A Christmas Poem for You

Wishing my SharingwithWriters subscribers and visitors a Merry Christmas. I thought you might enjoy this poem from the award-winning Christmas chapbook coauthored by Magdalena Ball and me as a kind of Christmas card-blog. Kind of light. Kind of nostalgic.

Christmas Reinvented

 

This is how it is, once, a half-lifetime

ago. The house comes alive at five

when kids too excited

to sleep noisily poke holes in

paper gift wrap, emit muffled giggles,

finally come to pull us (yawning)

out of bed. Later they begin to doubt,

hang out in the dark to prove

Santa a myth, fall asleep on the hearth.

When they’re teens the house

sleeps till ten. We eat breakfast late

then have a go at the gifts.

When they’re in college, Christmas

is a surprise package. One year an assortment

of boys’ cars—Porsches, hot rods,

clunkers—clutter the driveway. Terry

drops in with Swedish potato sausage

pungent with onions he pulverized

with an old-fashioned meat grinder.

Or the kids are all studying in France

or upstate. So, maybe a movie for

Dad and me at three. Schedules so erratic

one year I decide not to put up our one

unshakable tradition, a tree

that pushes its star to the top

of our fourteen-foot vaulted

ceiling. That was enough to roust

my son out of his dorm, hit crosstown

traffic with a huge blue fir roped

to the top of his Volkswagen. Measuring

the size of it with an upward wave

of his hand. A bargain he says. Nobody

wants to decorate this much tree

on Christmas Eve. He relishes

the joke as he pulls fragile garlands

and heirloom ornaments from their boxes

knowing that will sure enough roust

me out of my lounger to supervise.

 

That was then. These days we may celebrate

a couple of days before the twenty-fifth, or after,

on bastard dates left over from when others

have laid their claim on our progeny.

A new spurt of Christmas energy may arrive

in the great grandchildren generation

when we’ll be awarded honorary status,

but this spate of Christmases—call it the slow

decade—a new gift as miraculous

as a fat guy coming down the chimney.

The whole day. To think. To Write.

Uninterrupted.

 

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Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of This Is the Place; Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered; Tracings, a chapbook of poetry; and how to books for writers including the award-winning second edition of, The Frugal Book Promoter: How to get nearly free publicity on your own or by partnering with your publisher; The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success; and Great Little Last Minute Editing Tips for Writers . The Great First Impression Book Proposal is her newest booklet for writers. She has three FRUGAL books for retailers including A Retailer’s Guide to Frugal In-Store Promotions: How To Increase Profits and Spit in the Eyes of Economic Downturns with Thrifty Events and Sales Techniques. Some of her other blogs are TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com, a blog where authors can recycle their favorite reviews. She also blogs at all things editing, grammar, formatting and more at The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor .

Valentine Horror Story, Redbook, and Your Book Promotion

This is my Valentine’s story from a long, long time ago. I wrote it up as a pitch for the Help A Reporter Out (HARO progam). You can never tell when something will make a hit with a reporters so it sometimes pays to try something different. And this one actually attracted the attention of the editor of Redbook online. 

Was it that it was different? After all, she did ask for Valentine Horror Stories! Was it that I mentioned a fellow Hearst-published magazine?  That might not have hurt. Was it that it was set in New York, a city near and dear to many in the publishing industry? Was it that it was carefully angled to what she had asked for? That's always a good idea when it comes to pitching anything.

So, I'm sharing my Valentine Horror Story with you as a reminder not to fear pitching in unusual places and also as your reminder not to forget Valentine's day (today, mind you!)

Dear HARO/Redbook reporter:

My husband and I had been married but a year. My new husband was getting his master's at Columbia. I was working at a competitor of yours, Good Housekeeping magazine. We were a long way from home, had driven across country in an ancient 49 Ford convertible. An adventure. We had just settled into a studio apartment in Flushing and were getting used to the long subway ride and, frankly, I was homesick. It was February 14. We always met in the subway beneath Columbus circle after work. There were buckets of roses all over hell and gone. But he didn't have a rose in his hand. We bought a cheap dinner at a deli after we got off the subway in Flushing--the way we always did. The elevator in our apartment was broken so we walked up. The superintendent was grumpy--the way he always was. My new husband had to study for his next day at school--the way he always did. I tried not to show I was getting sullen. I mean, what he had to do was important right? I yanked our bed out of the wall. Took a hot bath to get warm. Fell asleep promptly. I guess I was in a drowse state when he finally came to bed--just enough motion to make me subconsciously aware he was there. I woke up finding myself whacking him and screaming, "All I wanted was a Valentine." I do remember that I meant a paper Valentine...even one he had made. Which was kind of tender. But the whacks I was giving him weren't at all tender.

BTW, he remembers well. He already brought me chocolates this year (we've been married a long time now!). You know, just in case he should forget on the 14th. He doesn't want any more nighttime whacks.

 

Now, just in case you did forget Valentine's Day, may I suggest Magdalena Ball's and my last-minute Valentine gift idea for $2.99. Cherished Pulse, an e-book of love poetry  can be sent by e-mail by the most forgetful—and frugal—of types.

 

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Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of This Is the Place; Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered; Tracings, a chapbook of poetry; and how to books for writers including the award-winning second edition of, The Frugal Book Promoter: How to get nearly free publicity on your own or by partnering with your publisher; The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success; and Great Little Last Minute Editing Tips for Writers . The Great First Impression Book Proposal is her newest booklet for writers. She has three FRUGAL books for retailers including A Retailer’s Guide to Frugal In-Store Promotions: How To Increase Profits and Spit in the Eyes of Economic Downturns with Thrifty Events and Sales Techniques. Some of her other blogs are TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com, a blog where authors can recycle their favorite reviews. She also blogs at all things editing, grammar, formatting and more at The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor .

New Year Resolutions: Tis the Season for Supporting the Industry

Aha! It is resolution time!

I’d love to give authors advice on setting goals for the New Year. Here’s the thing: I’ve done that and—in the doing of it—realize that no one author can help another set goals because each author and each title is so different.

I guess I sort of gave authors a whole book of possible resolutions to make in when I published the second edition of The Frugal Book Promoter (http://budurl.com/FrugalBkPromo). I even got general and told authors to pick and choose their goals from the book. That they wouldn’t be able to do everything that is in it and shouldn’t. I mean the whole idea behind writing it was to keep other authors from falling in the same potholes I did. I advised them to choose promotions based on their personalities, the titles of their books (different books call for different kinds of marketing campaigns!), and the health of their pocketbooks.

Still, I’m tackling this post because I do think there is one thing that almost every author could and should put on his or her resolution list. Are you ready?

Buy books!

I often get e-mails from authors saying that their fellow authors don’t buy their books. And I do understand how that can happen. The longer we’ve been writing, the more author-friends we have and, at some point it’s impossible to support them all. Having said that, we as authors shouldn’t expect fellow authors to buy books that don’t interest them. Books they don’t have time for. Or books that aren’t published the way they want to read them (paperback or e-books, anyone?)  That’s why we promote rather than just depending on friends and relatives—which, after all, isn’t the biggest pool of buyers in the world.

Still, we authors should buy some books each year and I think we should set aside a budget for that. It’s about Zen. It’s about supporting the industry that we expect to support us. I even tell authors that they shouldn’t limit themselves to buying only my book on, say, editing or book proposals or wordtrippers or the marketing of books. Even authors who have read extensively on a particular subject may very well get new ideas from a book on a similar subject or be inspired by it.

But there are other ways to support our industry besides buying books we want to read. Authors on strict budgets should find books make relatively inexpensive gifts for holiday giving, for hostess and thank you gifts, for birthdays, and even to give to business associates on appropriate occasions.

But we all know that we tend to get lax with our resolutions. So, to make your “Buy Books” resolution work all year, go to your gift-giving list and see how many people on that list could get the gift of reading in 2013 instead of something that will be promptly tossed in the Goodwill bin or re-gifted. Staple your gift list to your resolution list. And then make another resolution to read your resolutions and that attached list of gift-giving idea list at least once a month.

Heck, you could even give your own book to folks on that list. You are proud of it, aren’t you?

If every author gave books as gifts, I could see a bright, shiny year ahead. A year where agents take on more clients because more publishers are selling more books. And when that happens, just think! Books will be the gifts that keep giving. Books will be the gifts that give back as well.

 

Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of This Is the Place; Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered; Tracings, a chapbook of poetry; and how to books for writers including, The Frugal Book Promoter: How To Do What Your Publisher Won't; The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success; and Great Little Last Minute Editing Tips for Writers . The Great First Impression Book Proposal is her newest booklet for writers. She has three FRUGAL books for retailers including A Retailer’s Guide to Frugal In-Store Promotions: How To Increase Profits and Spit in the Eyes of Economic Downturns with Thrifty Events and Sales Techniques. Some of her other blogs are TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com, a blog where authors can recycle their favorite reviews. She also blogs at all things editing, grammar, formatting and more at The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor . If your followers at Twitter would benefit from this blog post, please use the little Green widget to let them know about this blog: