A is for Agents who I’m sending my query.
B is for Books which may soon disappeary.
C is for Children’s, a cut-throat division.
D is for waiting to hear their Decision.
E is for E-mailing queries like mad.
F is for Failing to proofread, so sad!
G is for Great, all the stories I’ve written.
H is for Hoping the agent is smitten.
I is for Indigestion I get from declines.
J is for Juggling submission guidelines.
K is for Keeping my eyes on success.
L is for Losing my mind from the stress.
M is for Money I hope they will pay.
N is for No which I hear everyday.
O is for Overworked, its taking its toll.
P is for Published, the ultimate goal.
Q is for Quitting and giving up writing
R is for Rhyming books, always exciting
S is for Seuss, everybody would read him.
T is for Tired of trying to beat him.
U is for Unpublished and feeling out of balance.
V is for Vastly overestimating my talents.
W is for Writing with all my finesse.
X is for eXpecting to always impress.
Y is for Yes, when someone finally replies.
Z is for ZZZZZZZZZZZZ I can rest my tired eyes!
Category Archives: Uncategorized
The ABC’s of Publishing a Children’s Book
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Messy Marvin and the Dead Monster
I’m Messy Marvin and I’m in quite a mess.
A mess that I don’t know how to address.
I’m not even sure quite where to begin.
Listen up for a moment and I’ll fill you right in.
My Dad’s truck has a dead monster inside.
There’s an atrocious smell when he gives us a ride.
He drives my sister and me to school each day,
and his truck smells smelly like rot and decay.
My Dad has been driving this truck for awhile.
“About ten years” he says with a smile.
So it’s strange that the monster had never appeared.
My Sister and I think that’s frightfully weird.
Now I’m not scared of monsters like you may think.
But I really don’t like dead monsters that stink.
I just can’t seem to figure out where he died.
I’ve tried and I’ve searched and I’ve searched and I’ve tried.
So how do I know it’s a monster you say?
Well it all started just the other day,
When my Dad said to my Sister and me,
“You’ve made a monstrous mess of my truck you see!”
My Dad blamed the smell on my sister and me.
He said “it’s the French fries and soda and candy.”
“The food that you eat when I’m driving you places.”
“The food that you spill as you’re stuffing your faces.”
What do messes have to do with monsters, I thought?
That’s a subject in school I’ve never been taught.
But Dad must be right because Dad’s know best.
About monsters and messes and all of the rest.
So he must be correct, it’s because of our mess.
He must know something, he wouldn’t just guess.
He must know the monster came from our trash.
He must know it grew from a soda-pop splash.
So I pictured this monster with all of my might.
What a sight it must be, a horrible fright!
Made from the garbage we throw on the floor
The garbage we never pick up anymore.
I pictured his body was a large paper plate.
Greasy and dirty from some breakfast I ate.
His arms and his legs, long strands of French fries.
Salt and ketchup connecting his shins to his thighs.
I pictured his round, creepy face was a waffle.
Half soaked in syrup and looking quite awful.
A bite from one side meant one eye was not there.
Like a pirate he had only one he could spare.
His eye and his ears and likely his nose,
I pictured as stale, crusty Cheerios.
His big grinning mouth was a straw from a drink.
Smoking a cigar that’s an old sausage link.
I pictured his clothes were some discarded napkins,
And pieces of foil that Pop-Tarts had been wrapped in.
With a handful of tissues I’d used for my nose
I pictured he’d fashioned some socks for his toes.
Chicken Nuggets, I pictured, he wore as his shoes.
Soaked in ketchup and starting to ooze.
A popsicle stick he used as a cane.
Because his French fry appendages caused him some pain.
Now I’m not scared of monsters, just like I said
But this picture I pictured filled me with dread.
That this monster had been living inside my Dad’s truck.
Wreaking his havoc and running amuck!
But now he is dead and we sure need to find him.
Maybe Dad will help, I just need to remind him.
If we don’t do something about this dead smelly ghoul.
I might have to start riding the bus to school!
So, I think I’ll start trying to keep his truck cleaner.
By eating with more of a grown-up demeanor.
And I’ll leave you with just a bit of advice.
Listen up closely, I won’t say this twice.
Next time you’re riding in your Mom or Dad’s car.
And drinking some juice or eating a candy bar.
Please try to keep it tidy and neat.
Or you may find a monster living under your seat!
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The Town Mouse and The Country Mouse
Do you remember the tale “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse?” Of course you do, it’s a classic Aesop’s fable (often called The City Mouse and the Country Mouse) that has been recounted in various reincarnations in a multitude of children’s books and stories over many centuries. As the story is told, the Town Mouse, after being disappointed with a meager meal of a few corn kernels and dried blueberries at the Country Mouse’s home invites his rural cousin to his home in the city to show him “the rich feasts of city life.” The Country Mouse agrees to visit his urban cousin but promptly leaves after their exquisite meal of bread and cheese and fruit and grains is repeatedly interrupted by prowling dogs (or cats).
The motto? A modest life of peace and quiet is better than a richly one with danger and strife.
I have thought about this story often recently. I wonder if I am a Town Mouse or a Country Mouse. On one hand, sure, I have chosen to live in the country with all the benefits of peace and solitude that it provides. On the other hand, although we as a family try to be responsible with our income, I by no means can claim to have subscribed to a complete life of modesty. On one hand I feel right at home, ecstatic even as if it is my proper place, working around my property dressed in a barn jacket and a pair of mud boots. On the other hand, I feel equally at home, dressed to a tee and sitting in a wine bar, consuming $10.00 glasses of wine and enjoying the company of friends. On one hand, I enjoy having adequate time to myself, peace and solitude and time to think and ponder and write and play my guitar. It would be fair to say I crave it even, thrive on it. Likewise, on the other hand I understand that I need, for sanity’s sake, interactions with friends and family and community. I guess it’s like a scale that I must continually add and remove weights to and from each weighing pan, to be sure that my life stays in the appropriate balance, a balance that varies from time to time, but which must stay relatively stable.
Where I find myself leaning towards the life of the Country Mouse, however, is in preferring an existence of solitude. I’ll be honest in saying that, if the choice were offered to me, most of the time I’d choose the loner life as opposed to constantly being in the presence of other people. It’s a strange dynamic because I have the unique ability to portray myself as someone who is somewhat sociable and confident and successful and in many ways I crave that stature as well. It’s not a complete ruse, I am all those things at some level, but some days, if I could just crawl into a hole and do my own thing, hand over all the responsibilities to someone else and live a “modest life of peace and quiet” I’d take that option in a heartbeat. I suspect that personality trait is what drives me to write, to be able to sit at a computer, with my thoughts and words, without the distractions of other people’s opinions, without the stresses from the problems that our business is facing, without the worries about bills and mortgages and needing a new car and the multitude of other issues we all face daily.
I am home today writing because my kids are on Spring Break and I chose to take some time off this week to be home with them. As they no longer require my constant attention, I sit here and compose this post, and it makes me crave even more the lifestyle of the Country Mouse. It makes me understand how much I prefer to be working at home, tapping on my keyboard, with a cup of hot coffee by my side and a classical music radio station playing faintly in the background, rather than toiling away in a business with phones ringing and e-mails beeping. It makes realize how much I prefer working by myself, passionately creating something that I find meaningful, rather than managing and supervising and delegating to others for the sole purpose of bringing in a paycheck. Like many of my readers, I would desperately like to find a way to nurture this lifestyle, to make a living writing and working from home. I don’t think this is in the cards for me at this point in my life but I do hope I am slowly planting the seeds that will grow my writing skills to a level, which down the road at some point, is more than just a hobby, more than just a blog, more than just a silly dream.
The Aesop Brothers never discussed the careers of the Town Mouse and the Country Mouse in their classic fable about living a meager yet meaningful life versus living a life of luxury and indulgence. Their stories had a way of teaching simple yet profound life lessons, in brief and not overly analytical compositions. If I were to venture a guess though, I suspect the Town Mouse was an investment banker or a real estate mogul or some other such business person, sitting in a corner office twelve hours a day, making a six figure salary that he could blow on cheese and bread and fruit and grains, but who never really found happiness and satisfaction in his career and his lifestyle.
The Country Mouse, on the other hand… most likely a starving author.
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Sayonara Brown Road Chronicles!
Greetings my fellow blogging friends, today I have some disappointing news I need to share with you. After a few days of deliberation I have decided to shut down the Brown Road Chronicles. This has been a terribly difficult decision as I am extremely proud of the stature this blog has grown to and the number of loyal, dedicated readers I have found. The upkeep of the blog, however, the obsession with posting and with statistics and hits and comments… well, frankly it has begun to take over my life and I have decided that something has to give. Until recently I thought I was managing this other part of my life, this newfound hobby, with balance and parity, but alas, two evenings ago it all came to a head when my daughter said to me, “Dad you haven’t spoken to me in over three weeks”. I knew at that moment that something in my life was amiss. My wife followed up with “Steve, we haven’t had sex since December when you started writing this blog.” Seriously, she said that right in front of the children. At that moment I became horribly concerned. Not that we weren’t having sex… the blog had replaced my need for sex… but that my children suddenly knew that their parents… well… had sex. I could only imagine the trauma and damage that had been done to their frail, innocent minds… and it was all because I had started this blog. “Honey”, I said, “uh, maybe this isn’t the right time.” She just glared at me with piercing eyes that hadn’t had sex since December.
The problem was capped off yesterday morning when I received a voice mail from my dentist at 7:45 in the morning. I was driving to work and I had chosen not to answer the call as I was busily reading one of my favorite blogs on my blackberry, glancing up and down every few moments, from blackberry screen to the highway, and from highway to blackberry screen. At work, when I finally had a moment to listen to my voice mails I heard this message… “Hi Steve, we’re just calling because we had you scheduled for a 7:30 a.m. appointment this morning, and its 7:45 now. We just wanted to be sure that everything was okay.” Damn… after close to seventeen years of seeing the same dentist, I had missed my first appointment. I could only blame it on my all-consuming obsession with my blog. After listening to the voicemail I slammed my phone down on the desk and my teeth suddenly felt dirty. Had I not been blogging so much I would have made it to the appointment, they would have scraped all that tartar sauce stuff off of my teeth and shined them up like the chrome bumpers on a classic Ford Mustang. Now they were just dirty and coffee stained… like dirty, coffee stained prostitute teeth. I was ashamed.
After putting in a full day of work, I sat down last evening with a glass of wine to evaluate this situation. No, admittedly it wasn’t just a glass, it was a bottle… alright, it wasn’t just a bottle… it was a box, yeah that’s right, a fucking box of cheap, shitty wine… and I was prepared to pound it all down… that’s right, the whole box… four bottles worth. All that, even with the knowledge that I had been drinking too much lately, the stress of writing and trying to brainstorm interesting and funny post ideas and tweeting all-day for blog hits and the constant marketing of the Chronicles had become overwhelming to me and I was calming my nerves… self-medicating as they say… with the booze… and too much of it. I realized I had become burned-out with the responsibility… the delusional dream… of becoming a successful blogger… and I’ll be frank here… I was tired of pretending to give a rat’s ass that this person’s kid took a shit on the floor the other day or that person broke up with their psycho boyfriend or girlfriend or what the fuck everyone ate for dinner last night. I now understood that I was leaving extraneous comments on stranger’s blogs with the irrational hope that it might generate some hits for me, like a crack-whore giving herself up so that she may get a hit of drug to get her through the next few hours!
There I sat, getting drunk and wondering how I was going to deal with this situation. It had reached crisis levels and I knew something had to give. It couldn’t be my family, it couldn’t be my stable, well-paying job and it definitely couldn’t be my dentist. So, when I had finally drained the enema-style bag of wine that was inside my wine box, I decided that unfortunately the Chronicles is what I had to give up. I cried with the realization that it was over… then I puked… then I cried some more. But it was an epiphany and today I have a new lease on life. I hope you understand the dilemma I was facing and forgive me for no longer providing you with such profound, stimulating, thought-provoking works of writing. I know you will miss me, but rest assured that I have made this decision with only the best interests of my family and myself and my sex-life and my dentist in mind. I want to close by saying thank you to all of my readers for your awesome support the last several months… for reading my posts and for leaving your comments, even if those comments were only your lame attempts at getting me to return to your blog and read your posts… you dirty crack-whores!
Sayonara, my friends!
Steve
Alright, yeah you probably figured out early on… I just made all that stuff up… well, except the dentist part… I actually did miss my dentist appointment. And of course I love reading all your blogs… seriously… I’m not just ass-kissing… and give up the Chronicles? NO WAY… I’m much too obsessed to do that!
Happy April Fools Day!!!
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The Brown Road Chronicles 