Pile of Leaves: Stories of a Rake

KINDLE SPECIAL - personal favorite - Pile of Leaves: Stories of a Rake - short stories from an inspired era FREE on kindle TUE & WED Mar. 22 & 23 https://www.amazon.com/Pile-Leaves-Stories-Thomas-Leverett-ebook/dp/B004IK948M/

new blog

Of all my writing blogs, this is the one where I have a lot of stories, and speak freely about being a writer. It is not available to google, so I figure it gets its hits from people who know it's here or who connect up from one of my main blogs. It will probably stay that way.

I find that writing on blogs is easier than other ways, and now that I'm doing stories again, I've been using this one to just write stories on. There was a time when I did that here. I may go back to that, but for some reason I've been more comfortable using the novel idea site to just put things up. It could be that they are somewhat experimental when I do that.

So there's this new blog, best of indie, that I hope to use to unite all these blogs together. There are of course my press blog and my blatant self-promo site and I will include them in my reckoning. Since these last two require me to keep publishing things and I've faltered lately, they are looking a little desolate. But if I keep them all connected to each other and keep the ball rolling like a good basketball team does, I should find an opening somewhere.

Look way back in the archives of this blog. You will find some of my best stories here. My plan is to fix up all the writing blogs - make them a set - keep their functions distinct - and allow you to have a good look at my whole mind as a writer.

This one has the best name.

This site is a place where I've always talked about writing freely. Looking back over my writing situation I once noticed that the first stories I did were actually more inspired than the later ones, or it could have been that they struck people more because I was somewhat wilder when I started out. Most of those stories are on this blog somewhere, free, and in some cases linked from the template.

This blog is somewhat hidden though, as it never comes up on Google (I told Google "hands off"), so it gets its views from people who know it's here and have come here often over the years. Many of those people are my former students. But I like the character of it and want to keep it to some degree the way it is.

Another blog, A Novel Idea, has gotten a lot of those spontaneous stories these days. That blog is kind of like this one - relatively unknown, not really linked from anywhere, and originally I was using it just to collect possibilities for novels or things that had caught my fancy. Why did I start putting random stories on it? Not sure. I also don't know where I want this to go. In a sense I feel like I should have an author's page, or some place to really show off. On the other hand, I'm much more comfortable with just casually flinging around stories.

So where is this going? Not sure. Change is in the winds, though.

balance

I'm using this blog to write about my experiences and feelings about becoming a writer. I've become somewhat obsessive about it, but frankly, I'm doing much more marketing, and much less writing. It could be that I need to muse about the way things are going in order to deal with it effectively.

In marketing, I've chosen to go with the read-for-reads method for several reasons. I read entire books in order to get other people to read mine, and I can see visually when they have and haven't. One at a time I gain readers and a reputation; in other words, now when I lay out a short-story book, people will read it, because they've already read a few of them. This makes it easier - I don't always set them out for days at a time, and when I want something I get it - and it also keeps my kindle rating generally, or at least occasionally, below a million. I have limited success, in other words - I have a good reputation among a single group of people, writers who are desperate like me - but it comes at a cost.

The cost is, briefly, time. I love reading what I'm reading, even when it's fantasy or a genre I'm not particularly interested in. The reading itself is relaxing and profitable. But I spent the entire morning catching up - briefly, I've taken on three or four books in my quest to keep my ratings good - and sometimes there's no way out of it besides sitting down and just plowing through them. But what isn't getting done is the research and the harder parts of writing my own book. My own book is a little bogged down at the quotes I have to copy over into it, and just simply not knowing enough about several eras that it passes through.

But more than that, my imagination has dampened a little bit, partly in response to grappling with others' imaginations. I don't get to night time wanting to push out a creative story, but rather get to night time totally exhausted and falling asleep while reading someone else's fantasy.

How to balance? It occurs to me to simply put down the reading for longer spells, or at least in the morning. Don't lay out so much of it that I have to finish by some deadline. Do my creative stuff in the morning, while I'm still up for it. I'm not sure how this is going to work out.

One problem is that night is when I get really uninterrupted time. Now, in the days, I'm in good shape, but all kinds of things are demanding my attention - dogs, cats, laundry, kids, whatever. Even this - keeping the blogs going - is a kind of marketing, and I'm trying to not let them slip. I have about thirty, but some, like Tall Corn State, need attention urgently. This one, I'm just musing. You the reader are watching me wade through the stream of life as a writer, and find the way that will get me where I'm going.

Proud to be included in Livi Brooks' site which appears to be very well done, very classy. She liked my book and wrote an excellent review, but it's not posted yet - when it is I will spread the review and hold my feathers in the sun, so to speak. Thank you Livi!

I'm deep into the "read for reads" method of publicity, where you, one at a time, get new readers by offering to read something you might like. Of course prolific reading gives us a better view of what's out there, but it takes time; this is a slow way to gather up an audience.

It's not a slow way to gather up author friends, though, and I feel better connected than I have for years, with an identity as a writer and a certain population of writers, or mostly writers, who know what I am and what I do. Sure, those writers will not follow me here, or want to read what I say about it. They're busy - they're in the same game I am. They read, and we read theirs in return.

One good thing about it is that we writers are about as critical an audience as one can find. We don't belt out that criticism, sure, we're sensitive to each other's effort and labor and, not willing to hurt someone who has worked so hard, are often likely to just be polite and not tell the whole truth. OK so one finds out slowly how good one really is at this stuff, and sometimes it's a disappointment. But the other end of it is this: when they like it, and they tell you honestly and enthusiastically, that's a good point. You can tell. You know they wouldn't go that far if they didn't want to.

It wears me out, hustling leads and then reading like crazy. I read a lot of good things, though. At a time when I'm switching genres it's good to get a wide-ranging view of genres just on general principle. I'm pretty sure of where I'm going, though.

I have this curious relationship with my ancestors. I can tell a good story about them, then I can get people to read about them, and then i can give them slightly more fame in this world. This happened to my first cousin, three times removed, a famous geologist who died about ten years before I was born. I wrote his biography. It was hard not to fictionalize or put words in his mouth. I tried to stay true to the facts and still I felt him up there somehow, looking down at me, knowing way more than I did, and unable to straighten me out when I went astray. But I also feel him up there even now, saying way to go Tom, for every person I get to read his story. It's 2021, and all of a sudden a few people know who he is. They'll forget, I'm sure. But the book will remain on the shelf, or on some shelf, and hopefully it will be read, possibly several times. I've put him out there, and I get a feeling from promoting family that is like I've returned the favor. He was, after all, a family hero, who collected names and birthdates and passed them along, who did his best to keep up relations even as the country spread out to the various coasts.

That's something non-fiction has over fiction. You can look at it and say, these are the facts, they're incredible, and it's something you really should know and appreciate. And if you write it well, they will know and appreciaate it.

 

I've met a lot of people online, getting my book out there, trading reads, trying to keep my ratings up. You run up against some interesting authors, some of whom might even merit a profile here, but all of whom have at least got it together to put something on the table. Several things have happened to my own self-image as an indie author as a result.

One is that I'm no longer happy with about half the stuff I have out there for sale. I could put better pop-art covers on them and clean them up, which I'm inclined to do since I value them, but in some cases I might want to just sweep the deck and put them in the Amazon dustbin. A couple of them lost their ratings this week as Amazon decided that any rating over about 15 million is probably hurting the author instead of helping him - and a 15 million rating means you haven't sold a book in about eight years anyway.

I have seen a wide range of tolerance for typos - lots of authors have way more than I do - but have become less tolerant of my own. When I go back through and republish my books, one at a time, I'm going to make sure that kind of thing is a little cleaner. Last time I went through them I caught a few and, because it's such a hassle republishing, I'm not even sure I got them all. And there are two venues to get them in - the kindle and the paperback. One has to be systematic about this.

Technically, for example, the kindle version doesn't need a table of contents, though if you put one in there they will link it up. So you have to decide to what degree you really need such a thing. One of my author friends said it was way more professional - for example, I have this issue with my autobiography, which has 100 chapters spread through - and I have to decide whether it's worth it to me to update them all and do it right or what.

Authors, of course, are more critical of these things and always notice. One has actually said that the template-made cover is the kiss of death. Well if that's true eight or nine of my stories need work and I don't know if I'm fully prepared to redo them all. As it is they give a kind of history of my writing, and of my life, so I find it hard to change or delete anything. But one author said the other day, and it kind of stuck with me, this is your product, this is your shelf - you have to keep everything up to date, everything good, everything the best you can do. These weren't his exact words. But they represented a kind of business approach moved over into writing/marketing. If you have something out there for sale and it's really not up to your present standards, even if it's only because you've upgraded those standards a little bit, what's up with that? We writers have to turn around sometimes and be business people, and upgrade everything, all the time.

By the way this blog is unusual because it has a lot of my writing on it, and therefore I turned off the "search engine" option so it wouldn't draw in everyone in a commercial sense. Noweadays I am using it for my free thinking about being a writer, but still I'm somewhat glad that it's not just totally commercial and totally drawing everyone in. I'm thinking of changing the way it is, though. The stories that are on it, and have always been on it, are still a major draw in the ESL world where I developed them and where my former students and their friends have always appreciated an interesting collection of readable short stories, usable for ESL, not too hard. They managed to find their way in here and use them, and still do, and this has given me kind of a name in the ESL world. So I want to keep the site, to some degree, as cool as it's always been. But I might open it up to the search engines, and make this part of it, the top, a writer's thoughts about writing. And I might start a "best of indie" blog just so I can keep cranking stuff out that I'm interested in, stuff I've read, other people's product, what people have on the line.

It's an interesting world.