#but those anthologies look really good and not too pricey

[omegastation]

Went to Waterstones today and ended up buying two love poems anthologies. Of course, I am totally associating some of those poems with Mass Effect pairings. So I'm sharing. Sounds cringy? IDK, let's embrace it.

First there's Thom Gunn's first lines of “Tamer and Hawk” that reminds me of Shepard and Joker:

I thought I was so tough, But gentled at your hands, Cannot be quick enough To fly for you and show That when I go I go At your commands.

The rest of the poem is meh, but those lines are perfect for them.

The first lines of Sharon Olds' “True Love” is VERY Shakarian:

In the middle of the night, when we get up after making love, we look at each other in total friendship, we know so fully what the other has been doing. Bound to each other like soldiers coming out of a battle, (...)

Those two lines from Lord Byron's “When We Two Parted” strongly remind me of Aria/Nyreen: In secret we met - In silence, I grieve

but also this poem by Isobel Dixon called “Truce”, which contains only those two lines: You bury the hatchet. I'll bury my heart.

Edwin Muir's lines from “The Confirmation” feels very Shepard/Kaidan:

I in my mind had waited for this long, Seeing the false and searching for the true, Then found you as a traveller finds a place Of welcome suddenly amid the wrong Valleys and rocks and twisting roads. But you, What shall I call you? A fountain in a waste, A well of water in a country dry, Or anything that's honest and good, an eye That makes the whole world seem bright.

A.S.J. Tessimond's “First meeting” is all about Ash/Kaidan to me:

When I first met you, I knew that I had come at last home. Home after wandering, Home after long-puzzled searching, Home after long being wind-born, Wave-tossed, night-caught, long being lost. And being with you was normal and needful And natural as sleeping or waking. And I was myself, Who had never been wholly myself. I was walking and talking And laughing easily at last. And the air was softer, And sounds were sharper, And colours were brighter, And the sky was higher, And length was not measured by milestones, And time was not measured by clocks. And this end was a beginning, And these words are the beginning - Of my thanks.

Caroline Norton's first lines of “I do not love thee!” feels a lot like Tali's pov regarding Legion:

I do not love thee!—no! I do not love thee! And yet when thou art absent I am sad;   And envy even the bright blue sky above thee, Whose quiet stars may see thee and be glad.

Simon Armitage's “Let me put it this way” reminds me of M!Shepard/Steve:

Let me put it this way: if you came to lay

your sleeping head against my arm or sleeve,

and if my arm went dead, or if I had to take my leave

at midnight, I should rather cleave it from the joint or seam

than make a scene or bring you round.

There, how does that sound?

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot is one of my favorites. Those lines make me think it could be from Liara’s pov about Shepard (especially before and after the Lazarus Project):

There will be time to murder and create, And time for all the works and days of hands That lift and drop a question on your plate; Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea.

and

Do I dare Disturb the universe?

“Come. And Be My Baby” by Maya Angelou: last lines are so F!Shepard/Sam from Sam's POV:

Some prophets say the world is gonna end tomorrow But others say we’ve got a week or two The paper is full of every kind of blooming horror And you sit wondering What you’re gonna do. I got it. Come. And be my baby.

“Words, Wide Night” by Carol Ann Duffy: entirely Jack/Shepard

Somewhere on the other side of this wide night and the distance between us, I am thinking of you. The room is turning slowly away from the moon.

This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.

La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine the dark hills I would have to cross to reach you. For I am in love with you

and this is what it is like or what it is like in words.

and I'm going to end with E.E. Cummings (always my favorite) with the classic 'i carry your heart with me (i carry it in)' which is all about Shepard/Miranda to me:

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)i am never without it(anywhere i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done by only me is your doing,my darling)                                                      i fear no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true) and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

[wyndottestreet]

The How & Why Now: My First Book (3/3)

From The What, How & Why Now Of My First Book by Adam Fike.

Part Three: The How & Why Now.

At the end of the last century, my Wife and I were in the process of moving West. I had a very shabby draft of the book together. So I bought one of those publishing guides with all the New York and London addresses. The newest one. Thick. Pricey. Very specific about which places were looking for submissions and which were not. With very specific instructions about whether to send samples with your polite letter, worded very much like a Beatles song.

Over a long and stressful period of time there was a lot of printing and envelopes and stamps. I remember it as all very stressful. But off they went.

And then they came back. Most of them, though I stopped counting. Unopened, with angry red ink. Sometimes in stamp form, some in pointed handwriting: No Submissions!

I would hold the envelopes up next to the listing in the book and shrug. Enough of that. And into the drawer it went.

PEOPLE MAKING DANGER: Short fiction anthology of well-paced thrillers, full of suspense, surprises and dark humor. COMING SOON!

However, there was a lot to suggest that things would change in terms of publishing. To what extent and precisely how, no one could guess (except, of course, some future Bond villains I can think of, currently making our world a more magical place).

When my Dad started out in the printing industry in the 1960’s, they were still pouring silver into molds to make letters. That’s what type-setting means. In the Washington D.C. area, printing was as important as tourism and government and points were called picas. When I was a kid, he owned a large company that provided color separation for offset-lithograph printing. He had to start his own courier company to get all the elements around town. They had an early computer that could do basic effects, like put the texture of an orange on an apple. (I remember that in their brochure, I particularly enjoyed a photo of the front side of a lady in a bikini composited seamlessly with a photo her backside, blurred somewhere around her belly button. Very thought provoking technology.) This one piece of equipment, around the size of small car, cost a million dollars.

These days that’s called Photoshop. You could probably do most of it in your phone.

Book publishing for authors traditionally breaks down to a writer convincing an agent to convince a publisher to add their words to the thousands of pages they’ll be printing next year. Because mainly their business is filling warehouses with books. They get paid more when the books sell. It’s a shame when they don’t. Either way, they get paid to produce them and write off any loses. Publishers are only printers with nicer cocktail parties.

The simple market psychology of all this is rooted in the fact that life is short. People simply want somebody to sign off before they waste their time paying attention. So the better the person vouching for you, the further you fly. As a reader, if the Big Publisher likes you, how bad could you be? And the Big Publisher simply figures, well, that Fancy Agent likes this book, and the Fancy Agent likes money as much as I do, so let’s give it a whirl. They pay themselves to do the art, they pay themselves to the do the marketing. You fly yourself to do the talk shows. And they make much more money printing text books.

So I guess I decided to wait until that all went away a little bit.

See, I spent my High School and College years learning to be a community newspaper reporter. Then that kind of reporter and that kind of news went away. I showed up in Los Angeles and spent a few happy years on independent movie sets, in pitches, in post production, until technology, 2008 and a poorly-timed Writer’s strike drove independent film from the Earth. So I know how things end. What I started looking around for instead is something brand new.

And that’s Amazon. And that’s direct-print publishing.

My Bride now oversees a travel magazine which has an almost half-million piece run twice a year. The magazines pop out one at a time from a big, automated, printer/binder system at a fraction of the cost or time. And are all fully customizable.

Those warehouses full of spinning metal plates, gone. The expert press operators with gigantic overtime checks, gone. Cans and cans of ink. Huge pallets of paper. The scary machine with a big open blade that could cut through a telephone book. Trucks so full of paper they sink into hot asphalt. That noise. Those smells. My first job in one of my Dad’s printing shops, carrying boxes, gluing notepads and sweeping the floor. Gone. My first newspaper job on small-town daily, my chair a few feet from a pair of swinging doors beside a whirring press spitting our words onto the street. Long gone.

The good news is, you may never have to buy a chatty lunch for an overpriced book agent ever again.

So, here’s the hustle. Your book, even electronically, is an item for sale like anything else on Amazon, a corporation both benevolent and evil, sort of like fire. They give you the marketplace and the remarkable technology to format and distribute your work, yourself, directly to a reader. Not for free, of course. They take their cut. And they want you to buy their ads, per click. Sort of like buying ten dollars worth of raffle tickets. If that gets you fifty clicks, those are your opportunities to convert a sale. If the ebook sells for three dollars and Amazon takes thirty percent, you get about two bucks. So if you sell five, you made your money back. Sell fifty and you clear ninety. If your paperback sells for eight or nine dollars and they keep three to print it, that’s still two bucks in your PayPal. Sounds great.

Except . . . Amazon. Those folks don’t make it easy. Again, that’s another essay for another day.

Where does that leave us?

A traditional publisher does, and always did, look to the author to promote themselves or at least be famous in the first place. Which is why a celebrity chef or former actor or disgraced politician will always have a place and there will always be that industry on some level. Coffee tables need books too. This won’t change. These authors will always carry the full support of a giant, successful mechanism.

For contemporary fiction, however, for the first time since Steve Gutenberg invented the bible, somebody writing really has nothing standing between themselves and the person reading. (And yes, this includes in airports and on beaches.)

Fine, but with this sudden rush of words into the marketplace, how will the cream rise, as it were? What about all the inevitable not-ready-for-an-audience nonsense?

Don’t worry. Turns out, everybody’s a critic. I am confident it will all find a way to curate itself . . . and so begins the next hustle.

Which brings us back to me. Hi. In my experience, making things is easy. It’s showing it to people that’s hard.

I pushed the publish button on this book last year and headed to the airport for the holidays. The sensation was that of walking around with all of your skin peeled off. Terrifying, but, you know, brisk.

One last story. At that printing shop I worked at as a kid, a guy came to the loading dock one afternoon, looking for a box of books they’d just finished. The book was, I think, a history of classic matchbook covers. They were his. Put it together himself. Paid for it himself. Had no real way to sell them or anything. This was end of the 80’s. Maybe flea markets or something. Fellow collectors.

There was real dissonance for me in that moment, looking at that poor guy smiling down at the first book he dug out of the box. Turning it over in his hands. I mean, it’s not like somebody picked him up and brushed him off and said, hey, come with me, my super-special friend, because you too are an extraordinary creator of thought, with a stamp on your spine that proves too all that you are one of us.

Wasn’t that cheating somehow? Or pretending? Wasn’t this just a regular guy?

Yeah, Paul, so he was. And so am I.

For more info about: Lights Along The Interstate On Goodreads and Amazon

Read the first post HERE

The How & Why Now: My First Book (3/3) was originally published on Wyndotte Street Presents Original Comedy And Music