Normally, I don’t do resolutions. But since the past few years have been anything but ordinary, maybe it’s time to fall in line with the trend. I think I have good chance to achieve all these resolutions:
Publish a short story in a magazine.
Edit my short fiction “Man of His Word” for 2022’s BWG anthology “Element of Mystery”
Publish in at least one other anthology.
Crank out at least one book. Finish the draft, and get as far into editing and searching for a agent/publisher as time allows.
Produce an audiobook!
Resume a healthy lifestyle, and lose my Covid-19 weight.
“Man of His Word” in BWG’s 7th Anthology!
Resolutions that I don’t hold out much hope for…
Invent a new sport called “Ochsball”.
Overthrow the government of a country. I think I’ll start small, probably Nauru or Tuvalu. Whichever has the least number of insects. Or spiders.
I’m sorry to report that November has been one of the most depressing months I’ve ever experienced. Normally, I’m an optimist, a class-clownish fellow, a weisenheimer punster, and one who takes time to smell the roses or stare in wonder at a sunrise or sunset. But November did a number on me.
Pochi – b.2006, adopted 2016, d.2021
First off, I had to put down Pochi (Japanese slang for “pooch”), a poodle-mix rescue, and my furry companion for the past 5 1/2 years. On Halloween, of all days. I’ve had seven dogs over the span of my life, and loved them all. With the earliest ones, my parents took care of the Sad Events, as I was still not yet an adult. Later, I raised two from newly-born pups, saying my tearful goodbyes to them when selling them to good homes at 6 months. Their mommy, a devilishly cute chocolate toy poodle, was my responsibility to put to sleep. However, I made the selfish mistake of not facing her time with her. The look on my pet’s face as the vet took her away made me vow I would never again let a dog go to the Rainbow Bridge alone. My previous rescue, Nix Nutz, passed away while frolicking in a boarding kennel, while I was working out-of-state. But my latest rescue, Pochi was the first and only dog, where I made the decision to end her suffering, and held her as life ebbed out of her old and decrepit body.
The experience has affected me more than I expected. Even as I write now, I still have to pause as grief overcomes me again. Not just because I miss Pochi terribly, or that I finally was grown-up enough to do the right thing, but because of the guilt over the possibility I strung out her suffering, missing earlier clues she wanted to leave. Is it strange that Pochi’s passing is depressing me far more than the day I was at my Mother’s bedside as she breathed her last? Or when I was not able to stand by my Father’s side when his time came?
Add to that the following: I have been on edge all month, and probably will be for another month, as my home is turned upside-down during the major remodeling of the basement. It is affecting me in the weirdest way. My house currently has the aspect of a terminal hoarder’s domicile, as the ground floor is crammed with furniture and paraphernalia displaced during demolition and remodeling. Such a state of living is disturbing enough for a person who normally has a place for every thing, and a thing for every place. But what is affecting my psyche worse is the fact that I have destroyed everything that my recently-departed Dad built and fashioned on that floor. Time, dry rot, ancient wiring, water and black mold have taken their toll, requiring the whole floor be gutted down the stone.
Another factor adding to my dejection, is that I spent most of the holiday alone. Usually, my circle of closest friends invite me on Thanksgiving day for an evening of food, friendship and festivity. But this was the year (thanks to the relaxing grip of Covid) when they all were with their respective extended families. And rightfully so. Mine are almost a thousand miles away, but I couldn’t leave the house during mid-construction. [Post-note: I was rescued by some good friends, who invited me over for “2nd Thanksgiving” later that weekend. Blessings on them!]
The rotten cherry on top is how all these burdens have shut off my writing. Hard. Because of the remodeling and contractors, writing time is minimal at best. And when I do have time to write, the words struggle mightily. On a good day I might get 100 words a day. At that rate, my next novel will be out in 2027. To make matters worse, this becomes a destructive feedback loop. When I can’t write, the Blues become deep, deep, Marianas-Trench deep Blue. As in black.
Despite all that — don’t worry for me, for I have my support networks. I have so much to be grateful for, I know eventually this dark cloud, too, shall pass. But to express my summation of November in the vernacular… Damn, this month royally sucked.
Kathy Fronheiser and Christopher D. Ochs at 2021’s Great Allentown Fair
Recently, I and another author rented a booth at one of the major fairs in Pennsylvania. The rental fee was pricey, but I made a small amount over the outlay, so it was financially a positive. My host and cohort was most gracious and a wonderful conversationalist, so the dead time between interactions with readers was fun and flew by.
Once the doors to the public were flung open, I discovered a large fly in this fair-experience ointment. First, you must understand my usual venues for selling my brand and my books are book stores, book fairs, wineries and craft fairs. However, this day’s adventure in sole proprietorship took place in a less, shall we say… genteel environment. I slogged bravely on, and continued to use many of my tried-and-true catchphrases to attract potential customers’ attention. For example, “Have you heard of my award-winning book?” and “What do you like to read?” Normally, my writing style tends to get wordy. Not this time. I’ll get right to the point. I was surprised and dismayed by the number of people who responded, “I don’t read.” Even worse, a handful of people were indignant that I dared ask. A few even snarled.
Before you jump to any conclusions about these unfortunate people, let me say, “Please don’t.”
Equal numbers of adults and teens responded “I don’t read.” Admittedly, the younger people often had there noses in their electronic devices. There was no observable common behavior among the adults, other than a recurring excuse that they had no time to read.
Nor could I detect any prevalent political party affiliation. There was a booth across the walkway that peddled New Americana chotchkys — t-shirts with a collage of bullets in the form of the American flag, “Old Glory”s made of painted pallet wood, woodburning art that combined images of rifles and crosses, etc. I’ll bet you can correctly guess the party affiliation the majority of their customers were. However, the people who told me “I don’t read” were equally drawn or repelled by that very busy booth’s merchandise.
Ladies & gents, we have a problem. People who, willingly or unwillingly, don’t read. I’ll say here the same thing I remarked to my author friend that day — “This is why people take Ivermectin.”
On a somewhat different topic for a quick moment, one curious trend I noticed: the day’s most popular book was not my latest award-winning book My Friend Jackson, but my collection of “disturbed bedtime reading to inflict on naughty children,” If I Can’t Sleep, You Can’t Sleep. No complaints. A sale’s a sale!
Getting back to the original topic of willing illiteracy… I am disturbed to the point of needing to do something. But what? Sure, we can teach kids to love reading early. But how to teach to joy of books to grown and less malleable brains? I’ve ruminated about this for two weeks, and have nothing. How does a writer, whose major tool is the written word, get people to want to read? Any ideas, please comment. Thanks, and stay healthy!
“You can have this for free, if you pretend to hold an invisible tray!”
There’s a meme that made the rounds, and one form or another of it still occasionally pops up in my social media input bins:
Oh, believe me — I have many more than just one. But today, I’ll concentrate on one that is applicable to business, and especially to my current vocation of writing. That thrice-cursed phrase is:
“The Customer Is Always Right!“
No. They are not.
If the subject is “What color sneakers should I buy?“, then yes, the customer is always right. The choice is essentially immaterial. Little to no additional labor, time, material resources, and/or expense is incurred. However, there is a line, beyond which, a customer’s demand becomes unreasonable — and the customer is not “always right.” They are wrong, dead wrong, sometimes “please go away so I don’t kill you” dead wrong. This is something I formulated when discussing this point with a supervisor (back in those salad days when I held down a 9-to-5 in the world of cutting edge microelectronics). The customer is driven by understandable market forces, and wants to get the biggest bang for their buck. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing at all! However, difficulty arises when the customer gets intolerably greedy. Their request is of the form, “I want EVERYTHING, I want it for FREE, and I want it NOW.” Ridiculous, right? How can a producer of goods possibly make a living if everything has to be given away? Hold onto that thought.
So, how does one answer something so unreasonable? I think the best answer was a graphic I spotted in another supervisor’s office.
You want GOOD and FAST? It’s gonna cost you. And proportionally to “how fast” and “how good” you desire. You want FAST and CHEAP? We can slap any Rube Goldberg thingamabob together. Tada! But the end result might fall apart if you look at it funny. You want CHEAP and GOOD? It will take a long time to design and retool. So you ain’t getting it anytime soon. (And you’ll have to buy in bulk.)
Fast forward to the world of writing. Thanks to the great god Internet, the reader (and sometimes even the publisher) has come to expect all three of the unholy trinity of Good, Fast, Cheap. I won’t wax eloquent anymore on how ignorant and selfish this is, regardless of how prevalent it is. But I WILL plant my flag in the ground here. I ain’t giving my writing away for free anymore. I expect SOMETHING in return for my blood, sweat and tears. The bait and switch of “you’ll get exposure” doesn’t cut it anymore — for me, at least. OK, I’m stepping off my soapbox now…
Anyway, my social media advisors tell me I must have a call to action at the end of my blog entries. Trouble is, I have no clue how to transition from a crabby lecture to a pleasing unicorns & rainbows sales pitch. So here it is, pure and unadulterated.
Hey there, readers! Apologies for not blogging for a while, but I’ve been so busy with so many events! Both good and not-so-good. The bad first: Life rolled a small crate of lemons my family’s way in October with the passing of my Dad. I’ve also been caregiver for my 15-yr old adopted puppy, who has turned diabetic and blind. But everyone is content and at peace. The good news: Health – I’m alive; I got my vaccinations; I can walk again! Though I could stand to lose the mass tonnage gained during the knee operations and Covid19. Home – Let the remodeling begin! Stage 1 is gonna be a challenge for my patience and my wallet. But at the end, I’ll have a whole new basement, an extra bedroom and 1/2 bath, and a new home office. Work – “My Friend Jackson” was published! It was a Finalist in Indies Today’s Best Books of 2020. I’m still waiting to hear if it makes its mark in three other competitions; Two more of my short stories were published in new anthologies – “Writes of Passage” by GLVWG, and my first paying gig in Firebringer Press’s “Meanwhile in the Middle of Eternity.” I have several short stories trying to wheedle their way into the hearts of several magazines and anthologies; Juggling amongst all that, I’m also working on two sci-fi/horror novels “Sentry of Eternity” and “No Place Like Home”; All of which you can keep track of on my website.
Oh, I wish I had a game vault like this! But I am, however, thankful for my co-volunteers on OTAKON Staff, who are constantly turning me on to new table games. I would not be surprised if one or more of these friends have stashes larger than the one depicted here.
I’ve written before about my preference for games that are a step above the plain vanilla challenges like Risk or Monopoly, so I won’t bore you with that again. Instead, here’s my compendium of the table games I have played to date, with my ratings and comments. The new games added to the list are: Azul, Clank!, Galaxy Trucker, Gizmos, Kane Gawa, Onitama, Suburbia, and Terraforming Mars. I haven’t added any card games, so check out this post for those ratings.
As with any opinion, your mileage may vary. Play on!
And when you’re finished. Top off a night of fun with one of my books! HINT HINT!
If someone calls us “ignorant,” our usual response is not kind. That’s because, in its typical modern use, the speaker intended it as an insult.
But is being ignorant, in of its own nature, bad? If one considers the actual meaning of the word, the answer is “No.”
I am ignorant of a ton of stuff.
So are you.
But are you or I flawed, inferior, or evil because of that status?
While being ignorant is certainly undesirable and possibly embarrassing in most situations, it is by no means evil, or a sign of a character flaw.
It simply means – “We don’t know.”
Consider the judge who declares “Ignorance of the law is no excuse,” during a proceeding. The judge is not handing down a reflection on that person’s intellect or moral character. What is being pointed out is that the person does not possess necessary knowledge, or is not properly prepared.
What is, however, an undeniably serious character flaw is “willful ignorance.”
It is hubris in its worst form.
It is the root of all blind allegiances to causes evil and stupid.
I often hear in my circle of acquaintances, “The more I learn, the less I know.”
That saying is attributed to Socrates, Einstein, and everybody in between. But it is absolutely true. As one discovers more about the world around us, it is the most self-evident of all truths. Falling into the false security that one is absolutely right is akin to reaching a mountaintop and screaming “I have done it all,” only to spot the next higher mountain range in the distance.
I certainly don’t claim to know everything.
And anyone who does, has pointed themselves out as a world-class idiot — though you will almost never hear someone so buffoonish to actually declare “I know everything!” It’s usually couched in such phrases as “I know more than…” or “You don’t know anything.”
I am ignorant. So are you.
But it is how we respond to the realization of ignorance that defines us.
Remain open to learning.
Remain teachable.
“The median age of the Fox News viewer was 68” in 2018 — so quoth Google from that year’s Nielsen ratings.
Let’s step into our Wayback Machine, and consider the “Summer of Love.”
Doing the math, we find that today’s average Fox News viewer would have been 19 in that halcyon year of 1969 – the perfect age to be drafted and shipped off to fight in Vietnam, yet still not yet old enough to vote. In other words, the exact age to represent the typical disenfranchised “Flower Child”.
So here’s my question — How did the generation that actively took part in “Drop Out, Tune In, Turn On”, chanted “Trust no one over 30,” embraced Free Love and Flower Power, and loathed everything associated with authority, turn into the Ugly American beating the drum of ultra-conservatism?
Truly I say unto you, the child grew into the thing they most hated.
I’m not just postulating hypotheticals here. I have a close relative who is the poster-child for this metamorphosis. In 1969, he was a hippie, lived in a commune, read Marx and Lenin, had a ponytail down to his waist, and was arrested for marijuana possession (in an era when such a thing was a truly scandalous societal Scarlet Letter). Today, he is a devout follower of all things Fox, Breitbart, and who-knows-what-else, often proselytizing the Gospel According to Glenn Beck.
But he is not the only one I’ve observed this startling transformation – not by a longshot.
So, what causes this reversal of behavior in so many of that fabled generation?
Is it Stockholm Syndrome run rampant on a society-wide basis?
Were they so disgusted with their failure to change the world, they decided “if ya can’t beat ’em, join ’em”?
Is it enantiodromia, a Jungian mental illness that causes a person to become their polar opposite?
I don’t have an answer to the question I pose.
I wish I did, but I don’t.
I merely post this to point out my latest unsettling observation.
Whatever the reason, it’s quite probable I’ll work it into one of my books. I’m already working on the follow-up collection of strange tales to “If I Can’t Sleep, You Can’t Sleep.” Stay tuned – it might show up there!
No deep thoughts this time around.
No discussions of things philosophical or metaphysical.
No diatribes over the craft of writing.
Just a bit of fun.
Last week, I had a book signing with A.E.Decker, who whiled away the slow spots with the iPhone version of Pokémon Go. After having a guilty chuckle over that addictive electronic version of crack cocaine, several questions came to mind:
How many people have hurt themselves walking into traffic in an attempt to “catch ’em all”?
Is the game a nefarious social experiment of Darwinism in Action, culling the genetic pool of those silly enough to walk obliviously, phone in hand, into dangerous situations?
Why haven’t Anonymous or other groups hacked the game, placing Pokémon critters at entirely inappropriate locations and situations?
That last question lit the fuse to both our twisted imaginations. We spent the next quarter of an hour rattling off a host of “Places We’d Like To See Pokémon.”
A house of ill repute
A funeral parlor
1000 ft above the deepest point in The Grand Canyon
The bottom of Niagara Falls
Oh, we had plenty more, but that’s all I remember…
Well, people – I’d love to hear your ideas as well! Leave a comment if one comes to mind.
If mirthful macabre thoughts like this are your bread and butter, then you’d certainly enjoy If I Can’t Sleep, You Can’t Sleep. A.E.Decker’s review favorably compares my dastardly tales to those of Roald Dahl. High praise indeed!
Apologies for not blogging over an extended period of time. I’ve been out and about, visiting across the country and the world, visiting friends, fiends and family. (I sometimes have trouble discerning which is which.) One of my relatives is big on books and an ardent fan of Mark Twain. It is indeed fitting that one of Mr. Clemens’ quotes deals with travel. After my month away from my desk and home, one seems especially apropos:
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.
So true – it is impossible to remain in the political and moral echo-chambers we Americans seem to seclude ourselves, when one is out and about in the company of others who are not imprisoned in one’s own myopic groupthink.
After considering how much this giant of American Literature has contributed to the American Psyche, I thought I’d just spout out a few of my favorite quotes and aphorisms from this wily and wicked wit:
There isn’t any way to libel the human race.
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.
Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
The two most important days in your life are the day you are born, and the day you find out why.
If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.
And last but not least – my favorite!
The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog.
If you’re enamored of these, you can find plenty more at www.twainquotes.com. As for my own teensy contribution to the world’s “Pearls of Wisdom” vaults, a few may be found in the lessons of the morality plays in If I Can’t Sleep, You Can’t Sleep.
“The median age of the Fox News viewer was 68” in 2018 — so quoth Google from that year’s Nielsen ratings.
Christopher D. Ochs 