😄SMOKIN' HOT SHOWGIRLS do the Crowd Wave with their LEGS!😄

So this, which I worked on for hours, got TEN views. I'd give up, but somehow after 13 years and 20,500+ subs, I find that hard to do.

WHY is this happening? Why are my subs rising by 300+ per month, but no one is watching? Ten views, when the Motormouth thing, which I threw together in ten minutes, has 14 MILLION.

Really, I give up, except I can't. I just had to keep trudging forward, but it does seem like everything I've built up since 2011 (over 3 THOUSAND videos) is just going down the toilet due to people's indifference. 

Is there a way ahead? I guess I will find out, yes or no. But it galls me that so many channels with 3000 subs or less are getting tens of thousands of views, while my stuff just falls into the gutter.

Nothing ever happens: or, my first psych nurse

Some days you may ask: why am I seldom writing long, in-depth  pieces about a particular topic of burning interest? Why instead do I resort to gifs, little videos, wacky things, etc.?
Because I have, literally or figuratively speaking, had it.

I've just had it.

Had it with trying to be A Writer and make Sales. Had it with internet popularity, followers, likes, views. Had it with  high school redux and that awkward feeling surging up my neck like a conspicuous red blush.

Had it with competition.  Of any kind. Want to just go walk in the woods,and probably will. Don't want to think about the past and all the things that sucked, and all the things that were beautiful, because all of it is over and both are gone forever. Want to dwell in Now exclusively.

Not good at this, but am practicing.

I DO look back at writing three novels after literally decades of effort, and selling nineteen copies and getting the best reviews in the world, or no reviews. So I have quit.

Quit all that effort. I am now Loose. Free. Not to be branded or categorized.

I tell myself pain is part of life, that it's all about letting go, then I think: ah, screw it, I'm NEVER letting go. Holding on is what I have learned to do all my life. Don't tell me to surrender the one thing I'm good at.

So  this is why you don't find a lot of in-depth writing from me any more. It was killing me. Don't be a writer, it will kill you unless you win the popularity lottery, and I almost guarantee you you won't.  Unless the genetics are just right, or the phase of the moon.

That desperate time of year

Artists struggle to survive in age of the blockbuster

RUSSELL SMITH

Special to The Globe and Mail

Published Thursday, Nov. 28 2013, 5:00 PM EST

In the artistic economy, the Internet has not lived up to its hype. For years, the cybergurus liked to tell us about the “long tail” – the rise of niches, “unlimited variety for unique tastes” – that would give equal opportunities to tiny indie bands and Hollywood movies. People selling products of any kind would, in the new connected world, be able to sell small amounts to lots of small groups. Implicit in the idea was the promise that since niche tastes would form online communities not limited by national boundaries, a niche product might find a large international audience without traditional kinds of promotion in its home country. People in publishing bought this, too. The end result, we were told, would be an extremely diverse cultural world in which the lesbian vampire novel would be just as widely discussed as the Prairie short story and the memoir in tweets.

In fact, the blockbuster artistic product is dominating cultural consumption as at no other time in history. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on each successive Hunger Games, and the rep cinemas have closed. A few sports stars are paid more individually than entire publishing houses or record labels earn in a year.

A couple of prominent commentators have made this argument recently about American culture at large. The musician David Byrne lamented, in a book of essays, that his recent albums would once have been considered modest successes but now no longer earn him enough to sustain his musical project. That’s David Byrne – he’s a great and famous artist. Just no Lady Gaga. The book Blockbusters: Hit-making, Risk-taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment, by business writer Anita Elberse, argues that the days of the long tail are over in the United States. It makes more sense, she claims, for entertainment giants to plow as much money as they can into guaranteed hits than to cultivate new talent. “Because people are inherently social,” she writes cheerily, “they generally find value in reading the same books and watching the same television shows and movies that others do.”

Well, the same appears to be true of publishing, even in this country. There are big winners and there are losers – the middle ground is eroding. Publishers are publishing less, not more. Everybody awaits the fall’s big literary-prize nominations with a make-us-or-break-us terror. Every second-tier author spends an hour every day in the dismal abjection of self-promotion – on Facebook, to an audience of 50 fellow authors who couldn’t care less who just got a nice review in the Raccoonville Sentinel. This practice sells absolutely no books; increases one’s “profile” by not one centimetre; and serves only to increase one’s humiliation at not being in the first tier, where one doesn’t have to do that.

Novelists have been complaining, privately at least, about the new castes in the literary hierarchy. This happens every year now, in the fall, the uneasiness – after the brief spurt of media attention that goes to the nominees and winners of the three major Canadian literary prizes, the Scotiabank Giller, the Governor-General’s, and the Rogers Writers’ Trust. The argument is that the prizes enable the media to single out a few books for promotion, and no other books get to cross the divide into public consciousness. And, say the spurned writers, this fact guides the publishers in their acquisitions. Editors stand accused of seeking out possible prize-winners (i.e. “big books”) rather than indulging their own tastes. This leads, it is said, to a homogenized literary landscape and no place at all for the weird and uncategorizable.

But even if this is true, what can one possibly do about it? Abolish the prizes? No one would suggest this – and even the critics of prize culture understand that the prizes were created by genuine lovers of literature with nothing but the best intentions, and that rewarding good writers financially is good, even necessary, in a small country without a huge market.

It’s not, I think, the fault of the literary prizes that the caste system exists. Nor of the vilified “media” who must cover these major events. It’s the lack of other venues for the discussion and promotion of books that closes down the options. There were, in the nineties, several Canadian television programs on the arts. There were even whole TV shows about books alone. Not one of these remains. There were radio shows that novel-readers listened to. There were budgets for book tours; there were hotel rooms in Waterloo and Moncton. In every year that I myself have published a book there have been fewer invitations and less travel. Now, winning a prize is really one’s only shot at reaching a national level of awareness.

So again, what is to be done? What does any artist do in the age of the blockbuster? Nothing, absolutely nothing, except keep on doing what you like to do. Global economic changes are not your problem (and are nothing you can change with a despairing tweet). Think instead, as you always have, about whether or not you like semicolons and how to describe the black winter sky. There is something romantic about being underground, no?

Look on the bright side: Poverty can be good for art. At least it won’t inspire you to write Fifty Shades of Grey.

BLOGGER'S NOTE. I reran this piece from last year because it's awards season, or rather the season when book award shortlists are announced. In spite of all my most florid fantasies, I'm not on any of them. I'm not even "midlist" as Smith describes here, but sort of "non-list". I've deleted a few posts that were near-suicidal in their despair at my near-total failure as a writer. That's the way it is, folks.

An award is the only way out, it seems, but it's not a way that's going to work for me. I have come to the end of this and won't publish again - it's bad for my health and ruinous for my love of life. It was an experiment that failed, three times. See, I learn hard.

But I do learn.

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

Amazon.ca
http://www.amazon.ca/Glass-Character-Margaret-Gunning/dp/1927068886/ref=sr_1_1?

The ravell'd sleeve of care

I can get addicted to almost anything. Mad Men. Caramel corn. Three Stooges videos. All kinds of good stuff. The knitting addiction started early, and has flowed in and out of my life like the tides.

I probably started around age 8 or 10, when "someone" taught me: either my mother, or Mrs. McAigie (don't know how to spell it), a dour old Scottish lady who sometimes looked after us and checked for sore throats using the ornate, grape-carved handle of a sterling silver fork. I remember her saying, "Always knit into the back of the stitch," which I know now is completely wrong.

In spite of all that, I learned. The first big spate of knitting came when my kids were born. I didn't care much about the quality, and they didn't either, but I did turn out some nice stuff: a Scandinavian cardigan in coral, mint and turquoise for my daughter; a pullover knitted side to side for my son. They weren't embarrassed to wear these in public. Oh, maybe they peeled them off when they got to school.

It's a little different story now. Certain family members, who shall remain nameless, don't like my knitting any more and have pronounced it "gross", so I try to avoid making those little sweaters. I've made "blankies" for each kid, probably eight of them by now because they keep wearing them out. I swear, a kid should not have a blankie at age seven.

But what do I have to say about it?

Every once in a while I try to knit something for myself. I remember early attempts, and even see some of them in old photos, and they're not bad, or at least wearable. In the interim, something happened. I just can't do it any more, and I can't quit either. I either give the thing away because it's too big or too small, unravel it and recycle the yarn, or if it's really hideous, toss it in the trash, wasting expensive materials.

So. Having run out of projects, and by now totally, deeply addicted to the hypnotic rhythms of the activity, I decided to take on a cableknit sweater, probably the hardest thing of all because you have to pay so much attention to what you're doing. So if I have my Mad Men DVDs on, I can't fully take in Jon Hamm's breathtaking gorgeousness when in bed with some skank that could be me.

I was totally seduced by the picture, of course. I'll never look like that, for God's sake. And as usual, the color I chose, a sort of caramelly light tan called Heather, now looks green. Store lighting is totally misleading.

Cableknit has such cabalistic instructons as C4F (slip next 2 stitches onto cable needle and leave at front of work. K2, then K2 from cable needle), T3B, T3F, C6F, etc. etc. Sounds like half a postal code to me.

I have to follow a little chart, pictured above. You probably can't understand it, and neither can I. It's hard to stay in step with this thing. It's like an elaborate dance (and I can't dance). Miss a beat, and the whole thing falls apart.

Kind of like life.

Is this why I'm so hopeless at making things for myself? When (I think) I've done an OK job making stuff for other people, even designing patterns for 8 different blankies? I keep trying, too, which I know I shouldn't. Some fatalistic part of me says, hey, face facts. It'll never happen because you're outside the club, always have been, and always will be.

A horrible thought came into my head not long ago, a real soul-killer. I had this realization that sooner or later, probably sooner, the grandkids will see through me (and thus, inevitably, stop loving me). But that wasn't the horrible thought.

The horrible thought was, "By the time they see through me, I'll be dead anyway."

These are the dark things that stir at the bottom of my brain.

I'm reading Furious Love, all about the tempestuous relationship between La Liz and Le Dick (aptly named). Richard Burton apparently harbored a deep self-loathing that drove him to alcohol (his true love). At the end of his life, after a fragile period of sobriety, he went on a bender, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, and died at 58.

Almost my age.

I'm not going to drink! I'm not. I don't even know where all this is coming from. I'm having a better week, I really am. I'm not so hopeless about the work.

But I'm gaining back the lovely weight I lost, and finding I can't get into all those lovely new clothes that I spent all that money on. I wonder why I have it in for myself like this. (Maybe that explains why I love the Hopkins poem about Margaret, To a Young Child: "And yet you will weep, and know why.")

So I knit. I try to knit up the ravell'd sleeve of care (speaking of Shakespearean actors. Did you know: my maiden name is Burton?). I try to make something out of nothing. Isn't that what writing is all about? What gives us the right? Who do we think we are?

All the stuff I hear about on blogs and message boards now talks about how nearly impossible it is to get anywhere, to get published, even if you've already been published many times. Some wise souls give up. I don't.

Good? Bad? Indifferent?

I may not be cut out for success, no matter how hard I try. And I've been told, repeatedly, that I have the goods, I have the talent. Some folks just aren't cut out.

Or perhaps they are.

**********************************************

POST-SCRIPT. Since the above post, I discovered some things that bugged me in the 9 or 10" I'd already completed on the sweater. I hummed and hawed about it, thought about backtracking and undoing the worst of it, decided I needed a new color and went to take the yarn back, changed my mind, came home and thought about it, then, ruthlessly, ripped the whole thing out and started all over again.

This may well be a metaphor for my life.

This is my LIFE

All right, this whole story is stupid, isn't even a story. So I'm sitting here in a ratty nightgown at 12:43 because a "little job" I thought would take five minutes took four and a half hours, give or take two or three.

I don't know why this crap makes me want to commit suicide. Maybe it's the futility, the utter loss of control, the totally pointless sweat and effort that yields exactly nothing.

I was digging out flannel sheets for the winter, and noticed what a pile of garbage my linen closet is. It's a war in there. I can never find what I want because of all the irrelevant sheets, some of which seem to go back to 1966. There are holes in things, rips in sheets I really liked. Others are magnificent, obviously never used (but those are the ones I can never find, or else they're just too nice to use). There are also old tablecloths, maybe used once at someone's wedding, old partial bath mats (the kind that fit around the toilet - asinine!), decaying shower curtains, a flannel fitted sheet for a playpen (the kid is now seven), and etc. etc. Crap, crap, crap, with the stuff I do want completely buried.

At first I started trying to, you know, straighten up. Just - put this over here, and that over there, and - . As I progressed, or didn't progress, the job got steadily bigger and bigger. There were whole shelves of towels involved (some of which went back to 1963), and a shelf of pillows of various vintage. And cartoon sheets for the kiddies' sleepovers, Dora the Explorer and Thomas the Tank Engine. Or partial sets. You can't put a Dora top with a Thomas bottom (in fact, it sounds alarming). Quivering with fury, I grabbed and pulled out every item on every shelf, dumped it onto the floor and vowed to go through everything item by item. It would only take a few minutes.

Then why do I smell so bad? I smell so bad because the whole thing took so BLOODY LONG, and didn't yield the results I wanted at all.

My sheet inventory was as follows.

One Dora sheet, not fitted.
One Thomas pillow case, with some kind of stain on it, can't think what, could be blood.
One set of twin sheets for the spare bed (which my husband regularly sleeps in when I snore). Hideous color, made in Bangladesh.
One spare set of sheets for our queen bed, very old, with those corners that pop off.
SEVEN SETS OF DOUBLE SHEETS. Double sheets. I couldn't even think about how long ago we had a double bed. Then I realized we bought a pullout years ago, what, seven or eight? It has been slept in maybe twice, three times. So yes, oh, surely, truly, goddam YEAH, YEAH, like we really needed seven sets of double bed sheets!!

OK, it was four, but still. It just defies logic. I never bought those sheets. I never. They must've been spawned by all those other sheets writhing around in there in the dark. It got worse. I kept finding those stupid toilet lid covers and finally put one on my head like a beret. I wanted to flush the sheets down the toilet. I couldn't find my favorite pillow cases - well, I found one, but it was a set, see, given to me by my best friend, nice big queen-size pillow cases, the kind you can never find anywhere, sunny yellow, with pictures of violins hand-embroidered on them.

What the crap happened to the other pillowcase? I want it back I want it back Iwantitback.

Mostly, I want my morning back, and I'll never get it. My life is ebbing away. I can't afford this shit any more. Nobody sleeps in a double bed, it's just not done. Everybody's too fat now. I won't tolerate indelible menstrual stains on my best sheets because I'm eight years past menopause. It's disgusting. From now on, I will sleep suspended in the air 4" above the sheets. Or on the ground outside.

************************************************
POSTSCRIPT. I did find the yellow pillowcase. It was in the wash. But there are still things missing. I broke down and bought a queen set at Zellers for 20 bucks, and now that I've washed them I realize they're the nicest set I own. I want to go back and buy more, more, more, but the thing is, now that I've cobbled together a reasonable variety that sort of match, I don't really need any more. But some day I will need sheets, and say to myself, why do I have to pay $85 for sheets that I could have had for $20?