The Readers Hub Newsletter

The Readers’ Hub Newsletter

              Friends: Here’s my pledge to you….sign up for The Readers’ Hub here

          http://authorp.blogspot.com/

 and I’ll send you updates about my work and interesting trends and ideas I come across. I hate spam and don’t like to get reams of e-mails either, so I’m not going to be bugging you with too many annoying updates! (Two times a month-topsJ)

Here’s a few odds and ends I’ve collected as I’ve worked on various projects around the internet. Every month, I’ll send you a short note. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy! –MLJ

Weddings, funerals and retirements have been the focus in this year of our Lord 2016. So many friends and family members, and fellow Baby Boomers are now retiring. Children I helped to raise are now marrying and starting families of their own. And some people, good people, tend to die too young…

 

·         The Writers Hub: Weddings and retirements are featured, as well as Notes from a Native, and The Blurb Blog, all part of the newly incorporated one-stop blog shop:The Writers Hub.

·         6 Degrees Summer Newsletter is out. New releases haven’t bowled me over of late, but critics these days are working with less material from even more film sources. So we have to separate the wheat from the chaff. See what’s coming in 6 Degrees of Film at the Movies.

·         Non Profit News debuts this month. Working in a church gives me an overview of not only issues that affect us here at home, but globally. See the list and the links in NPN.

·         The GF Writers Cooking Journal is the home of our magazine of the same name. Eventually, the book will debut! Meanwhile, check out the encore posting of the excerpt: “Marge & Dad: A Love Story” on the blog.

This summer promises to be as productive as all summers tend to be. You go in with a bang, thinking you’ll have plenty of leisure time and lazy days to finish that novel, clean up the mess in your {fill in the blank} and to just chill and relax. It all sounds good and it goes so fast…Proof is in the picture below, of my niece Kirsten, now married and expecting her first child. Oh, how time flies!

Please connect with me through The Writers Hub and sign up for monthly updates. Here’s the link….Or go to  my website: 6degreeswriter.com. You can also e-mail me at mljtpa@6degreeswriter.com.  I’m on Twitter @mljtpa. My Facebook connection is just Mary Lee Johnson.  I’d love to hear from you!

Tis the Wedding Season

 

Jane Austen always ended her stories with a wedding. So it seems fitting that the final episode of Downton Abbey closed recently with another wedding. This is the season when weddings abound.

 Spring blooms forth, and those of us ridden with allergies reluctantly peek our heads around and venture out to participate in weddings and picnics and walks in the park.

 With a wedding in the works in our immediate family, all eyes are on the bride and groom, along with the upcoming shower and pre-nuptial events. There are engagement photos and bridal showers, the catering and flowers, the planning and the all-important dress.

 

All of these things condense to a point where we are left wondering where the fantasy ends and the reality begins. One of my favorite bits was from an old Bob Newhart show where Bob tries to bring the prospective groom back to Earth with a reality check on the practicalities of day-to-day life for a young couple. To which the young man responds, ‘To heck with marriage, Bob, we’ve got a wedding to plan!”

 

So apropos is that remark when staring down the barrel at another young couple’s approaching wedding date. No practicalities can match the starry-eyed fantasy attached to a young girl’s Dream Wedding.

 

If only we had a society where high school and beyond came equipped with classes designed for reality. “Everyday Living with Others”, “Budgeting”, “Compromise in Relationships”, “Learning to swallow your pride” and “Love means learning to say you’re sorry-several times in the course of a day!”

 

So with great regret we pause and consider the fictional world of Downton Abbey. And then, we consider the fictional world we imagined when we were younger. Then… Life Happens. Jane Austen had it half right. Life begins when you are a young and dewy eyed bride or groom. And happily ever after’s are found in the fairy tales of young children. But for most of us, Life is what you make of it, and at times, you must turn the Lemons into Lemonade!

 

For Retiring Baby Boomers: Life is what you make of it...

 

For Baby Boomers, it’s that time. There are so many friends and family members retiring soon. It’s such a finality. The boss I have loved working with for the past ten years will be gone soon.

What’ll I do? When you …

Are far away..

& I am Blue…

What’ll I do?

 

As my mother told me many years ago, “All of Life is about change.”  And I would add that it’s about how we adapt to change, really. I started my working life when computers were as big as a car. Now we run programs on micro-chips the size of a fingernail.

 

I was born in the fifties during the Cold War.  Back then, we were afraid of nuclear annihilation.  Now, we are living with terrorists who threaten to take us back to the Dark Ages. We are faced with the phantom fear of beheadings and torture. The irony is that technology has become so advanced and we still look back at fears that haunted us in the Middle Ages.

 In spite of this, we have seen incredible breakthroughs in science and technology. The Golden Age of Information Technology has arrived. We are braced for many more wonderful discoveries in the 21^st Century. It’s like standing at the peephole of King Tut’s Tomb. What do we see? Wonderful Things! Many more advancements in medicine and in future technology that will enhance the way we live our everyday lives are in store.

 And still, we tend to be a bit sad to see things change. As McLuhan said:

 “When faced with a new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future. Suburbia lives imaginatively in ‘Bonanza-land.”

 

I have long suspected that retirement would open up this Brave New World for Baby Boomers. Those of us who feel that there is life, a vital and productive life to be found on the far side of fifty, should feel energized and re-vitalized about this Golden Age we have landed in. And that’s why the gift of Retirement and Old Age may be a Blessing or a Curse. Old saws still apply.

 

Life is what you make of it. So Viva Retirement and Bring it On! We Baby Boomers have survived so much, and so we will look forward to all that the future holds in store.

 

Diary of a Low Tech Girl

In Part 1, I've been writing about some of my frustrations as a "Low-Tech Girl, living in a High-Tech World." In Part 2, I've continued the theme of living with low-tech skills by sharing some notes that I've accumulated through the years while trying to learn more about Marketing and Search Engines and Data sharing and other elusive topics. Here's some diary excerpts from a low-tech girl:

Dear Diary: I learned a little bit more about link building today. You are going to have to just suck up and look quite obvious and needy as you are grasping at the straws of relevancy when you build your links.

 
Dear Diary: Metadata was a fun new word. It’s like a baby with one of those mobiles you attach…look at the pretty things spinning around! What are they?
 

Dear Diary: Back links are links that…what the hell? Who cares what they are called!?

 

Dear Diary: Platform & Branding are two new words that I have decided to ignore as a writer. They seem to be made up for those impotent people (Remember the joke about the pimp who went to the doctor and came back with new platform shoes and fancy clothes?

 

Joke:

 What did the Doctor tell you?

Pimp: He said I was “Impotent”…..Lots of impotent people will tell you about Platform & Branding.

 Dear Diary: SEO means Search Engine Optimization but is sounds way better when you just say SEO because it’s like the Seinfeld episode called “The Dealership” where Jerry gets Putty (Elaine’s car salesman boyfriend) to confess about the real reason for the Sealant under-coat for the new car

 Jerry: You don’t really do anything to the car, do you?

Putty: (confesses with a laugh): “We don’t even know what it is!”

 SEO is like that…. LOL-We don’t really know what it is!

 Dear Diary:

 

·         Hyperlinks sounds like a made-up word from a Star Trek geek.

·         Content Curation is manna from heaven for writers. Because instead of coming up with ideas, you just scroll down and troll through the archives to pull someone’s blog post and then just pretend you are back in college writing a paper and it’s due tomorrow. You summarize the work and change the title and submit it with fingers crossed, hoping for at least a B Minus.

·         Google Penalites sounds like something from Fantasy Football or the like.

·         Dear Diary: Marketing means just about anything these days. Lots of jobs for kids fresh out of college revolve around some form of Marketing…whatever.

·         Dear Diary: After going through my web design course and my in-bound marketing course I have a new password: Ihaveaheadache…oh yeah, I forgot. There has to be a number plus an extra key…How about; Ihaveaheadache#1000!?

·         Dear Diary: Every day, tech gives me a headache. People who wrote for a living used to simply sit and write with a pen and paper. Then typewriters came along, and it’s been downhill from there. Changing the ribbons and figuring out the margins and then the page setup on a typewriter was bad enough.

        Now we do nothing but worry about the process. And the writing classes are hilarious, because people older than myself (I’m a Baby Boomer) think that we are doomed as a society.

     Young people don’t understand what the fuss is about. And Baby Boomers are stuck somewhere in the middle. We Boomers are old enough to remember life when computers filled a room and the blinking DOS cursor was all that was known about computing.

     Now, we have to know the “process” and writing is secondary. There is data about the amount of time a person will actually read the content on the page. We scan a page and leave after about eight seconds. McCluhan was right-The Blurb is the word.

·         Dear Diary: Now all of our Titles are analyzed, and you have to hook the audience right away! The speaker in our Marketing for Writers Workshop says with a straight face,

       “ Number 1 on the List to sell your work is a Good Looking Cover."  Then he gets down to Number 5 or 6 on the list. That would be… "Good content! “

·         Right? I’m not kidding, this was part of a workshop I attended, and I was the only one laughing. Jane Austen, where are you when we need you?

 

Dear Diary: I am taking the day off and taking a lesson from that sweet looking older lady who was caught in the photo of a crowd of phones, with people around her taking selfies, while she simply watched and took it all in as she just enjoyed the moment. I might just take a walk-and enjoy the day. And leave the phone behind!

 

 

Notes from a Low-Tech Girl Part 1

One of my biggest problems, and frankly frustrations, has been my lack of tech ability and the need to constantly adapt to an ever changing world where information moves at the rate of light speed and we, as writers and marketers, must learn to keep pace with the changing times. One solution I’ve found was to take a Marketing Class online. I’ve taken several, and have amassed piles of notes on the subject.

Being a writer, I’ve decided to keep a diary to help me make sense of it all. Here’s some excerpts from my diary. They are my Notes from a Low-Tech Girl:

  

·         Link Building= Ass-Kissing

·         Metadata= Data about data. So it’s BS, right?

·         Back Links=what the hell?

·         Platform & Branding- Big words for Measuring Success

·         Google Analytics-are for Dummies

·         Keywords-just made up mumbo-jumbo

·         SEO=Search Engine Optimization….ok

·         SEO is for the Birds

·         Hyperlinks-are some kind of links-who cares what they are called?

·         Content Curation-is cheating for writers that’s permissible as long as you change the title

·         Google Penalties-what?

·         Marketing-is the buzz word for some made up  jobs

·         I have a headache is my new tech password

 

*Stay tuned for Part II!

 

The Stuff that Dreams are made of

 

“Idle dreaming is often the essence of what we do.”- Thomas Pynchon

I took a planned leave from work for about three weeks. And it felt so good to get away from the atmosphere of daily grind in the office where I work. It’s not just there, but everywhere you work, you find this stifling influence of creativity, really it can be found in any office environment.  Perhaps it’s the artificial lighting combined with superficial worries of the day, but whatever the reason it makes for a completely down-trodden environment. No creativity is allowed or encouraged. Just mindless day to day crap.

 That’s the way we’ve done it for the past 50 or 100 years of the Industrial Revolution, so that’s the way we’ll keep doing it….But eventually, I guess we’ll be replaced with robots.  There will be robots to answer phones and questions, and to push papers. Office workers will eventually be no more, thank God. People will be less needed.  We will be less in demand for every sort of thing that machines can do cheaper and better. Machines don’t complain or get colds. They need maintenance, but not health care. So it goes, as Vonnegut would say.

 

We will eventually be an obsolete race, but we probably won’t know it for a generation or two after the deed is done. Things like that happen silently and stealthily, not with great drama and gusto. There’s no clamoring to end life as we know it, as boring as it seems to us. But office workers will be the next wave to go, as factory workers have already gone the way of the dinosaur. We can work out of our homes, if we’re lucky. Some people could do very poorly and perhaps be out on the streets. And more of us will end up living in cars, or in trailers or utility sheds. It’s not such a bad life, really. I work in a converted shed, and it’s fine for the most part. Of course, I don’t have to live here full time with a room overflowing with other people. The words “it’s fine” would not apply in that scenario. Rather it would be annoying and confining. But it could be done.

 We would not be any happier if the office drone positions in society were eliminated altogether. We would be relieved on some level, and unfulfilled on another. For there is a deep and abiding need in Americans for the comfort of the boredom provided by monotonous work. We are free to daydream and dally without interruption, an eternal Mitty-esque dance of the macabre acting out in our brains.

Some of us daydream of sports, or sex, or food, or money. Others dally with power and revenge. There are seekers and doers that would happily imagine us helping others and saving the world. But most of the drones of the human race would be caught red-faced with their pants down around their ankles metaphorically speaking. We cannot judge the unseen nature of dreams and ambitions of others in their private thoughts, but if all of our most boring activities were suddenly gone from the face of the Earth, what then, would we do?  Most of us would drift aimlessly as we depend upon the stability of our boring existence to make it through each day. As the man said, idle dreaming may be our true purpose in life. In the end, it could be the essence of who we are and what we do.

The Commercialization of Writing vs Harper Lee & Marjorie Rawlings

Marjorie Rawlings at Cross Creek

 

My two heroines are Harper Lee and Marjorie Rawlings. They came along at a time when women in literature were still like children, seen but not heard. Their contributions to the literary world made them giants among us, but they spoke softly and both carried big sticks. Marjorie was a pioneer in more ways than one. Her move to Florida, her gutsy decision to stick it out when her husband left, and her high ethical standards make her a giant among writers. She was also the point man-(or woman)-in the battle for literary control in a non-fiction work. Her publisher left her out there to swing,( they had big Ernest Hemingway to defend), and she was left to defend herself against a long-running libel suit that drained her both emotionally and financially.

Harper Lee worked with Truman Capote, behind the scenes, to help him write his masterpiece, In Cold Blood. And then, in her own right, she published one of the most beloved books of the last 50 years, To Kill a Mockingbird. I think it still resonates because, from the time the story was published, it immediately captured one of the most important eras in our country, the Civil Rights movement. And it became timeless, sadly, because we are still fighting the battles of racial discrimination fifty years out. Unfortunately, those of us who were raised in the South have seen evidence of the naked prejudice and hatred portrayed in the book and the film. Harper Lee put it on the table, on display for all to see. And she did it in the most masterful way possible, telling the story through the eyes of a child.

In The Yearling, Marjorie Rawlings also gave us a timeless portrait of a people and a culture that will soon be extinct. She preserved the culture and ways of Cross Creek, and did so in the most careful and reverent way possible. She, too, tells the story of the Creek through the eyes of a child.

Both women have served as role models in their lives as well. Marjorie insisted that her home would not be in any way, shape, or form used to sell items for profit. Her home is preserved in much the same condition as it was the day she died. Upon her death it became a part of the University of Florida, as she donated her property to the University system.   There are other support groups for Ms. Rawlings’ work, one being The Friends of Marjorie K Rawlings Farm. I, too, am a friend of Marjorie. She speaks to me all these years later, eschewing the commercialism and material gain that is so rampant in our culture and, indeed, in our own literary world.

*Harper Lee, still living yet elderly, (Died 2/25/2016), never gave interviews or took gratuitous promotional forays to promote her book. Instead, she made a conscious decision to live quietly and fairly normally in the small town in Alabama where she had always lived. There were no pretensions or glitzy book tours to sell her work. She let it stand and speak for itself. And by all accounts, has led a happy and well-adjusted existence far from the public eye. That was her choice.

When I went to a writing conference recently, there was a young man pushing his book. He put up a list of the ten best ways to promote your work. I was the only one who laughed out loud when he displayed, “Good Writing” as the Number Five best way to sell a book! He did seem to get the irony in the statement, but still insisted that the best way to promote your work was to have an eye-catching cover for your text.

I love these two women. They were against the commercial hydra that has overtaken the publishing community. There will never be a return to the simple life that Marjorie and Harper Lee wrote about; but the values they lived by and the ideals they stood for are timeless reminders that there are some things worth fighting for, worth living for, and yes, even worth dying for.