The learning curve continues. 

This is the first time I've knit anything that wasn't based on a square, rectangle, tube or triangle, so you can imagine how this is burning some new neural pathways. The other odd thing is that the pattern calls for a total of 12 petals or points, and then sewing the last row to the first. I have a hard time believing this will be a flat disc and not a cone. 

Today we went out for brunch at The Grey Lodge, my favorite local pub, but my patience for people was so thin I almost had to Force-choke someone. Remember when jukeboxes had actual records inside them? You put in your quarters and punched some buttons, with a satisfying KERCHUNK, KERCHUNK, KERCHUNK, and when your selection came up in turn, you'd get to hear it?  Now The Grey Lodge has one of them Intarweb connected Touch Tone machines. Takes up less space, provides a wider selection of music. Sounds good, right? I've never had a reason to complain. If I want to put on Dave Brubeck, me and my hard-earned dollar can make that happen. 

Now, Touch Tone machines have an app. So, if you have the app and this is your financial priority, you can control the jukebox from the comfort of your bar stool, shoveling your musical taste down the throats of everyone in the bar for as long as you like. 

These 30-year-olds were playing with their phones, talking about how "old" they were for liking Blink-182 and early-2000s "punk." When some girl started squawking about the band Poe, a guy admitted that he thought "poe" was the Spanish word for paella. They were controlling the jukebox, and you like what you like, whatever. But when the music stopped for a minute, I got up and shoved my $4 into the machine, so I could hear something different for a couple of minutes. 

I put on Thelonious Monk (I don't remember the name of the piece), and Nina Simone's "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood." Monk played through, a bright, complex yet palatable piano instrumental that made my chilaquiles seem much less like soggy nachos. My mood improved. Unfortunately, it was immediately followed by, not Nina Simone, but more of the early 2000s punk and "OMG this is the best song EVAR." 

Which means some knucklehead paid extra to bump his selections ahead of mine in the queue. 

I said to the bartender, "if everyone in the bar has the app, and everyone can pay extra to bump their songs higher in the queue, what happens?"

He said, "The music selections get pretty crazy in here. Personally, I think you should have to walk up to the jukebox and punch it in, if you're gonna play "Barbie Girl." You have to own that shit." 

KERCHUNK. KERCHUNK. KERCHUNK. 

I'm trying this knitting pattern for the first time: 

I've never knit anything with short rows before, so this is a good learning experience. 

So far, so good.

I'm having trouble staying asleep because I dream about work.  Not fun. So hopefully this will give me a new fixation pattern. 

At the Philly Airport.   It is creepily empty. I keep waiting for Bronson Pinchot to show up with a blind chick. 

Debating telling the flight attendants that it's my birthday.  

Cons: They may sing Happy Birthday, which I really don't like.  

Pros: They might make me a crown made of toilet paper rolls and stirrers. 

We shall see. 

Off to Austin! 

My dad always says that the Bad Idea Bears whisper pretty loudly to me.  He says too that you can practically see Bad Idea Bears in the ether over twelve year old boys, informing them of the possibilities.

I have a skate buddy.  It's good we don't drink together - because things would get out of hand.  Today I texted him.

"I wanna try skating behind a car and you're gonna drive."

"NO!!! I draw the line."

But there was something in that.  Only three exclaimation points.  I don't buy it.  I predict that within a month we are trying this and frankly, yes he's gonna drive as he's the only person I trust.

Right now we are in negotiations.  

*********************************************************************

Last night was straight up disco.  I wanted to skate like gangbusters but I have my little queen with me.  So I headed to Pattinson's West, our local rink, for family skate night.  She took one look at the lights, the floor, the awesomeness of the carpet glowing back at her and deployed her full primate cling.  Arms wrapped around my neck, legs around my body.  Chatting to the rink manager, she said even her kids were like that and they'd grown up at the rink.  HerMajesty slowly unpeeled when security offered her a plastic Easter Egg.  And when my skate buddy took off flying around the rink she sprang loose and yelped, "tate!"

I love this rink, it's where our school parties are held so there's a fondness associated. But it is also extremely clean and well kept.  There's a lot of staff on the floor on family skate nights to assist and also, remind people that this is a family time and slow down some of the wildings that want to speed around.  The layout is great too.  There's a concessions area, but also, just a candy counter, but it's all pretty unobtrusive to the main affair: which is skating.  There's tons of family seating, I've never had a sticky table, and you can actually get food and candy for the kids without compromising your mortgage.  And it's just pretty.  Skate rinks have their own asthetic... and if there were a coffee table book of skate rinks I'd be among the first to buy one.  I love the carpets here.

Her father sent her these amazing little Fisher Price Grow With Me snap on skates that work like a dream.  I can't recommend these enough for Skate Queens who want to raise baby monarchs.  They have three settings to adjust the mobility of the wheels.  My daughter is two and a half, so the sensory confinement of boot skates and resulting panic at not being able to get them off and on herself was too large a leap.  These ones she can put off and on herself.  They were the perfect color for her, she loves bright pinks and oranges.  They fit very well over her sparkly little Pumas.  They also have a decent heft without being too heavy and disconcerting. 

So I helped her strap in and we were off.  Naturally, the first thing she tried was a jump.  In skates.  It worked becuase the wheels were locked.  She was able to experiment with the difference between walking and skating.  A few laps around and she was getting the hang of pushing her skates on the floor, though we've been watching a lot of street skating videos so she was taking "little steps."  In rink skating you can take long strides with reasonable confidence that the floor is clean and unobstructed, but street skating, no.  You need smaller steps so you can leap to your other foot when you inevitably hit a rock.

It was so damn disco when my kid pulled over and tried to adjust her own skate settings.  I snapped them to full mobility and off she went.  What's more, I forogt my own feet, which is what I've been working towards.  Foreward, backward, around in circles, as long as she didn't fall badly towards the back, I wanted was fine.  I skated spotting her for that scary backwards fall to the back of the head and my skate buddy blocked around us so no one crashed into her by accident.  

We skated up until 10PM.  My children have never needed a lot of sleep.  In the early days I was tortured by parenting books that insisted that children would and ought to sleep from 7PM to 7AM.  There are times that my children do need that sort of rest, during a growth spurt. But the best advice my pediatrician gave me was under the weight of a heavy sigh.  She told me that her children had never needed more than 8 or 9 hours a night and to restructure my parenting expectations to my child rather than the child to a book.  This has actually been how I discoverd my son had an innate athletic endurance.  He does not need "normal" amounts of sleep unless he's really taxed his body.  Which is why he's now in heavy training and on the road with his coaches and my father to compete at a very high level in his sport.  

I've wondered if my daughter had the same inheritance.  It seems it may be so, she skated pretty constantly (and this was after a day of strong play) from about 8PM to 10PM and did not fall sleep before we arrived home.  But as I tucked her into bed she rolled over and looked me deep in the eyes.

"Wroller tate," she said, and grinned and wiggled, "Baby wroller tate."

Which is about the best endorsement I can think of.

It's now the bright morning.  I'm having a private rock and roll dance party to Alexa's pick of 80's music while my daughter plays with her Easter Eggs in her small blue race car.

My own Easter gift to myself has not arrived yet.  

But I suspect today we will take advantage of this bright, clear day and head down to the water front to (what else?) skate.

Disco kisses, bishes.

Queen.

I realize I'm not on week three of increased skating sesssions. 

My feet are gaining strength.  I do ballet foot exercises as I'm decidedly uninterested in any injury I can prevent. or the amount of couch time or bench time that would come with injury.  I have gorgeously healthy knees, ankles and hips, my back is a happy back.  My adult body is the result of a coach father and a mother who felt that "you only have one chance to grow bones and teeth" and fed us very well and with a great deal of thought and consideration.  I'm extremely grateful.

So it's not time to undo the gift now.

When I started derby, we learned to skate and hit fairly quickly.  From that point we transitioned into team practices.  For myself, I'd have preferred a far more gradual increase, to build muscle memory and also, skating uses lateral muscles and ... I don't know quite how to describe it but if you've skated in a rink you know... rink skating uses them unevenly.  Your inside leg develops differently than your outside leg.  I was in another sport for years and performed at a high level that also created a difference in my body like this: cross training was very important to long term structural health.  I'm sure each league does it differently, but skating is such a different activity and everyone enters at such different ages, experience and fitness.  I do daydream of derby again but I'll give myself my own year of rebuilding my skating muscles before I risk injury with the sort of punctuated, quick skating that you need to do to jam or the heavy hits of blocking.

For squad skating (I really don't know what else to call it) I want to take it long and steady.  I've set a week by week fo things I want to learn and work on.  So far so good.

So I've been going to the gym a lot more, and on the days I don't know, stretching and doing some additional work outs on that side of my body have helped.   I've lost about eight pounds in three weeks, which sounds startling but that's not from skating alone.  I've been lifting weights and on a structured diet as a project to reduce my weight - separate from skating and more related to a desire to be able to safely run long distances again.  I'm "up fifteen" now from the weight I've been my entire life.  My youngest is two and a half, for me I usually seem to be able to relinquish the weight when they turn three.   I've been struggling against this weight for the last six months. 

But it's amazing to feel the transformation in my body going into week four from week one.  Each session is about three hours at least, and by the end, I've been in constant motion.  Muscle definition is emerging from my legs and calves,  it feels like my body sings when it aches.  

So this was my third week.  I've slowly regained my feet and I spent most of last night skating backwards.  Not just skating backwards but working on weaving and remembering my comfort forwards or backwards.  I tried a few jumps - unsurprisingly to me I can jump and turn better than I can skate backwards effortlessly.  Next week I'm going to really focus on those turns and balancing on one foot to build my lateral muscles more.

That's the technical.  

But here's the rest.  Last night as I worked on things I said to a friend that I just wanted to feel what all the sensations of flying backwards felt like without the visuals.  Sometimes what I'm seeing, or the rink lights, seem to throw me off balance.  So my friend put out their hands and said, "Go ahead."  They are a steady, firm skater, and I doubt I could take them down.  

So I did.  with my eyes closed, I could feel the rink lights flashing across my eyes as I moved around.  The sound of the wheels underneath the music, and strangely and comforting, the speed, because for anyone who has ever been depressed, stuck artistically, or in a place in their life where things are less thank sink-your-teeth-into-it satisfying, momentum is important.  

It's not uncommon, I think, for adult athletes to feel very passionately about their sports. It's a chosen thing, for one, in lives that are largely dictated by smaller choices made against practical necessity.  

And in all of that, anything that brings that feeling of flying, that sensory experience that leads to an explosion of happiness in my chest, anything that brings that I will seize.

Ripping out your jeans is part of it, I guess.  

I am so rusty on backwards skating, but I can do it in a rink, including transitions.  This weekend I realized it's a whole different game outside, on sidewalks, but only after I went ass over teakettle shocking a little knot of tourists on the boardwalk.

I have to regain my skill at falling.

You simply can't learn to skate or do tricks without cuts, bruises and falls. That's why you learn to fall and fall well.  There's an art to falling and the old saying, "Fall ten times, get up eleven," only really is inspiring if you know how to fall without breaking your contract.  For me, I've taken years and years of judo and still do from time to time.  I've always had a strange sense of joy and power that I can be hit and actually sent flying and still land decently.  That said, it's nothing until you practice it.

Falling leads to cuts and bruises, even if you fall well.

I'm at the point where I remember why pants and skating have never quite felt like they are a good pairing.  It's somehow easier and more forgiving to wear tights, leggings, skirts, shorts, just about anything than pants - which bind up in the crotch and have rivets in the pockets that dig firmly into your ass like little teeth when you land leaving the oddest peppering of bruises on one's (in my case, ample) rear end.   I'm a minimalist, and so what I own  tends to be limited.. and expensive.  I don't fancy ruining any jeans that were carefully hand stitched in the USA that I've had for many years, but nor do I buy poorly traded goods new.  So I spent part of the weekend thrift store crawling with a specific slant to find good skating clothes with some success.  I know the traditional look, which is fantastic: short booty shorts, knee high socks, cute t shirt.  But where I live, even on a sunny day, it's chilly this time of year.  I do warm up skating but I need more coverage and yet I feel a pre-emptive slump of defeat when I think of wearing plain old work out clothing to skate as skating just ignites my joy in ways that the treadmill, despite it's... charms (I suppose?  It must be someone's bliss, somewhere) has never.   My work out clothes are pleasant, but they don't celebrate my joy. 

It's another meandering side step, as I wash dishes at night and watch skate videos, with some mild form of obssesion.  I'm in a new world, of Chicks in Bowls - it's entirely tempting - and I still must remind you that I was falling down skating backwards outside this weekend so my dreams are quite heavily laced with idealism and optimism at this point, probably from an outside perspective at least.  But I'm quite confident that with time, perhaps a lot of time, I'll get there. 

What's interesting is... I am an unusually determined person.  I have in the last year or so, felt I've lost my touch for it.  I've suffered some disappointments, no worse than others, I suppose, but sometimes it is hard to hold to my narrative that I tell myself of what I am doing as a creative person and why.  There valleys...and mountains...but what we are least equipped to deal with I think are the plateaus.  The long, steady pace that goes on and on for miles, days or even a year and you wonder... without those valleys or hills, how will I find the low or the high to use to push, to make something happen?  For anyone that sees the arts from the outside, this is almost always what it takes to get anything going, much less stustain it.  A few good pushes from inside, a strong donkey kick and you sit down, you write the damn thing, you sit down, you make the asking phone call, you take the chance, you show up.

I easily put more effort into my skating  last weekend than I have my own work this year.  I work hard for others, but for my own creative work, I haven't, not yet this year.   

Part of this writing is to trace that vein, that vein that connects what I love to what I create.  

So I stopped mid entry, and as late as it is, sent something I'd thought about doing but...hadn't...because... but now it's done.

And I'll keep skating and thiknin about these things. Maybe it will carry me somewhere.  Maybe it won't, and in another year I'll see be on this same plateau.

But the difference is, I have something I love to do now, helping me along.

I was going to write this as an email to Tom, but this message (seeing as this is a week's worth of hypergraphia exploding in a Saturday blast) is probably better living its life as a One Post Wonder post. So, if anything else amazing happens today, I'll add it at the end. 

Ever since the Dead Milkmen's album Beelzebubba came out, I have loved the (song?) piece of whimsy that is Stewart.  if you're not familiar with it, this is it.

I don't know why I love it. It's hilarious, contagious, and picturesque. Do I need another reason? It's a satirical exploration of narrowminded xenophobia, even more necessary today than it was when it was originally released in the era of George Bush I. 

When I went away to college, the Beelzebubba album made my homesickness for the Greater Philadelphia area easier to cope with. My friends and I used to sing "Punk Rock Girl" at the tops of our lungs, walking around the Frasier-Crane-esque Back Bay area, wrapping our lips and tongues around those South Street vowel roller coasters as a way of pushing off the stifling snobbery of cold, concrete Boston. 

Flash forward to a couple of years later when I worked at the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire. One of our dialect exercises was to take something we already knew by heart and "translate" it to Renfaire language and dialect (I say Renfaire because I'm 100% positive there are huge differences between 16th century English language and what gets used at faires, no matter how historically acurate they may try to be, I just can't cite those differences right now). One of the characters in the summer of 1991 was named Stuart, and my friend Gina and I used to rant a translated version of "Stewart" to him. he would look at us like we were completely insane. We asked him, "Have you e'er heard of those bards of the Shire of Brotherly Love, who name themselves after the ghosts of dairy farmers?" He said in that in sooth and faith, no tale of such bards had ever been introduced to him.

To this day, 25 years later, when I don't feel well, and especially if I'm nauseous, if I need to soothe my brain, I occupy myself by trying to remember the Renfaire translated version of "Stewart," that Gina and I would tell to this poor guy when we had gate duty together on hot summer afternoons.  We never made it much further than the burrow owl business. I seem to recall it was something like this:

Know ye, Stuart, well I love thee. Thou are unlike all others in this shire. 

Misunderstand me not, sir, they are fine people, good English stock, but they are content to recline, enjoy a Punch and Judy entertainment, quaff a mug of ale. But they do not know, Stuart, what the Spaniards will do to this shire! 

Know you young John of Wurster? He delivereth messages throughout the Shire and rings the town crier's bell. This youth hails from another land, and some say he inhaleth the smoke of the poppy, but this I believe not. When the day came that he had ten years passed, he begged old Wurster for the gift of a burrow owl. "Father," he said, "nothing more could my heart desire, for all the years I might live." 

Some nights past, I ventured out at half ten, to find young John of Wurster staring into the moonlit branches of the birch. "What brings you hence? " I asked, "No youth should be out this late, hath some madness gripped you?" thinking of the tales of the poppy that dog this lad's heels. "My burrow owl," he cried, "I seek it in the night."  "God's hairy butt," I cried, "know you not that a burrow owl liveth in a hole in the ground? For what reason else, in heaven, on earth, or in the fires below, would it be so named?"

And so, good Stuart friend, do you think such a lad would know what the Spaniards wil do to this shire? 

And, yeah, that's about as far as we got. Mostly because the poor guy would find a reason to run away from us. 

A few years ago, during a particularly bad bout with a virus, I started trying to translate it into actual Shakespearean sonnet form.  Iambic pentameter is hard. I had gotten up early feeling lousy, showed up for work on time, tried to hang in there for an hour, and made it to the toilet just in time to vomit up my entire viscera. They sent me home, but I had to take the train. The gentle swaying of the car and blur of the outside did not help things, so concentrating on translating Stewart into iambic pentameter gave me something to hang onto so I wouldn't become another SEPTA vomit statistic. I don't think I made it past the first two lines.  

Since then, if I feel sick or crappy, this is my thing to concentrate on. That and translating this into Spanish:

This is really hard, because the word for "female dog" in spanish is perra, which has two syllables, and "mom" is mamá, also two syllables. 

HEY, I DON'T TELL YOU WHAT TO THINK ABOUT WHEN YOU'RE TRYING TO PASS OUT BECAUSE YOU FEEL LOUSY. 

When I'm tired and frustrated, Stewart pops up in my brain, as I'm sure Pavlov's dogs could hear phantom bells ringing when they were hungry.  It's not going away. When I have a long day of repeating the obvious to people who just don't get it, in the back of my mind, a voice is screaming, "THEY'RE GONNA BUILD LANDING STRIPS FOR GAY MARTIANS, I SWEAR TO GOD!!!" 

My point is, one of these days, I really want to sit down with Tom Boutell (for his experience with iambic pentameter), a copy of Charles' Onions' Shakespeare Glossary, 3rd Edition, and translate Stewart into the Shakespearean poetic saga that I've been craving since 1991. That is a bone my brain wants to chew on.

I wonder, if I wrote a really carefully-worded letter on letterhead in real ink to Rodney Anonymous, he'd read a proposal allowing me to adapt Stuart into a 45 minute Shakespearean play for Fringe production? 

Shit, he'd probably say yes if I tweeted it, but I don't tweet-propose.

(Why 45 minutes? Come on, there's no point in dragging that story out past 45 minutes.)

But it can't be Spaniards that the narrator is afraid of. It would have to be queers or whatever they would have been called in that time period. I think it has to be that the narrator is in love with Stewart, but can't deal with it because of his own internalized homophobia. 

OK, that's enough out of me for right now. 

I can't remember how it started, but last night I went down an internet rabbit hole looking up information about the 1996 disaster on Everest. (Jon Krakauer wrote about it in Into Thin Air.) Well, that led me down the the more wide-rangingly morbid path of reading about other people who've died on Everest - that number is close to 300 since 1922. Most of those bodies remain up there because it's not feasible to remove them - people have literally died, trying. I'm haunted by the fact that some of these bodies serve as landmarks for subsequent climbers.

Just a warning: if you start looking into this topic...you can't avoid seeing photographs of the dead. The most interesting body to me, personally, is that of George Mallory, who ascended and died on Everest in 1924. His body was found in 1999, and it still has most of its flesh. I mean to say, it is not a skeleton. The flesh appears completely bleached white in photographs. (Edit to add: I'm interested because of how well-preserved his body is, not because of who he was.) For context...Mallory is the guy who gave us the phrase, "Because it's there," as an explanation for climbing Everest.

I have zero interest in climbing Everest, or even the more conveniently located (since I live in Seattle) Mt. Rainier, for that matter. I've been up to Camp Muir on Rainier, which is at about 10,200 ft. From there I could see the next leg of the journey that climbers take when they attempt the summit. It becomes a technical climb (as opposed to a "hike") from there - Camp Muir is where summit aspirants spend the night before the final 4,200 ft. push. I still remember looking at the crevasse field on the Cowlitz glacier, which is immediately adjacent to the stone shelter that was built up there in 1921. That view created a pit of pure dread in my stomach. I enjoyed the rest of the day - particularly "boot skiing" down the Muir Snowfield - but that dread haunted me all the way down. I was relieved when my friend Siobhan and I got back to our car. Since then, I haven't been up to anything  even approaching that altitude.

Another memory from that climb that sticks: how it feels, physically, to ascend above ~8500ft. where the oxygen deprivation starts to become very noticeable. It's a weird experience: working so hard; fighting for breath while making very little progress.

Mt. Everest is 29,029 ft. at its highest point. That is 3.4 times the altitude at which I started experiencing oxygen depletion on my way to Camp Muir. Climbers hang out for days at severeal different points in order to acclimatize to the altitude. Those who undertake that climb know that death is a serious risk, they feel the lack of oxygen, and yet they continue on up anyway.

I can't get my head around it: the desire just to attempt the summit of Everest, the persistence necessary to weather the extreme oxygen deprivation - to say nothing of the cold - and then passing all of those bodies along the way. To keep going, despite all of that.

Just to be clear: I don't think it takes courage or heroism to climb Mt. Everest - nor would I call it "ambition," exactly. It certainly takes desire and persistence. Also required: a downright pathological degree of hubris - verging on stupidity, in my opinion. I also don't begrudge anyone who chooses to make the attempt. Mostly I don't. I have serious questions for the ones who climb up that high when they have small children at home. Everyone leaves loved ones behind, but children are different. Dependents.

Why am I so fascinated by the stories, then? Why do they have the power to lead me down rabbit holes?

One of the houses I lived in growing up was built on glacier land.  There was an underground river that ran deep beneath the land, but in places it burst up into springs.  When the snow melted, and the river was as swollen as a kiss, you could hear the water in the house.  

Some days I feel like I can still hear that, the current, the movement underneath everything, that makes it all grow.  Drought years you could stand on the high hill above our property and see the green where the river flowed underneath because the grass didn't dry there.  And other times, in drought years, I'd go straight down to the actual river, and put my feet in to feel that cold, cold water, though I knew better than to swim too far into it.

I'm always fascinated by what drives people to do things.  Motivation can be written up into all the red and black and white titles that you can buy at the airport, like it is a series of things that lead to success.  I don't know about that.  To me it has more to do with gut and heartbeat, the subtities that are still in us from being hunter gatherers, a sense of rain, a sense of snow.  

When I do something that is physically challening, and it intersects with music, something shifts in me.  I can hear that river, I can hear it roaring in my ears.  I may not be the best, I may not be good, but something is happening.  Sometimes, I think, you have to be brave enough to do the things you aren't very good at but you love to be great at the things that you know you are good at and sometimes take for granted.

It's humbling, making a space to talk entirely about skating and it's intersect, when speaking frankly, I'm not that good and I may never be.  I know this is the point where I should say I have no fucks to give, but that would imply I have fucks to give about other things.  I quite simply don't. The last few years have been so humbling and difficult, disappointment bordering on humiliation for the attempt at things I've hoped and dreamed for....the bitter metallic taste of failure.  

These moments are punctuated by the absolute highs of those successes where, for a moment, an hour at least, you think, "I was right all along!"  But somehow success never stay with me as long as failures. I think it's because I learn more from the failure than I ever do success.  There is no quote in a neat box that will pop up on any social media that will salve those wounds.  I hurt where I've not achieved at the things I loved, but I'm still here.  As one of my friends pointed out, "This is what it means when you're making this a career.  It means you keep throwing yourself at it even when it's not working."  And that's on the low days, when I'm a the sunken end of my garden of thoughts, struggling against the crespulcar sky that is my area of the country, relentless.  On a sunnier day I could tally my successes, but long ago I decided that I had no one to impress.  I do what I do and what matters most is... did I do it?  Did I finish it?  Did I try to do my very best?

I am teaching myself, in between writing this, how to spin on skates with one toe lifted and the opposite heel lifted.  I'm blasting music and for the first time, truly grateful that the back room of the house is pergo and not the 1950's hardwood that is throughout the rest of the house.  I keep falling, I get up, I worked all day, I keep trying to write this short story though I've not published one in years, though the toddler woke me up all night, though I'm tired, though my words stumble and I can't quite get the story right.  And so I skate, fall down, get up and write, and in between, parent.  Which in this case means sitting her safely in the center of the table with coloring book.

This isn't an organized space, I've decided it's not perfect.  Things won't wrap up into little packages and deliver a message. These are liner notes, thoughts thrown down into a welcoming white space in transit, between train stations, graffetti on a wall inviting commentary, relevant or not, scrawled beneath it in pens of each individual's choosing.

So you tell me, how does it work for you, then?

yours from the roomette compartment -

QRC

One of the advantages to being ADHD is the random directions my head travels sometimes. Yeah, I actually see it as a perk, believe it or not. Sometimes, anyway.

I listen to a lot of "So you're a self published author? We'll help you market your book!" podcasts. Yeah yeah, I know. I haven't even finished A book, so listening to marketing podcasts about it does seem a little bit 'cart before the horse'. It's... just a thing with me.

Anyway. The single, solitary item that all of these podcasts seem to feel is the very base of any/all book (read as: any digital creative product) marketing systems is the almighty email list.

I won't bore you with the hows and whys. If you really want to know, feel free to ask. Bottom line: I believe them.

As noted above, I've long had a theory that it would be a good idea for me to start a list for my digital illustration stuff. That way, folks who are into the sort of stuff I do don't have to be lead to Dragonbones.net, but rather, could have my stuff show up in their inbox. Yes, it goes without saying that I would have to do this very carefully to avoid being seen as spam or sales-pitchy. (Which, for the record, I would genuinely not want to be 19 times out of 20.)

This thought train got me thinking. I should be doing some more short stories to lead up to the book. Generate some interest in a way that "So, I'm writing this book." can possibly manage.

So now, in my head, I'm thinking this email list receives short stories and art from me on a regular (though likely somewhat infrequent) basis.

That last part bugged me. While I certainly don't want to be sending folks an email every day, (that would bug me as a theoretical recipient of the email, so no) I would want to send out an email a minimum of once per month. Maybe a max of once per week. That really feels like it would be more satisfying to the recipients.

If we assume that the art/writing is good enough that folks actually look forward to the email, that feels like the right volume of emails to be pleasing without being overwhelming.

But it would take way too much from me on my own.

So what if I invited others to join in the content creation?

Well, that would help me, but what would it do for them? I don't really want to ever use the term 'exposure' when trying to attract content creators. As the old catch phrase goes: "People die from exposure."

So I ask you, my fellow writers and creators: "What would be a worthwhile benefit to you to get you to sign on to something like this? To send in your short stories, photos, or illustrations etc." Obviously there's the promise of cash, but obviously that would be very limited for me as a one man band, and the idea of 'contests' and the like feels a whole like like 'exposure'.

I'm asking here because I think most (all?) of you know me well enough to know that I'm not trying to run some kind of scam that just yields perks for me. I'm thinking that it genuinely could benefit other creators in the long run, but getting out of the gate...

For those who are familiar, I was kinda thinking of bookbub in the long term, but on a more diverse scale.