Personal, Writing, Editing & Journalism

A Month in the Life

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The onset on seasonal fur-shedding by my feline overlords reminds me that summer’s coming, a welcome reminder in the mid-winter gloom. The characteristically goofy weather in the Upper Midwest has contributed to a sense of change: Last night, we were in the low 20s F, but a few days before we enjoyed the upper 60s.
Some updates, in no particular order:
Ziggy and Tiger. So speaking of cats, my two neighborhood friends, Ziggy and Tiger, continue to be a near-daily presence around the property. Of the two, Tiger — a neutered male, and sweet as molasses — is probably an indoor/outdoor cat for someone. He’s obviously well cared-for, with no signs of injury or illness, and he’s extremely friendly to strange humans. Ziggy, a black tuxedo female, is a bit worse for wear. She’s also adorable, with a chirpy meow, but she’s underweight and is now showing occasional signs of injury (perhaps from fights) as well as patches of fur loss and ear damage. She has a collar, and I texted with the phone number on the tag a few months ago, but the response was cagey. I suspect she was abandoned last fall. If she starts to appear to be in real distress, I’ll probably scoop her up and take her to the vet, and then look into having her put in a shelter. She deserves a loving forever home.
Chicago. Just got back from an unusually warm and sunny Windy City for the semiannual commission meetings for NAHQ. Great experience. The four commission chairs met Wednesday for a day of planning with the executive director and the president and president-elect. My commission met Thursday and Friday. Went well. Flights were also pretty good, although I was thiiiiiis close to starting an angry tweetstorm with American Airlines. Apparently, AA swapped the plane type. The plane arrived into O’Hare on time, but it was a different model with different weight-and-balance requirements. I was one of nine passengers pulled aside on the “you’re probably gunna be bumped” list. Ultimately, we all were able to board, but — THE PLANE WAS ONLY TWO-THIRDS FULL. Why we’d be over-weight on such a de-populated flight defies reason.
Caffeinated Press. We’re entering a make-or-break year. We’ve mastered the art of making books, but the bigger challenge is selling those books. Although we’re in various catalogs, and we do a fair amount of hand-selling on our own, the real trick is networking with independent bookstores. So it appears that we’ll be doing our own state-wide distribution operation. With Partners having closed, and other distributors being big and expensive, I think that divvying up our target market and personally serving participating bookstores is probably the key to success and the next evolution of our business. Meanwhile, we’ve got exciting changes coming for our literary journal, The 3288 Review, and nine new titles in various stages of completion. And also: Most of the heavy lifting of our tech migration has now concluded. New project-management tools, new email server, new learning-mangaement system … yay!
Grand River Writing Tribe. The Tribe continues to meet. It’s going well, so far. Great participation and engagement, and a wonderful group of people around the table. We’ll be re-opening the door to membership at the end of March, so if you’re local to the Grand Rapids area and wish to join, consider our Grand River Writing Tribe online application.
Poetry. Poems are funny things: When you want to write them, you can’t; when you don’t have the time to write, inspiration strikes. I’ve been working on a collection — a chapbook provisionally titled Whiskey, Cats & Poems — for a while. Got a half-dozen poems or so complete. Then … nada. But, this morning, eight new ideas struck me, like the cars in an out-of-control freight train. At least I had the foresight to take notes. I’m not a skilled poet, by any measure, but I’m working on it. Very relaxing, especially writing by candlelight with (you guessed it!) a cat and some whiskey. But working more with poets and reading much more poetry, thanks to my time with the Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters, has proven instructive.
Get Published! and UntitledTown. We at Caffeinated Press have been invited to participate again in the Get Published! writers conference, which this year will be in Holland in mid April. Then, in late April, I’ll be off to UntitledTown in Green Bay, WI, to present a session about publishing. Exciting!
State Convention. I went to my political party’s state convention earlier this month. Got to meet some great new people from mid-Michigan. Stayed the night with Tony and his wife at their palatial estate in Dimondale. Great weekend all around! I went to my political party’s state convention earlier this month. Got to meet some great new people from mid-Michigan. Stayed the night with Tony and his wife at their palatial estate in Dimondale. Great weekend all-around!
Personal Goals. During my Christmas vacation, I did a great job of more carefully planning my 2017 goals down to the month level. That approach seems to have paid off — progress and visibility are now more “in my face” than they were before, leading to more deliberate decisions about how I spend my time and what I choose to prioritize.
Ash Wednesday. Lent’s coming this week. I’ve had a personal goal of returning more actively to regular liturgical life. Perhaps this year will be the year.
All for now. Enjoy the rest of the winter!

Personal

What a Month!

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While I was on my winter holiday a month ago, I experienced a transition of leadership at the day job. My boss, Bob, took a different role, so now I report directly to our divisional vice president.

The change is, to put it delicately, not inconsequential.

The last few weeks have required a major pivot in how my team and I execute our work, and on what cadence. So a series of 60-hour weeks.

And other things have crept up, too —

  • I was sideswiped in a hit-and-run accident earlier in the month. In the grand scheme of things, not much damage to me or my car. I pulled a back muscle, which has been intermittently unpleasant. The damage to the car looks superficial, although the insurance adjuster quoted $977 in repairs. (You might have guessed that I have a $1k deductible.)
  • I’ve transitioned into my treasurer role at the Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters. The long-term time commitment is minimal, all things considered, although I did have to spend some time getting set up — new accounting system, logins, emails, etc. So a bit transition time.
  • I had the chance to offer a final revision to the essay I submitted a while back, to an anthology about the Catholic Church. Not 100 percent I’m thrilled with it yet — pretty tight word-count constraints — but at least the project is moving along.

Quiet weekend, for once. Might start digging through messages, which have now (cumulatively) crossed the 1,000-unread-emails count. Perhaps a fire and some whiskey and a cat would help. Hmm.

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Merry Christmas!

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As of noon today, I settled into the second half of my annual end-of-year vacation. Hard to believe that eight days have elapsed already — I haven’t gotten a ton done off my to-do list, but in fairness, I’ve been fairly heavily preoccupied with fire drills from several different sources (lookin’ at you, Priority Health and NAHQ conference calls) and party planning, so I haven’t had much chance to just sit, plan and execute. The little time I’ve had, has been significantly interrupted by the cats. Seriously. I literally cannot work from home anymore — the feline overlords want to lay on me or on my keyboard and no amount of gentle redirection proves effective, and locking them out of my office merely engenders scratching and loud meowing that persists for hours.

Christmas this year has been a mixed bag. I know I’ve been harping on it these last few years — and earlier this month — but I look at Christmas a bit differently than I used to. It feels more like an obligation game: Show up places, give people things, receive things, fight crowds, etc. Having snow on the ground helps, but not a lot. Religiously, the Advent/Christmas season has grown so trite that it seems hollow, a point I attribute mostly to the astonishingly and consistently poor homiletics among the Catholic clergy.

But it hasn’t been bad, all things considered. Did the maternal-family thing on the 17th. My soon-to-be-former boss took his direct reports for dinner at Gravity last Tuesday evening. Roni took me to dinner as part of newly joining the GLCL board of directors. My mom did her usual Christmas Eve thing last night (my extra “drunk Santa” gifts with messaged labels went over well). Today has been fairly quiet — I edited episode 299 of Vice Lounge Online and now have been plotting next week’s intended achievements with one hand (literally) while the other hand attends to one of the cats.

And sitting here, in my home office, writing this post, it occurs to me that I have a lot of “Christmas cheer” to share. I’m grateful for a lot of things — having a decent career, relatively little family drama, a solid circle of friends, lack of serious material want — that I often take for granted.

Because I just edited a podcast episode, VLO makes for a great top-of-mind case in point. Over the years that Tony and I have been podcasting, we’ve had the privilege of meeting some wonderful folks from all across the Anglosphere. The cast of characters waxes and wanes, but the fact that I could make a solo trek to VIMFP in Las Vegas in October and run into probably 20 or more people I knew, or that we could get a dozen people to our five-year podcast event in Louisville in April, speaks volumes. I have “people” — friends of the show — that I know well enough that I could reach out if I ever visited their home communities. Southeast England? Manitoba? North-central Texas? Atlanta? Las Vegas? Northern California? Pennsylvania? Check, check, check, check, check, check, check. And then some. #Amazing

I’m immensely grateful for my friends, my health, my stability. I know that others don’t have what I have, but I’m keeping those folks in my thoughts. I know some friends and acquaintances are working through challenges as different as raising an infant, navigating a divorce, changing gender identities and recovering from cancer. These people need our holiday well-wishes!

So to all of you out there, I wish you a very merry Christmas.

Personal

There and Back Again: A Reflection

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Flight DL300 touched down in Grand Rapids last night around 8:40 p.m. I got off the plane — it took off from Atlanta; I started in Orlando — then trekked home to greet the feline overlords and head to bed. The great thing about that ATL-GRR segment was the tranquility: I enjoyed an exit-row seat with no one next to me on the two-person side of the MD-88 aircraft. Plenty of space! But also room to unfold my Surface to take some notes. Some of which, are presented below in the form of a reflection.

Updates

NAHQ Board Meeting. This year, our board of directors convened for a destination meeting. We settled on Orlando, FL so we could partake in a “behind the magic” tour offered by the Disney Institute. Interesting experience: It’s a mix of a bus tour and a walking tour of parts of the Magic Kingdom and Epcot. It started at Textile Services, which is basically the commercial laundry for Disney Resorts. Huge. Efficient. And lots of the folks on the floor who saw us on the catwalk waved and smiled, which I guess is the Disney way. Then we went to Epcot and got to go “behind the scenes” at the places where cast members get their costumes and have their break rooms and such. Then off to the Magic Kingdom, which included a brief tour of Main Street inside the park as well as a chance to walk through parts of the Utilador — the “secret tunnel” under the Magic Kingdom that’s actually neither secret nor a tunnel. (You can’t dig into Florida swampland, so the 1.5-mile “tunnel” was actually built on a normal foundation and then it was buried, with the park built atop it.) All the while, our host kept inserting comments about Disney culture and process improvement, to help tour guests better understand the specific mechanisms of Disney’s commitment to operational excellence and guest satisfaction.

We stayed two nights at Boardwalk Inn, which — I must admit — was a great location.

Apart from the Disney Institute tour, we enjoyed 1.5 days of board meetings. These conversations have really solidified; Day One was mostly strategy, with the final half day focused on operations (budget, consent agenda). I’m cautiously optimistic that we’ve settled on a really solid framework for setting program/service strategy for the next few years.

NaNoWriMo. As I mentioned in my last post, I ended the year with a moral victory but not a word-count victory. I am, however, eager to translate my experiences from this November into a more nuanced master plot-and-conflict timeline that I can weave into a better version of the original story.

Grand River Writing Tribe. As part of my general commitment to “rite moar gooder” I’m launching a writing group for authors serious about publication. Read more, and apply, on the Tribe’s temporary landing page.

Kent County Republicans.  By virtue of having stood for county-level office, I was automatically extended the privilege of serving as a member of the Executive Committee for the next two years. So that’s fun. I also got to see my friend Edgard, which was awesome. He suggests he might be moving back to the area next year — a suggestion I hope translates into reality!

Social Schedule. November was busy:

  • 11/3 — Nat Sherman 85th event at Grand River Cigar with Scott
  • 11/4 — Writers’ group Thanksgiving fest (turkey and all!)
  • 11/5 — “Dead Presidents” Halloween party @ PPQ’s in Royal Oak, MI
  • 11/10 — Dinner with Roni
  • 11/11 — Sister-in-law’s 40th birthday party
  • 11/13 — Day of Knockout Noveling at CultureWorks in Holland, MI
  • 11/18 — Murder-Mystery dinner at Ruth’s Chris in Troy, MI
  • 11/24 — Thanksgiving Day at mom’s house
  • 11/27 — The End Is Nigh celebration at KDL/Kentwood
  • 11/28 — County convention, Kent County GOP
  • 11/30 — NAHQ board meeting commences

… and all of this, plus the day job, plus me attending Jessica’s write-ins every Tuesday, plus me hosting write-ins every Saturday morning.

About.com. I’m back into the editorial-consulting space, working as a contractor for About.com and its migration of content to premium verticals. Similar concept to the Demand Media “renovation,” but executed with a much higher degree of sanity.

Reflection

This morning, Saturday, Dec. 3, the National Weather Service’s landing page for Grand Rapids says: “November was among the Top 2 to 4 warmest on record around the area. Meteorological Fall (Sep 1 through Nov 30) eclipsed Fall 2015 as the second warmest on record.”

So, yeah. It’s been unusually warm. My landlord mowed the lawn last week, if that’s any indication. The forecast is for roughly an inch of snow locally over the weekend, although temps will still hover around 40 F; however, the freeze starts to set in around Tuesday night, with predicted high temps between 28 F and 33 F and lake-effect snow likely for the end of the coming work week.

I like cold, snowy Decembers. Warm/dry Christmas seasons totally suck the life out of the holiday. That point was impressed upon me in Orlando, where the Magic Kingdom now stands bedecked in holiday regalia. Looking at Christmas trees while walking around in 85-degree weather just feels weird.

I spent some time on the last leg of my trip home working through some planning notes for my upcoming two-week Christmas vacation, as well as penciling in some goals for 2017. It occurs to me that some of these goals require downtime. When the seasons are out of whack, it’s as if my body’s calendar gets out of whack, too. Downtime is a function of environment as much as a schedule.

Catholic liturgy values seasonality. We have a clock to rule the day, a calendar to rule the month, but the seasons rule the year. Throw some sand into the gears of any of those three temporal markers, and things grind to a halt. I noticed, perusing some old blog posts, that as recent Decembers have been unseasonably warm or cold, dry or snowy, my reaction tends to follow suit. 2012 = warm/dry; 2013 = snowy; 2014 = frigid; 2015 = warm/dry. I got into my vacation and come back again either refreshed or dejected, in part based on my attitude about it all, which is influenced by the climate.

I have high hopes for this December. Let’s see if the weather cooperates.

Personal, Vices, Writing, Editing & Journalism

Twelve Quick Updates from a Whirlwind of a Month

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What an interesting — and busy! — few weeks it’s been.

  1. Las Vegas trip. I got back this past Monday from a two-night trek to Sin City to meet up with friends surrounding the Vegas Internet Mafia Family Picnic event. VIMFP is an annual confab featuring Vegas-focused podcasters and bloggers. Lots of attendees. Lots of fun. You can listen to me and Tony discuss my trip report on episode 290 of The Vice Lounge Online.
  2. Nicole’s wedding. My cousin Nicole married Corey on the 14th. Lovely wedding and reception. I wish them the very best for many years of wedded bliss!
  3. Horseshoe Hammond excursion. Tony and I trekked to Hammond, Indiana for a day trip to this lovely Caesars Entertainment casino on the outskirts of Chicago. Everything I touched seemed to turn to gold! You can hear the highlights in VLO’s episode 289.
  4. Essay contracted.  I’m pleased to announce that I’ve recently signed a publication agreement for a short essay, “A Moment of Clarity,” intended for publication in a volume titled Staying Catholic When You’ve Been Hurt in the Church. The book — edited by Eve Tushnet and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers — is currently in early production status.
  5. Brewed Awakenings 2 released. I’m delighted to share that Brewed Awakenings 2, the annual house anthology of Caffeinated Press, is now on the market. Buy your copy today to support local literary excellence! This collection features 15 stories by 14 different authors, ranging from just a few hundred words to more than 20k words; the stories cross genres and styles.
  6. Grayson Rising released. And speaking of releases, Grayson Rising also hit the market this month. This delightful YA novel, partially set in Grand Rapids, is the first major fiction release by local author AJ Powell. In fact, AJ hosted a small launch event at his place of employment that was well-attended and greatly enjoyed by those who dropped by.
  7. The 3288 Review, Vol. 2, Issue 1, released. And now the trifecta: We recently printed the fifth iteration of our quarterly journal of arts and letters. It’s a flourishing property that is already drawing attention across the state. Quite proud of it!
  8. NaNoWriMo is coming. November looms, and with it, National Novel Writing Month. I will participate again. I will also continue to host my Saturday-morning write-ins. I have a pretty good idea of what I want to write, a point I’ll expound upon in greater detail over the next few days. Let it suffice that I’ve developed a good skeleton for a literary novel augmented by some detective-genre conventions. The working title is The Catfish in the Shallows. Do not expect to see/hear much of me between 10/31 and 12/1!
  9. Site5 shenanigans. Although it didn’t affect this site, I had a world of trouble — as in, five days of unexpected downtime — with my longtime Web host, Site5. Outmigration is on the near-term horizon, unfortunately.
  10. Health quality glossary. Spent a fair amount of time recently as a subject-matter expert for NAHQ as we fine-tuned a comprehensive glossary of terms specific to quality improvement in healthcare. Much of this work entailed the alignment of definitions across existing products. Good intellectual exercise.
  11. SIP lines for Caffeinated Press. For years, the CafPress toll-free phone number (888-809-1686) went straight to a voice-mail box. I’ve now set us up with a SIP provider (i.e., a voice-over-Internet phone service) so our toll-free number actually rings in the office. I even have a desk phone, now, with my own extension and local number. Not that I actually use the phone much. But still. Progress.
  12. Outdoor kitties. A pair of felines have been lurking around my house. One of them has a home, and I’ve ensured that she’s been returned to it. The other — a fluffy black tabby, neutered, and sweet as molasses — keeps visiting. He likes it when I give him some Meow Mix. So I do. So far, he looks like he’s in good shape: his coat is fine, he looks well cared-for, his weight seems constant. I’ll keep my eyes peeled for signs of neglect as the cold-weather season sets in. I get the feeling he’s someone’s cat and that he might be an indoor/outdoor dude.

All for now.

Personal

Turning 40: A Reflection

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I’m told that 40 is the new 30. I hope not; my 30s — particularly the first half of that decade — weren’t all that enjoyable. If my 40s are like my late 30s, though, then bring it on!

Some background: Heretofore, birthdays (especially those evenly divisible by 5) have been a real disappointment. After 21, birthdays don’t matter much. I think I didn’t pay a lot of attention to 25. However, 30 was well-nigh traumatic; the only saving grace was that just two days after, I stepped on a plane to San Diego for my first-ever conference speaking gig. That trip was magical, offering a distraction from pointless introspection. Worse was 35; at that point, you’re half-way to 70 and the phrase “middle aged” starts to crop up. You’re less culturally aligned with your younger friends, but (at least for me) not really settled into a long-term life trajectory. It’s an awkward period, especially if you’re not ensnared in the domestic bliss of spouse and children and white picket fences and minivans. You don’t necessarily fit anywhere. You’re too old to say within the immediate-post-college crowd; you’re too young to spend afternoons on the golf course reminiscing about the Viet Cong. You’re too old to shop at Abercrombie & Fitch; you’re too young to shop at J.C. Penney. You just kinda exist in a grey zone.

But 40? Bah. Just another day.

My thinking about aging has simmered down the last few years. A big part of this serenity relates to the dawning self-awareness that with age comes experience, and that experience brings real benefits. Nowhere does that perspective shine more strongly than at work, where the 20-something fresh-outta-college people we often hire seem to be distracted by irrelevancies. I hear the things that cause them so much angst and say to myself, “Self, that’s a whole lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” In other words: Been there, done that, got the T-shirt, threw the T-shirt in the trash. They spend a lot of time worrying about things that don’t matter. Then again, at that age, I did, too. It’s liberating being on the other side of that divide.

The last few years, with my promotion into management and arrival on various boards of directors and running a small business on the side, have engendered experiences an order of magnitude removed from worrying about who said what on Facebook and which party to attend on the coming weekend. Plus, a solid mid-career professional existence provides means and assets that remain out the reach of younger adults. The stakes are different, so the betting strategy adjusts accordingly.

I am aware, as I occasionally peruse this blog’s archives (I’ve been writing at A Mild Voice of Reason since I was 29!), that at times I’ve raged about getting older or about finding purpose in ways that are, in retrospect, incredibly whiny. Those posts provide milestones along my evolution from pseudo-sophisticated 20-something to a calmer, more focused 40-year-old. And I’m OK with that. I think at some point, you have to stop looking at life as something to be manicured and just live it.

I’m actually pretty happy with my life now. The basics are so well established that I don’t think about them — I don’t worry about covering the rent, I drive a newish car, all the things that should be insured are fully covered, I have a healthy retirement account going, the cats never run out of food — thus freeing more time to focus on other things of greater substance. Like Caffeinated Press. Or my personal writing. Or NAHQ. Or my career at Priority Health. Or the podcast. Or my outdoor hobbies.

But getting there wasn’t always easy, and the barriers were pretty much all of my own making. I wasted that critical 16-to-21 period by making bad choice after bad choice; it was really only the disapprobation of my grandfather (I can’t believe it’s been 11 years ago, this week, that he passed away) that nudged me off a self-destructive path. My family teed me up perfectly for a life of high success. If I’ve managed to achieve middling success, it’s because I pissed away the advantages they bequeathed to me but managed to get lucky with a partial recovery.

My 20s weren’t solid. I was a long-term student. I had a decent job, but didn’t really focus on it. I spent a lot of time in coffee shops, plotting big things that never came to fruition because if I actually tried to execute, but failed, then I’d deal a fatal wound to my own personal mythos of smug omnipotence.

My early 30s were the worst. They started off well enough, with a newfound appreciation for fitness and a devotion to exercise and martial arts. But then I got sick. And made more self-defeating choices, to boot. It wasn’t until five or six years ago that I really re-founded myself, mostly by recognizing that aspiration is nice but it doesn’t pay the bills. And, gee, you really do have to pay the bills. A certain shame at not really being a grown-up offers a powerful, if unplanned, motivation to clean up one’s act.

Many years ago I started a running goal list. Some of those goals, I’ve written about; others, not so much. That list sits in one of my OneNote notebooks, so I can see how it’s changed over the years. Some items that seemed so important six years ago now amuse me. Some current items would have never struck me as being important in those days. Other items have been checked off as successes. Still others remain, their staying power helping me to recognize what’s constant and giving me a focus for my future efforts.

I’ve learned that being busy matters, but only if you’re occupied with meaningful work. I’ve learned that obsessing about love and lust is a sure-fire tell that you haven’t yet learned to love yourself, and that when you finally do love yourself for who you are, the Captain Ahab pursuit of romance seems silly. And at some point, you have to welcome the occasional failure as an opportunity to thrive, and as an object lesson in (finally) overcoming imposter syndrome and all the painfully awkward justifications that prop it up.

Today, I turn 40. And you know what? It’s just another day. What matters isn’t the number, but what you do with the hours allotted to you.

Make yours count.

Personal, Writing, Editing & Journalism

Laborin’ on Labor Day

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I took off Friday, and this coming Tuesday, from the day job to focus on stuff at Caffeinated Press. Making hella-good progress, too.

Some updates:

  • Book Projects Complete.  Yesterday, in an all-day marathon, I performed my finishing touches on the Brewed Awakenings 2 anthology. The project is overdue by almost exactly a year. Yesterday evening, I sent full/complete proofs of the interior and cover to all 14 authors; so far, three have responded, all positively. Except in the highly unlikely scenario of a major edit request, this collection will be released in about three weeks. Today, keeping the theme alive, I did final wrap up on Grayson Rising — also horribly overdue — and sent the proofs of this delightful YA novel to the author. And I finished the first-pass cut of the interior of Ladri, although I have about another hour or two of work on the cover, which I’ll complete when the author gives me a few pieces of info I need. And, John advises that he’ll wrap up the initial layout of Vol. 2, Issue 1 of The 3288 Review this weekend. So September looks like we’ll be wrapped up with four major projects. Which is a relief — the rest of the stuff in the production queue doesn’t hit until winter-ish. I’ll be able to head into November’s NaNo-fueled writing frenzy with a clean conscience that at least I’m not delayed on anything else.
  • Kerrytown Book Festival.  In a few weeks, I’m headed to Ann Arbor for the day to shop our wares at the KBF. Should be a good time. I’ll put the sales education I got from AmyJo to good use. If any of my peeps from East Mitten feel like stopping by ….
  • Submissions. I pulled a few more items from my vetted personal slush pile to submit to a pair of writing contests. I’ve got another submission due tomorrow, then a few more sprinkling through September. It’d be nice to win something, or to at least grow my publication list for fiction/poetry stuff. The current flash piece I’m shopping, Regret, is fairly strong thanks to the workshop I attended in July at the GLCL.
  • Birthday Lunch with Mom. Three weeks and a reschedule later, I finally took my mom out for lunch for her mid-August birthday. It was fun. But it’s funny that it took so long. We’re actually closer to my birthday than we were to hers. And I got to see Gunner, the happy-go-lucky but health-challenged German Shepherd.
  • WriteOn! Flash Critique. Last month, our illustrious writing-group leader, JCBAH, was gallivanting around Ireland and Scotland, so I offered the group an assignment: Prepare a flash piece of no more than 800 words for vetting by the group. As if by magic, eight of the nine participated (and the lone holdout has a really good excuse). The event went well. It’s good for the group to feel the pressure of critiques. We do really good on the pizza-and-socializing part, not always so good on the writing part.
  • National Novel Writing Month. Speaking of writing, I’m looking forward to the frenzy of NaNoWriMo again. I don’t have a fully fleshed idea yet, but some concepts are rollin’ round my noggin. I’m hosting, again, a kickoff Halloween event at Caffeinated Press: Show up after 6p on 10/31, bring a dish to pass, wear a costume if you want, and prep — with a word war to follow at 12:01 a.m. on 11/1. Should be a good time.
  • VLO on Schedule. Tony and I are back on track for weekly podcast releases. We went to every other week in July and August.
  • VIMFP.  I had discussed it briefly with Roux a while back, but it’s looking increasingly likely (odds now above 75 percent) that I’ll be attending the Vegas Internet Mafia Family Picnic in October in Las Vegas. Tony, however, cannot attend. Which means the VIMFPers get an upgrade. 🙂
  • Outside Stuff. Jen (and her husband) and I have rescheduled our diving trip to Gilboa, Ohio for later this fall. And I think I’m going to take a late-September weekend — because I have some free time — to do an overnight backpacking trek near Cadillac. Neither of these are set in stone, but if I can do both, this marks the first year I’ve hit the diving/hiking/kayaking trifecta in a single season. Which will be nice.
  • Ye Olde Catholic Church. Last week I had the chance to meet a new friend, Jane, who’s an author we’ve worked with at Caffeinated Press. She and I enjoyed several beers and nachos at The Cottage one night. She and I spent the bulk of our time talking religion. Reminds me of the value of having a church home, but also reminds me of how painful the state of homiletics remains within Mother Church. No matter where I go — St. Anthony, St. Andrew, St. Robert, St. Mary — I’m struck by how superficial things feel. Perhaps a self-directed renewal during Advent will help.
  • Virtual Desktop. I created an account at PaperSpace.io — the company offers cheap but robust virtual Windows desktops. I picked a Pro offering and created a surprisingly awesome experience out of it. When I need to run the full Adobe Creative Suite on my Surface 3, it’s no problem. As long as I have Wi-Fi, that is.

I’m looking forward to the next few months. September — besides being my birth month — marks a pivot from summer into autumn. So far, the month looks to be fairly sedate, now that I’m fundamentally caught up at Caffeinated Press and the outlook for the next year does not include massive boluses of work I have to handle. October sees the transition into a glorious #PureMichigan autumn, with prep for NaNoWriMo and (presumably) VIMFP on the docket, leading toward my family’s kickoff of the holiday season with Halloween. November is a busy writing month, culminating with Thanksgiving and another five-day weekend. Then December, with a NAHQ board event in Orlando (I know, rough) and then two weeks’ holiday at the end of the month.

I think my anticipating is growing because more and more things are firing on all cylinders. The norovirus-induced weight loss continues. I feel better. Less stress at the day job and at Caffeinated Press, one vexing writer notwithstanding. My writing is solidifying. My financial situation is stable and healthy. I plan to get my Christmas shopping done by the end of this month. Life with the feline overlords remains pleasant. The podcast is doing well. The governance transition within the NAHQ board is starting to gel.

A couple of things are missing — a tighter degree of spiritual centeredness, perhaps acquiring a Significant Other — but those are solvable problems, and they’re not immediately pressing.

The Starks remind us that Winter Is Coming. I say, bring it on.

Personal, Writing, Editing & Journalism

Laborin' on Labor Day

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I took off Friday, and this coming Tuesday, from the day job to focus on stuff at Caffeinated Press. Making hella-good progress, too.
Some updates:

  • Book Projects Complete.  Yesterday, in an all-day marathon, I performed my finishing touches on the Brewed Awakenings 2 anthology. The project is overdue by almost exactly a year. Yesterday evening, I sent full/complete proofs of the interior and cover to all 14 authors; so far, three have responded, all positively. Except in the highly unlikely scenario of a major edit request, this collection will be released in about three weeks. Today, keeping the theme alive, I did final wrap up on Grayson Rising — also horribly overdue — and sent the proofs of this delightful YA novel to the author. And I finished the first-pass cut of the interior of Ladri, although I have about another hour or two of work on the cover, which I’ll complete when the author gives me a few pieces of info I need. And, John advises that he’ll wrap up the initial layout of Vol. 2, Issue 1 of The 3288 Review this weekend. So September looks like we’ll be wrapped up with four major projects. Which is a relief — the rest of the stuff in the production queue doesn’t hit until winter-ish. I’ll be able to head into November’s NaNo-fueled writing frenzy with a clean conscience that at least I’m not delayed on anything else.
  • Kerrytown Book Festival.  In a few weeks, I’m headed to Ann Arbor for the day to shop our wares at the KBF. Should be a good time. I’ll put the sales education I got from AmyJo to good use. If any of my peeps from East Mitten feel like stopping by ….
  • Submissions. I pulled a few more items from my vetted personal slush pile to submit to a pair of writing contests. I’ve got another submission due tomorrow, then a few more sprinkling through September. It’d be nice to win something, or to at least grow my publication list for fiction/poetry stuff. The current flash piece I’m shopping, Regret, is fairly strong thanks to the workshop I attended in July at the GLCL.
  • Birthday Lunch with Mom. Three weeks and a reschedule later, I finally took my mom out for lunch for her mid-August birthday. It was fun. But it’s funny that it took so long. We’re actually closer to my birthday than we were to hers. And I got to see Gunner, the happy-go-lucky but health-challenged German Shepherd.
  • WriteOn! Flash Critique. Last month, our illustrious writing-group leader, JCBAH, was gallivanting around Ireland and Scotland, so I offered the group an assignment: Prepare a flash piece of no more than 800 words for vetting by the group. As if by magic, eight of the nine participated (and the lone holdout has a really good excuse). The event went well. It’s good for the group to feel the pressure of critiques. We do really good on the pizza-and-socializing part, not always so good on the writing part.
  • National Novel Writing Month. Speaking of writing, I’m looking forward to the frenzy of NaNoWriMo again. I don’t have a fully fleshed idea yet, but some concepts are rollin’ round my noggin. I’m hosting, again, a kickoff Halloween event at Caffeinated Press: Show up after 6p on 10/31, bring a dish to pass, wear a costume if you want, and prep — with a word war to follow at 12:01 a.m. on 11/1. Should be a good time.
  • VLO on Schedule. Tony and I are back on track for weekly podcast releases. We went to every other week in July and August.
  • VIMFP.  I had discussed it briefly with Roux a while back, but it’s looking increasingly likely (odds now above 75 percent) that I’ll be attending the Vegas Internet Mafia Family Picnic in October in Las Vegas. Tony, however, cannot attend. Which means the VIMFPers get an upgrade. 🙂
  • Outside Stuff. Jen (and her husband) and I have rescheduled our diving trip to Gilboa, Ohio for later this fall. And I think I’m going to take a late-September weekend — because I have some free time — to do an overnight backpacking trek near Cadillac. Neither of these are set in stone, but if I can do both, this marks the first year I’ve hit the diving/hiking/kayaking trifecta in a single season. Which will be nice.
  • Ye Olde Catholic Church. Last week I had the chance to meet a new friend, Jane, who’s an author we’ve worked with at Caffeinated Press. She and I enjoyed several beers and nachos at The Cottage one night. She and I spent the bulk of our time talking religion. Reminds me of the value of having a church home, but also reminds me of how painful the state of homiletics remains within Mother Church. No matter where I go — St. Anthony, St. Andrew, St. Robert, St. Mary — I’m struck by how superficial things feel. Perhaps a self-directed renewal during Advent will help.
  • Virtual Desktop. I created an account at PaperSpace.io — the company offers cheap but robust virtual Windows desktops. I picked a Pro offering and created a surprisingly awesome experience out of it. When I need to run the full Adobe Creative Suite on my Surface 3, it’s no problem. As long as I have Wi-Fi, that is.

I’m looking forward to the next few months. September — besides being my birth month — marks a pivot from summer into autumn. So far, the month looks to be fairly sedate, now that I’m fundamentally caught up at Caffeinated Press and the outlook for the next year does not include massive boluses of work I have to handle. October sees the transition into a glorious #PureMichigan autumn, with prep for NaNoWriMo and (presumably) VIMFP on the docket, leading toward my family’s kickoff of the holiday season with Halloween. November is a busy writing month, culminating with Thanksgiving and another five-day weekend. Then December, with a NAHQ board event in Orlando (I know, rough) and then two weeks’ holiday at the end of the month.
I think my anticipating is growing because more and more things are firing on all cylinders. The norovirus-induced weight loss continues. I feel better. Less stress at the day job and at Caffeinated Press, one vexing writer notwithstanding. My writing is solidifying. My financial situation is stable and healthy. I plan to get my Christmas shopping done by the end of this month. Life with the feline overlords remains pleasant. The podcast is doing well. The governance transition within the NAHQ board is starting to gel.
A couple of things are missing — a tighter degree of spiritual centeredness, perhaps acquiring a Significant Other — but those are solvable problems, and they’re not immediately pressing.
The Starks remind us that Winter Is Coming. I say, bring it on.

Personal

View from the Butt-End of August

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A bit of trivia to kick off the post: I had attempted a server version upgrade several weeks ago but the process borked in the middle of an interactive shell session. Short version: I had to restore from a backup, but backups had been inoperative (who knew?) for a month, so today I re-posted all the stuff I had originally uploaded in July and August. The content was, theoretically, lost, except I subscribe to my own RSS feed, so Feedly kept a full-text version of everything. Cut-and-paste FTW. Although, I didn’t bother re-creating the original posts’ cover images. Anyway, I’ve been silent here a few weeks (in fact, the site was down thanks to hopelessly broken Apache and MySQL discrepancies) because I just didn’t have the time to fiddle with it. As of tonight, problem solved.

Some updates:

  • Birthday. In less than three weeks, I turn 40. I’m surprised by my own serenity at the prospect.
  • CafPress posts. I had, while the site here was under the weather, posted two things at Caffeinated Press — a primer on literary citizenship titled 8 Ways to Engage with the Local Liteary Community, and a brief screed about The Sarcastic Narrator.
  • Book sales. I trekked to Novi a few weeks ago to attend the Rust City Book Con. Disappointing. Literally no sales, because the convention had almost zero attendees. Today, however, AmyJo and I manned the booth at the Made in Michigan Pop-Up Market, a monthly event at Downtown Market. Had gangbusters sales, and learned a ton about product sales from AmyJo, who in the real world is, well, a sales executive. (Of course, if you want to support local literary excellence, you can buy our stuff online. I’ll even ship it to you.)
  • Submissions. Speaking of books, a ton of writing opportunities are open, and since I’ve been fiddling with poems and short stories lately — a bit of pre-bedtime relaxation with adult libations and fuzzy felines — I’ve actually got a somewhat well-curated slush pile to draw from. Fancy that.
  • Chicago. The NAHQ board meetings went well. The trip was surprisingly fast — I blew through Chicago on I-90 in record time, in both directions — and the agenda flowed smoothly. Plus, I got to see my old friend Tony, from Illinois, for a cocktail one evening.
  • Departures at PH. Our ongoing transitions have left my team in a bit of a mess. One person was promoted and transferred, while another resigned. Never a dull moment. But I am now in the market for a data analyst and welcome recommendations.
  • Life after Norovirus. Weeks after being ill, my appetite hasn’t recovered. Down 8 lbs., and counting.

I’m enjoying an extended vacation for Labor Day, so more later. ‘Til then, stay safe out there.

Personal

The Dog Days of August

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Life’s been a peach lately (he says, without substantial sarcasm).

In no particular order:

  • Joint Statistical Meetings. I attended #JSM2016 in Chicago last week. The event centered at McCormick Place, although my hotel was the (ever delightful) Palmer House Hilton. I attended a committee meeting — the executive strategy session of the Section on Quality and Productivity — and chaired a session on new approaches in classification methods for the Section on Statistical Learning and Data Mining. And I ran into my colleague Linda at Starbucks. I did a bit of walking the streets of the Loop, in the blocks around the hotel, one night. Such a great change of pace to see Chicago’s downtown versus, oh, downtown Grand Rapids.
  • Atlanta & Chicago. Speaking of Chicago, I’ll be back in a couple of weeks for the quarterly board of directors meetings for NAHQ. A few weeks ago, however, a subset of the board traveled to Atlanta for some project-coordination meetings. The Atlanta trip was really good — we uncovered a process block that was causing us some epistemic confusion about NAHQ’s new governance model. We’re currently working through a pair of books — Race to Relevance and Road to Relevance — and one of the authors, Mary Byers, is working with us as a consultant to help clarify strategic direction about our target market.
  • County Commission. I am now the official Republican candidate for the 17th district of the Kent County Commission. Congratulations to me for winning an uncontested primary. Interestingly, the Democratic incumbent, Candace Chivas, narrowly lost her primary to Robert S. Womack. Chivas and Womack have gone head-to-head before; this is his first win. Chivas was a solid commissioner — speaking to current GOP commissioners, I understand that she was considered a particularly engaged and thoughtful colleague by her peers across the aisle. I was recruited to run on the Republican side so that we have an appropriate ballot presence; the 17th is the most heavily Democratic district in the county. I earned roughly 350 primary votes as the sole candidate whereas Chivas and Womack split nearly 1,700 votes, if that’s any indication. I do not, to put it delicately, expect to win, but I am pleased to play a small role in the body politic and look forward to the election season to come.
  • Norovirus. A week ago Friday I experienced an unplanned sick day. I thought I had food poisoning, but Maria the Nurse tells me I had norovirus instead. I was ill from roughly 4 a.m. until 10 p.m. on Friday. It was awful. I think my entire intestinal tract was power-washed in the process. But what fascinates me is that my appetite really hasn’t recovered. I’m down several pounds and I’m not especially hungry. I’m capitalizing on that sickness to re-calibrate some diet choices.
  • New Neighbors. The house in which I dwell — a circa 1892 Victorian mansion — was subdivided during the Great Depression into three apartments. I occupy No. 1, which is the entire main floor. The second floor is divided into two fully furnished efficiencies. The third-floor-slash-attic was never finished, so it sits vacant except for dust. Anyway, the previous occupants of Nos. 2 and 3 had moved out by last Halloween. However, No. 2 was rented out in May and No. 3 in June. So the house is full again. My new housemates seem like nice fellas, and there have been no challenges of noise or bad behavior. Not that, historically, there had been before. But it’s nice to have respectful neighbors.
  • Muscle Daddy. Having recently enjoyed the unexpected opportunity to reconnect with a former coworker, I realized — based on thinking launched by some of his more ribald comments — that I’ve been looking at the aging process in a completely ass-backwards way. So let’s stipulate that I’m physically attracted to people with a young/fit/athletic appearance. As a rule, that demographic doesn’t tend to gravitate toward early-middle-aged, soft-bodied men. “Alas, woe is me,” one might think, “for I cannot go back in time to recover the glow of my early 20s.” However, as my friend reminded me, people do dig the muscle-daddy type — older, built, dominant. I can’t turn back the clock, but I can pump the iron, so to speak. The irony (haha) is that I’ve recently read a fair amount about the value of weight training as a contributor to long-term calorie burn, so my mind was moving in that direction anyway. Add some strength training to my cardio, and dive more deeply into macronutrient best practices … hmm. Perhaps aging will have its sundry charms, after all.
  • Authorial Bullies. The only real drama of late has been on the Caffeinated Press front, wherein we’ve had to get a bit more aggressive recently in dealing with the bullying behavior of a creative type gone full-bore “tyranny of the entitled.” It’s unfortunate, really. Sucks the time out of my schedule, having to deal with it, and reinforces my personal sense that many authors do not grasp their economic role in the literary revenue cycle.
  • CafPress Contracting. Speaking of Caffeinated Press, we’ve got a lot of fun projects now on the docket that have recently passed through the contracting process. We’ve got an informal working list of stuff, with their relative sequence, that runs through the next 12 months. Wow.
  • Novella. A while back I mentioned that I wrote a novella, released to Amazon, in a subgenre of erotica. (Written, of course, under pseudonym.) That little book is actually doing quite well — just this month I earned a deposit of almost $60 from Amazon for the first partial-month’s royalties.
  • Other Personal Writing. The nice thing about curating the Caffeinated Press Community site is that not only do I get to give myself a fancy title (I went with “supreme chancellor”), but I also have a first-hand window into various writing opportunities. In my downtime, often an hour or so before Murphy d’Cat yells at me to go to bed, I sit at the computer and work on various creative-writing projects. Lately, it’s been the novella series plus an occasional poem or flash piece or long-form essay. Good for the soul. I went to the July flash-fiction roundtable led by Phillip Sterling, offered through the Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters. My 750-word flash piece, Regret, was considerably enhanced through the critiquing session.
  • VLO Summer Plans. Tony and I went to an every-other-week release schedule for July and August. A bit of a summer vacation of sorts, but with a twist — we’ve got (oh, god) and idea. Won’t spill the beans just yet, but he and I are getting together in a few weeks to see if we can do what we’ve been talking about doing, privately, for a while now.
  • Day Job Transitions. The strategic re-alignments at Priority Health arising from a new CEO, transition to a different SVP and a new VP, continue to unfold. It’s an interesting time, but there’s a virtue, I think, in being serene amidst the storm. “This too shall pass,” I keep telling people. If you do well and you’re focused on the mission rather than a portfolio of work, you’ll usually come out fine during corporate restructuring.
  • Correspondence. I’m back to being pretty much caught up with emails. Sometimes I get behind — and sometimes, three to five weeks behind. All a function of volume and scheduling, I’m afraid. This weekend, I achieved Inbox Zero on nine of my ten different inboxes. #W00t

All for now. Write on, and prosper.

(Oh, and if you’re wondering about the cover photo — Fiona d’Cat enjoys hiding in her collapsible fabric cube. On occasion, when I don’t realize she’s there, I’ll walk by it and then feel her swiping at my ankles. It’s funny, really, and a good metaphor for some of this summer’s distractions.)

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