gone a lone old Ford shows up that’s overheating. Hernando fills the radiator with water and finds out from the young people in the car a nuclear war has happened. And then the car drives off. What is obvious, there is no sign of the calamity where Hernando lives and we can assume his little corner of the world is survivable.

A New World

The only point I see which might disqualify the story as a cozy catastrophe is the hope of building a better world out of the ashes of the old. For Hernando and his wife, there are no ashes and life goes on. Which is a point Bradbury liked to make: our modern world is too complex and too fragile and isolates us from the simple pleasures of living an uncomplicated existence. So, in a way, for Bradbury, Hernando's world is the desired new world.

One can, of course, argue something must be survivable for all the cars to have headed north into the war zone. If the US had been totally obliterated, why go there?

The story, though, is about Hernando and for him there is no other world than the one he has always lived in.

Conclusion

In this seven page story, master storyteller Ray Bradbury tells a tale which uses the cozy catastrophe format to tell us a story of the value of simple living.

The tale is very much worth reading and I encourage you to do so. Add a copy of The Illustrated Man to your library. You won’t regret it.

Comments are always welcome. Until next time, happy reading!

It’s a Wonderful Life

No, I'm not talking today about the 1946 film directed by Frank Capra. I'm talking about life. About why life is worth living. Which, by the way, is the theme of the movie. We are going to spend a little bit of time today chatting about philosophy. I know, I know. Philosophy. Boring. Bear with me and see how eminently practical philosophy is.

We all have one, you know. A philosophy, that is. We may not be able to articulate its tenets, but how we live our lives tells others what those tenets are. Even if they can't enumerate specifics either, they know exactly what drives us and what we value.

What we value and what motivates us is in fact our personal philosophy. And if we can't utter it with our lips, we certainly do so by our actions.

I've been interested in philosophy for nearly 50 years, ever since high school, and the one philosopher I continually come back to is the ancient Roman Stoic, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, known as Seneca the Younger.

Seneca was a fascinating individual in his own right. A man often at odds with his own school of thought. A man who was eminently guilty of not following his own advice.

However, where Seneca, in my opinion, redeemed himself was in his old age. There, in his last years, stripped of power, position, and wealth, Seneca embraced his philosophy and wrote the best advice one person could ever hope to give to another. His Letters to Lucilius are short and pithy and cover a wide range of topics. They are very readable and enjoyable today — almost 2000 years after they were written.

What in particular do I like about Seneca? I'd have to say it is his very practical and realistic approach to life. His advice is reasonable and not freighted with pietistic or moralistic sentiment. It is pre-Christian and fits well with those of us living in a post-Christian age. Ironically enough, early Christian morality and ethics were based on Stoic principles.

As an example, let's take a look at Seneca's opinion about wealth. According to our philosopher, there is nothing wrong with having money. Even lots of money. The problem comes, according to Seneca, when we try to cling to our money. The solution, he offers, is to live as if we didn't have any money. In other words, to live a simple life. By so doing our lives won’t be cluttered with the problems one encounters when one has lots of money.

Seneca himself learned this lesson the hard way. At the highpoint of his career he was one of two tutors to the very young Nero. He had tremendous power and was one of the wealthiest men history has ever known. Bill Gates’ wealth would have been casual spending money to Seneca. When Nero became of age and Seneca realized what the Emperor was truly like, our philosopher gave his money to the young man and retired from public life. Seneca went from being in control of the vast Roman Empire to being a humble patrician farmer.

From Seneca, I learned to value life for its own sake. Not for what I have, because tomorrow everything I have might be taken away from me — as it was for Seneca. The small things and the intangible things give value to life. Things like friendship and contentment. And those are found within a person, not without.

No one has friends who is not first a friend to himself or herself. I cannot love another, unless I first love me. I must, first and foremost, love myself and be friends with myself. Only then, am I capable of truly loving and befriending others.

Contentment does not come from without. It comes from within. If I am satisfied with who I am, then I will be satisfied with what I have. And I will be content.

The human being is a reasoning animal, Seneca wrote. And when reason has been brought to perfection in the soul, we fulfill the good for which nature designed us. We live then according to our nature, as reasonable beings. If we are out of control, if we lack contentment, is we lack love for ourselves, then we are imperfect beings and do not live reasonable lives. We are not living, Seneca would say, according to nature.

The goal of philosophy is to bring us to a state of mind where we live according to that for which we were designed. That is, lives marked by reasonable thoughts and behaviors.

This is a wonderful life if we live according to our nature, according to reason. If we are balanced and content, everything within us and around us will be wonderful.

That is philosophy. And why I find it such a wonderful, non-judgmental guide to life. The good life. The wonderful life.

The Wonderful Machine Age: Mass Marketing/Consumerism

Then I saw in my dream, that when they were got out of the wilderness, they presently saw a town before them, and the name of that town is Vanity; and at the town there is a fair kept, called Vanity Fair. It is kept all the year long. It beareth the name of Vanity Fair … because all that is there sold, or that cometh thither, is vanity… One chanced … to say unto them, ‘What will ye buy?’

John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress was published in 1678. His description of Vanity Fair predates the Industrial Revolution by eight decades and the Machine Age by two centuries. And yet nothing characterizes the Machine Age and the Modern Era so much as the question, “What will ye buy?”

Mass marketing and the accompanying Consumerism began in The Machine Age. And as it began, so did the hue and cry arise for us to return to a simpler life and eschew the call to “Buy! Buy! Buy!” Writers such as John Burroughs, David Greyson, Edward Bok, Ralph Borsodi, and Theodore Roosevelt wrote books and articles and gave speeches extolling the virtues of a life without “stuff”. And all the while the Ad Men appealed to our sense of need.

I know for myself there is life before iPad and life with iPad. I confess, I prefer life with iPad. Although I could live without the iPad, it would be much more difficult to dispense with the world wide web altogether. I’ve become used to having volumes of information at my fingertips that would have been difficult for even my local research librarian to glean a mere 40 years ago.

The Stoic philosopher Seneca, very much a voice for our age, counseled his friend that wealth was not in and of itself bad. What was bad was thinking we can’t live without it or that we should have it.

With stuff comes anxiety and the modern age is filled with anxiety. Thoreau’s image of the man pulling a massive barn-sized wagon down the road with all of his worldly possessions piled high in it comes to mind. There is something a whole lot simpler about a backpack.

How then did Mass Marketing and Consumerism arise? They arose out of the scale of production and the means to produce tens of thousands of an item, whereas previously only a hundred or two had been produced. They arose out of the dreams of our Victorian ancestors of what constituted progress and plenty.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, goods were generally produced at home or in small shops. What today we call cottage industries. Local artisans and craftsmen produced goods to order in addition to what they produced for themselves. The extra money helped to supplement what was produced on the farm.

For example, in the American Revolution muskets and rifles were produced by hand. The British government contracted with gunsmiths to produce a certain number of weapons in a given period of time. An agent then went to the gunsmith’s place of business, collected the weapons, and paid the smith. The same was done for uniforms before the big textile mills were built.

The process was slow and costly. Production of goods was often secondary to the main livelihood of the producer, which was usually farming. With the advent of steam power and the invention of machines to manufacture goods, the scale of production went up. Instead of maybe ten or twenty pairs of socks a cottage industry could produce by hand, the mills could produce ten or twenty thousand in the same period of time or less.

This, however, caused a problem for the manufacturer. He simply had too many items on his hands. The cost to him to produce a thousand was often greater per item than to produce ten thousand. The economics of scale gives us a lower cost per item the more we produce because it is cheaper to buy in bulk than singly. So what was a manufacturer to do with the extra goods? Enter the Ad Man and the Salesman and the call, “What will ye buy?”

An interesting article is “The Commercial Christmas”, which gives a quick look at how the Victorians commercialized the holiday. And by 1890 editorials were appearing in The Ladies Home Journal complaining of Christmas being too commercial.

Today we have, through the world wide web, everything at our fingertips and ad agencies convince us we just can’t live without _________ (you fill in the blank). The amount of consumer debt is frightening. In the US, as of 31 March 2015, household debt was $11.85 trillion. Of that credit card debt was $684 billion. And as of the end of 2013 28% of Americans had more credit card debt than savings and only 51% had more emergency savings than credit card debt. And this doesn’t include other debt, such as school loans, car loans, and mortgages.

Consumerism is alive and well. Every government in the Western World worries when consumers stop spending and every developing country’s government  tries to figure out how to get its people to buy. The modern world is built on consumerism.

So why don’t we see more of this in our retro-future novels? Clearly the Steampunk and Dieselpunk real life worlds saw the beginning of mass marketing and consumerism and were in large part formed by them.

Is it a case, perhaps as with television, they are so much with us we see no fictional value in them?

I think of the short-lived, late ‘80s sci-fi TV show Max Headroom. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the show, it was a satirical and cyberpunk look at ourselves “20 minutes into the future”. The first episode, entitled “Blipverts”, explored mass marketing. [Spoiler alert here.] People were mysteriously exploding. It was discovered that Network 23 was using high-intensity commercials which had the ability to overload people’s nervous systems, causing them to explode.

Of interest is that the atmosphere of Max Headroom was about as depressingly noir as one can get. I think it was cyberpunk at its finest.

Surely there is something in this the steampunk or dieselpunk writer can use. After all both steampunk and dieselpunk are children of cyberpunk. I see both subgenres ignoring major expanses of territory which need to be explored. Where is the inventiveness of Jules Verne and H G Wells? Or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Fritz Lang (the movie Metropolis from 1927).

Both subgenres are science fiction and from my observation (of my own work too), both have degenerated into using highly selective tropes to produce works which are simply mysteries or romances or adventure yarns set in an alternative historical universe. There is nothing wrong with this. I just think there is so much more. Something like “Blipverts”.