Asheville for recharging the batteries

My wife and I have been visiting Asheville, North Carolina for the past 20 years; when it came time to decide what we wanted to do for our anniversary this year, returning to Asheville's Biltmore Estate was an easy choice. We considered activities: everything from rafting to horseback writing to rail riding on off-the-road Segways.

We ended up taking it easy, though that alone tired us out enough to need a rest and recuperation period when we got back home. The farms, the gardens, the bass pond and the lagoon, which we'd seen before, drew us back. Though we walked a lot, it's safe to say we did not walk off the calories we picked up at dinner and the Bistro and at the Inn.

We've been there when new rooms and floors opened up. We've gone "behind the scenes" and we've seen the house decked out in Christmas lights. This time, we went on the rooftop tour. The view of the grounds from there was spectacular, but we were more interested in the architectural details. We learned, among other things, that the gargoyles were created in place rather than being made out of blocks of stone in a shop and then attached.

The family has done a marvelous job maintaining the estate, keeping it pure to the architect's and the landscape architect's intentions. Not an easy job at a time when similar operations have had to go from privately operated to publicly operated to stay solvent. For the most part, the newer shops and activities have blended into the world of the estate in a harmonious way, providing once again a fine way for us to recharge our batteries.

The muse and I

The whole MUSE THING used to really bother me, and even now, I approach it carefully.

Since author Mark David Gerson talks a lot about muses, I finally said in a comment that I grew up hating the entire muse concept because it always involved frail personages who looked like they were dying of consumption floating around writers who looked fairly vacant and out of touch with the real world.

It was almost as though Mark David's point of view about this subject gave me "permission" to say, yes, I can give the source of my writing ideas and themes a personification. In fact, it was somewhat easier when I did, for she seemed partly to be a component of myself--the anima, to use Jung's term--and partly to be separate. To the extent that I understand Jung, I like his views and approach.

Thinking of my muse as a person and/or as an anima and/or spirit guide and/or soul actually made the flow of ideas better than before. My source of inspiration became more focused when I saw it as coming from a "an entity" with whom I conversed. Perhaps, as in the Velveteen Rabbit story where a toy becomes real when it is loved, my muse became real and stepped out of hiding when she was loved and acknowledged.

I realized then that she has always been there. I had simply kept her at bay because having a muse seemed rather silly, especially when I looked at old paintings of frivolous muses floating around inept writers. In reality, the muse is my soul--or, at least, that's how I think of her--and now she has a voice.

She is real enough to me that she appears in "Garden of Heaven" as a fully formed character. And, as I told Mark David, my kind of muse is the kind who is rather sultry and drinks Scotch.

Hmm, she is telling me now with a lot of mocking profanity that I don't have the guts to tell you her name. She thinks that because she's a sorceress, she can trick me into saying her name. ("Hush, Siobhan, we'll talk later.")

'Garden of Heaven' released as a free download

This afternoon, I uploaded a PDF file of my mythic novel "Garden of Heaven" to the book's website. I considered making "Garden of Heaven" available on Smashwords, there my two novels published by Vanilla Heart, are available in multiple e-book formats. However, Smashwords cannot handle novels formatted into multiple columns. Perhaps, one day in the future.

"Garden of Heaven" is my companion novel to "The Sun Singer," even though it's not necessary to read one novel in order to understand the other!

While "The Sun Singer" follows the hero’s journey of young Robert Adams into Glacier National Park, "Garden of Heaven" follows the odyssey of David Ward who leaves the Montana ranch where he grew up in hopes of finding greener pastures. Once again, I have followed the hero path structure popularized by Joseph Campbell in "The Hero with a Thousand Faces."

In the years since I wrote "The Sun Singer," many writers interested in the hero's path structure have found help in Christopher E. Vogler's "The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers," now out in a third edition.

On my web site, I'm warning those thinking of downloading "Garden of Heaven" that it's not for the faint of heart: This 240,000-word kaleidoscopic novel is nonlinear, often twisting facts, events and time. The disturbing multiple columns in some sections can be read in any order the reader chooses. Horses fly, eagles steal away sheep and men, and the Goddess presents obtuse and enchanting riddles. For reasons of safety, some readers will leave the book in the early chapters. All others may, in the years that follow, come to question their sanity.

With the warning in mind, I invite you to stop by the Garden of Heaven website and sample the materials there before you decide whether or not to take the plunge into my novel of quantum entanglements.

The Route to Buying 'Swimming With Wings'

I've been known to buy a new book in a spontaneous fit of divine madness. More often, I approach books I've just heard about like a cat playing with a toy filled with catnip. I approach, then I run off. Then I pretend to approach, then I'm diverted by a doorbell or a thunderstorm or a glass of wine asking to be poured.

What a labyrinthine process it is.

The first time I heard about Lee Libro and her novel Swimming With Wings was on a blog tour interview on my friend Lauren E. Harvey's blog The Writings & Ramblings of a Philadelphian April 14th.

I enjoyed hearing the story behind the novel, but on that day I didn't go directly to Amazon to buy "Swimming With Wings" because I'd already spent all the rent money on a box of books several days before.

A few days days later, I remembered the book and did a Google search and found the following quote on LibraryThing: "Lee Libro is a visual artist and writer. Elements of fantasy, myth and Jungian symbols are often interwoven themes in her art and fiction." That sold me on the book since almost everything I write is tangled up with Jung, Joseph Campbell, myth, and spirituality.

But I ran off again because I had just ordered some postcards and bookmarks for promoting "The Sun Singer" and though, hmmm, I better not put anything else on the credit card this week.

I hate to say this, but when a box of books to review showed up, I almost forgot about "Swimming With Wings." The initial dose of figurative catnip and been obscured by fresh catnip from other sources. Plus, I had reviews to write. Once I was caught up (sort of) with reviews, I had time to look at Libro's blog, Literary Magic. (I like the name.)

Needless to say, that brought me face to face again with "Swimming With Wings." Okay, I thought, the universe wants me to read the book. The first paragraph of the blurb on the book's website convinced me that the universe knew what it was talking about when it kept showing me this novel: "What do a 20th century light healer who can raise the dead, an eccentric, would-be debutant teen and a wandering gypsy have in common? A story of human brotherhood released only through the colliding dogmas surrounding their shared tragedy from long ago."

This is how I buy the books I buy. Actually, it's a more tangled process than this post, but this is getting wordy. If beginning authors knew this is how book sales happen, they wouldn't give up so quickly.

--Malcolm

Wordless Wednesday - a constant gardener

When I look at old photographs of myself, I'm never sure who exactly I was then. But the stakes here tell me, I had high hopes.

Nasty book reviewers

Some reviewers on Amazon go past the call of sadism chopping up books they don't like. Yes, I know it's tempting sometimes, but most readers are astute enough to see the difference between a review that states why a book doesn't work for a reviewer and a review written by a reviewer who enjoys having cutting things to say.

As far as I know, I've only given one book a seriously harsh appraisal; it was a novel that used a real life person as a character in a method that should have been grounds for a libel suit. I stand by my opinion of it even though I got really trounced by readers who loved the book.

I felt like trouncing a reviewer today, but figured an Amazon flame war wouldn't help anyone including the author of the book. I liked the book. The review I saw today looked like a chop job. Maybe I'm overreacting because that reviewer called my review a spin doctor review.

My father wrote hundreds of reviews as a part of his journalism work. His work was always fair and balanced because he treated the reviews as a form of news and commentary, not a venue for showing off one's own writing and/or philosophy. I'll never live up to my father's style and approach, but as I read some Amazon reviews, I try to remember that most of them don't come from professional book critics or reviewers.

Frankly, I think all Amazon reviews ought to carry the reviewer's real name. When posted under handles and screen names, the reviews can be posted with little attention to fairness and balance. On the flip side of the coin, I find that most of the reviews I see on Amazon seem to come from people who really like, or who really feel disappointed in, a book. They show genuine enthusiasm and honest disappointment. They make up for the reviews that appear to be written with a poisoned pen.

Recent Posts on My Other Blogs

The Value of Ignorance
A beautiful bookstore in Dubuque
'The Sun Singer,' a reluctant hero
FEDs rule that perception is no longer reality

"The Sun Singer" Bookmarks

I just got in some bookmarks for the new edition of "The Sun Singer." If any of you would like me to mail you one, send me your name and address to malcolmrcampbell@yahoo.com

They don't look half bad.

--Malcolm

Handwriting = Very Tired Hand

Normally, my right hand gets exceptionally tired only once a year: when it's time to send out Christmas cards. (Yes, we still send out paper cards rather than e-cards.)

Today, my right hand is cramping up after writing only 24 postcards yesterday. In today's computer world, I have no handwriting stamina at all. The cards are part of my direct mail campaign to Montana bookstores and gift shops, urging them to stock my Glacier Park novel in time for this summer's deluge of tourists celebrating the park's 100th birthday.

While working on the postcards, I had to take constant breaks--check e-mail, eat a snack, play a game of hearts (on the screen, of course).

Since everything I usually write by hand, such as shopping lists and Post-It notes is usually illegible, it took extra effort to send out post cards that were possible to read. And I still have more to send out today.

When I mentioned the tired hand problem on Facebook this morning, one comenter suggested I get a manicure. I'm sure it's a great idea, but not in a small town where men aren't caught dead anywhere near the manicure salon. So, I'm slogging on today, going past the call of duty for the world of writing.

Don't ask me to start a personal journal, though. I'd never be able to read it, and while that might be a PLUS, I'd like to be able to pick up a coffee cup or a fork at dinner time without needing help.

--Malcolm

P.S. If you own a Montana bookstore and receive a postcard showing the cover of my novel "The Sun Singer," I hope you can actually read the hen scratchings on the message side of the card.

Stop by the VHP Authors Blog

The relatively new Vanilla Heart Publishing Authors Blog now has eight posts which we hope are of interest to writers. The blog, written by authors with books published by Vanilla Heart, is more or less a how-to place for folks working on novels, poems, articles and short stories.

Today's post, by author, editor and writing coach Smoky Trudeau looks at reasons to consider small, independent presses with your manuscripts rather than thinking NEW YORK, NEW YORK. "First and foremost," she says, "you stand a much better chance of getting your book published {with an independent}. Major publishers rarely take a chance on unknown authors. For independents, unknown writers are their bread and butter."

We haven't had the blog long enough to have covered everything but the kitchen sink yet, but I invite you to stop by and take a look, see what's there, and even join our followers list. Leave your feedback, too, including suggestions for future posts.

Malcolm

Wanted: Message in a Bottle

I grew up in the Florida panhandle, a vast section of real estate referred to by writer Gloria Jahoda as "The Other Florida."

I liked living in the other Florida, driving forgotten roads, exploring a scrub oak, slash pine and palmetto world tourists avoided en route to the rest of the state; I swam at beaches that I hope are just as little known today as they were fifty years ago.

The tides brought me scallops and periwinkles and sand dollars and blue crabs and sea horses and dreams, one of which was that on a bright, moonlit night, I would find a message in a bottle.

Such a bottle might have begun its journey oceans away and years before I was born; perhaps it was thrown into the water with great hope and anticipation in the Sea of Japan or the Bering Sea only to follow winds and currents far from shipping routes, inhabited shores and outstretched hands until the Goddess called upon me to fetch it up out of the seaweed near the end of the pier.

I was so certain I would find such a bottle, I feared that a message dated decades into the past might say, "all hope is lost if I find no rescuers or kindred spirits by week's end." Or, "I hear them, the wild animals in the swamp looking for food and looking for me." How could I possibly help? Would I wade out to the small sailboat and follow fair winds and intuition off to unknown seas?

I sought connections along the beaches of the other Florida, not because I was lonely or had delusions of being a heroic rescuer, but because I wanted so much to share what I saw in the marshes, swamps and black water creeks. I wanted to hear that another soul had heard a limpkin cry or a sea gull sing.

One night, then, I might pull a cork from an ancient bottle still smelling of rum or lamp oil and extract a scrap of paper containing words written with the blackened end of a stick from a lonely signal fire: "If you read this, think of me. I will never meet you, nor will you ever meet me unless fate is wiser than we know. I am well. I hope you are well and I hope the night tides bring you dreams that make you smile."

I traveled once by ship from New York to England and several times from California to the Western Pacific. I was temped to find a bottle, write a message, and toss it off the ship's fantail. I'm rather sorry I never did that, that the time was never right or that no bottles were at hand. I might have said, "If you read this, think of me" and you, who are out there somewhere in the world reading this post might respond, "I did, I truly did, and I smiled when I heard the lullabies of birds and tides."

Our writing is so often like that, a search for a connection, a silent musing we hope to share with other eyes, a thought we had while looking for sand dollars, and whether it's tossed into the ocean of the world as a novel or a post on a blog, that somebody will find it on a night when the moon is bright.

Malcolm

How Many Hookers Have You Slept With?

Honest novelists must engage in tawdry activities in the name of research, of being sure they're really writing what they know and not something they dreamt about while coming up out of a hangover.

If we don't lead interesting lives tracking down the best possible stories for you, the reader at home seeking an escape from the laundry and the whining brats, we sure as hell ought to have the sense to lie about ourselves.

Consequently, I am--once again--absolutely flabbergasted at some author interviews I read recently that are more useless than a tattered Sears catalogue at the bottom of an outhouse pit. How can a creative writer interview another creative writer and do nothing better than ask: How long have you wanted to be a writer?

Oh, for Heaven's sake, that's drier than Aunt Edith's ashes. I don't want to read the answer to such a question because it involves a sappy dream some kid had while they were raking the yard while wondering what it would be like to be John Grisham or J. K. Rowling.

Are prospective readers lapping this up like rich cream? Hardly. Yet the same novelists who say "you gotta catch the reader with a powerful hook in the first graph" are interviewing each other about stuff that won't even hook a dead trout in a shallow pool.

Consider these alternative opening questions:

How many hookers have you slept with?
Did you really kill a guy on your climbing expedition to K2?
How drunk were you when you wrote chapter three?
Did you change your name after you went into the witness protection program?


If you feel unkind and/or frightened asking or answering such questions, read the last ten interviews your fellow writers are suspected in perpetrating on a purported audience. Then, resolve to avoid every question you see in these examples.

Authors need to become their very best fictions. Otherwise, their interviews are nothing but a yawn and a click away from Internet oblivion.

Malcolm

There is no Twitter

Spoon boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Spoon boy: There is no spoon.
Neo: There is no spoon?
Spoon boy: Then you'll see, that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.

--The Matrix

"A day will come," writes Deepak Chopra in The Way of the Wizard, "when you will realize that the entire universe can be found inside you, and then you will be a wizard. As a wizard you don't live in the world, the world lives within you."

This comment and the scene between the Neo and the boy in The Matrix focus on old and persistent concept. There is no outside, only your thoughts.

Perhaps you have read the old Zen story: Two men were arguing about a flag flapping in the wind. "It's the wind that is really moving," stated the first one. "No, it is the flag that is moving," contended the second. A Zen master, who happened to be walking by, overheard the debate and interrupted them. "Neither the flag nor the wind is moving," he said, "It is MIND that moves."

I have a hypothesis: There is no Twitter, only minds filled with tweet-sized sound bites that comprise the celestial, the drivel, the pragmatic and the self-serving 140-character notions we perceive outside ourselves at www.twitter.com where KnowFree just said: "First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do."- Epictetus

And where, yesterday, I said: Don't tweet me your cloying affirmations and purple platitudes. I've heard them all. Tell me who you are behind the veil of words.

In the real world, I'm discouraged with Twitter because I'm so easily bored by tweets about getting more followers and maximizing my website's traffic and what famous (and now dead) people said years ago. I want to ask, is this the best we can do? And I want to say, is this what passes for conversation these days?

But in the actual world, if I accept the fact that spoons and Twitter don't exist, then I must also accept the fact that what I'm seeing is what I'm creating.

In the real world, I want to take responsibility for the well-crafted spoon and the tweets that have redeeming value.

In the actual world, I'm forced to look at the fact that I'm putting the bad and the ugly there (assuming we can call anything bad and ugly) along with the good. This is why we smile and laugh nervously when we talk about the concept that we create our own reality. It feels so much better to say our talents account for our best days while fate is responsible for the days we don't consciously like.

Don't mind me, these are musings for a rainy Georgia Monday and, it goes almost without saying, that what you're seeing in this post is what you put in it.

--Malcolm

Recent Posts

* Malcolm's Round Table: "One Positive Person Makes My Day"

* Morning Satirical News: "Local Author to Read and Discuss 'Me and My Darth Vader'"