It was, as they say a dark and stormy night Thursday, a lot of wind and rain and gusty winds, my favorite brooding weather. We met Ed and Carol Gully for dinner at the Foggy Bottom Bar and Restaurant, known locally as the Bog. It was a perfect night to be at the bog, a cozy place with a good wood stove and a pool table. The Bog’s burgers are well known and much praised around my town.
We have become good friends with the Gulleys. In so many ways we seem different, but in so many ways, we are alike, we find many points of connection. Ed and Carol work brutish hours on their dairy farm, milking twice a day, hauling hay, fixing tractors. Ed is too busy right now building an addition to his house to make his popular junk art.
We talked about a lot of things. Carol wants to start a blog, Ed is eager to get back to his art. He asked me why I thought he was so uncomfortable in crowds, I talked to him about attachment theory and childhood, Ed is a self-aware man, unlike many men, he wants to understand his life. We all talked about the complexity of raising children.
I told him I thought farmer fathers were often closer to their children because, unlike most men, they don’t go off and leave them every day, they work right at home and with their families nearby. Ed said that was true, but it was changing. Farms are getting bigger, the smaller family farms are closing, the big corporate farms hire immigrant workers to run the farm for them and milk their cows. It is unusual for the children of farmers to work with their parents anymore.
Carol talked about the grievous injury suffered by their son Jeremy, who was mauled in a traffic accident. He was in a coma for 40 days, Ed was the one who found him and he and Carol spent every day and night at the trauma hospital where he was taken. He has recovered, but Carol talked about the great pain of seeing her youngest child so badly hurt.
Carol talked openly with us about how painful the experience was, how long it took her to get over it. Maria and I were both grateful she felt comfortable enough to tell us about it. The Gulleys are dairy farmers, they have a good life and a hard life, just about every day. They are open and honest and real. I hope we spent a lot more nights with them at the Bog. I think we will.
There is an artist in Ed, and it wants to come out. I think there is a blogger in Carol also.
Maria and I both asked her if Carol had gotten any help, she shook her said, no, she said, she wanted to work it through herself, it was a hard time for all of them. I don’t think the Gulleys have time to get help, their days are too long and hard.
We spent several hours in the Bog with the Gulleys, I am sometimes at a loss to understand friendship, Ed and I come from very different places, yet not really. I love Carol, we were cardiac rehab pals together.
Carol is eager to start a blog, she wants to call it “The Farmer And Me,” she wants to tell the truth the family farm, how they run, what they mean. I think that would be a wonderful subject for a blog, I am going to help her get it going. We showed her how to use the video on her new Iphone 6, Ed and I taped a windbags video together. He will be great on a blog.
Friendship has come to me late in life. Scott Carrino and I have started a weekly lunch get together, we’ve done it two weeks in a row now. Scott came over with some bread for the donkeys and Chloe, and then we sat in the house for an hour or two and talked about the things we want to do in life. I think Ed would be great in the Fabulous Old Men’s Club.
Chloe kept nuzzling Scott Carrino today as he came over to put new license plates on Sarge, his Vietnam-era farm truck. Sarge is getting picked up tomorrow and driven back to Pompanuck Farm with a big load of donkey manure for Pompanuck’s gardens. Sarge fit right in at Bedlam Farm, he is a truck with great character, we will miss him.
Red would have made a great Pony Express Dog, nothing gets in the way of the line of duty when he is working. Today, he was watching the sheep when Chloe came up to him and starting sniffing his head and nibbling on his collar. I do not know of many dogs who would have sat stone still through that nibbling, and then she started sniffing him from head to tail.
I think Red would get stomped to death before he would move an inch, so I keep an eye on encounters like that, he had them with Simon and Lulu and Fanny, and before that, with Rocky, the blind Appaloosa pony. When Red is in the pasture gate, he is undistractable and undeterrable. I’ve seen him sit like that in high winds, torrential rain, snow and ice storms. He gets it done.
So I have some big blog news (and news of my life and future) to share. It’s been three years, it’s time to raise the price of the voluntary payment options for the blog. The blog will remain free forever to those who can’t afford to pay for it. For those who can afford to pay for it, the payment options will change in a few, hopefully in small and gentle ways.
In a few weeks, the $3 a month subscription option will go up to $5. The $5 subscription option will increase to $10. The $60 a year option will rise to $75 a year. These are voluntary. Like you, my costs have gone up, the blog and the photography are expensive to maintain, and have become the centerpiece of my work and creative life.
If you have subscribed at the $3, $5, and $60 options, they will remain in effect for you for the full year of your subscription. Your payments will not go up unless you decide to raise them. In a couple of weeks, new subscribers will not be offered the current options, only the $5, $10 and $75 year options. If you are a bargain hunter, you can get the lower rates for awhile.
There is no pressure for existing subscribers to raise their payments, a deal is a deal. In a year, the existing payment structure will be phased out.
I’m also changing the terminology, I’m dropping the subscriptions and calling the payments what they really are: voluntary payments for my work. I balked for years at the idea of being paid for my work, I understand that it is necessary and appropriate for me. It feels good, it helps me keep the blog free for those who need that, and gives people the option of paying me for the work I do.
I was surprised to learn that many people appreciate the opportunity to contribute to my work. That is humbling. In the past several years, not a single person has complained about being asked to pay for my work, that is a wonderfully affirming thing for me. But the idea of payment for online work is still new, only a small fraction of my readers – four million hits a year on bedlamfarm.com – pay at all.
I would love to keep these rates as low as they are, but that is not how our world works. The experts were right, the $3 option drew a lot of people into my subscription program, but it isn’t enough to support the work over the long haul, much as I appreciate it. They tell me $5 is the new $3. But if that is the option you selected, I thank you, it will stay the same until it expires.
If you care to choose the lower rates now, you have a few weeks to do that. By next Thanksgiving, the payment change- over will be complete, you can cancel your subscriptions or choose one of the new rates.
Why call them payments rather than subscriptions? Because that’s what they are. You don’t need to pay a thing to subscribe, you just go to the “subscribe by e-mail” bar at the top left of the Farm Journal page and you can subscribe anytime for nothing. The money is really payment for work done, not a subscription. I believe in being transparent, I believe in plain labeling.
When this changeover occurs, the subscription page will become the payment page.
I want to mention a couple of things. First, no financial information of any kind is stored on my website or its servers, no one can access your account or manage it but you and/or Paypal and your credit card company. This is for your protection and my sanity. Hopefully, there will one day be thousands of accounts, I don’t want to go anywhere near them. Managing accounts is simple, you can change your payments or cancel them at any time. A week before your subscription expires, you will be notified by e-mail and you can cancel it with the click of a button or renew it.
You can make these payments by Paypal or credit card. Or by check (see below.) Just hit the “subscribe” button at the top right of the Farm Journal Page and then go to “manage your account.” You control it, nobody else can see or touch your money.
I don’t want anyone feeling trapped in my world, I want it to be simple to get in or get out. A few people cancel subscriptions regularly and depart in a huff when I write something they disagree with. If you can’t stand being disagreed with, I’d think about reading andpaying for another blog. I can almost guarantee it will happen from time to time. I think of it this way, people are paying for my work, they are not buying me.
I started my blog in 2007 as a way of supporting my books, and to my amazement and satisfaction, the blog has become the book, my living memoir, my great adventure into the new world of writing and publishing. My world has gone online, I am following. Creativity is about change, and I will never whine about Amazon or the rise of the e-book universe or the demise of my royalty payments. More people are reading more books than ever before in human history, and if I can’t make this work, I should find a trailer to rent and go live there with the dogs and donkeys.
My photography has become as important as my writing, many of you know that photography – like animals on a farm – is an expensive pursuit, there is no proper way to do it without spending a lot of money. The blog needs continuous modernizing and updating, this is a custom blog, it needs maintenance as the reading universe changes.
The blog is not just about my work, it is also about my life. I update it daily, usually more than three or four times. It has evolved, it is about dogs and donkeys and horses, but much more than that now: it is about Maria and my love and admiration for her, and about the remarkable journey the two of us have undertaken to live creative and meaningful lives. I am dipping my toes into spirituality and philosophy as well, I like it. I write broadly about animals and their future in our world.
I love working on my blog, and I love the challenge of being an author who is learning how to cross over into the new and exciting world of publishing. I still write books and love them, but I intend to be relevant, I work hard on my blog every day of my life (just about) and will continue to do so. I plan on challenging you, entertaining you, uplifting you and making you think too. I want to do good, I want to keep getting those letters (and e-mails) from people telling me how much the blog means to them, how faithfully they read it every day.
They come from over the country and some of the world. I mean to keep earning that mail.
If paper books are declining, digital blogs and online reading are soaring. I am there. I love being a writer and an author, it does not matter to me as much in what form people choose to read my word. Change is the one constant in our lives, I embrace it. So thank you for subscribing and/or paying me for my work. These payments are very important, they matter. Royalties and fat advances are vanishing in the publishing world, your support of my work makes it possible for me to do it.
For those of you who do not do online commerce, you can pay me by check or cash, P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816.
And payments/contributions/subscriptions will always be voluntary, many of you have stayed with me from the first, and I will never abandon you. So thanks, whatever you choose to do.
It’s difficult for Fate to remain still when she is near the sheep. In the morning, Chloe tends to go and eat hay with the sheep, the donkeys go to the feeder. Horses like to eat from the ground if they can, the lower the food the better. So I work with Fate on her directionals. “Come bye” means move in a clockwise direction (as in the photo), “away” to me means do the same thing in the opposite, or counter-clockwise direction.
Like Red she loves doing outruns, she runs in ever widening circles, looking to me as she rounds the turn for hand signals. At some point, I tell her to lie down and watch the sheep. They are still challenging her, she is still hanging in there. It does not seem possible to intimidate her.
