We owned a hammock once and actually installed it, lashing it to a couple of oak trees in a shady spot between our cottage and the lake.
With the shade, the breeze off the lake, the whisper of waves caressing the beach, it was an ideal spot to loaf.
I tried it once or twice. No more than that. I guess I'm just not a hammock person . At least I wasn't at the time.
In fact, I've never been much good at idling in general. Too task-oriented. My wandering mind always landed on the chores I could be crossing off my list.
But I'm getting better. In recent years. I've taken up the study of creative loafing - dong absolutely nothing. In the middle of the day!
You could call it contemplation, or meditation, or living in the moment. You could call it breathing. You could call it wasting time.
Here's a hint: Don't send him any money. He may be lying.
Good advice about self publishing for all authors, by Jonathan Kile, in Creative Loafing.
I was recently in a spirited discussion with a couple of battle-scarred writers about book deals, publishers, marketing, and the various successes and challenges that our colleagues have faced. I have friends and acquaintances who have “traditional” book deals and I have friends who’ve self published. And then there are the tempting vanity presses. Being as this blog is called The Self Publishing Notebook, I’m going to have a bias toward the self publishing model, but I’ll admit it’s not for everyone. If you have a better chance at a book deal than my cat (which I don’t), go for it. And, frankly, if a publisher walked up to my door and offered me an advance, I’d be all ears. ( Having done time as a door-to-door salesman, I’m a softy for street peddlers — to my wife’s dismay.) The point is that self-publishing is a legitimate and often more successful vehicle for writers who stand little chance in the beleaguered world of traditional book publishing. (Particularly fiction.) The reason I chose self publishing was that I wanted to write fiction — not query letters.
But I do have a confession. Somewhere along in my journey — I’m not even sure how they got my number — I had a conversation with a person from a well-known vanity publisher. They called to tell me that they were interested in publishing my book. Flattering! Although I had literally nothing out there that they could have read. Perhaps my undergraduate treatise on Canadian labor economics had them convinced that I was going to be a successful novelist (given my knowledge of the topic, it probably could have been filed as “fiction”). The person was intent on having me hire them to edit my book and design a cover — and get their foot in my door/wallet.
I got off the phone, Googled the company’s name and didn’t have to go far to find horror stories of people getting ripped off for tens of thousands of dollars. Other than the testimonials on their own website, I could find absolutely nothing to suggest that it was a good idea. I found stories of people who shelled out $20,000 and got a royalty check that wouldn't buy you lunch. As far as I can tell, they take money, provide you with a few books (so fun to hold your very own book written by you! Happy day!), and spend their most valuable (gullible) clients’ money advertising in the New York Time Book Review. The ads are terrible. This outfit is so sharp that the amusingly named “Carl,” who has a thick Hindi accent and a few hundred people talking in the background, left me a voicemail the other day to see how my book was coming along. Carl, I finished it more than two years ago; you can find it on Amazon. I have only a little sympathy for the writers they ripped off, since they couldn’t take the time to do their research. Worry not, they can recover their losses with their Zimbabwe lottery winnings.
Read the complete article here.
When Jonathan Kile isn't leaning back and opining with a knowing look, he encourages you to check out his adventure thriller, The Grandfather Clock, which is in the top 30 Free Adventure/Suspense eBook for Amazon Kindle (just ahead of a book that shamelessly swipes its title from a Jame Bond film). The sequel, The Napoleon Bloom, will be out in 2017. He promises. Jonathan gets his email at [email protected].
From the archives: A roundup of old “Did you read” blog posts
I've gone back and gathered links to old Chicago Reader “Did You Read __________?” blog posts that I contributed items to from 2012 to 2016. These posts were all “authored” by “Reader staff” with attibution to the individual contributors appearing in the body text next to their contributed items. So like some other things with the top-level byline done in this way, they don't appear on individual contributors’ author archives pages.
I got the post URLs using Google Search and then wrote a PHP script pulling all the URLs from the Search results into an array and fetching each post’s headline, subheadline, and publication date, sorting it all in reverse chronological order, and then outputting a useful list of links in nice HTML for presentation on the web. It’s probably most but not all of these posts that I contributed to.
(Among possibly other things, this let me add these to my Muckrack portfolio.)
“Did You Read __________?” [snapshot in the Wayback Machine at archive.org] was a topic series—you can think of it simply as a blog—that started in January 2012 in The Bleader blog (previously “The Blog,” sort of a single-company blog network or parent blog under which individual blogs or sub-blogs existed) on chicagoreader.com that ran initially as a more-or-less daily place for Reader staff to share interesting things, usually articles, from elsewhere on the web, sort of quick-hit link sharing. It shared links to “stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us.”
It was the successor to “What the Reader’s Reading” [Wayback Machine snapshot], a regularly updated feed of links from early 2010 to late 2011 powered by a news-aggregation platform called Publish2 that the Creative Loafing folks were especially excited about but did actually do some cool microblogging things including tagging and categorizing content and, if I recall, also had some rudimentary social media-type features built in. Links shared this way were presented in various places on the site, especially on the Reader homepage and on section-specific posts (e.g. music-tagged links [Wayback Machine] on music posts) and on section table of contents [Wayback Machine] pages.
Later, the idea of daily “Did you read” posts as compilations of staff contributions was dropped and freelancer Kate Shepherd wrote all the posts for the rest of the series from January 2016 until it was discontinued after Valentine’s Day in February 2018—at a particularly tumultuous time in the Reader’s history.
