What Happens After 'The End'

I now work for WFIU, the NPR-affiliate station at Indiana University-Bloomington. I was hired for front-desk and admin work, with an eye towards helping with production tasks on a couple of weekly programs.

Well, when a new half-hour arts magazine started up, I revved my production engine and said, "Er, I have an idea for a show."

That idea was aired this morning at 7 am, as the October 8, 2016 episode of Cafe Indiana.

"What Happens After 'The End'" came as my response to hearing so many talented writers in my area express bewilderment about what to do with their finished manuscripts. I had gotten Yu: A Ross Lamos Mystery published after six years of queries and submissions, and during that time came to the realization that that publishing a book in the 21st century was very, very different from what it had been before 1990 -- for writers, publishers, distributors and sellers, everyone involved anywhere in the industry.

For this radio story, I had the great good fortune to have as friends several writers with a  broad range of experiences in publishing: Claire Arbogast had gotten in with an academic publisher, IU Press. Annette Oppenlander had a bad experience with one "partnership" publisher - and she had to invest nearly $1,000 for the privilege. Terry Pinaud has worked with self-publishing service companies from AuthorHouse to CreateSpace over 20 years, as he cranked out six novels and a story collection. And K. H. Brower went whole-hog do-it-yourself by creating her own imprint.

And best of all, I knew Paul Burt - the fellow who published  Yu: A Ross Lamos Mystery in 2010, through his company, Open Books Press. Paul had a special story to tell: how Author House got started in a basement in Bloomington, Indiana.

You see, Paul worked in sales for the small business that eventually became Author House. It was called First Books when he was hired. With an infusion of venture capital, it became Author House -- leveraging bleeding-edge publishing technology to tap the market for what used to be called "vanity press."

And what did Paul do, seeing that he was in on the ground floor of what was about to become a global business phenomenon?

Click on What Happens After 'The End' and find out.

PUBLICATION DAY IS ALMOST HERE!

Ring out, wild bells, because my story "Into Kansas" is going out to discerning readers in Berlin and cyberspace on May 14!

SAND Journal is a high-quality English-language literary magazine published in Berlin, Germany, in print and online.  Issue 13 will launch on Saturday!

Somehow my short tale of a strange incident at the wild edge of the Kansas prairie in 1879 rang their bell ... 

... and I am wildly grateful to the editors, copy editors and designers Over There!

Get SAND in your eyes online, or order yourself a copy. Imagine me dancing, grooving, drinking, shmoozing and dazzling everyone with my native wit at their party ... because I'll be exercising my bi-location siddhi superpowers to do so. Half of me will still be here in Bloomington, Indiana, doing yoga, recording an audiobook, and helping Mom get groceries.

She's going to wonder what put that mad, gleeful glint in my eye!

Who Made My Clothes?

In honor of the hashtag #whomademyclothes, here is a poem by my friend Murray Gordon, of Seattle, Washington:

Get To Know Your Jacket 

Reach into the closet for your jacket

and grasp the collar which was sewn on by

Nan. She has a quota of twenty-eight

dozen per day. Thrust a hand into one

sleeve and twist the other hand into the

second one. They were set by Sideth and

immediately after topstitched by

Chong. Their machines are adjacent but they

are not allowed to speak to each other

for forty hours a week, fifty-two

weeks a year. Smooth the jacket around you

torso. Larita bodyseamed it for

you. She's been doing that job for more than

fifteen years breathing in lint all that time.

That the left and right fronts of your jacket

should match, Khamdy personally took a

marking pencil and marked your zipper at

the neck, yoke and waistband. Last year, she set

61,405

front zippers. The pocket welts were cut by

Eulalia who stands on her feet for

eight hours a day at the Reece machine.

The pocket zippers were set by Honee

who is so good that you will never

see a pucker at the corners because

she must make repairs on her own time. When

you put your keys, comb and change into

the pockets, you can do so with confidence.

They won't fall through because Jojo is the

pocket bagger. She is so fast that it

isn't necessary for her to think

anymore. William cut out the pattern -

360 ply. There is

not a moment anymore when he does

not hear the buzz of the cutting machines.

Pauline supervised the sewing line. They

gave her a raise, put her on salary

and now they don't have to pay her over-

time when the plant works on Saturdays. George

is the owner. He comes in late and leaves

early, takes two hour lunches and he

does not know the names of any workers.

Your jacket comes as an experienced

traveler. Ordered in Seattle from

a catalogue company in Maine, the

fabric was shipped from a Massachusetts

mill to the contractor in Seattle,

reshipped to a subcontractor in North

Carolina, sewn there and reshipped back

to Seattle to be inspected, tagged

and bagged, reshipped to Maine and then shipped to

your home address in Seattle. When you

wear the jacket no one will be able

to see any of this. What they will see

on the left front is a small label with

the name of a dead man woven on it

For a While, I Was Being Followed

Oh, yes, I did it --  I got a #Twitter account. Played around with it. Made some mistakes. Panicked. Got a grip. And now I have 87 followers.

That feels comfy, like a nice party or a warm crowd at a bar. I don't push for followers, mainly because I have discovered Twitter spam. Not my cup o' tea.

One thing I did that affects This Writing Thing is, I bought a year's worth of Twitter promotion with a marketing business called BookBuzz. You fill out a form giving a short logline for your book, submit your cover graphic, and boom (or, Tweet!) you're in rotation for mass Twitter appearances, with a link to your book's sales page, wherever that is.

So I hope some people have elected to visit Open Books Press, to check out YU, or to my site, to read the free chapters.

But the thing I have to tell you - OMG YouGuys! - I found #WernerHerzog's Twitter handle@WernerTwertzog, and Followed, because his Tweets are darkly hilarious haikus about life.

"I can no longer
Distinguish between The goatees of NASCAR enthusiasts, Leninists, Nashvillians, Mitch-MIllerites, And Brad Pitt."

I favorited and re-tweeted, and replied to that one, comparing Duck Dynasty to Rasputin.

Whoever @WernerTwertzog is, he Favorited, and Followed!

I squee'd a squee to remove the paint from my walls.

For 24 hours I was terrified to re-Tweet anything, because WERNER HERZOG WOULD SEE IT!

Then I got a grip, again.

And now, 7 days later, he's un-Followed me ... but he did Favorite something else I replied to one of his haikus.

I figure he does a weekly purge of who he Follows, just to stay fresh.

Man, for a while there I was looking over my shoulder when I left the house - knowing Werne Herzog was following me.

PS -- any movie Werner Herzog makes, go see it.

Literary Reporting?

What do you suppose they mean by that?

MATTHEW POWER LITERARY REPORTING AWARD
http://applications.nyujournalism.org/matthew-power-literary-reporting-award/


NO ENTRY FEE.


Deadline February 16, 2015. $6,000 upon announcement of the winning proposal; $3,000 upon evidence of substantial progress; and $3,500 upon completion and acceptance by the Award committee. NYU ID and full online and onsite NYU Bobst Library research and reference privileges. Space allowing, an office at the NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, with WiFi. On completion, the author may be asked to present the work to the NYU journalism community in a mutually agreeable format.


It does sound kind of cool.

In other news ...

My Twitter handle (or "Twitness" as I prefer to call it) is @ShayneLaughter.

I have investigated www.twitterfeed.com, an app which allows your blog posts to go directly to Twitter.  I, being a spectacularly lazy blogger, would rather have something that posts my re-tweets on my blog.  Then I could fill the blogosphere with bon mots from the Paris Review, LA Review of Books, and other Lit-Twits.

Now that I've thought of it and said it out loud-ish on the Net, I'll just settle back in my lawn chair and wait for somebody to come up with the algorithm.  Send the check to my PayPal account, please.

And yes, I know I promised you more Spain pix.  Soon.

Days in a Warm Place, Part 2

In less than a day, it will be the final month of 2014.  These pictures are precious memories of July, in residence at Can Serrat, an hour outside Barcelona, in the foothills of the Montserrat mountain range.

Right this way ... my new friend Jacqui and I got off the bus from Barcelona and walked down a steep gravel road dragging our wheeled luggage ...

This view assured us it was all worth it.

Up the driveway ...

We come in peace, dude.

Loggia inside the estate walls. Henri the handyman would strap a full trash can to his back every day and ride the ATV up a steep hill to a trash bin in the little town of El Bruc.

The inside dining room.  We nearly always ate outside under a grape arbor, at a huge stone table. Which I did not take any pictures of, dammit.

The large studio. Several painters and sculptors could work in here together.

The small studio, big enough for two artists. That's Henri the handyman, shirtless as usual.

The writing room. A library of books from around the world, plus desks, deep couches & chairs & a couple of beds.

My room. I shared with 2 other women. The bed in the foreground is a sort of extra sofa-like bit of furniture. The open clothes rack was my "closet," because the 2 roomies used an enormous antique wardrobe. That arch beside the balcony french doors is the entrance to ...

My little cell. About 5x7, just enough for the bed and the side table. I grabbed it because it was a private space. The other two women shared a larger niche on the other side of a wall.

I really came to appreciate the mass of the stone walls, for quiet and coolness on summer nights.

More in the next post!

Days in a Warm Place

I know I left you all hanging back in June with just a couple hundred dollars to go in my crowdfunding campaign.  Bad blogger, bad! bad! blogger!

So anyway, I made it to goal and a smidge beyond. I had a grand adventure in Spain. I finished the short story I had thought I would just get outlined. I made awesome friends. I realllllllly didn't want to come back.

Here are pictures to prove it!

Cathedral in Barcelona.

Old City side street in Barcelona.

Poster for a poetry festival -- "Poetry Please!"

Barcelona rents bikes.

Oh, Gaudi, you wild and crazy guy!

Palau Musica de Catalan, OMGYOUGUYSTHISISAWESOMELOOKLOOKLOOK

Ceiling of the concert hall ...

It's got a winged horse, even!

That's a tree carved in stone, underneath the stained-glass central skylight.

Valkyries!

The snack bar in the lobby ain't shabby, either.

All-around amazing craftwork from the turn of the 20th century. "Modernisme" in Catalunya was called "Art Nouveau" in France and ""Arts & Crafts" in England.

Then I went to the country. Next post!

A Marketing Ploy, Mmmmuuuwwwaaahahahahahaha ...

Yü: A Ross Lamos Mystery is now being promoted on Twitter by #Whizzbuzz, at http://fb.me/1NzLkhHE3  !

My own Twitness is ShayneLaughter.  Let's follow ...

Just $525 to Go!

My crowdfunding campaign has had a silent spring. My Mother (Elmer Smith’s daughter Marjorie)

 decided in January to take a small independent apartment in a nice senior community, so she could have more of a social life and not be hogtied by the weather. Six weeks after her decision – bam, she was moved in, perfectly organized and quite satisfied (after the usual hassles with Comcast and AT&T, naturally).

So, I am re-settled by myself in the condo, furniture moved and rooms rearranged … and ye gods, time has moved on!

I have just $525 left to raise to meet the $1,300 goal for my summer trip to Can Serrat, the artists’ residence estate outside of Barcelona, Spain, to work on the Papaw Project. I’ve extended the campaign to June 15 – and for anyone who wants to donate again, I have new story gifts for you!

A second donation of up to $10 means you’re a VALENTINE – and you get a .pdf of my award-winning short story, “The Valentine.” This story was published in the 2013 Bacopa Literary Review and was the Second-Place Winner in their annual fiction contest.

A second donation of $11- $50 means you’re IN MOONLIT BONG – and you get two short-short stories that were published in the online creative-life magazine Rebelle Society: “In Moonlit Bong” and “Not the Enemies You’re Looking For.”

A second donation of $51-100 means you are a SWEETIE – and you get a SNEAK PREVIEW of the Second Ross Lamos Mystery, still in progress! 

All my thanks and praise to those who have donated already. I hope you have enjoyed the stories of the Papaw Project! 

The story that will cap the collection is being enriched by my reading the wartime “ordinary soldier” accounts by Ernie Pyle: "Here Is Your War" and "Brave Men." I am also digging (ha!) into the history of the interstate highway system and methods of urban sanitation in the 1930s. Stay tuned!

Yeesh, has it really been SEVEN months since I last posted? Bad Me!

 

Well, it's Arctic Freeze Day here in Bloomington, IN, so I'm home taking care of bidness while wearing3 layers.

 

News from September 2013 that has had me grinning ever since: I am going to Can Serrat artists' retreat on a supported residency for a full month ... next July ... near BARCELONA!

 Will be working on my "Papaw" story collection and - yes! - the second Ross Lamos Mystery!

 

Plans for travel are shaping up -- I have a travel companion for the trip out, including some tourist time in Madrid and Barcelona that we hope will include literary cafes and open mics!

Among the Madrid plans are a meetup with the Rebelle Society co-founder Andrea Balt. I recommend a trip to www.rebellesociety.com, for inspiration and dream-enhancement.

If you prefer tangible dreamstuff, "The Best of Rebelle Society, Vol. 1" is now on sale at Amazon's Create Space.  I've got mine, and it's delicious.

I started and finished a new story in one evening this past week - a great beginning to a year of writing!

And how are you?

Live Reading, Friday 5/24/2013

I am the featured reader for LEMONSTONE, a program of the Writers' Guild at Bloomington, tomorrow night! Sweet Claire Bakery, on 3rd st. between Grant an Lincoln, in Bloomington, 7 - 8:30 pm. I will be reading 2 short stories from THE STRONGER, a story collection inspired by my grandfather's life and family tales.  

"The Last" - twenty-year-old Eli Swett is having a bad summer in 1879.  He thought he could make good money poisoning wolves on the Kansas prairie, but unexpected factors dog him, help him and defy explanation.

"Black Horse Fever" - A beautiful black horse and a rivalry between two country doctors turn a county upside down in 1902.

I hope you can be there!  I will have copies of YU: A ROSS LAMOS MYSTERY on sale at discount.

More Good News!

Just got word that "The Valentine" also won 2nd place in the Bacopa Literary Review's contest! *happy dancing*!

2013 Publication coming!

A short story of mine, "The Valentine," will appear in the print journal, Bacopa Literary Review, in spring 2013. 

In this tale, mismatched love blooms around a car crash in rural Southern Indiana.

Bacopa published my short story, "The Stronger," in 2011.

Further Rebellion

Rebelle Society has published another short-short piece from me, here.

As you might guess from the subject, I had had enough of Some People.

Serenely Not-Looking-For-It

I am open to the Blue, which great things fall out of.

What I Read, Last Year

I originally posted this as a comment on Michael Glab's blog, Electron Pencil, but because it's about the books I read and loved in 2012, I thought I would re-post it here.

My list of fave books read in 2012 is short, mostly because there are a lot of books I started and got bored with, or had to return to the library because I had used up all the renewals and still hadn’t finished.

But I did read Her Fearful Symmetry (Audrey Niffenegger) and loved it. Splendid modern-day ghost story with some very sympathetic ghosts (familial and ectoplasmic) in London.

Shine Shine Shine (Lydia Netzer) is a 2012 novel that puts a fresh spin on the trope of husband-is-obsessed-with-work-and-wife-is-pissed. Husband is a Nobel-Prize-Winning robotics scientist and Asperger’s adult who is on his way to the moon. Wife is genetically bald, and loses her wig in front of the whole neighborhood. There is an autistic child between them, and one mysterious baby on the way.

I got through most of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (Roberto Calasso) before I had to send it back to the Library. I will get it again soon. An amazing take on Western Civ, distilled through Calasso’s individual heart-mind-sex alchemy.

Read Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden: the British Agent as a kind of prequel to the fabulous Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (John LeCarre) – which, come to think of it, is also on this list. I couldn’t get enough of the tricky film, so went to the source.

I also zipped through a classic sci-fi anthology from 1963: Short Science Fiction Tales (Asimov and Conklin, ed.s). I first read these in junior high and was warped for life — thank God. It was fascinating to see, in 2012, just how rigid the gender roles were in any kind of literature, especially SF, in 1963. In some respects, we’ve come a long way. But for the most part these tales are still fresh and disturbing looks at humanity in the midst of their beloved technology.

If I had ignored work and just read for the whole day on December 31st, I would have surely finished (and loved) Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities in 2012.

Oh, I read a wonderful book on screenwriting, Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder. Funny and gripping, like a swell movie in itself. And dammit, Blake Snyder died in 2009. Dammit.

Do screenplays count?  Little Miss Sunshine was a fun read, and Michael Arndt's commentary about how the directors changed his script for the better is even more fun.

The Shawshank Redemption is one of those movies I never saw but hear about a lot.  Good script by Frank Darabont for a plot-heavy story, yet there is an enormous refrigerator moment at the end that I have not quite forgiven.  You know what a refrigerator moment is?  The director Jonathan Demme came up with this term.  It's when you see a movie, you're swept up in the movie, you drive home thinking about the movie, you get home, you go to your refrigerator and open the door, and it hits you -- "Wait a minute! That one thing -- No!  No Way!" But by that time you've been to the movie and had fun, so nobody really cares that you had a refrigerator moment.

Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked was a long good time; I'm warming up to his fiction after being spoiled by his book and music reviews for The Believer magazine. 

And of course there was Kate Chopin’s "sordid and depraved" 1899 novel, The Awakening, now lauded as a classic of feminist fiction, but reviled and banned upon its publication.  It ended Chopin's career, much to her distress.  After all, its themes and situations were ones Chopin had been writing about for years.  What happened?  My  take is, Chopin had hit a rare peak of skill at shifting point of view, and taking us into the subtleties of a character's changing consciousness.  She delivered such an enveloping experience of a woman who realizes that she doesn't really love her husband and children, and has come to the end of her options in the world-as-it-is … that people were just plain scared to death.  It was disturbing.  I read the book aloud for the new “Books Unbound” podcasts at WFHB Community Radio.  Click to listen.

And we're off to 2013!  I'm still working on Invisible Cities, as well as a collection of Calvino's non-fiction journals, Hermit in Paris. And I used my birthday money to get copies of Ann Patchett's State of Wonder and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas.  It'll be a great year!

In Moonlit Bong

I have a short piece of fabulist fiction published here.

Rebelle Society is one of my favorite places on the Internets.  Go. Explore. Dream.

BTW: "moonlit bong" is an anagram for my hometown's name -- Bloomington.  Come visit, to find out how perfect that is. 

"Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral." - Paulo Freire, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Freire

Perhaps to truly be neutral yet engaged, one must go among the powerless, appear to be as they are, and demonstrate humbly the great powers that are all around them, immediately at hand, if they would themselves set down that conflict. Kindness is one such enormous power. Imagination is the power that trumps all others, and in collusion with kindness and compassion, it invents the world anew.

I would draw attention to the difference between "washing one's hands of the conflict," and not engaging in that conflict while acknowledging that yes, it does indeed exist.

Choosing not to engage in a conflict - to not mirror the aggressive or passive-aggressive or entitled or co-dependent habits of those who are engaging -- opens up enormous spaces for alternative actions and new patterns of behavior, that make the conflict not only evidently boring but evidently obsolete. 

"The Awakening"

My "radio reader" reading of Kate Chopin's "The Awakening" debuts next Saturday at 5 pm on WFHB - 91.3, 98.1, 100.7 and 106.3 FM in and around Bloomington, IN.  

This classic of feminist literature was published in 1899 and ended Chopin's already long and well-respected literary career.  It was called "vile," "depraved," "sordid" and "depressing" by critics, was pulled from libraries, and prevented Chopin's latest collection of short stories from being published.

Having read it several times on the page and all the way through aloud, I think what transgressed the bounds of "good behavior" for literature was that Chopin succeeded in bringing the 19th-century reader into the expanding consciousness of a young woman and mother who discovers that she truly has a self, full of desire and talent and decision, that is separate and alive apart from her husband and children.  Chopin's protagonist goes as far as a woman can in that era, and knows she can never go back.  It was the "Thelma and Louise" of its day. Give a listen. 

Episodes will be archived for download and podcast at WFHB.org.

New Review Up!

PJ Swanwick's site, Fiction for a New Age, seeks to define a new genre of "spiritual fiction" that goes Way Out There instead of just to church.  I got to meet PJ Swanwick at the Buddhist Geeks Conference in Boulder, Colorado back in August, and could not be happier to have made this lady's acquaintance.

To read her review of YU: A ROSS LAMOS MYSTERY, go here. 

Excerpt:

"Laughter’s jade stories burst at the seams with elegant, concise, and yet restrained prose that pierces the true nature of each character. She evokes sympathy for a villain with a single, well-crafted line: “He carries so many more secrets than I. We both need so much comfort. ” Spare and beautiful, each word of the many jade stories performs double and even triple duty–prose haiku. Even the act of eating in public becomes an intimate, sensual act filled with tension and danger, more highly charged–and more thrilling to the reader–than the most explicit passages of a romance novel."

PJ's reviews of other books on her site have swelled my "must-read" list - and if you are hungry for fiction that takes the spiritual dimensions of story seriously, these books will land on your list, too.