Twinkie or Dead Sea Scroll—You Decide

I’d like for you to think of your writing as Twinkies—not for its abysmal nutritive content, but for the extraordinary vitality of its preservative army: your writing can continue marching on, even after it has bivouacked for a while. Twinkies, of course, have a reputation for staying soft and squeezy long past their recommended consumption date (if anyone recommends consuming Twinkies). Such is the less-sugary substance of your writing—you can achieve successes with writing that has been gathering hard-drive webs, by sending it out anew after its slumber. You can also redirect writing that you thought was a fruit, but really turned out to be a vegetable. (Note: Twinkies are not vegetables. Or fruits.)

Here’s what I mean: This past weekend I received an email telling me that I’d won a scholarship to the Wrangling with Writing conference in Tucson, Arizona, held this coming weekend. The award, which includes the hotel room, was given to me on the strength of an essay I wrote some time back—not for this conference, but for another online contest. Though the topic of the conference essay was pretty close to the online contest essay, I had to trim out some fat and slant it a touch to make it fit their guidelines. I really didn’t think I’d win, but I had the piece snoozing on my hard drive, so why not wake it from its nap?

Slot Machines on Ice: Melt Them
Another roll of the dice: I wrote a short story about Las Vegas in the 70s years ago. I’d prodded and poked that thing a bunch of times, sending it out to magazines and small literary publications. No jackpot. So, it sat with its slot machine unplugged for a while until I thought, what the heck—I sent it out earlier this year to the Labletter, and they were happy to publish (and pay for) it in in their annual journal of arts and literature.

And just one more example of how you can shave the grizzled beard of your writing to reveal the fresh face below. I wrote a short story in grad school about some high school shoplifting hijinks that was never published. Years later, I heard about the National Steinbeck Center’s short story contest. I thought it was a real longshot, but again, why not? I was shocked to have won, and still cherish the lovely glass plaque that was given to me. I cherished the $1,000 prize as well.

Naturally, I haven’t emphasized the bajillions of rejections I’ve received over time for my Tantric poetry muffin recipes, or that little matter of the novel that can’t seem to fit in any agent’s ear. But I don’t need to emphasize those, because they don’t matter. What matters is that you can’t succeed if you don’t keep sending the stuff out. Once in a while, those old Twinkies will still have a twinkle.

Bonus Twinkies Story
Many years ago when I lived in Seattle, I dated a nice woman whose high apartment windows faced out on a warehouse district in the city. One late evening, staring out at the cityscape, I notice some huge trucks—with big cylindrical carriers like gasoline trucks use—lined up against a factory building, with giant chutes attached. When I asked my pal what was going on, she said that those were sugar trucks, and that they were unloading their white wonder into the Twinkie factory! That gave me quite a thrill, since I have been a lifelong fan of sugared objects, and it was rather a hallucinatory sight to witness the eerie glow from the wee-hour factory lights, dumping massive amounts of sugar in the semi-darkness, destined to torque the brains of young children all over America. There was something criminally poetic about it all…

Ezine Articles provides a perk-me-up

I’ve written before about Ezine Articles. It’s an article directory or repository, where writers post articles on a wide range of topics and they give permission to other publications or sites to republish them. Article topics cover most of the subjects in the known universe, and probably unknown ones too. However, pieces can only be re-published if they retain the original URLs of the article writers, which typically go back to the writer’s business site, as is the case with my publications.

It’s a nice site for me, because I own the reprint rights for lots of articles that just listlessly sit around in a back pocket of my computer—why not poke them to life again and see if they bring any baying of writing bloodhounds to my site? Ezine’s tracking stats let me see that I’ve had several of my articles re-published on other writing sites, and I’ve seen from my own tracking stats that being on Ezine does indeed bring traffic to my site. Customers—I dunno.

But that’s just my long-winded intro to noting what I got in the mail a few days ago, pictured above: Ezine sent this gift package, with a nice coffee cup, leatherette coaster, package of coffee for a pot o’ joe, and a certificate stating their thanks for me being a member of the site. Sure, it’s all branded stuff, but wow, it was totally out of the blue (I hadn’t seen anything on their site about them sending gifts), and I’d only posted 10 articles, which is nothing by comparison with some posters. That’s the kind of unexpected customer appreciation that sets some companies apart, and prompted me to give them a shout-out today. Treat a writer right, and they will write right. Or at least write more.

(Pssst! Ezine: the coffee was nice, but a half-pint of bourbon next time will help my digestion.)

Books and Booze
Speaking of sticking your nose in a glass of hootch while you drink in some literature, I was heartened to read a post last week from Shelf Awareness that included a link to an article on Books and Booze, An Old and Profitable Mix. The piece looks at a number of bookstores that also serve wine and beer, such as The Spotty Dog Books and Ale in New York. Goodness, that is quite an advance over the bookshop cafe, such as the one I worked in, where we merely peddled sugar bombs and jolts of java.

One of the quotes from a Spotty Dog bookseller is illuminating: “… the bar allows us to have more in-depth relationships with customers and to discuss all matter of things, including books, than just having a coffee service would necessarily support. The more you talk to your customers, the better you can know what they will want to read.” I have no doubt that the customers want to discuss all manner of things after getting schnokered, but books might not be at the top of the list. Lady Gaga’s latest foundation garments, perhaps.

The store’s owner said, “Also, serve quality products, and you will get people out to enjoy one or two delicious beverages, not to go on a binge. Unique micro-brew beers go well with books.” Aye, a good brew, a good book. But cognac isn’t bad either, in my opinion. The article also profiles some other bookstores that stock swill and have found it to be an asset. When they start putting bars in church, you’ll know the world’s a kinder place.

Bacteria, You Are Me
And thinking that you’ve massaged your mind with all available nostrums by having read your basic anxious modern person’s requisite amount of self-help, nutrition and doomsday books—and that knowledge of the human condition is your stock in trade—out comes the most recent Smithsonian, with this nugget in an article about organizing and talking nice to microbes and their neighbors:

“Trillions of cells make up the human body, but there are at least ten times that number of bacterial cells in you or on you. You are, at best, only 10 percent human.”

Man, I KNEW that those times when I reached for the TV remote and I picked up the cat that it wasn’t me. All along it was those filthy bacteria controlling me. And they’re getting a free ride! Why can’t we tax these creatures and pay for another 100 years of Social Security?

OK, OK, I know it’s a cheap imitation, but too fun not to parody.

A friend of mine was in a Borders yesterday looking for a couple of books. She sat down on the carpeted floor in the travel section so she could comfortably pull out a few titles from a low shelf and check them out. A clerk came up and said, “Ma’am, customers are not allowed to sit on the floor.” She asked if he had a chair, and he said she would have to go to the cafe if she wanted to sit down.

They haven’t invented the right profanity for this situation yet, but let me express why it deserves one most sour: These are the days in which bookstores are going down. Amazon, ebooks, self-distribution, shortened attention spans—there are a raft of reasons. In this time when bookstores are at least on the threatened, if not endangered species list, you tell a customer they can’t sit in the store when they are looking at books? Greatgodalmighty!

When I was a kid, one of my greatest delights was to go to the library and surround myself with books I pulled off the shelves. I sat in the aisles for hours sometimes, lost in the world of words. Many years later (and the jobs years apart), I managed a couple of bookstores, even one owned by a corporation. There was no stiff-backed rule about sitting in the aisles—I couldn’t imagine shooing a customer away like that unless they were putting ice-cream cones in the books, or taking Magic Markers to them. Of course, of course, you don’t want your customers literally blocking the aisle, but this wasn’t the case.

Howl of Customer Cruelty
The kicker is that besides looking for a travel book, my friend was looking to buy a copy of Howl, the seminal Allen Ginsberg work. Why Howl? Because one of her clients is a poet. The client is moving to New Orleans, and she wanted to give him a gift. THAT’S customer service. Her customer is leaving, yet she is making him a generous gesture. That’s rising above—not practicing rule-making folly.

Don’t treat your customers like trash in your aisles. Find a connection, not a stiff-stick-up-the-rear rule. Share life’s poetry with them instead.

And for surviving my rant, you get a bonus treat: here is the last paragraph of Sunflower Sutra, one of the selections from Howl. Let’s be sunflowers instead of automaton clerks at bloodless corporations.

--We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread
bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all
beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed
by our own seed & golden hairy naked
accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black
formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our
eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive
riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening
sitdown vision.


I’ve mentioned before how answering HARO (Help A Reporter Out) story queries can result in your blog or business URL getting flapping wings over new waters, and indeed that again was the case for me in answering Lisa Kanarek’s solicitation for hints on stepping away from the home office for her Working Naked blog.

Lisa posted my short answer to her inquiry on her blog yesterday, and I saw this morning, through the magic of Google Analytics, that seven people had traipsed over to my site from hers.

A Lucky Seven
Now you might think that seven people is only a crowded phone booth [Note to self: do people remember what phone booths are?], but I know that even gaining small numbers of folks sifting through the shelves of my site is a good thing, no matter if they are interested in my copywriting services or in seeing if I’ve made a spelling missteak. (And no, I don’t obsess over every traffic footfall in Google Analytics, but it’s an intriguing tool.)

By the way, seeing as how summers in Santa Cruz County, CA are often pretty durn foggy, I never work naked; the heat’s on right now…