No, the blog’s not dead, just resting. While I’ve been working like a busy bee, restarting my acting career, while still writing and having Fiero Publishing get my stuff up for sale. Lots of stories up since the last blog, both under my name and various pseudonyms.

But my latest project, sparking my return to this blog, is a plunge into audiobooks. It’s a bit of an experiment for me so I’m starting small, on a much loved, older short story that gave me a chance to really work some of my acting chops.

It should be live, says ACX, in about two weeks. If all goes smoothly, expect to see lost more of my stuff getting translated into audio for the ever-growing population of aural consumers out there. (Nothing like a good audiobook to make a commute something to look forward to.)

I also just watched my son graduate from high school. The school motto: Carpe Diem. Seize the day! Felt that fully while watching him with pride.

Now go forth, all of you, and do likewise!

Amazon is ramping up its book lending program whereby Amazon Prime members will be able to borrow any number of bestselling and other books as part of their membership. It’s another way of offering you a free sample in the hopes you’ll come back and buy more where that came from.

Not that it’s totally free. You have to pay to be member of Amazon Prime, the publishers and authors get paid a small percentage to have their books available in the lending library, and Prime members are limited to one free read each month.

The downside? Only one I see at present is that Amazon is asking writers who make their books available through the lending library for a minimum of 90 days to make those e-books available exclusively through Amazon. Not their physical counterparts, but the electronic versions. This isn’t an insignificant demand, given that Amazon, for all its behemoth stature in the industry, still sells fewer than half the electronic books worldwide. (No hard stats backing that up. Just my own e-book sales and those of most of my writer friends.)

Given Amazon’s previous aggressive moves to dominate book retailing, it’s not hard to see it trying to expand this exclusivity concept in the future.

But back to the concept of free sampling. My prediction? The lending program will be a moderate success for Amazon, targeting mostly readers who only read the occasional bestseller. Avid readers (who make up a big chunk of e-book readers) know there are already huge numbers of stories and novels up for free every month. Some are deservedly free, put up by people who have more technical self-publishing ability than writing ability. Others are by talented newer authors looking to get their names out there or well-established authors seeking to draw in new readers.

Either way, we’re in a golden age for e-book readers, with the ability to explore new worlds and follow favorite authors more easily than ever before. Not to mention the opportunity to delve into a favorite author’s backlist of both novel-length fiction and short stories, something that used to be difficult to impossible for all but a few bestselling authors.

Which brings me at last to my own quick plug: not one but two of my short stories are available for free in a growing number of e-book retailers. Neither are free in Amazon.com as of this writing (though they should be shortly), but for a limited time “The Tides” can be found at Smashwords, Barnes and Nobles, iTunes, and Diesel. “The Substitute” can be found at Smashwords.

Happy reading, and Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Sadeh, Pancha Ganapati, Yuletide, and celebrations to all!

Breaking my silence here for the obvious reason, to talk about a new book of mine that Fiero Publishing has made available through Amazon.com, Amazon.uk, and soon through Barnes & Noble, Kobo, et. al.

It’s a bit of a leap from the popular splash I made with my first novel Chasing the Minotaur, and my second, Stay with Me. But the themes of desperately struggling to hang onto a threatened love, to figure out how to be worthy of that love as you deal with the incredible things life throws at you, will be familiar to the readers of either of those works.

Life is pretty damn intense at times and the figuring it out — what’s important, how to make it work — isn’t easy. But I really believe the answers are there. You just have to scrabble through a lot of stuff  to get to it. Which is what good fiction is all about.

It’s about the journeys we take and how we find our way home. Sometimes it’s through the magical fields of Provence (Chasing the Minotaur), sometimes it’s the pursuit of a daughter we thought lost forever (Stay with Me), sometimes it’s leaving all we had known to accompany a siren we’ve just met on a trip into the darkest heart of the American Midwest (Jessica Falls).

Pick up a sample of Jessica Falls and you’ll get a sense of the journey. Join me for the ride.

Back into blogging. Simple theme – search for truth.

Here’s a mental search that was touched off by an e-mailed newsletter sent around by Daniel Popescu, a wealth management guru based here in Vancouver, and a really smart guy. When it comes to making money and building portfolios.

But the newsletter essentially said (and I’m sure I’m paraphrasing wildly, so forgive me, Daniel, if I missed the point) that the U.S. government wouldn’t be in the mess it’s in today if only it were run like a successful corporation.

Got me thinking about that. What do corporations do? Generally, they produce a product, trying to get maximum return for minimum investment; they often invest in R&D so the product keeps improving and evolving to better serve their customers (or at least keep their attention); when they get big enough, they often diversify so they have multiple revenue streams. All that would be good for a government, I suppose, if you treat the country’s output as the product and keep pushing your country’s workers to do it better, cheaper, etc.

But is the product of a government truly the country’s output, with the people of the country as the workers of the national corporation? Is that why we form governments?

Maybe from an international trade standpoint. And I wouldn’t argue against it being one function of government. But look a little deeper at what successful corporations do.

1. In an effort to maximize profits for their shareholders, they’ll often cut and slash jobs to minimize overhead. Kind of like trimming the budget? Sure, if there are other jobs or places for those who are slashed to go. But if those who are slashed are the very ones who elected you to look out for their interests and they’ve now been cut adrift, just who are you the government of? Only the most productive/successful? Is that truly what we want a government to be? A government by the successful for the successful? Seems kind of redundant to me.

2. Again, to maximize return, corporations increasingly outsource their labor to the cheapest labor market, say, China or India. So if I elect a government to represent me, the first thing it might do is decide I’m way too expensive and it would really rather manage a group of people in another part of the world, thank you very much.

3. The focus is on product, what sells, what people will buy. Extraneous benefits like health care, childcare, education, infrastructure, are only considered when they impact that bottom line. Simple question: Is the point of living to produce stuff for others to buy? Is the point of life to accumulate wealth from this process? If your automatic response is yes, then the government-as-corporation model fits you well. If you have other values you’d like your government to represent or protect, recognize there may be a conflict at times.

All of which brings us to the simple point that it’s easy to look at government spending or operations from the context of how well it fulfills a particular function, but be very clear you understand the implications of such a narrow analysis.

Figuring out what values you most want to promote and defend with your life and speech (not an easy process) should be a prerequisite for public discourse.

I just finished reading John Locke’s book on selling e-books. Not only did I enjoy it immensely, but it got me thinking hard about my blog and its purpose. Mostly it pointed me towards targeting better whom I was writing to, how often, and just what I wanted to share with them.

Look for changes in my next blog.

(And for those of you who’ve been enjoying my “Story Idea” blogs, you can always send me a note at terry@terryhayman.com and continue that particular conversation.

As a Canucks fan, I was disappointed when we lost last night against the Bruins (who did, unfortunately, play better for more games this series and deserved to win). As a Vancouverite, I was disturbed by the post-game riot.

I wasn’t “ashamed,” as so many people here declared themselves to be, because I honestly don’t identify enough with my city to feel responsible for the actions of a bunch of criminals, thugs, low-IQ yahoos, and drunks who found an occasion to burn off some of their anti-social energy without suffering an immediate shut down.

But disturbed, yes. Disturbed afterwards, in particular, as my two teenagers told me about all the classmates they know who were proud of sticking around through most of the riots and who were consequently running out of their last day of class today at regular intervals to cough, puke, or dry-heave because of all the tear gas they sucked into their lungs last night. Also a bunch of Seniors who were sick because of too much drugs and alcohol ingested at last nights “camp out.” And tales of how, at last week’s after-grad party, which was supposed to be a dry event, not only were lots of people drunk, but ecstasy was making the rounds and making lots of the already-oversexualised youth strip off their clothes by the end of the evening.

This isn’t a rant about what are our youth coming to (though I’m tempted), but more a long, disturbed look at the forces which drive so many people to escape reality, bust out of the normal codes of social conduct, kick loose in ways that harm others, then laugh and blog and Facebook about it as if it’s a cool thing.

And disturbed is always a good place to start a story. What scares you? What angers you? What disturbs you? Write to understand, to moan, to make things right somehow. Because you can do that in fiction – make things right. You can restore order and sanity. Or you can tear it apart and explain why it is so.

Either way, you, the writer, get to be in control of what is sometimes a world that seems out of control.

Writing as therapy. Writing as reassurance. Writing maybe even to influence change.

There’s the impetus. The particulars, I’ll leave to you for this week. I’ve got more brooding to do.

There was a column today in the Vancouver Sun by Andrea Mrozek, called “Thriving in a sexual economy,” which monetizes sexual relations between men and women, basically saying that women are the gateholders of sex (ie. they can have it whenever they want it; men get to have it when women allow it) and dole it out in exchange for “commitment, communication, and closeness.” Mrozek goes on to argue that, for various reasons, the market value of sex has gone. It’s so easy to get now, apparently, that men won’t pay for it with long-term commitments any more because they can get it for short-term commitments.

Cue the end of marriage, even the end of decent wooing. The answer, says Mrozek, is for women to band together and withhold sex a bit more until it commands a higher price.

This has all the elements of a great story – sex, strong emotions, people doing stupid things for what they believe are smart reasons, a push towards a new state of affairs.

But you know what? The withholding sex thing is overdone. It’s a traditional (and misguided) way for wives to signal their displeasure or power in that relationship. It’s also so sexist that I can’t stand it.

So how to use the same idea of withholding but twist it a little? Withhold hugs. In fact, create a protagonist or group of them (men? women? both?) who are fighting for something and decide they will still give their partners, existing or new, sex. What they won’t do is hug them or show them any tenderness at all.

Recall the Harry Harlow experiments from back in the 1950s, when Harlow found that, given the choice between a wire-frame “mother” with a milk bottle and a terry-cloth-covered” mother without, the rhesus monkeys would spend all their time with the latter except when eating. They were drawn to the comfort more than the food. And when the monkeys weren’t given the choice but were raised by either the terry cloth “mother” or the steel mesh “mother,” the latter developed all kinds of personality problems.

Of course, in the great continuing-tradition of animal experimentation, Harlow was only allowed to do his experiment on monkeys. In our story, we get to do it with humans. Just think of the carnage and messed up characters we could create.

And that’s as far as I’m going to take it. Create a character or group of them in a small town (or other isolated environment so the characters can’t escape the experiment), put in a situation or event which precipitates the decision to withdraw all physical affection, then portray the spin out.

Here’s #14 in my series of posts intended to give you a sampling of how a story creator’s mind works. There are lots of different ways into a story and the ones I use will obviously work for some writers, but not others. So if you’re mainly a reader curious about writers, remember the limited population sample here. If you’re a writer looking for tips, try stuff, use what works, ignore stuff that doesn’t.

Onwards.

The way in today will be the desire to communicate a message or theme. I was told often by writers I admire a lot that you never write a story to preach a message. It leads to deadly dull writing.

Right. Kind of like saying, never write about musicians, never write to the market, always write to the market, never write phonetic dialect, always start in the middle of action, etc.

The minute I hear “don’t” or “can’t” or “must” when it comes to storytelling, my first urge is to prove the admonition wrong. Storytelling, after all, is about possibilities. Am I really going to let someone tell me that, in all those thousands of stories out there everywhere I look, there’s not one that could express a truth I want to convey in an exciting, engaging way?

So…pick a truth. Mine for today is that it’s important to face your fears and responsibilities rather than always running from them or avoiding them, even when, and maybe especially when, the expected outcome is negative. You need to build your fear-facing muscle and take risks regularly to achieve anything great in life. So you fail this time, but you get stronger to try again next time, and the time after that, until you succeed.

What kind of story would lend itself to that message? Ha! Thousands. Facing down your fear is probably a touchstone for ninety percent of the Hollywood movies out there right now. But you’ll note that the theme was the facing your fear even when the expected outcome was negative, that it’s the facing, not the overcoming, that’s critical here.

So…as my mind leaps from situation to situation, character to character, I’m trying to get down to the nub of the idea. This is a short story, after all. No time to spin out a great long character arc. It’s mostly about a decision. So let’s make the story about just that decision. And let’s keep the decision really simple.

How about a young man in a bare room, sitting on a chair, arguing with someone. If it’s SF or fantasy or a thriller, he’s arguing with a disembodied voice. But I see him arguing with someone who loves him and wants him to face his fear. His mother? Cliche. His girlfriend? Cliche. How about his daughter? Maybe. His son? Yeah. But I want the young man to be young, so maybe the son is only, like, an articulate eleven years old, so our hero could still be 27.

The more they argue – the young man doesn’t want to go out the door to face his as-yet-undisclosed fear and it’s the 11-year-old who’s telling him he must – the more you figure out the whole backstory of the two and the world they live in. Or maybe you just figure out their relationship – how he was a young dad, how the kid’s mother died and now the dad is saddled with looking after a kid when the dad barely knows how to look after himself. Maybe the kid desperately needs the dad to grow up and prove to him it’s possible.

And what is the fear the young dad must face? We never find out. It’s the fact of him being scared of it and having to finally face it, knowing he’ll probably fail, that’s the story.

I hate movies or novels like this, that set up a goal or important object being chased (the maguffin) and never tell you what it is. But this is a short story. You can get away with a lot in a short story because the reader doesn’t necessarily expect a full-rounded experience. They want a quick hit of character, setting, situation, that makes you feel and think. And in this case, not knowing what the thing is would actually strengthen the focus on what matters, which is the decision to face your fear or not.

There you go. Now go face a fear.

I’ve added a new pseudonym to my writing life – Ben Birdy. He’ll be the name fronting my stories for kids and teens. I’m actually changing the name of the author of a number of my existing titles, like “The Girl Who Invented Peanut Butter” and “Half Pint Heroes” to Ben Birdy.

Why?

Nothing hidden or mysterious here. I just heard from a few readers of my younger stuff that they found the themes of my other work – sometimes frightening or sexual or mature – an unwelcome shock when they were looking for something to share with their children.

So here I break off the sweet (mostly) younger stuff to another author name. Same author picture. Same publisher. Think of it as genre assurance, hey ho!

Okay, we all know (you do know, don’t you?) that bestseller lists are determined by many different factors which depend on the particular list.

The New York Times bestseller list, for example, is probably the most famous list of its kind, the one most writers would kill to get on. But how are its rankings determined? It’s reportedly based on weekly sales reports from selected independent book sellers and chain bookstores and book wholesalers in the United States. How do they select them? How representative are they? Do the list compilers manipulate things when someone like J.K.Rowling or a religious writer dominates the list for a long time? Let’s just say there have been controversies.

Other lists have their own quirks, and the list my novel Chasing the Minotaur just showed up on is no exception. Chasing the Minotaur cracked the top 100 list of bestselling paid (as opposed to free) “metaphysical” books in the Kindle store on Amazon.com. As I write this, it’s sitting at #89, on the same page with books by Jack Kerouac, James Redfield, and Deepack Chopra. It may be off the list an hour from now. Or up at number 32.

And there’s the quirk of the Amazon lists. They track actual sales numbers by the minute. Their sales ranks also take into account whether a book’s sales figures are climbing, falling, or staying the same. There may be a bit of occult prognostication in there as well.

But you know what? I don’t care at the moment. Chasing the Minotaur is a damn good book about a story of discovery, both artistic and personal, and it deserves to be up in those lists. So I’m just enjoying it.

It could use some actual review, though. Sheesh! For readers of this blog, who I know would love to read it and leave a review online, you can get yourself a free copy for one week only (until May 25/11) at Smashwords. Just click on the buy button, enter the coupon code UW72L, and you should be able to download it in the format of your choice for free. If you’re a Kindle user like me, you download the Kindle format to your computer, then plug in your Kindle and just click-and-drag, or copy, the file from your computer’s hard drive onto your Kindle. Works fine. Trust me.

Or if artsy metaphysical is not your thing, check out some of my other stories available under my name – ghosts, SF, literary, historical, children’s fiction, even a romance or two. Something for everyone.

Until next week…