Any Shiny Thing - Life after 50
Midlife Fiction
A lot of us just started blogs, and we’re all excited. I check out each and every one, because I want to be a good cyber-citizen, but I will be honest with you: when I see lots of paragraphs, I go away. Darren Rouse, who writes about blogging for actual $$$ (!!!) said that 250 words is long enough. He also said 9 other smart things about good blogging. Read it here.
I just got invited to speak to a group of senior citizens on any topic I chose. I had to decline because, while I know a little about a lot of things, I don’t know a lot about any one particular thing. So I missed a chance to enhance my platform.
How often have we been told that in order to establish a marketing platform, we should specialize or become a bit of an expert in something? For example, my friend Dodie Cross, who wrote “A Broad Abroad in Thailand” can talk about her experiences living not only there but in Iran before the Islamic Revolution. My friend Vicki Mills who wrote “Any Body Can Enjoy Computers — the Clear and Simple Basics,” can talk about that. What can I speak about?
Let’s consider my almost-finished novel, Dakota Blues. I could become more of an expert on any one of its themes. See how many you can spot:
A middle-aged workaholic executive gets the kiss-off from her job and husband while attending her mother’s funeral in her Midwestern hometown. She wants to race back to California, but wonders if she should reevaluate – if she has wasted the first half of her life. Besides, North Dakota beckons; she meets a whole new network of dynamic gal-friends and falls in lust with a sexy professor. She is drawn by the sweetness of her hometown, and by her immigrant roots. Torn between the familiar and the possible, she rejects them both, and instead agrees to ferry a persistent 90-year-old neighbor cross-country in an aging RV. It turns into a road trip that will change her life.
I’ll bet I could talk about a lot of things from the above. Mid-life crises, the second half, Banat German immigrants to the Midwest, modern-day patterns of reverse migration…The next time I get invited to speak on anything at all to a group of kindly, receptive people, will I accept the offer? Ask me in three months.
I’m so anal I used to have a list of values (Recognition, Relevance, Time, Money, Service) by which I would measure whether I was living a good life. It was only several years into having developed this list that I realized ALL OF THE VALUES PERTAINED TO MY JOB. None of them addressed the pursuit of family/friends, artistic interests, health, love or leisure. So for all the list-makers who think that completing your to-do list is synonymous with living a full and satisfying life, here’s the risk you are taking. And thanks to Janet Reid and Toni McGee Causey for reminding me not to sleepwalk through my one precious life.
In She Writes, a new community for writers created by Poets & Writers magazine, author Lauren B. Davis expressed what a lot of us are feeling about having to do all the marketing and selling of our books:
“… just about everything these days seems like advertising or marketing. So much LOOK AT ME!!! LOOK AT ME!! Twitter. Facebook! It’s so… well…. gosh, dare I say desperate? Dare I say vulgar?
“For me, this is a question of how I wish to live my life. William Zinsser once said that he wanted to be a person first, and a writer second. I agree with him, but would add that I want to be a self-promotion-machine not at all.
“The publishing industry is in transition at the moment, trying to figure out what it wants to be when it grows up, and during this petulant adolescent phase it seems to be throwing authors up in the air (while not paying for their airfare) and telling us it is our responsibility to market/promote/sell our own books. Well, maybe. Maybe not. Just because they say that doesn’t mean we have to buy into it.
“I think we must, each of use, decide what we want to be, and what we’re capable of being. Do we want to be writers who use writing as a way to make meaning in our lives, as a way of connecting to some deeper center, or do we want to be Authors, more concerned with the sales figures and market share?
“…I have no training or expertise in marketing and/or sales. Didn’t people used to go to school and get degrees in such things? I have studied for years to be a writer. Not an author (which implies publication), but a writer. As it happens, I am an author, with four published books behind me, but they’re just that… behind me. Like all writers, I must accept the fact I may never publish again. There are no such guarantees for any of us, ever. We are not entitled to anything. So if I am going to find a way to sustain myself as a writer, it must come from something deeper than the public/publishing industry’s fickle affections.
“I’m happy to do readings, and love book groups, and if invited will happily show up. The same goes for radio shows and print interviews and anything else that comes my way. But I will not spend more time marketing my work than creating it. Not even close. I am a writer, not a rock star. I am a writer, not a publicist. I am a writer, not a public speaker. I write essays and novels and stories, not tweets. I put my essays up on a blog because, frankly, I can’t think of what else to do with them, and it’s a nice way of connecting with people and having occasional contact. (We do spend a lot of time alone, as writers!) But in the end, I’m a writer. I write. And that, when all is said and done, must be enough. When it stops being enough, when I become obsessed not with the words but with the sales then, for the sake of my sanity, I’ll quit. Simple as that.”
My first blog was a tester. I wanted to get comfortable with the idea of blogging, so I started Any Shiny Thing and proposed to write about anything my hyperactive mind found attractive. I assumed that other people would find my topics attractive, too.
Brrrrrt! Wrong assumption. Let Penelope Trunk of Brazen Careerist tell you why it’s critical to make your blog about something specific.
Do you know that there are now more than FIFTY MILLION blogs on the Internet? With all those choices, why would anyone read yours (or mine)? I began to suspect Any Shiny Thing wasn’t a good idea when I’d explain what it was about, and my listener’s eyes would glaze over with polite boredom. “Oh, just anything I find interesting” is not a compelling reason to go there. Denise Welch of Computerworks, Inc. has a related viewpoint. “You tell me, ‘Read my blog! read my blog! I don’t want to read your blog,” she says. Unless you are going to make it worth her while. In her view that means you have to GIVE something to the reader (beyond the pleasure of your company).
I hope I have given you a tool today for making your blog more effective.
Pablo Neruda said, “To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life. But to feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know, from those unknown to us, who are watching over our sleep and solitude, over our dangers and our weaknesses – that is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things.” Happy Thanksgiving.
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