Day: April 23, 2013

My writing life is continuing to undergo change, and I will continue to share that with you. My 23red book tour is coming up in November – for “The Second Chance Dog: A Love Story.” This is a book about loving a dog, but more importantly, about loving a human. It is never too late for love, or so I believe and so I hope the book persuades. But I think my next book tour needs to be very different from the others, and I think my publisher will agree with me and give it a shot. Publicity has changed, sales have changed, bookstores have changed, and so have the habits of readers. I need to change too.

I ought to say I love book tours. This is the only time all year when the writer gets to travel across the country and meet readers, talk to them, sign books for them, meet bookstore owners and salespeople. Writing is a somewhat solitary affair, and it is wonderful to look readers in the eye and listen to them.  I get to see different cities, get driven around by media escorts or limo drivers, and I so love room service, a far cry from farm chores. But it is harder and harder for mid-list writers to get the publicity that book tours feed on. Bookstores have few ways of attracting people to events any longer.

Scores of papers used to review my books, and I was almost always interviewed by the local paper, or NPR or commercial radio station. Now only a handful of papers have book writers or editors and many big papers are gone altogether. Bookstores struggle to draw readers into their stores, and when they do, many of them go home and buy e-books. I draw strong crowds but it is increasingly apparent to me at least that this isn’t a good way to sell my books any longer, it doesn’t make sense given the alternatives. I need a different kind of book tour for me to survive as a writer, and I intend to survive as a writer.

This afternoon, I had a meeting with Random House executives and editors to talk about the book tour and promotion for this book, and I suggested that we scrap our conventional notions of what a book tour is – traveling around the country to different bookstores for readings – and do something else. The meeting was a good one, we talked and listened to one another. I was excited, and I think they were too.

I confess that what I was proposing was somewhat painful for me. I’ve had 22 book tours in my writing life, and I hate to let go of the idea. But I am also excited about the prospects of forging a new kind of book tour using my blog, social media and the widening platform I have been constructing for my work – bedlamfarm.com,  Facebook,  YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, my forthcoming Podcasts. I plan to have a book tour that runs on and offline for 45 days, from early November right towards Christmas. I plan to give copies of “Second Chance Dog” away to people who come onto my digital realm to ask questions or offer comments on the issues the book raises – finding love, the importance of animals in relationships and the remarkable story of brave and loving Frieda. And we will be discussing those things. I might take Frieda up to the Adirondacks where she was abandoned and put up a video on YouTube. I will do readings from the book on my podcast. We’ll have themes to talk about each week, photos and videos.

It will not be an all virtual or digital tour. I will do readings at bookstores around the Northeast, perhaps fly to a city or two elsewhere in the country if Random House wants me to, and do interviews with magazines, online websites and print and radio outlets.

This is a fairly new idea for commercial publishing, I think it is the future. It is a bold step but I feel it is the right step.  I am excited about talking about this book and selling it and showing that writing is not fading away or imperiled, but simply changing form and delivery. I don’t believe bookstores will disappear, nor do I believe print books will disappear. But changes in publishing and marketing are making book tours obsolete for writers who are not discovered by Oprah or are superstars in their own right. I have been working hard on new media platforms for my books for some years now, and I want to put these new forms of publishing to work and hopefully blaze a trail or two. Nothing has been decided, and this isn’t all up to me, but I feel after the meeting that it is a strong and positive direction for me to take. I think a lot of writers would disagree with me about the book tour, many are strongly committed to the book tour form of sales. I understand.

When you good people ask me if I am coming to  your city, the answer will more and more likely be no, it is too expensive and the returns too small. But you can meet me here, and hear me on my Podcast and talk to me on Facebook and come and see the Frieda board I am considering for Pinterest. There will be all kinds of ways for you to experience my stories. And I will surely be appearing at some bookstores.

The book tour will kick off at Battenkill Books in Cambridge, N.Y., my local bookstore, my favorite bookstore, on November 5. I’m sure other bookstores will plan events around the book that will make it worth while to go to them. But mostly, my focus will be online – my blog and venues, and other websites and online magazines. I plan events, discussions, Q & A’s online, almost every day. It will hopefully be entertaining and informative.

That is the nature of our world – change and acceptance. If this happens, I will greatly miss flying into some distant city and wandering the downtown at night soaking up the scene, lying in bed eating my oatmeal while reading a book I bought at the bookstore the night before. I will even miss airport food. And I will mostly miss the lines of people who wait to meet me and talk about my books. No book tour will replace that. Still, I will be making some joyous noise for my work until the end, and I hope you will be reading and listening. I will share the experience, as always.

Our days are framed by chores, bounded by them. Morning chores are right after sun-up or 7 a.m., whichever comes first. Animals eat first. Animals to be fed:

First, the barn cats, Minnie and Flo, fed some dry food by the back door, or in the barn, depending on weather and where they are. They need fresh water.

Then, the donkeys get one third of a bale of second cut hay, taken from bales stored in the barn.

Then, the sheep get one-third of a bale.

The hose is pulled out to fill the water buckets.

The coop is opened, the chickens given some feed.

The manure is swept out of the barn, shoveled out into the field.

The barn is swept out. Often, the buckets are dirty, filled with hay and dirt, and need to be rinsed out.

Then, the gates are checked and double-check,  the dogs are let in from the yard (Red is with us doing the chores, he keeps the sheep in place and in line. The dogs are fed. We take a few minutes and scan the animals to check for limps or wounds or aberrant behavior.

Then, Maria and I go back into the house. I scan e-mail to see if there is anything I have to attend to, I cannot scan all of it. I have breakfast, sit and talk, usually meditate together. Then Maria goes to her studio, I go to my office. I blog and work on my books all morning and through the early afternoon. I take photos intermittently throughout the day. My camera is always with me. We have lunch together if we can. I cook and shop.

Then, afternoon chores at 3, eggs are collected if there are any and all of the animals have to be fed and watered again. Chores take about 30 minutes in the winter, less now. Soon the animals will not need hay. We have added garden chores to the mix. Maria and I split the chores up wordlessly, we just each start and the other picks up with the rest. These chores are dynamic and inflexible. They cannot be put off, they embody commitment and focus. Dependent animals are always a responsibility that does not end.

Smile, it is mid-day, the sun is streaming through my office, the Princess Lenore is stirring from her noon nap, withdrawing  as she does in the middle of the day. Lenore is tired from her relentless pursuit of love and food. Today she loved me, Maria, the UPS driver, a child on his bike, a woman at the post office, Connie in the bookstore, three children playing in a corner. And the day is only half over.

Like most people, I do not have good memories of my dentist. I’m sure Dr. Brown was quite the nice man, but I remember him as a  nightmare, a bogeyman, a sadist, sticking gas masks on me and using one of those medieval bone-rattling drills to torture and frighten me. His needles always seemed a foot long to me, and I don’t recall him asking if it hurt. It always hurt, and I didn’t sleep for days in advance of my appointments. For years, even the mention of dentistry gave me the sweats. But life is a circle, a wheel that turns.  My dentist is located in the small and struggling town of Granville, New York, right by the Vermont border. The Granville Family Dentistry continually surprises me.

“I see you are no stranger to dentistry,” was the first thing Dr. Harvey Coco ever said to me.” His assistant Dawn Delisle laughed. Dr. Coco loves irony, you can see it in his eyes. He does not take himself, the world too seriously, except when he is drilling or poking around Then, he is very quiet.

I think of Granville Family Dentistry as a place that could only exist in the country, and nothing about the town Granville is especially modern.  A once booming Slate mining area, Granville is one of those beautiful upstate New York towns that the world has left behind. Yet the dental facility is a spotless and strikingly modern facility which reflects the ethos of nearby Vermont  – it runs on solar power, there are giant panels outside and the computerized x-ray and records system is  right out of Star Wars.

It is a high-tech place, yet not.  Here, technology has not overwhelmed  humanity. It has none of the impersonal coldness of medical facilities, it could well be set in the 1950’s. The staff seems cheerful and engaged – everyone who works there gets to pick the music for morning and afternoon rotations. It is clean and manages to be as close to painless as dentistry can get. I am spending some considerable time there lately – decaying cavities, a crown, and now, a root canal scheduled for Monday. Dr. Brown continues to haunt me across age and time.

The oddest thing is that I look forward to going (mostly), and generally have a great time when I get there. Dr. Coco and Dawn and I make a lot of noise. We trade stories, laugh, compare notes on the absurdities of life,  and I appreciate the small things that add up to big things.

The whole place exudes competence, but I am especially lucky to be in the care of Dr.  Coco and Dawn. These two exude the values of another time. They have been working together for years, and I am always touched by how Dr. Coco sees Dawn as a partner, the two of them working in sync, with respect and affection. Doctors have a reputation for arrogance, Dr. Coco is anything but. He sets a gone that is comfortable and reassuring and Dawn contributes, observes and truly assists.

Generally, Dr. Coco and Dawn don’t even need to speak with one another, each is always ahead of the other. That adds to the comfort level, the confidence and chemistry of these two. Both are rabid football fans (I am not) and once provoked, there is a blizzard of statistics, predictions, arguments, analysis,  recaps and gossip. I don’t know exactly what they do, but even root canals hardly hurt, and I am shocked to leave smiling. Like most sports fans, they are both usually outraged about one thing or another – they are both rabid New England Patriots Fans – and I love hearing the recaps, even if I generally don’t know what they are talking about. When you are strapped into a dentist’s chair, it doesn’t really matter, you don’t have to try and grunt and mumble an opinion.

Dr. Coco and Dawn have a great sense of humor, and they inspire me to get some of my own stories out there, once there is a break in the NFL chatter (they both know a LOT about football). Sometimes the laughter in our room is so l loud the office staff says you can hear it all the way down the hall. Sometimes, I give as good as I get, I love to tell stories too but rarely in a doctor’s office. Dr. Coco tells funny stories of parenting, Dawn has resisted computers and social media. They love working together, an odd but compatible couple.

I called Maria up this morning and said “I need a root canal, but it will be fine. I love going to the dentist, isn’t that strange?” Even she has no idea how strange it is for me. Health care is complex for everyone in our world, and for most people, it is a tense and unnerving process, forbidding and uncomfortable. One day in Granville I was sitting in the waiting room and another patient and I were aghast at the explicit gum disease video running on the tube. We each mentioned it – who wants to wait to see the dentist watching that? –  and it was gone the next day.

Dr. Coco and Dawn Delisle are a fine medical team, but what is important about them – and perhaps this is a rural life thing – is that they remember to be human, and that their patients are human. In this way, they have spanned the sometimes yawning chasm between humanity and good health care.

They are taking good care of my big mouth, but they are also making the bogeyman go away. I thought he would be with me to the end.

They say artists and photographers return again and again to certain people and scenes, because they are touched by them and also learn how to capture them. I am drawn to Wendy’s old farmhouse, which sits on a busy road, and I am drawn to the wires and lines of the road and the big open field behind her house. I think I knew Wendy, I think she ran a farm stand nearby, I don’t know what happened to her and her house, or even why it speaks to me. I go there to take photos in storms, and when the light is framed against it.