Sharing is Caring

I know how beautiful and courageous it is to dip the pen in the inkwell early on, then to stay motivated, finding other voices to keep you inspired. Never give up. Always dare to dream... In the electronic age, all can be heard. The depth of your audience is up to you.

Monday, January 31, 2011

Sunday, January 30, 2011

"There's a new girl at school. She's coming over to visit. Please don't make a mess of things by mentioning Paul Bunyan is my great, great uncle."
"Why are you so ashamed of your heritage?" her father Bob asked.
"This is the 21st century, dad," Alissa said. "Your fairy tales are killing my social life."
"Just last week you said acne was killing your social life."
"That too."
"I'll try to behave," her father said. There was disappointment in his voice.
http://ping.fm/P6sql

Friday, January 28, 2011

I just reread Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth - Awakening to Your Life's Purpose. A nice reinforcement when I feel mired in the muck I often create by letting people step over my unattended boundaries. Nice guys really do finish last if they allow the universe too much of their time, energy and creativity.
http://ping.fm/1TMR3

Awakening to your life's purpose


I just reread Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth - Awakening to Your Life's Purpose. A nice reinforcement when I feel mired in the muck I often create by letting people step over my unattended boundaries. Nice guys really do finish last if they allow the universe too much of their time, energy and creativity.
http://www.eckharttolle.com/home/about/

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Lean Sentences With Power

Amber Beulah stood at the guardrail of the footbridge, studying the streambed below for signs of life.
She was barely seventeen, but the weight of the secret baby ball inside her skinny kid belly made her feel thirty. What have I done? Two minutes of a strange new terror and pleasure while I leaned against a dead tree. What have I done? I’m a mistake. Worthless.
She pressed her arms against the pair of library books that were now a month overdue. She adjusted her flimsy black waistcoat, pulling it down. It was a good buy. Two bucks at the secondhand store, according to the price tag. What made it even better was that she stole it. Just slipped it on and walked out the door. Amber didn’t like stealing, but there was no job, no allowance. You didn’t get an allowance at the group home for wayward girls.

Lean Sentences With Power

Amber Beulah stood at the guardrail of the footbridge, studying the streambed below for signs of life. http://www.barryhickey.com/
She was barely seventeen, but the weight of the secret baby ball inside her skinny kid belly made her feel thirty. What have I done? Two minutes of a strange new terror and pleasure while I leaned against a dead tree. What have I done? I’m a mistake. Worthless.
She pressed her arms against the pair of library books that were now a month overdue. She adjusted her flimsy black waistcoat, pulling it down. It was a good buy. Two bucks at the secondhand store, according to the price tag. What made it even better was that she stole it. Just slipped it on and walked out the door. Amber didn’t like stealing, but there was no job, no allowance. You didn’t get an allowance at the group home for wayward girls.

Monday, January 24, 2011

Friday, January 21, 2011

Science has not made me happy yet

Why does the magnificent applied science which saves work and makes life easier bring us so little happiness? The simple answer runs: because we have not yet learned to make sensible use of it - Albert Einstein.
And here I am at my computer, reminded that War and Peace,  Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick were written by hand and typewriter... There is something said for the slower method, connected perhaps most implicitly to the thought process from head to hand... Not a mad dash to fill up the page with extemporaneous and unnecessary words. Anyone use a typewriter anymore?

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Writing on napkins... I'm looking for participants!
http://ping.fm/kFyi0

Writing novels on napkins

Yeah, I know. Crazy title, but I can't tell you how many ideas, changes, insights I get as I'm constructing my story and I'm away from the keyboard. At least once a day an idea strikes and I'm off! I write on a Starbucks napkin, the back of a grocery receipt, the edge of a newspaper ad, whatever is immediately available and able to soak up the ink of a particular pen I may be carrying. (I have backed away from cardboard... Just doesn't feel good in my shirt pocket... Never a Sharpie! Screws up my clothes when I forget the napkin and wash it. Anyone else out there doing the same?http://www.barryhickey.com/

Sunday, January 16, 2011

THE GREEN DOT

The sea was unnaturally calm and not a cloud on the western horizon. Golden time. In a few minutes the sun would dip into the ocean with a wink of a goodbye followed by a final green flash.
Katie Jones stood alone, her bare feet dug in the sand at Crown Point, a strand of beach at the end of Jewell Street. Crown Point was just one of many approaches to Mission Bay Park, a massive recreation area with twenty seven miles of Pacific shoreline and nineteen sandy beaches in San Diego. Day’s end was near, but jet skis, open-water kayakers, skiers and an armada of windsurfers darted around the bay like pesky flies on water.
There were birds here, too. Migrants and residents. Over at the eastern mud flats, ruddy turnstone, willet, and black-bellied plovers nested. A goofball with a tuft of blue punker hair seemed to have one of its luckless feet stuck too deep in goop to pull itself out.
I know the feeling. Katie shook her shoulder-cropped blonde mane. Love isn't dead; it's just hibernating.

Saturday, January 15, 2011

Hooking the reader in your novel
Opening pages of Chasing God's River
BANKING IT

Wade Jones stood in the shower and yawned. He had originally planned his day for the garage, stripping the antique nightstand that he and his wife Katie had found at the yard sale in Hillerman Heights the previous weekend.

Instead, what he got was an eight-thirty phone call from Doctor Lieverman’s assistant. The doctor wanted to check his remaining testicle again, grab another blood and urine test for tumor markers, get a serum testosterone level and maybe try to bank some sperm.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


"Just a simple lube job," the doctor’s assistant quipped over the phone.

His female doctor was a godsend, an excellent physician with good information. Because of her, he might become a father some day and for that, he was grateful. The cancer could have spread to his abdominal lymph nodes, lungs, bones, liver, maybe even his brain.

Katie was the one who noticed the signs – he was losing weight, eating less and complaining of lower back pain. The back pain he attributed to old sports injuries. But one night, while attempting to make love, Wade complained of pain in his scrotum and when Katie playfully ran her fingers over his nipples he pulled her hand away.

"That hurts," he had apologized.

The next day, his wife ordered him to get a physical. After that, his personal physician sent him to Doctor Lieverman and the race against cancer was on.

He rinsed off the hair conditioner and watched the froth puddle at his feet.

Wade had done a lot of work around the house, even before the cancer was found. Finding a job was the last thing he wanted to pursue. He had a college degree. He was six-feet tall and smart, good-looking for thirty-five. He was also a kayaking hero to a handful of somebodies somewhere. The cancer was just an inconvenience. Wade knew what he had to do to get back in the real world soon. The only nibble at an opportunity was a commission job shaving down fiberglass surfboards and kayaks at a local beach shop, but the owner was taking a "wait and see" approach because of the cancer, promising Wade a space when a clean bill of health was provided.

Wade ran his fingers along his deadened pink scar. He had a bikini line now, a four-inch incision running across the lower abdomen on his left side from the orchiectomy – a surgery to remove one of his beloved testicles using an inguinal incision. They put him under general anesthesia during the surgery. The incision sounded like a simple long snip. After she made the cut, the good doctor pushed the left testicle up through the pelvis and out it came with a ‘pop’. A snip, snip, and tie followed. The whole surgery took forty-five minutes.

Wade was home the same day before the pain medication wore off. That was almost three months ago.

He grabbed a towel and stepped out of the shower stall, thinking of the summer kayaking circuit again. He had made a few secret phone calls in the past few days to old friends, but he was just poking around, making inquiries.

Who am I kidding anyway?

In the past months, he'd been through the chemotherapy regimens used to kill the cancer and so far it seemed to work. Wade had lost twenty pounds since they found the cancer. Twenty pounds of practiced muscle and sinew. Now the chemo was over and everyone was watching the healing clock. His hair was coming back fine. On his last visit, according to Doctor Lieverman, it seemed the chemo had worked and killed all the germ cells and so it stood to reason that he wasn't going to have a whole lot of sperm anytime soon. At least, no sperm with fish swimming upstream. The good doctor said that for fifty percent of men the sperm counts returned to normal in two to three years and for a select few even sooner.

"Depends on the quality of the sperm," she said. "Like karats in a diamond."

The doctor gave Wade a five-minute pep talk about sperm being genetic and since he had five siblings, it was all looking good.

"Good genes," she reassured him.

He banked some sperm before the surgery and the chemo treatments began. A whole vault full. Enough to repopulate an entire city, it seemed. He wondered aloud where they kept all that banked sperm. "Is it a savings account or a checking account? Does it gain interest or lose interest? Do they keep it in a hospital or a mini-storage unit? What happens if the power goes out and the refrigeration is kaput?"

A physician’s assistant had examined a sperm sample under a microscope. "You have good sperm. High quality," she reassured him with a smile.

The tumor attached to his lost testicle turned out to be malignant so the sperm bank turned out to be a great idea after all. Doctor Lieverman explained why the surgery was an absolute necessity. Doing a biopsy in that area of a man's body might cause the cancer to cross-contaminate and spread and then he might lose his other "ball."

He didn't know why men called their testes balls. He thought eggs or walnuts a better name.

Katie sat through the ultrasound as moral support, talking with the doctor about scrotal sacks and lymph nodes and testicular cancer having a tendency to "run north."

That Katie. Gotta love her.

When the pathology report came back from the lab on his removed testicle, everyone was relieved. It appeared Wade had beaten the cancer. So he was down to one remaining testicle. It was all he needed to grow hair, have intercourse, and make babies. Now all he had to do was wait and see if he could get an erection again.

After his morning visit to see the doctor, he'd taken his kayak down to San Diego Bay and worked out for almost two hours. He would have paddled in Mission Bay but didn't want to risk the chance of Katie seeing him out on the open water. He was afraid of hurting his wife. She was the center of his universe.

After he dressed, Wade contemplated going out to the garage to start stripping the nightstand. He decided to take an afternoon nap instead.

It's the water that's missing in our lives. The water.

His rivers had run dry and a mean sea had replaced Katie’s lakes.

Wade Jones, former world champion kayaker, was ready to change their future. All he needed was a few returned phone calls to start the process. All he needed was the ripple of a small pebble into the stale pond that had become their life together.

All he needed was a swift kick in the ass by any old friend to jump-start him again.

www.barryhickey.com

Hooking Readers - first chapter of Chasing God's River

BANKING ITWade Jones stood in the shower and yawned. He had originally planned his day for the garage, stripping the antique nightstand that he and his wife Katie had found at the yard sale in Hillerman Heights the previous weekend.
Instead, what he got was an eight-thirty phone call from Doctor Lieverman’s assistant. The doctor wanted to check his remaining testicle again, grab another blood and urine test for tumor markers, get a serum testosterone level and maybe try to bank some sperm.

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Growing your presence on the Internet takes time and patience.
After Aunt Alice read your book, you hired a book editor. You found hundreds of companies online available to take your dimes and sell you their webinars, podcasts, press releases, publishing packages, and marketing schemes to put you at the top of the heap as a self-published author. But for how long? At what cost per unit? As a novelist, it's still like rolling a giant rock up a hill when it comes to self-promotion. I've had press releases that went to the moon, I think, because I never got any kind of response. At my book signings I usually spend more on lattes for four hours than the profits I make from my books. Unless I sing karaoke, too. Drunks buy more freely than tea-sippers. My local paper passed on a cover story because I'm not a nationally known writer. They told me to come back when I'm John Grisham. (As a sidenote, my book appeared on the shelf at the Westminster library weeks later next to a book by John Grisham - at which point I realized Barry Hickey would never be John Grisham because there is already a John Grisham). And so I plod on. I use Ping.fm to post many ramblings which then populates to my accounts and friends at Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Blogger, etcetera and I'm on Youtube with interviews and book trailers. My name comes up on page one in every major search engine in the world alongside the archbishop of Perth... But with such an odd name, where else would you find me on an internet search except page one? Keep inviting your potential audience, your newly acquainted friends into your universe, to share the adventure! Inch by inch, step by step your tree of influence will grow. Strangers will discover you one by one. And remember - sometimes, along the way, a Tipping Point may occur where you are discovered by the masses. Fame and Fortune (pays some bills) will follow or perhaps your book will have such an impact that you change some lives in the process. Here I am reminded of my old days as a narcissist - sitting in a tree in India surrounded by hundreds of people wanting my autograph (I was an actor then). As I felt the weight and crush of people below me I realized what it must be like to live day in and day out as a celebrity... It can't be much fun being Tom Cruise, wearing disguises, talking to bodyguards, living with paranoia...

Barry James Hickey
Author of The Five Pearls, Chasing God's River (almost finished with The Glass Fence in January before attacking my outline for The Mermaid Latitudes.
www.barryhickey.com
barryjameshickey@yahoo.com

Creating an Internet Presence

Growing your presence on the Internet takes time and patience.

Sunday, January 9, 2011

Do we retain more information as a reader from hard copies versus ebooks? I'm sure there is someone out there trying to discover the answer. I think with textbooks there is much to be said for the printed and highlighted text book as one crams for an exam.
Survey Finds 75% of College Students Stick to Print Textbooks
By Maryann Yin on January 7, 2011 3:47 PM
According to the Book Industry Study Group (BISG)‘s “Student Attitudes Toward Content in Higher Education” survey, 75 percent of college students prefer print textbooks over digital versions.
eBookNewser noted that 12 percent of those surveyed had purchased eBooks for convenience and lower prices. This group consisted primarily of men pursuing MBAs and long-distance learning students.
The BISG survey also revealed: “Renting a textbook – rather than purchasing or downloading – was preferred by 11% of surveyed students … Survey respondents said they often buy previous editions of a textbook (16% did this for their current class ) or international versions (18% did this at least once) … Print study guides, Campus Learning Management Systems – such as Blackboard and WebCT – and diagnostic self-tests held high value for survey respondents.”

Thursday, January 6, 2011

For the past few years I have read and researched the evolving book buyer marketplace. Have readers declined? Absolutely. Let's face it - many people still love to read, but they also love movies, cable television, and playing with new technological gadgets. I am sure publishers and writers are exhausting all known resources to keep or find the audience, but there are so many channels of publicity, marketing and electronic distribution to discover, often pay for, and stay on top of that it boggles the mind. How do you build a loyal audience? One reader at a time... Can your writing make a difference? Often it does in ways that you can never measure. Case in point - I was restless the other night, needing to get away from the computer, the television, the stack of books by my easy chair, my two dogs and their constant need for affection. I went to sing some karaoke and fell into a conversation with a woman. I asked her what books she had read recently and out of the blue, she said The Five Pearls (my book).. (http://ping.fm/dXbkv She didn't know that I was the author. She said it rescued her from the emotional and physical loss of her son who recently passed away. Wow! I realized that the quest for success writer's crave is often co-mingled with a writer's more ethereal quest for contribution.

Book Readers Are Always Out There

For the past few years I have read and researched the evolving book buyer marketplace. Have readers declined? Absolutely. Let's face it - many people still love to read, but they also love movies, cable television, and playing with new technological gadgets. I am sure publishers and writers are exhausting all known resources to keep or find the audience, but there are so many channels of publicity, marketing and electronic distribution to discover, often pay for, and stay on top of that it boggles the mind. How do you build a loyal audience? One reader at a time... Can your writing make a difference? Often it does in ways that you can never measure. Case in point - I was restless the other night, needing to get away from the computer, the television, the stack of books by my easy chair, my two dogs and their constant need for affection. I went to sing some karaoke and fell into a conversation with a woman. I asked her what books she had read recently and out of the blue, she said The Five Pearls (my book).. (http://www.tumblebrushpress.com/  She didn't know that I was the author. She said it rescued her from the emotional and physical loss of her son who recently passed away. Wow! I remembered that the quest for success writer's crave is often co-mingled with a writer's more ethereal quest for contribution.

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

There is so much competition in social media now. So many sites, marketers, publishers, packages, seminars, webinars, SEO companies, VOD's, newsletter offers... It reminds me of the great immigrant floods into the United States over a century ago. An immigrant arrives at Ellis Island, speaks no English, has no contacts, but has money saved in his shoe and a book he or she has written about how to make cheese... a prime and gullible target for the unsavory. What I have learned in a relatively short time using Inet media is that there are times you must pay for services, for "expertise." but dig deeper in your search engine and you may often find one product barked as part of a marketer's package is a free service elsewhere that they are piggy-backing off. In my exploration of Free Press Release sites, I have discovered that simply announcing and posting one of my new book releases on the internet leads nowhere. But should I pay $399-$799 for a targeted press release? How can one be sure of the quality of a media insider list? Your feedback is appreciated.

Monday, January 3, 2011

Saying a lot with a little


In The Five Pearls, I decided on very concise writing. The flowers are there, but with less petals.

Example:

He carried his duffel over to the bus stop and sat down on a cool metal bench under a lean-to that was supposed to be a respite from the blistering Texas sun in summer. But it was long past summer now and the wind in the air tasted like dirty chalk.
A big sign was screwed to the fence next to the bus stop; words printed in big blood red letters:
DO NOT PICK UP HITCHIKERS