Two Freebies! Laugh a Lot!

Ted Krever: Writing and other forms of torture Posted on by

It’s Comedy Weekend at Ted’s Book Bazaar! (or wherever the hell this is…)

Tomorrow and Sunday, ‘A Crafty and Devious God’ is FREE on Amazon! A look at divorce, sex, exhibitionism, sex, the early days of the Web and the early days of everyone becoming (or trying to become) a celebrity.

And sex.

 

Sunday and Monday, it’s ‘Howling At Wolves’! FREE on Amazon! (just being explicit for the hard-of-understanding)

 

A lighthearted look at stalking, men reclaiming their tribal roots, sex, sex in cheap hotel rooms, sex with sisters (do you sense a common thread here?), moose having heart attacks, how the Greeks founded Canada (?) and how to almost get arrested for trying to blow up the Canadian Prime Minister with a Super-8 projector. And MORE!

 

Two hilarious (and somewhat dirty) books for free – oh, sorry – FREE!!! With extra exclamation points! Tell your friends!

Okay, phew, I’m done now. Go back to whatever you were doing…

Beyond Dreams

Ted Krever: Writing and other forms of torture Posted on by

One of the key moments in the life of a writer (painter, actor, athlete or President, if you like) is when they reach the limits of their dreams.

In our dreams, we are everything we’d like to be, no limitations, everything works out just the way we’d like.

Of course, I’m talking about waking dreams, not those weirdo convoluted things that happen when I’m asleep and make no sense at all after  – not talkin’ ’bout them, okay?

If you’re like me, very little of your daydream life involves actual work. Most of my daydreams concern the perks, the money, the prestige,  the reverence in which I expect to be held (which you could all start on now and get ahead of the curve). My daydreams completely bypass the compromises, frustrations and tedium of getting there. It’s like ignoring the highway and focusing only on the scenic overlooks.

Most writers start out wanting to be somebody else anyway.  Dostoyevsky, Mark Twain or Virginia Woolf, John Grisham, Dave Barry or Jacqueline Susann, take your pick. It’s a way to sketch the outlines of what you want to do at a time when your own creativity is still very nebulous and you have no signposts.

But that’s the tricky part of the transaction. Those signposts are crucial for getting started but at some point down the line, you reach a Crossroads where that predetermined destination starts sapping your energy, dimming your intuition and enthusiasm. Because a story is a journey, not a destination.

Paintings by Edward Hopper

 

This is where a lot of writers give up or stop growing, because becoming yourself means letting go of the signposts. It means switching directions and modes of transportation without warning. It means finding yourself off-road with no assurance you’ll ever get back and nothing but a horizon in front of you. And knowing that empty horizon is the only way to get wherever the hell it is you’re going.

 

The task of the artisan or artist, whatever term you prefer, is to develop your own instinct, your own intuition and inner compass and follow wherever it leads. Which means giving up on who you wanted to be – in order to allow yourself to become who you are.

 

Don McLean and the next ‘Mindbenders’ (huh?)

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I haven’t been around much lately (Bad Ted! Bad!) because I’ve been writing a lot (Good man, Ted!).

Don McLean

But I read something this morning that really struck me. I’ve never been a Don McLean fan, despite my friend Barry’s repeated attempts to get me to see the light (You don’t know Don McLean? American Pie? If you don’t, just forget the whole thing – it’ll never make sense now).

Bob Lefsetz (who writes a great blog about music and creativity in a fast-evolving universe) cited an interview with McLean today which included these paragraphs:

1 When you look back over four decades in the music business, what do you consider to be your greatest accomplishment?

The main thing I would like to say is that I have become the person I wanted to be. As opposed to reaching goals but being an alcoholic, or reaching goals but having four failed marriages, or reaching goals but having kids in rehab. A lot of people reach their goals, but at a terrific price.

2 Is it safe to say, then, that you never cared about fame?

I had a recording contract with Clive Davis for about a year. He kept sending me wimpy little songs to sing and I didn’t want to do them. So we ended our association. I guarantee you if I had decided to sing those songs, with the production values they would have used, I would have had hit records. But I didn’t want those kinds of hit records. I don’t want songs that don’t mean anything. You wind up regretting it in the end anyway. Because if you get a hit that you don’t like, you’ve still got to sing it.

____

Emphasis above is mine. I think it’s a great line. Writers thankfully aren’t forced to write the same story over and over, though many of them write essentially the same story over and over by choice. But add this to my file on why I don’t and can’t churn out six books a year.

You live forever with what you do creatively. Your books (songs, poems, paintings, movies, what have you) are your children (along with, if any, your  real children).  So they’d better be good company over a length of time.

I’ve been working on ‘Mindbenders: The Big Dream’ for many months now. If I have a problem getting finished, it’s that my characters and the situation keep growing and getting more complex as I dive deeper in. So everything’s taking longer than I wanted but Max and friends (and enemies) are turning out to be extremely good company.

I don’t know if the book will be a hit but – and I wasn’t sure of this three months ago – I’m confident it’ll be something I can live with for a long time to come.

 ____

And a little plug, for a book I’ve already lived with awhile: my book of post-9/11 short stories, ‘After’ can be purchased in paperback here.

More Beer!!

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It’s time to renew the ‘Buy A Paperback-I Buy You a Beer’ Promotion! Since I’m busy writing the second Mindbenders (and you haven’t read the FIRST one yet!), I’m just going to run it again!

beer

The Internet is supposed to break down the walls between writers and readers and that all sounds good but I’m tired of metaphors. Let’s talk REAL interaction!

You buy a paperback – I buy you a beer!

I’m not promising some expensive micro-brew – I’d like to still make something on this deal. But yes, you could be a pioneer in new frontiers of Internet marketing! (When you say stuff like that, you have to have an exclamation point at the end – the union insists.)

our legal department

Here is all the fine print (and I printed it big for you this time, since you’re not as young as you used to be):

You (hereafter referred to as ‘You’) buy a lovely trade paperback version of ‘Green’ or ‘Mindbenders’, my two best books (Moneyback guarantee, as per our legal department: If you’re not entirely satisfied after thirty days, I don’t know what you can do about it) on Amazon Createspace.

Buy the ‘Green’ paperback here.

Buy the Mindbenders paperback here.

Then you (‘You’) email me (hereafter referred to as ‘Me’ or ‘I’, depending on the technicalities: see Marshall vs. Westmoreland, 1857, ipso facto, et al) at tedkrever@gmail.com (Address line: Free Beer Offer) and tell me the next time you’ll be in New York. If I can work out the timing (as long as I’m not working), I’ll meet you someplace  and we (hereafter referred to as ‘We’, within limits) will have a beer. You get to ask me one question while I’m sober (That doesn’t mean I promise to answer). Of course, after I’ve had a few, you can ask as many questions as you like.

For those of you who read my books and thought ‘Wow, what an imagination – I wonder what this guy is like’, here’s your chance to find out. For those of you who (wisely) thought, ‘What a lunatic!’, buy the ebook. It’s cheaper less expensive but no beer.

more beer

This offer good until I decide not to offer it any more. All disputes to be arbitrated by the firm of Hungadunga, Hungadunga, Hungadunga and McCormack. (Wait-you left out a Hungadunga! And you left out the most important one! If you know where that comes from, you probably qualify for another beer)

All patents pending, no animals were harmed in the making of this offer, side effects may include drowsiness (almost guaranteed), nausea (not the Sartre kind), lack of libido and an unexplained craving for S’mores.

Sorry, it’s just the kind of day I’m having…but I really mean it. Buy the book, I buy the beer.

You’re on your own from here…

 

‘Mindbenders’ Gets Another Five-Star Review!

Ted Krever: Writing and other forms of torture Posted on by
Now This Is How To Right A Book, August 26, 2012
By S. leigh Johnson (Pine Level, AL)

I don’t write many reviews, but this book was so good I wanted to share with future readers.

It moves very fast and is a great read. Also it is proofed. There are very few, if any, typos! You can tell the author took pride in his work, and we the readers benefitted from his hard work.

Mr. Krever wrote a fun and exciting book the way it should be done, and I can’t wait for the sequel!

Thank you for showing that Indie does not mean sloppy. Good luck and again thank you.

:>

~~~~

There’s been a lot of talk about reviews flying around lately – I have to say, I love this one.

There are a couple of typo’s (or at least spelling errors) while the reviewer’s congratulating me on not having typo’s but that’s entirely sensible – I’m the one selling my writing! In the meantime, you can see that the reviewer (can’t tell male or female so I’m avoiding pronouns, can you tell?) is excited and enthused and wants others to know it.

I have nothing against professional reviewers or anything that creates employment these days, but in all reality, is there anything more we really need to know from a review?

‘I had a great time – read it!’

‘And…no typos!’

 

Self Esteem at $5 Bucks a Pop…

Ted Krever: Writing and other forms of torture Posted on by

MJ Rose, who’s an author and expert of long standing on publishing, self-publishing and publicity, sent out a link today to a ‘service’ I won’t dignify by naming. Here’s a screen capture from their webpage:

 

Obviously, this is fraud. Worse, it cuts at the heart of this new indie-published world some of us are trying to help create.

One of the big reasons indie books are so often seen as the ‘also-rans’ and ‘not-good-enough-to-be-really-published’ segment of the book world is the lack of a gatekeeper system that readers trust. People aren’t sure yet how to separate the wheat from the chaff. Traditional book reviews don’t apply and the new system – reader reviews – is still an unknown quantity.

My experience with reader reviews has been mostly positive. They’re like recommendations from a friend – not always intellectual critiques like traditional reviews but honest visceral reactions. They’re direct and sincere and that’s all to the good, as far as I’m concerned.

But they’re still an unknown and as long as numbers of readers have questions about them, they’ll hesitate to take the plunge into this huge world of new authors and ideas. It won’t matter that publishers spend the overwhelming portion of their resources on long-established writers and celebrities, so that that new serious writers are actually better off publishing themselves these days; reader suspicion will linger. We really need a ‘rottentomatoes.com’ for books but, until that happens, we have Amazon’s system and this  circumvention of it is a real problem for both authors and readers.

‘Mindbenders’ has attracted 34 reviews so far.  Two were written by old friends, one by Smitty before we got serious; the rest of the reviewers were strangers to me when they posted. I’ve given away copies of the book in exchange for an honest review but I’ve never paid (nor would I) for one.

I don’t really have a problem with the people writing these reviews – they’re trying to make a living  with a very limited skillset, if you go by their ads. But I am distressed by the writers who pay them.

I have no greater dream than to make a living from my writing. We all want  commercial success. But this kind of gamesplay is just another example of the materialism that’s consumed this country, the kind of thinking that says ‘You’re only as good as your sales” and “If you can get away with it, it’s just fine.”

I want my books to sell but I want them to sell because people care about them, get excited about them, tell their friends about them. I want to know that, whatever success I have, I’ve earned.

A book  is a reflection of the writer’s soul. I’ve always said I didn’t need any outside force to dictate morality to me, as long as I had a mirror to face in the morning.

 

Apple-Samsung for Non-Geeks

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For those of you not fascinated by geeky court battles, Samsung was found guilty yesterday of violating several Apple patents governing the look and feel and behavior of their mobile phones and ordered to pay $1 billion in damages.

Now, Samsung is Apple’s biggest supplier of microprocessors and nobody expects that relationship to change – after all, what’s a billion among friends?

And, of course, there will be appeals and legal wrangling; the amount of the verdict might go down or even up under judicial review. This is courts and lawyers, so the more time it takes, the more everybody gets paid – and the people who make the rules for lawyers are lawyers, so guess whose interests get served first?

But I digress.

The verdict will likely have several effects fairly soon, assuming it stands. There will surely be more lawsuits against other companies using the Android operating system, because Google’s Android is the actual offending party here – and the real target of the suit.

Samsung basically argued that the icons and control actions they’d copped from Apple (they didn’t bother pretending they weren’t the same) were inevitable, that pinching and widening your fingers to zoom out, for example, was nothing unique – surely people make that movement all the time.

And surely there is a real advantage for consumers in having the ‘controls’ of mobile phones act the same across all brands – when you get in a car of any make, for example, you know what the steering wheel, brake and accelerator are for. It would be a mess if you had to relearn how to drive each make separately.

But the truth is, these are not automatic motions – at least they weren’t before the iPhone came along. There are a hundred different finger movements that could be used to signal a zoom.  Apple’s genius is in figuring out means to make complex tasks feel natural – and even fun. So the verdict is a victory for the innovators, the guys who sweated the details, who decided that most people would feel comfortable using this particular move for this particular function. 

So now – and, to me, this is the only really interesting part of all this – maybe we’ll see some real alternatives. Microsoft, of all people, has recently come up with a mobile operating system that doesn’t crib from Apple. Now Google will have to do the same.

So maybe we’ll get to experience some other moves that work almost as well, as well or even better than Apple’s. Maybe we’ll find out that Apple doesn’t own the only geniuses in user experience. Because now, makers of these devices will have to do their own homework and see if they can’t actually improve on the status quo instead of just copying it.

On the rare occasion that I watch the business channels or the rarer occasion that I watch anything (other than the Simpsons) on Fox, the ‘experts’ are always saying that capitalism is wonderful because it encourages innovation and ruthless competition among creative alternatives. And I look around and see instead a landscape of monopolies, semi-monopolies or wannabe monopolies protecting their turf by whatever means they can get away with, doing far more intimidating than innovating.

Maybe now we’ll get the chance to see if those business channels are right.

 

Family, of several sorts

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Smitty and I went on vacation. On ‘vacation’, that is, in quotes.

We don’t know how to go lie on a beach. It’s possible we just don’t know how to relax, period, but nothing in this trip promised relaxation.

We flew to San Francisco (airplane cloud photos here, for those of you into cloud photos or who just like following stray links). I was on my way to meet for the first time two cousins from my biological family. I’m adopted and never met my biological parents – for more on that bizarro story, read here, below the synopsis and excerpt link.

As if that wasn’t enough, Smitty was going to reunite with a group of people she grew up with. This was not a high school reunion. It was another kind of family and one that, going in, I wasn’t entirely comfortable with.

But the first day, we decided to be tourists (her brilliant blog on the subject here)! With Smitty’s best friend of thirty years (and mine of almost a year), we ate way too much food at the Ferry Terminal, rode a 1940’s-era streetcar, ate yet more food at Pier 39 (the kitschy version of the Ferry Terminal) and then went for a cable car ride, a mechanical-age marvel roller coaster clattering through the middle of America’s most beautiful city. And I saw something there I’d never seen before – Smitty as a 10-year-old girl, that look of utter, innocent fearless delight on her face from Hyde and Bay all the way over the hill to the Embarcadero.

All photos by CO Moed

The two dinners with my cousins, who remember my biological mother as Aunt Betty, revealed a sharp, witty and cutting woman, always maintaining a bit of shell and a bit of distance. One of my cousins wrote a radio play for college and sent it to Aunt Betty (who started selling her radio plays at age 16!) – Aunt Betty promptly cut it to ribbons.

I see myself in all of this. I’ve worked on my total lack of diplomacy my whole life – I’m still distinctly a work-in-progress on that score. I can surely be cutting and witty, not always at the right time. And though I’ve always wanted desperately to be loved, to find a place I fit in, there’s always been a part of me that distrusts that impulse and fears wanting something that much.

In a way, the most powerful result of the dinners was also the most subtle, the one that took awhile to surface: feeling normal. I grew up an artist in a family that didn’t encourage that calling. They loved me and put me through (a very expensive) college for writing but were always dismissive and discouraging of my ambitions, out of protectiveness and fear for me. And you’ve got to be at least selectively fearless to be an artist.

So now, I had two new cousins a few years younger than me; smart, funny, blunt and plainly artistic: one a rock musician/massage therapist, the other an advertising creative and book writer. Smitty said to me after dinner, “You fought all those years just to become who you really are”  and the proof of that was sitting across the dinner table from me.

As to the Santa Cruz reunion, that’s not really my story to tell, except for one bit, the one that matters most to me: One of my major reasons for taking this trip (money’s very tight these days) was a protectiveness for Smitty that she’d probably smack me for. I knew she needed to see these people again but the experience they’d had together wasn’t all roses and starlight, to say the least, and I was concerned about the effect reviving these memories might have.

The weekend was every bit as intense and jarring and powerful as I’d anticipated. But Smitty’s old friends were really fine, smart, loving people, people I really related to, who’d shared a very complex and very powerful bond (does anything powerful ever come from simple?).

I hung around Smitty (I probably hovered a bit more than I should have), did a lot of dishes and participated whenever I felt I had something to add. But, as we were saying goodbye, I was shocked when one of the women pulled me into a hug and said ‘You’re one of us now.’ I teared up – something inside me let go. I really did feel like one of them, one of the lost children who’d found his own way in the world. I’d found a place, finally, where I fit in.

Family isn’t blood or even history, though those things surely matter. Family are the people who make your heart open up whenever they’re around and you find them where you find them.

Ted’s Everywhere (or at least a couple of places)

Ted Krever: Writing and other forms of torture Posted on by

‘Mindbenders’ got a mention on the Front Row Monthly site (link here) and

My recollections of Woodstock (family-friendly ones) appear here at Hooplaha.com – however, they chose not to use my photos. The editors there probably doubt the thrill of black-and-white but I think they go with the story so in the spirit of hippie anarchism, I’m going to post a few:

Arriving

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rain and more rain

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Crosby, Stills and Nash

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s interesting that these somewhat murky monochrome pictures were taken with a heavy (by today’s standards) Kodak Instamatic that I lugged around with me all weekend and that then required my waiting until the film was developed and pictures printed, while the lovely and definitely sharper color cloud photos in my last post were taken by my (now-obsolete) cellphone. Which also tells me where I am, wakes me up if I ask it to, gets me email, sports scores and the headlines.

My grandmother was born about the time of the Wright Brothers flight and died after the moon landing. I always thought that was pretty remarkable technological change for one lifetime but our era is turning out to be pretty impressive as well, albeit (happily) a lot less dramatic than what she went through.

Anyway, photos here, memories on Hooplaha – enjoy!