Tag: Mother’s Day

In which I approve of motherhood

On By Luther M. SilerIn Writing1 Comment

Big thumbs up to all the moms out there.  Please continue to, as they say, do you.  Or not, if you’d prefer otherwise.

xfy9qj9cheppk0yhxf8t.gifMy brother and his fiancee are in town for the holiday, and we got together yesterday to go over details for the ceremony, which I’m officiating– totally a bucket list item checked off there.  I am currently on my fourth draft of the benediction, and by “fourth draft” I mean I have written three entirely different speeches and rejected all of them, including one that was nearly entirely references to movies and TV shows and songs that I mostly wrote to get it out of my system.  My own proclivities as a writer are sort of working against me here; I do sincerity best when seasoned with anger and outrage, and… well, that’s not entirely appropriate to standing in front of a roomful of a couple hundred friends and family and the occasional random stranger and marrying my brother off.  I need to do genuine sincerity here, and sincerity about life and love and a whole lot of other things that my Midwestern sensibilities make me occasionally reticent about speaking of in front of other people, and I need to do it without using the word “bullshit” or saying “labia” even once because that will scandalize people and apparently the officiant at a wedding isn’t supposed to do that.

There were meow jokes in one of the drafts.  This is the level I’ve descended to.  You can see there is still some work to be done.

Maybe one meow.

On the other hand, I managed to work a Princess Bride reference into the ceremony itself, so I probably ought not to press my luck any further.

Now turn the computer off and go hug your mom.  Or the nearest available mom surrogate.

So this is sorta fun

On By Luther M. SilerIn Writing4 Comments

rusnrd6jsjs4njnofritA couple of observations:

  • Releasing a book on the Saturday before Mother’s Day probably wasn’t the smartest marketing move I ever made in my life.  I went through the whole registration process on Amazon thinking that at some point it was going to have me pick a release date for the book to go live and then it became clear that “Okay, you’re published!” was the only option I had left.  Because I have no patience (and had already said, a whole bunch of times, “This weekend!”) I went ahead and did it.  Whee!
  • It’s an incredibly heady feeling seeing something you did available on a site like that.  Granted, self-publishing ebooks are kinda Amazon’s ghetto, but it’s still real estate.
  • That was a crappy metaphor.
  • Current sales rank is #43,315.  Which isn’t very high, until you realize that there are a  few million books on the site.  It gets me wondering how high I’d climb in the rankings after, say, a couple dozen sales.
  • There are over 2600 of you, supposedly; read between the lines.  🙂
  • One scary thing that happened:  I got an email from Amazon pretty promptly saying that there was content from my book available free on the Web and that I needed to reconfirm they owned the rights or they’d delete the book.  And my account.  Which: yikes.  That said, going through their process and pointing out in an email that the website that was hosting the free content was also linked from the back of the ebook got me a polite email from what appeared to be a human this morning confirming that everything was fine, so I’m gonna go with “I appreciate this service” even though it nearly gave me a heart attack.
  • That said, I’ve pulled the first-draft version of BA 5 from the site, both to avoid future potential Amazon drama and because I made some pretty massive revisions in the actual ebook and don’t want both versions floating around.  You can still read the first BA story using the “Look Inside” feature if you like.
  • Happy Mother’s Day, if you’re into that.  🙂  I’m making breakfast for folks soon so I won’t be able to babysit the internet as much as I really want to today.
  • Who am I kidding, of course I will.
  • I have an author page over there now, which actually publishes bits from Twitter and from the blog through RSS.  I am not convinced of the wisdom of allowing them to do this but it’s active at the moment.
  • On the non-book front: Kosovo, what’s your deal?   I’ve been chasing hits from you for like three months and you’re starting to hurt my feelings.  I got two hits from Libya this week, ferchrissakes.  Does Libya have better internets than Kosovo?
  • Also, I’m thinking of buying a Rams jersey.  I don’t have a favorite pro football team so I might as well be political about it.