"WOW!" Response to yesterday's post

As a followup to yesterday's lament, which was originally posted on Facebook,  I received a heartwarming outpouring of support from my fellow writers, many of whom aren't even on my friend list.  Some of the longer comments say "see more", so they aren't complete, but you get the idea. I had no idea ANYONE would respond to this. It's that "I'm all alone in this" thing, which it turns out I am not. I have  copied and pasted these without changing the format, as quite often you get nothing but one solid block of text. This is one of the longer things I have ever posted, but it's important to me that it be put up here to balance yesterday's lament. I also had a chance to tell some writers how I felt about them and their work. I didn't do the usual thing and intersperse photos (as I've always felt big blocks of text are hard to get through). But here are the comments, not quite complete. As Christopher Walken would say: "Wow."

·        Ruth Hill I am wondering why he is bent on criticising you instead of encouraging you. I also do not believe popularity is any measure of the quality of the creative endeavor. I am hoping you can ditch the grouch and surround yourself with

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Margaret Gunning I think writers have a tough enough time trying to deal with editors, critics, etc. without getting it from their fellow writers. It's too bad. But his opinion doesn't carry much (if any) weight with me.

Vera Ingrid Tarman Ruth Hill well said!

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Amber Hayward A real writer doesn't write so that their words will not be heard, a real writer aims to communicate. Otherwise we could stow it all away in closets and feel we accomplished enough. Good grief!

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Margaret Gunning I keep thinking: humans became human when they began to communicate with words. And that began with everyone sitting around the fire in a circle listening to the the Storyteller, mesmerizing everyone with the tale of. . . Oh, wait - take away that circle! A storyteller isn't a storyteller if they need THAT crap.

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Lori Hahnel You don’t need a jackass like that in your life.

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Margaret Gunning Well, he's blocked. It was kind of a shock to receive a tirade like that. And he wanted me to re-title my novel Glass Girl. The novel is about silent film comedian Harold Lloyd. But "girl" was a sort of buzzword in titles a couple of years ago. . . I don't know, everybody's an expert, I guess. (But you're right.)

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Lori Hahnel Good for you for blocking him. What a weirdo.

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Catharine Clark-Sayles This person is not a friend

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Margaret Gunning No, he's not. Not even in a Facebook sense.

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Luanne Armstrong Sounds like a good subject and an interesting topic from you

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Bruce Meyer Hey, you have a right to care. Everyone who is a professional and wants to be recognized has a right to their own barometer for success. Keep writing. Books don’t go away and many begin to sell long after the fact. Austin Clarke felt the same way you d…See More

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Margaret Gunning I'm still hoping for the movie deal! And I still keep writing, this "thing" I work on late at night. . . I don't think I'll ever show it to anyone. But you never know.

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MJ Cates Wanting your work to be read by as many people as possible is not nearly the same as wanting to own a private jet and four houses. Many great writers lamented their lack of sales/recognition (Keats, for example), and your analogy to making something yo…See More

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Margaret Gunning Thank you so much! I posted this because I was trying to come to terms with what happened and, frankly, not get too hurt by it, though it hurt anyway because I used to think this guy was an ally, if not a friend. But his naivete (or perhaps ignorance) …See More

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MJ Cates I mentioned your post to a highly regarded novelist today and he was as offended by your friend's comment as I was.

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Margaret Gunning MJ Cates I almost wish I had kept it, but I blocked him to protect my feelings. It was just jaw-dropping. I have no idea why he'd do this to me, as a fellow writer. To say I wasn't a writer and have never been a writer. Hmmm, I kept a diary from age eight because I felt like nothing had really happened in my life until I had written it down.

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Natalee Caple That is garbage and abusive -- real writers are not all the same and this is just a way of asserting power for the jerk who wrote that. Writers care about reception -- otherwise they would not publish.

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Margaret Gunning Thank you so much, Natalee. Though I seldom comment, I follow your page daily because I admire your sensitivity and honesty and can see that all writers are "up against it" in many ways, including ways which never came to light before. Yes, this guy is a bully, and though he more-or-less behaved himself before and seemed supportive, there was an agenda. I blocked him immediately.

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Natalee Caple Good, that was a set up for more abuse -- I am glad you asserted your boundaries.

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Patricia Robertson Facebook can be hazardous. As a professional writer, I write for money, an audience and attention. We write to communicate. We need readers to complete that circle. Book sales are driven by timing, subject matter, marketing budgets, PR efforts and the …See More

                                                       

Margaret Gunning I think his comments reflected a kind of purist attitude of "art before everything" (when I know very well he's just as interested in recognition as most other writers). I found this article (link below) many years ago and bookmarked it. It spoke to me and at least made me feel better. I …See More

THEGLOBEANDMAIL.COM

Artists struggle to survive in age…

Artists struggle to survive in age of the blockbuster

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Margaret Gunning I don't agree with everything he says, but it's true that writers feel they have to shoulder the entire burden of the shifting global economy and the way it rules book sales, and who becomes a "best-seller" or even a "seller" at all. There used to be s…See More

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Patricia Robertson Margaret Gunning and Ian Brown's show, too. I remember Gzowski's great interview style. Readers and writers still need to find each other. I'm not sure that poverty is good for your art as Smith concludes. I'd rather have my bills paid so I can focus on my writing. But much of what he asserts about the shifting tides in the industry is bang on.

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Margaret Gunning I think he was being ironic! I just realized Gzowski extensively interviewed Elly Danica, the author of an incredible book called "Don't: A Woman's Word". This was in ***1988*** and he gave it his full attention, and also extensively wrote about the au…See More

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Patricia Robertson Margaret Gunning I remember that book. It was ground-breaking and controversial back in '88 when I was enrolled in Women's Studies at York it generated a lot of classroom discussion. Elly Danica stands out from the period for me, too. Gusty.

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Patricia Robertson "I was interviewed by Peter Gzowski for CBC’s Morningside Show in 1988 after the publication of Don’t: A Woman’s Word. Peter won an ACTRA award for this interview, which was produced by Hal Wake." from Danica's website

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Margaret Gunning Patricia Robertson She was, and is, extraordinary. Women weren't speaking out then, and when they did, lo and behold, it spawned a new corporate entity: the False Memory Syndrome Association (FMSA for short). I say "corporate" because it was highly org…See More

                                

MH Pilk I've gotten up every single day for 19 yrs and cooked breakfast for my kids, made their lunches for both school and home, and cooked dinner. I'm a mom. It's what I do. But if I found that every single day they were scraping it in the trash and walking …See More

                                                       

Margaret Gunning I am loving this conversation! I felt so alone in this.

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Jerry Levy Hey Margaret. I don’t know you other than that we both published with Thistledown. And I rarely post anything on FB. But your post made me write something. I just want to tell you that you have an amazing track record as a published writer. Think about…See More

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Margaret Gunning It took me literally decades to get the first deal, after which I assumed I was on easy street. My first publisher, whom I really liked by the way, and treated me well, told me two things: I had gotten more reviews/more positive reviews than they had …See More

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Jerry Levy So hard to get a book deal. That means only one thing - publishers love your work. You should be incredibly proud of yourself. Not everyone can be a NY Times best seller but likewise, not everyone can write and publish novels. So continue writing, you’re obviously a very, very good writer. And ignore the naysayers (they just might be jealous of your talent)

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Luanne Armstrong It is bloody hard to be a Canadian writer. It's very much a popularity contest. I think frankly that almost every writer in Canada feels left out and ignored much of the time. The great thing is that despite this, we have so many great writers doing an amazing job.

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Margaret Gunning I think you guys may have just saved my life!

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Luanne Armstrong Good for you, Margaret, now I am going to look up your work and maybe order some books. It's also hard when we have small publishers ( mine is Caitlin) and depend on their writers to do all the PR. I am not well enough to run around and do that. So, not much more I can do...

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Margaret Gunning Would you like the link to my Amazon author page? It lists all the novels, publishers, etc. Well, here it is!https://www.amazon.com/Margaret-Gunning/e/B001K7NGDA

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Margaret Gunning Luanne Armstrong I think at least one of my novels has been pulped - maybe the first two - because they weren't selling and the publisher didn't have warehouse space for them, so they were destroyed. But there may be a few copies left, and I think Amazon has a few.

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Luanne Armstrong ok -- I'm gonna read up on you anyway. We can complain to each other. I'm fine with that. I don't think there are any real rules on FB yet. There should be. It should be subject to libel and slander and hate speech rules like any other publications. And why people are so rude, I just don't know.

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Sue Reynolds I'm so sorry you had that experience Margaret. When someone tells us how we "should" feel about ANYTHING that complete invalidates the experience we're having. You didn't need to have more shit heaped on top of the way you were already feeling. I'm sorry you're struggling right now.

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Margaret Gunning Oh I don't know, this turned out to be a pretty good day after all! It's the first time I've felt this supported on FB. I appreciate all of it. You make yourself vulnerable when you expose feelings of failure or disappointment in the reception of your work. I find a lot of social media in general is "sunny side up", and that's not of much help.

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Sue Reynolds Well that's making lemonade! Happy to hear of your resilience

                                                   

Margaret Gunning Sue Reynolds A lot of it is age, I think. Being a senior has its points. The pension cheque is great!

Is that what good friends do?

This hasn't been the best day. I guess I broke a cardinal rule by posting a comment on Facebook about how disappointed I was that none of my novels sold very well. A former longtime friend (it was Matt Paust, you read it here first!) then ripped into me and said, "Then you're not really a writer, and you never really were a writer. A REAL writer doesn't give a shit about how many books he sells and being famous and sucking up to the critics and getting rich off it. A REAL writer writes no matter what" (which, by the way, I actually do, even if I'm not sending it out as much). 

He then went on to seriously claim that if I had taken his suggestion for a title change for The Glass Character (including the word "girl", because a lot of novels had the word "girl" in the title then), it would have been a success. He even suggested, after it had already been published, that I change the title and just go to another publisher and ask them to re-publish it under the new title. Ummm. Matt. That doesn't happen.

I think this guy has some aggression problems, and at one point broke off his compulsive commenting on this blog because I wasn't doing the same thing on HIS blog. I don't see comments or reviews as a tit-for-tat thing, but that seems to be how the game is played now. Authors even agree to post five-star reviews for each other, never having read the books. It happens all the time, in fact, it's standard now. As a thirty-year veteran of actual book reviewing, I have a little bit of a problem with that. That's not reviewing the book, it's barter, and I'm not going to get involved in it.

I know something about this guy, he's a white American retiree who lives in Virginia and was a newspaperman way back when, and is volatile and prone to explosions, but I never thought he'd start blasting me publicly for no good reason I can see. Being told I'm not a writer and never was a writer is kind of like saying, "Hey, you don't have Type O positive blood at all! It's RH negative. You don't deserve to be Type O positive because you just want to be famous." Wha - ??

If he knew anything at all about me, which after all these years he clearly doesn't, he would know that the written word always was, and ever shall be, not just an activity but my ground of being. As for being famous, I see what fame does to people and I can certainly live without it. But it's painful to me to realize that you can spend literally years of your life crafting and pouring your soul into a novel that even gets good reviews, then have it sell so poorly that no publisher will ever want to deal with you again. It's like having nobody come to the party. It hurts. If you have a literary reputation at all, it will soon fade into a ghost.

Personally, I see nothing wrong with seeing publishing as a business, and writers wanting to be successful at it, and even - if they can - make a partial living at it. Very few can live solely off their sales. Awards go down OK, too, though it's taboo to say you want or (worse) deserve one. But publishers can't live on air any more than authors can. 

In my comment I used an analogy of putting time and love and effort into preparing a sumptuous feast, then having nobody show up to eat it. But if you care about THAT, then you're not a real chef, and you never WERE a real chef. What happens to the food after you cook it and lay it out on the table is completely irrelevant. 

It'd be nice if we could just not give a rip (or pretend not to, which is what Matt is doing) and write only for ourselves - and while I'm writing a novel, I am completely absorbed in the work. But then comes another process, which I think is the next step towards having somebody actually READ what you've written, and we should not be treated like whores or "not really writers" or denigrated in any way because we need to pay the bills, or at least have the gratification of communicating something to another human being. 

I knew this would be a touchy subject because it seems absolutely taboo, and I almost never see anyone write about it (and now I see why - people would rather not be publicly gutted on a Wednesday afternoon). But I didn't expect a merciless tirade from someone who used to support me. By the way, this same Matt Paust featured my third novel in a blog post called "Friday's Forgotten Books", and was puzzled that it upset me to hear my novel described that way.

In some weird way, he seemed to want some  sort of control over it. He wanted me to call it Glass Girl, and if I had called it Glass Girl, which is an utterly nonsensical title, he said it would've been a great success and gotten me a movie deal. By then, "girl" titles had already fallen out of fashion due to lameness, not to mention sheer glut.  But if I care about my title or any of the rest of it, I'm "not really a writer and never  was really a writer". (Kind of a double message, wouldn't you say? Or just hypocrisy.)  I feel like that poor sap in the old TV show Branded, getting all his  stripes ripped off one by one and pushed out into the wilderness, while the doomy-sounding drums played behind him.

Someone I know has suggested jealousy as his motivation. Could be. I am not saying this to be unkind, but as a writer, he's just not terribly good. He asked me to review a book of his (self-published) short stories, and it was awkward, because they weren't really short stories - mostly a lot of rambling and crude jokes. ONE story stood out as completely memorable. If only he could have done more of those! His father forced him to learn how to hunt (this was the U. S. South, after all) and shoot a rifle, and he shot a rabbit.  While they were eating it for supper that night, he bit down on a piece of buckshot. So I tried to focus on that one powerful story and gloss over the rest.  He had already left an effusive review of The Glass Character on my Amazon page, so obviously there was a  sense of obligation to him (which is NOT the same thing as writers being supportive of each other). But I just can't bring myself to play that "one hand washes the other" thing. 

Meantime, though I've tried to hold the hurt away from me, I'm not doing a very good job of it. My best writer friend David, who would never ever do such a thing and DID see the need for getting our work out there, recently died, so I really have no one else to turn to who would understand. Oh, I can just picture how he'd react to Matt's words! The righteous indignation! He once called someone who had treated me badly "an insect", which practically made it all better. 

Sadly, about half a dozen of my most cherished friends have died over the past several years. Why? People in the arts don't take care of themselves, maybe (or so they say), and most of my friends are (were?) older by quite a lot. At any rate, this is probably why I don't do a lot of extended writing on this blog any more. I just post stuff that's fun and that won't get me hung out to dry, like I just did. 

Matt, Matt. Shame on you! I am so disappointed. As a person, I assumed you had more common decency than that. You could have been a lot kinder and more understanding towards a fellow writer.  And you weren't. 

Is that what good friends do?

SLAIN: found photos of murdered women

I made this  slide show from small, grainy photos taken from newspaper morgues about unsolved murders. The headlines on some of them used the word "slain", a quaint and Biblical-sounding term which has something oddly sensational about it. I found a lot of them on a Google search for something else, and felt I had to do something with them. I don't know their names, which makes it all the more ghostly. Each of these people had a life, and I don't know anything about them except what I can see here. 

A pure white doe in an emerald glade

A pure white doe in an emerald glade

Appeared to me, with two antlers of gold

Between two streams, under a laurel's shade,

At sunrise, in the season's bitter cold.

Her sight was so suavely merciless

That I left work to follow her at leisure,

like the miser who looking for his treasure

Sweetens with that delight his bitterness.

Around her lovely neck "Do not touch me,"

Was written with topaz and diamond stone,

"My Caesar's will has been to make me free."

Already toward noon had climbed the sun,

my weary eyes were not sated to see,

When I fell in the stream and she was gone

Francesco Petrarch 1573

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind, 

But as for me, hélas, I may no more. 

The vain travail hath wearied me so sore, 

I am of them that farthest cometh behind. 

Yet may I by no means my wearied mind 

Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore 

Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore, 

Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind. 

Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt, 

As well as I may spend his time in vain. 

And graven with diamonds in letters plain 

There is written, her fair neck round about: 

Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am, 

And wild for to hold, though I seem tame. 

Thomas Wyatt, 1557

Animated aspic (a truly terrible animation)

 

A truly terrible animation - but I couldn't help it.  Watching green jello getting violently ill is just too irresistible. 

Don't leave the cover open on your scanner!

The world's first automobile (and Ford had nothing to do with it!)

The Benz Patent-Motorwagen ("patent motorcar"), built in 1885, is widely regarded as the world's first production automobile, that is, a vehicle designed to be propelled by an internal combustion engine. The original cost of the vehicle in 1885 was 600 imperial German marks, approximately 150 US dollars (equivalent to $4,183 in 2018). The vehicle was awarded the German patent number 37435, for which Karl Benz applied on 29 January 1886. Following official procedures, the date of the application became the patent date for the invention once the patent was granted, which occurred in November of that year.

Benz's wife, Bertha, financed the development process. According to modern law, she would have therefore received the patent rights, but married women were not allowed to apply for patents at the time.

Benz unveiled his invention to the public on 3 July 1886, on the Ringstrasse in Mannheim.

About 25 Patent-Motorwagens were built between 1886 and 1893. (Wikipedia)

And here it is in action! "Action" may be too strong a word here, but at least it moves. My enthusiasm for vintage automobiles is relatively new, but this one goes about as far back as you can without putting a horse in front of it. As they must have, sometimes, when it sputtered to a halt or ran out of the thimblefull of gas it must have taken. Sputter, sputter, sputter! As they used to say, "chitty chitty bang-bang". Only this sounds more like a sewing machine.

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I was delighted to see how many videos there are on YouTube of this glorious clinker of a machine. And they work! It's almost like an electronic wheelchair, or one of those velocipede bicycles with the huge spoked wheels. I have mixed feelings about the internal combustion engine, of course, but my feelings are too complex to get into that now. 

A glorious-looking thing. Almost impossible to believe it ran under its own steam. Ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.

A gorgeous colour shot of the Benz, likely a reconstruction. 

A cat's maternal instincts

Oh my goodness. And they say cats make such good Moms!

Joni Mitchell - The Fiddle and the Drum

The Fiddle and the Drum

Joni Mitchell

And so once again
My dear Johnny my dear friend
And so once again you are fightin' us all
And when I ask you why
You raise your sticks and cry, and I fall
Oh, my friend
How did you come
To trade the fiddle for the drum

You say I have turned
Like the enemies you've earned
But I can remember
All the good things you are
And so I ask you please
Can I help you find the peace and the star
Oh, my friend
What time is this
To trade the handshake for the fist

And so once again
Oh, America my friend
And so once again
You are fighting us all
And when we ask you why
You raise your sticks and cry and we fall
Oh, my friend
How did you come
To trade the fiddle for the drum

You say we have turned
Like the enemies you've earned
But we can remember
All the good things you are
And so we ask you please
Can we help you find the peace and the star
Oh my friend
We have all come
To fear the beating of your drum

On Canada Day: we see thee rise

It's not that I have nothing to say. Quite the opposite. I have too much to say, and have learned to censor myself. It's a sad thing, but that's how it is. This blog has devolved into something less meaningful for me, though I still keep it going for my own amusement. Whatever desperately serious thoughts I have, I keep to myself.

There is a reason for this. I remember a wholesale bailing of followers after I posted something that went straight to the core of my fears. It did not go well, and I took it down soon, because I realized I can't do that sort of thing here. I also don't address my mental health issues - much - except peripherally, since, as the old song says, "oops, there goes another rubber tree plant."

Not that I am making fun. Far from it. I know people garner huge followings by revealing their most raw, innermost selves, their secrets. But there is schadenfreude involved, as there is with me, the sense of "well, that's too bad for her, but I'm glad it's not me". Do I insult my potential readers when I say that?

I wept when I played this video, which I found last year and forgot to save. So I had to hunt for it again. The national anthem has never made me weep before. I see desperate daily news items of escalating violence, and wonder how "strong and free" we really are. But I have to say, at one and the same time, I am proud, fiercely proud of this self-deprecating, well-intentioned, blundering, dignified, crazy, brilliant country. We're like the little brother who gets sand kicked in his face. Do we complain? Yes, we do, daily. But ask an immigrant. On every Canada Day, people who have just become Canadian citizens comment to media on what this means to them. And it is everything. It is freedom, freedom to "be". I hate to say "but it's worse everywhere else", but - guess what - it's worse everywhere else.

You're not going to believe this, and I jinx it as I say it, but I have found a kind of happiness, an intense joy and pleasure in the simplest of things: walking around Como Lake with Bill, finding a rare troll doll and having it come in the mail like it's Christmas Day, having a magnificent red-winged blackbird eat out of my hand. And even capturing and posting the wonder of it on YouTube, where I never realized until recently that I have some followers. My enthusiasms have not died, but neither have my fears, and my haunted past has never haunted me more. Everyone keeps telling me it wasn't my fault. I want to speak of these things, in fact I ache for it, but I know it isn't wise.

I also know you can hold two opposing emotions at the same time. Two opposing personalities, more like. I have learned the reality of malignant narcissism in my family of origin, and PTSD in my own core, but for the most part I keep these things to myself. At least there's a name for these things now. In the past, it was just called "life". 

And since some my my small band of readers are from other places, here are the words to Canada's national anthem. MY Canada.

O Canada!

Our home and native land

True patriot love

In all of us command

With glowing hearts

We see thee rise

The True North, strong and free

From far and wide

O Canada

We stand on guard for thee

God keep our land

Glorious and free

O Canada we stand on guard for thee! 

O Canada we stand on guard for thee!

Francaise

O Canada!

Terre de nos aïeux

Ton front est ceint

De fleurons glorieux

Car ton bras

Sait porter l'épée

Il sait porter la croix

Ton histoire

Est une épopée

Des plus brillants exploits

Et ta valeur

De foi trempée

Protégera nos foyers et nos droits

Protégera nos foyers et nos droits

Gumby's little sister: it's MINGA!

A special boy, on a special day

Just listen!

There is something perfectly intoxicating about these early Maxwell House coffee ads. Whoever came up with that coconut-clopping or block-striking or whatever-it-was-that-made-that-perc-ing-sound was a genius, for it's forever associated with coffee that TASTES AS GOOD AS IT SMELLS. Which is funny, because as I recall, "perked" coffee smelled terrible, gaseous and burnt, like the stuff that collects under the burners of an old stove. What it tasted like, I'll never know, because I wasn't drinking coffee then. I wasn't even drinking amniotic fluid then, folks, because I wasn't conceived yet.

What a concept.

This was one of the more magical illusions of my youth. Really, it still is pretty impressive. I made a YouTube video out of this, and millennials gasped over it because they'd never seen it before. How did they do that?? It was nearly as magical as the Hertz Rent-a-Car ad which showed a couple being lowered down into a moving convertible. ("Let Hertz put YOU in the driver's seat. . . TODAY!")

It does seem ironic to me that, though I remember coffee smelling gaseous and burnt, Maxwell House was sold mainly on "aroma", with consumers whiffing it up as if it was some sort of intoxicant. People even smelled the steaming beans, as if they'd ever have the opportunity to whiff massive mounds of coffee beans. Back in my youth, there was a fad of eating the roasted beans (and you can still get them, chocolate-covered for sissies). Though you'd think they would send you into orbit, it seems to me that the brewing process was what brought out the caffeine. But it was a quick pick-me-up if you didn't have time to brew it.

I have no idea of the provenance of this eagle emblem. At first I had an awful feeling it might be Nazi, but I don't think so. Are those stars and stripes on the emblem? It looks a bit like a cheese grater, or one of those old Afro combs. Are those arrows in its talons? Who knows. Handsome cup, but I am not sure what it means.

Special Bonus Gif! Looking at this old ad again, I'm impressed by how good it looks. Apparently they  reversed a shot of the couple being pulled out of the car - but how exactly did they do that? How to attain the precise angle needed, how to keep the background steady while the car moved? There's a magic here, magic that has been lost in this era of CGI and computerized, photoshopped trickery. 

Proudly Canadian! Gold Seal Salmon commercial

A typical cartoon ad from the 1950s, with primitive, highly stylized animation. There's no doubt what the product was, which I believe was Proudly Canadian. My Mum made salmon loaf, creamed salmon on toast, and salmon sandwiches for our school lunch boxes out of Gold Seal. I loved the bones, which looked like vertebrae and were tender and salmon-y. I could never figure out why the company left the vertebrae in the can, along with that gross, fatty black skin. Couldn't they find a way to remove it? Never mind, those bones were great.

Two charming Louis Wain cats

Wobble Girl Dubstep - Swagga Edition

This woman faked ataxia in order to get insurance payments after getting a flu shot. Inside Edition nearly fell for it, until they followed her around for a bit and noticed her walking normally. In this clip she claims to be able to run and walk backwards. This just makes the dubstep funnier. For some reason I kept watching this and laughing every time. What an idiot!