Done! And Done Some More!

I have finished the broadsides.  They were a pain in the ass.  The printer kept jamming which was really annoying but I finally triumphed.  I also wrote a pretty nice Christmas poem.  It's not too crazy with all the religious stuff and I got to mention a few little dark things that won't really insult anyone because I was careful when concealing them.  I decided to give up on doing a prose poem and just write an etheree which wasn't too bad.  I will share that with you momentarily.  In other news, my rabbits are driving me crazy.  Andromeda literally hopped into the bathroom and peed on the bathmat which she knows she isn't allowed to do.  And Cassiopeia keeps running around and torturing me.  Still, I am grateful for these monsters.  They're cute.  It makes up for all the pain they put me through.




So this is the poem I wrote:

The illustration on the top is a sketched (and stretched) image of the Milky Way Galaxy to sort of go with that whole star-like, snow-like quality that is so much a part of Christmas.  




This is what the actual broadsides look like printed on the silver paper:  

You can actually read the poem a bit better on the photo (I think).  I'm pleased.  I think it's nice and I like the silver shimmer.  It really goes with the whole idea of the star hovering above everything in the poem plus its a nice tie-in with the image.  


So that's it.  My Christmas creation.  I feel good.  It was annoying, what with all the paper jams and smudges but I triumphed and now I can give them out and feel happy.  I rock.  

Christmas Broadside Production Begins

I went on a search for paper yesterday.  Snow cannot stand in the way of art.  Besides... the roads weren't even that bad.  Anyway... Eddie and I went to the local art store.  They had some beautiful packs of vellum but nothing I was really looking for.  They did have loose sheets of a papyrus-canvas like paper which was really nice but I panicked at the thought of spending $0.82 a sheet.  That means, if I'm making exactly ten broadsides (which I'm not), I would spend $8.20 and not have any paper left over in case I mess up.  There were some displays of specialty paper in the back but I was too afraid of messing the paper up to buy any of it.  From there, we entered the land of commercialism (i.e., Staples).  I found a pack of stationary that had a black design across the front and then the same pattern covering the back of the paper.  It was really cool but a bit flimsy for what I wanted.  Then Eddie noticed that they had a mix-and-match card section.  They had packs of A7 card stock that when folded in half would make a sheet 5" x 7" in size.  Eventually I decided to get two packs, one in ivory and one in silver so that way I have extras.  It came to around $8 but I can make over 30 broadsides with it.  I just printed the first broadside out and it's cute but not what I was looking for.  I have to rethink my idea.  That and I don't know how I feel about the poems I wrote for the broadside.  I ended up changing up the idea and just doing some lanturne poems but they just seem so cheesy.  Then again, Eddie said that I should write something happy for the sake of the holiday but it just feels like cheating.  I wrote an awesome poem last night but I think that the mention of Krampus Claus might throw some people off.  That and they'll probably ask who Krampus Claus is and I'll have to mention that he was the demonized Santa figure who kidnapped and killed children in terrible terrible ways and had a satchel of their bodies.  Good stuff.  But stuff they won't really like.  


Maybe I should just do an ode to winter's night.  Maybe throw in some references to the star and the shepherds, the great cold and the shivering bodies... I'm doing the dark thing again.  This is very hard for me.  But it's a challenge.  And I like a challenge.


Stay tuned for updates as I continue brainstorming for the rest of the morning.  

M.L.H.D.V. Otherwise Known as the Magical Levitating Hammer of Domestic Violence

I had a dream the other night about a levitating hammer.  I had magical powers and I made it float.  The man who was with me called it the Hammer of Domestic Violence and said it was more frightening than any gun.  I agreed.  People screamed and cringed when it came near them.  Personally, I thought it looked more like a crowbar but he said it was a hammer and I called it a hammer so that's what I'm sticking with.

Anyways... so have you guys heard about that new show on MTV called "Jersey Shore?"  It's about a bunch of people from New York who go to Seaside Heights in the summer and undergo a number of trials and tribulations, a la "Real World."  I didn't want to watch it because I don't do stereotypes but inevitably, I found myself sucked in.  It was terribly good in that blowing-your-mind-and-beating-the-hell-out-of-years-of-fine-literature kind of way.  In short?  It was addictive.

The most startling aspect of the show was a short clip showing one of the family characters getting punched in the face by a guy at the bar.  This is where the M.L.H.D.V. fits in.  Domestic violence is one of those things that I feel strongly about.  It's up there with animal cruelty and wearing fur.  In short, I think it's disgusting.  My initial reaction to seeing the clip was my jaw dropping open and a quick breath being drawn. 

Now, I am technically a Jersey girl.  I have lived in New Jersey since the ripe old age of about four months (I was born in New York).  My high school best friend even had a house down the shore that her family would go to during the summer months.  For about two weeks every summer, I was invited to travel down with them.  Seaside was always an interesting entity.  Even as young teenagers, we understood the status quo.  In the morning, it was comfy shorts and jeans, a breezy top, and hair pulled back.  We would spend hours walking around the boardwalk, accomplishing nothing, and then we would go back to her house in the late afternoon.  From there, it was just a quick wait until nightfall and then we would change into tops that were slightly more sexy, different pants, put some makeup on, and take our hair down.  We weren't old enough to even go near clubs so we just wandered up and down the boardwalk yet again.

Nightfall led to one thing.  In the daylight, sexually desirous men would simply call out "Hey Ladies.  Hello Girls.  Blah blah."  At night, they would follow us on the boardwalk and grab us.  In the span of about three or four years, I was grabbed countless times by men I would never have any interest in.  They would grab my arm and pull me over to them, try to get me to talk for a time until my best friend realized I was no longer beside her and turned back around.  Often, we would have to make up stories about our wrestler boyfriends to save us from the attention.

Being on that boardwalk was interpreted as our giving permission for men to act out.  Because we were dressed up, because we were simply two young girls, they could touch us when we didn't want it.  They could try to converse with us even though we had no interest.  And while standing there, we understood one main thing: We were afraid.

We were afraid for a variety of reasons: they were obviously stronger than us, although there were people around none seemed to look in our direction, they were strangers, we were young... As much as we thought otherwise, we had no idea about the sexualized nature of the area.  We were both inexperienced with the opposite sex.  We knew what they wanted but we were not at the point in our lives where we could offer them that willingly.

In a sense, we didn't realize that our actions were causing our situations.  We got dressed up because we saw everyone else get dressed up.  We allowed the men who grabbed us to have long conversations because that is what most women did.  We were so naive that we didn't understand the dynamics behind this mating ground we had stumbled onto.

Of course, Seaside Heights isn't the only area where people act in such a way.  When I was in England, a man working at the school advised my friends and I to stay away from the bars in the area because he had heard a number of stories about men visiting from other countries and hitting on the women in the bars.  When the women denied them, the men got upset and hit them.  Despite angering a number of people in my program, I refused to go to the bars after that.  The entire program would travel to the pubs after our evening readings were over and I stayed behind, safe in the computer lab or in my rooms, unwilling to put myself into such a situation.

These are the sorts of memories that that advertised clip brought back up.  Every woman has a right to defend herself.  We should be able to tell a man to stay away from us without having to be fearful that he will retaliate in some way that we cannot protect ourselves from.  The problem is that many men interpret our unwillingness to have anything to do with them as our way of emasculating them.  We deny them, and thus, society says that they are not really men anymore. 

This also leads to a dangerous and emotionally debilitating notion of only other men being able to protect us.  If we go to a bar, then we should have our boyfriends or good guy friends there to protect us from predators.  As society has turned more to the dominant male figure, we forget the notion of the ancient Goddess.  The Goddess was the ultimate warrior.  In Hinduism, the gods fought against the demons.  Unfortunately, it was written that no god would ever be able to conquer such evil.  So the goddess was born.  She was a slayer of demons.  She destroyed everything that the gods could not.  The goddess, Kali, was able to resurrect her husband from the dead.  The ancient Mesopotamian goddess, Tiamut, the primordial waters, created the earth and then attempted to destroy her own children.  The goddess, and in a sense, the woman, figure has always been meant to be a terrifying entity.  We are directly involved in birth.  Without the female, evolution cannot progress.  Ancient civilizations understood the need to revere women because they were such powerful forces.

Today's modern world has turned against that.  There is a sense of machismo that has spread over everything.  Men suddenly find their worth in dominating women.  That sense of reverence has vanished.  That is what the "Jersey Shore" seems to represent now.  It provides a microcosm of a society that we are coming to terms with, one where men forget a woman's worth and instead use her presence to validate their own existences.  They need to conquer women so that they can feel god-like.  Think of the story of Adam, Eve, and Lilith.  Lilith was damned and turned into a demon-figure because she refused to be lesser than Adam.  Eve was blessed because she allowed Adam to subdue her.  There is the idea of worshiping men, of being subservient.  It is a turn from feminism.  That punch shows just how farther feminism must go.

You Know What, Holiday Season? You Can Take Your Consumerist Point of View and Go Screw

As you can tell, I'm really getting into the holiday spirit.  I don't like Christmas.  Never have, never will.  Christmas stresses me.  I haven't started the books yet for my family.  Now I'm thinking about maybe just designing a really nice broadside for everyone.  I'm not sure.  I can even be super awesome and do a series of them and have people pick which image and poem they would rather have.  But we'll see.  I just ordered some books for Eddie as the last "purchased" part of his Christmas present.  I write that here freely because I think the last time he even bothered to look at my blog was a year ago when I started to yell, "Hey!  Go look at my blog!"  He's just not interested in the writing world.  I guess it's the same thing as if he had a plumbing blog.  It would be painful to read all those entries on why copper piping is better than PVC (I don't really know if that's the base at all... I just know that he always mentions copper piping and PVC... I do know that copper is probably more expensive though).

I'm going to make a series of broadsides for him for each of the 12 days of Christmas.  I used to write him poems all the time when we first started dating but then I moved in and the romance fizzled.  Or at least the poetic impulse to pen love poems.  I have a big thing of card stock and I'm going to write a poem to him and then add a picture of us and give him one every day.  In my head, I thought that the 12 days of Christmas actually began before Christmas but apparently I was wrong.  It actually runs from Christmas to January 6th, which makes sense since my mom used to celebrate big-time on January 6th in Cuba.  We tried doing the whole Three Kings Day thing once when I was younger but it was kind of, eh.  Whatever.

Anyway, yeah.  So I got Eddie the collection of Anne Rice's Lives of the Mayfair Witches because that was always one of his favorite book series and he was looking for the collection when we were at the bookstore the other day.  I do agree that they are good books.  I like her prose.  It's very ornate.  A little long, but it's kind of musical regardless.  I also bought The Time Machine, mostly because there's a quota for free shipping and I've never read the book and figured I should get it for the house.  We'll be better people because we read it.  Or at least I think so.

So that's where I am.  I have spent a great deal more on his presents than I had originally intended but I like buying gifts for him.  He always gets me things so I feel like Christmas gives me permission to return the favor.  Next year, we're just going to set a price limit and get each other a few small gifts.  It will be better that way.  As I write this, I realize that my hand is actually aching which I think could be a very bad thing.  I might be wrong but I'm pretty sure aching bones signifies a physical injury.  I think that I sleep on my hand.  That could have a lot to do with it.

Anyway, when I finish the broadsides, I'll post them so you can see what I came up with.  I'm kind of excited.  It'll be like little mini works of art.  I think I will attempt to make them Christmas themed but we'll see.  It would be very hard to not mention the dark origins of Christmas and how my family's favorite religion led to the slaughter of possibly millions of innocent people.  For some reason, they get a little cranky about the historic facts.  Still, that has never stopped me.  If someone were to write a book about me, I would be described as "incorrigible" because no matter how many times someone gives me the stink eye and the very ominous threat of "Alana Isabel..." (no one ever uses my full name unless I'm in trouble), I just don't stop.  Hence why my sister has suffered years of psychological trauma from all the ghost stories I would tell her combined with all the times I would very happily leap out of dark places screaming.  I think I even told her a story about an evil Santa once.  In retrospect, scaring her so often was kind of mean.  Ah, good times.  Merry Christmas. 



***UPDATE ***
I have looked at the calendar and determined that for my purposes, I will celebrate 24 days of Christmas (because I'm cool like that).  The 12 days of pre-Christmas will begin December 12 (I like the significance) and then I will ascribe to the traditional 12 days.  Which means that I have 24 day of Eddie-themed poems to get through, plus toning some pieces down so that my family can gush and smile and not comment with raised eyebrows over how emotionally damaged I am.  I tell them that I am creative and that life is not full of butterflies and rainbows and hopping bunny rabbits.  Well, actually, it is but there are also some dark parts.  Plus, I live with hopping bunny rabbits on a daily basis.  Don't let their adorable, fuzzy faces fool you... those little monsters are evil.

Whee! New Books!

Every year, Eddie asks me what I want for Christmas.  And every year, I do the same thing: make a list of all the books I've been pondering and hand it over.  And then I go to sleep the morning of December 25th knowing that all my new books are happily gift wrapped and waiting for me to open them in a few hours' time.  Sure it limits the surprise element but I hate being surprised.  I really hate waiting.  I don't enjoy anticipation.  Might be why I don't have the patience to shop around a book proposal for months on end.  Just don't have the stomach for it.

Anyways... I convinced Eddie to take his Christmas present early this year.  I got him a new digital camera because the one he had really sucked.  Every time you turned it on, the screen thought that the surrounding world was blue.  I do enjoy the color blue but not when everything has the same strange tint to it.  Long story short, he loved it and I know that this camera will have a long life taking photos of various subjects that find their ways onto book covers.  Yay for that.

Afterwards, we went Christmas shopping for our families.  We inevitably ended up at Barnes and Noble and I went around the story with Eddie following me, a stack of books in his arms as I selected and picked, selected and replaced.  In the end, I decided that the books I really wanted to read were only available online and the books that I happened to be eying would make me a very happy little writer.  So what did I get as my pre-Christmas gift?  Poet's Market and Novel and Short Story Market.  Why did I choose these?  Because frankly, I get sloppy when I'm submitting things.  I don't have the patience to spend all morning researching various sites and then spend the evening selecting pieces to send out.  I wanted someone to do the leg work for me.  Mostly because I'm lazy.  And because if someone can compile some information better than I can, what's the problem?  That and the books will motivate me to take the time and send some things out.  I always mean to and never get around to it. 

I was originally torn over what to get.  Should I get a big book of mythology or one of fairy tales?  I do have a lot of reference books just stacked up next to the couch.  I decided that in the end, I might as well just get the books that will help my writing career a bit.  The fun books are coming later.  I'm ready for them.  I'm already salivating... well, in my head.

I'm Back on Smashwords

You guys might remember that a few months ago, I attempted to join Smashwords.  It was a failed attempt.  Despite my numerous formatting edits, the damn book just wouldn't look like I wanted it to (We're talking about Hooks and Slaughterhouses).  I couldn't take it and said, see you later.  Well, yesterday I decided to try again with The Grave Eater.  I know I already had it on lulu.com but I've been trying to get all my stuff off for one big reason: Lulu has started charging a storage fee for ebooks.  So if I sell a book and set my price at $5, then $1.50 of that goes to the storage fee, then about 20% of the remaining price goes to Lulu for a distributor's fee, and then the rest goes to me.  All in all, I end up making a fraction of what I would make elsewhere.  Plus, you can only get the ebooks on Lulu.

What Smashwords is doing is absolutely awesome.  They're making the books available everywhere.  You can get them for pretty much every single ebook reader on the market.  And I want to be a part of it.  So I uploaded The Grave Eater and checked the pdf version this morning and smiled.  It looked perfect.  I realized that the problem with Hooks and Slaughterhouses was that since the book was poems in verse, the formatting would get lost.  Not cool.  So I'm going to go back into the file and just make some prose poems out of them.  Please be aware that all the books listed on this site will soon all be linked to a smashwords volume.  I'm excited.  I'm hoping that I'll be able to get some of the books to be listed with Sony, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon.  Then my family and friends can order with ease.  It'll be good stuff. 

I'm feeling positive.  Smashwords is definitely redefining the indie movement and I'm very okay with having my name be a part of it.  For the record, I'm not talking about from a financial state, although making money off my books would be awesome.  No, I just like to feel like I'm making my way through this world, one story at a time, and that if I make some money, I make some money, and if I don't, then oh well, because my book is still the best I could write at the time.  So I'm proud no matter what. 

I'll keep you all posted with further developments.

Christmas is Creeping Slowly Forward, Ready to Assault Our Sanity with Tinsel

If you're Hispanic like I am, Christmas is in only 20 days.  That's less than three weeks.  Crazy, right?  To be honest, I have never liked Christmas.  Even as a kid.  When asked what my favorite holiday was, I would always say Halloween.  That answer has not changed.  I still love Halloween. 

But still, given the fact that Christmas is still a big deal in my family and that I was raised Catholic, the holiday season is unavoidable.  I might have mentioned in a previous post that my gift this year will be some sort of book.  I had no idea what to write.  Should I write a series of funny haikus about the family?  Should I make a memento photo album?  What should I give that I could also offer to my father/stepmother and my future in-laws?  Questions, questions, questions.

Today, I decided that I will not make an item specifically with my family in mind.  Okay, well, I will be acknowledging them as my audience but I will not be freaking out.  Last year, my aunt gave us copies of different prints she had done and that was awesome.  Last year, I did a cook book.  It was something I had been meaning to do for everyone.  So I did it.  Awesome.  Done.  Never again.  I don't like to be cheesy.

So this year, I will be writing a longer short story and giving everyone a copy of the limited edition chapbook.  Sounds good, right?  The books will be cute and pocket-sized, about 1/4 of typical letter head paper.  Today, I did the first test run, just to see how I should put this together, since there's no easy way to instruct a print out of two copies of each page per computer print out.

Here's what I figured out:

1. First, I made a pdf of the document I want to print.  I labeled that, #1.

2. Then, I opened pdf #1 and printed it again as booklet printing.  That is then named, pdf #2.

3.  From there, I manually copied (adobe pdf has a screen selection option where you can just highlight what you want for the image capture) each page and pasted it into a blank document.  For each chapbook page, I put two copies to one document page.  So the first page will have what looks like four separate squares. 

4. I had to figure out the sizes for these copies.  I usually type using a A5 paper size but for these purposes, I simply divided an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet in two.  The dimensions are then 4.25 x 5.5.  That will evenly fit two copies of each chapbook page.

5. From there, just print it out.  Since the pages are already in booklet printing, you don't have to do anything other than a straight print.  Yeah, the first couple of steps are a pain in the ass but once those are done, that's it. 

Here's a layout of how the document pages will end up looking if you're doing an 8 page chapbook:

Pardon the not so great graphics.  I originally did this by hand and just quickly did it again on the computer for illustration purposes.

Also, if you're going to do your own holiday chapbook, remember that this will only really work if your book has pages in multiples of four (4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 28, 32, 36...etc).  A chapbook is usually less than 48 pages and I really wouldn't recommend doing this method if you have more than say, 16 pages.  Then it might get a little tedious. 

I'm planning on mine having either 8 or 12 pages.  Usually, I start my chapbooks out on page 5 but for the purposes of such a short book, I'll probably start on page 3 just so that I can have the most amount of space.  The first inside page (page 2) will have copyright information and any other cutesy stuff you want.  A dedication, acknowledgments, the world is your oyster.

Next time I do chapbooks for sale, I'm going to make a quick version and then just go to Staples to print it out.  It'll be a lot faster.  I might do that with this one as well but I'm not sure.  The only thing I can guarantee that I will be printing out at home is the covers because I have card stock specifically for them and they need to be in color.  Actually, the paper I have is cover stock, which is slightly thinner than card stock but I got a pack of 100 sheets for about $5 so I can't complain. 

I'm going to be hand-sewing the bindings and then maybe decorating the edges with some ribbon or something.  It depends on what the cover image ends up being.  I haven't even planned what the content will be yet so I have no idea.  I know it can't really be anything too grotesque because my family is slightly afraid of my creative mind but at the same time, I can't have it be anything so lame that I'm ashamed to admit that it's my creation.  I might tell a dark fairy tale or something, minus the cannibal and incest references (although those are always fun).  Maybe I'll try to tell a fairy tale like the ones I've been reading.  Edgy but still palatable. 

Once the book is done and given out, I'll post a free version of it here so that you can all check it out.  I'm generous like that.  Besides... doing this stuff is a labor of love, not capitalism.

In other news, I made carrot falafel last night.  It was wonderful.  The trick is to use garbanzo bean flour instead of actual beans.  The beans make the mixture too chunky.  The flour holds everything together just right.  Plus, 1/4 cup only has about 100 calories and I use a 1/2 cup for each batch, making it some of the healthiest falafel every.  I did fry it but that's okay.  It makes up for the fact that I am literally ingesting only chickpeas and carrots.  I spice it up with some curry powder because that has every spice I need in the recipe.

So that's that.  Please be advised that there will be some photographs in the coming days as I come up with the book itself and get Eddie to travel up the hill to Staples with me.  As long as those printers are able to do double-sided copies, we're in business.  If not, we need to buy a new print cartridge anyway.  The ink never lasts long enough.