Fresh Price of Bel Air

Good news! Newfangled Death—my little collection of stories—is near complete (for real this time) and should be available for everyone to purchase or ignore (or both!) in the coming weeks. New development: print editions will be available as well, for a few more bucks! They will be kind of skinny books, but they will love you all the same.

But, bad news, I've run into a minor dilemma, and I was hoping for some input from you guys.

I was planning on a $1 price point for the eBook version. That doesn't have to change, but here's why it became an issue:

- Amazon discourages any price below $2.99 by plummeting the royalty rates down.
- Apparently there are a lot of negative associations with $1 works (flooded "bargain bin" sentiment)
- For the amount of work and time involved, I need to price future releases of this length at at least $2.99 for any hope of ever supporting myself. Will people be upset to pay more for the same length of work?

And to be totally up front, the length of this work is approximately 55-65 pages the size of an average book.

I was considering the following:

- Stick to $1 this time.
- Make it free for the first day! Then price it $2.99.
- Make it $1 for a week or month, then bump it up to $2.99.
- Give it all up and become a blind jazz musician.

Any of those would be fine with me. What do you think?

Cookies

Sometimes it seems like there's a recipe to everything. As if no matter what you're doing, it's just a matter of throwing in the same ingredients, doing the same grunt work, and you'll get your cookies. Yeah it's rarely that simple at first, but once you get something right—or at least sort of right—it's so easy to get locked into the behaviour that achieved it.


Positive reinforcement can lead to genuine self-improvement for sure, but there's always the annoying danger of complacency on the side. Especially if it becomes something you start to crave or need.

Humanity was brilliant to invent money. Look how much good and bad it does, and all for a cookie we can't even eat.

...You can buy some though.

Getting there

Sometimes I wish I could crumple up my monitor like paper and throw it in a wastebasket. Yes! This is an update about the short fiction collection, which has proved to be much more time consuming than I thought it would be, especially for a project of relatively short length.

Thing is, I'm learning how to write better prose as I go, and I keep having to rework the broken little babies that seemed perfectly healthy the other day. I've also had to toss some out, bring in some new ones, and just flail madly at my keyboard in general.

I won't pretend to know when it'll be done anymore, but I hope it's soon. As fun/agonizing as this has been, I'm dying to move on. Next project will be a volume of poetry—a medium I'm much more comfortable with!

Let's
let's
let's
let's
let's
let's
let's
let's
be
okay.

Okay?

Skullhole

In a way, it still seems like there's a big hole in my head. Other than my mouth.

When my brain became a time bomb towards the end of last year and proceeded to go kablammo, I was waiting for a long time afterwards to get back to normal.

Now I'm wondering if "normal" helped wire the thing up in the first place.

Don't know if to let it grow back.

Is it wrong to be a broken person, and happier for it?

Excuse me, my baby come out wrong

But he's still my Johnny

This Gen

A perennial complaint among people who aren't exactly young anymore (including me) is the good ol' "Music today sucks!" This is fun to say, but really not fair. Think of it this way: what if the generations of music were like the cast of a movie? You have your leading men and women, impressive ensembles, maybe the eye candy on the side and the comic relief—all the usual roles to fill.

Well, then the past has been filmed and released already. All the awards have been handed out, and everyone is relatively immortalized for their impact: artistically, culturally, or both. You can argue whether they deserve it or not, but you can't argue the fact that they've survived time so far, and that doesn't happen without reason. They did something big. All the people who didn't? They faded away, and you're left with those who really stood out. (Yes there are always great people who get overlooked, but that doesn't mean those who do get cemented in the spotlight weren't deserving.)

So that makes the present day an immensely crowded, years-long audition for who gets to survive and be heard beyond the next five minutes. Of course it's going to look like a lot of shit with all the masses trying out almost American Idol style. The ratio of bad to good may be worse now with the accessibility of technology and proliferation of mass media, but still! Get over your favourite generation! You should absolutely highlight and remember what was awesome, but you can't pretend it all was or even most of it was. It wasn't.

I'm not saying everyone is going to have a cultural phenomenon like The Beatles, or whoever holds that throne in your heart, but the lack of a worldwide darling doesn't imply a lack of good music. The public eye is fickle, so especially in the present, especially if you're older and have heard a lot already, you need to look more for yourself. There will always be new, incredible people making new, incredible music. Find them, and give them a chance!

Easter Legs

Grab bag blog! (Grab blag?)

First: Happy Easter! Just like Jesus, I had a dream the other day that my cousin was dating Rosie O'Donnell. She rode a tricycle. I'm pretty sure it was actually a glimpse into an alternate dimension and/or heaven.

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From "You Are Not So Smart" by David McRaney:

"Bargh conducted a study in which Caucasian participants sat down at a computer to fill out boring questionnaires. Just before each section began, photos of either African-American or Caucasian men flashed on the screen for 13 milliseconds, faster than the participants could consciously process. 

Once they completed the task, the computer flashed an error message on the screen telling the participants they had to start over from the beginning. Those exposed to the images of the African-Americans became hostile and frustrated more easily and more quickly than subjects who saw Caucasian faces.

Even though they didn't believe themselves to be racist or harbor negative stereotypes, the ideas were still in their neural networks and unconsciously primed them to behave differently than usual."

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Still plugging away at the stories I'm writing, but they're coming along. The trouble is, I'm getting reacquainted with writing prose as I go along and keep spotting new problems that I would've missed before. This is good, but is also slowing things down. Still want to get them out this month.

And I think I need to start that obligatory dance with social media if I want to take this seriously, so expect at least a Twitter feed and Facebook page to haunt as you please.

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Jaw-and-entire-face-dropping performance of "The Bad In Each Other" by Feist at the 2012 Junos. Awesome big finish!

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Question: Do you have any tried and true methods for thwarting the procrastination monster? A simple but effective one for me has been flicking the wi-fi switch off on my laptop. At the very least it makes me think twice about what I'm going to be using the net for.