That Thing That Happens While We’re Making Plans

I’m not the greatest when it comes to organization of any sort.
I’ve spent the last 10 years trying to convert(via Franklin-Covey), and my wife says she’s seen a marked improvement in that now I write things down that need to be done so I don’t forget about them. But my list was still more reactive than proactive – more tasks than goals. I knew certain things needed to be done on a schedule, so I’d schedule them. When new tasks came along that required attention, I added them to my list.
Every once in a while I would look at that list and see how many times tasks were sliding into tomorrow and despair. Well, no, I really didn’t care enough about it to despair. I just shook my head in frustration and wrote them on tomorrow’s list, until I decided I needed to do something about the colossal waste of time of manually rewrite those tasks into the future in my planner. I solved that by switching to software so all the things I failed to get done automatically moved to the next day.
I could solve the task problem if I just had someone else to do it all. Still, we’re talking tasks – not goals.
I’m a late-comer to goal-setting. I realized after 5-1/2 years of saying I wanted to be a writer (meaning actually writing stories, having people read them, AND get paid for it) that the only way it was going to happen was for me to stop saying it and just do it (thanx, Nike.) I set myself some goals (words per week, number of stories per year, how fast I had to get a rejected story to another traditional market, an ePublishing schedule), and “suddenly, overnight” I was producing stories in the double-digits (instead of 1 story in 2 years.)
The frustrating thing is, there’s this thing called life, and it keeps happening no matter how many times I try to avoid it. I look in my resolutions, goals, and schedule, and even though I never wrote down “Get rear-ended at a red light,” it still happened.
Planning is good for laying out the things you want to do, but who puts on the calendar: “Here is the week that my child will be sick?” Or sets aside time for a string of accidents that seem to come along so regularly that it make me wonder if they really are accidents, or if FATE just has it out for us.
I suppose you could block time in anticipation of this – leave yourself a contingency gap to cover when these things happen. But do people in Tornado Alley block off a couple of months in the spring and say “I won’t be doing anything here because there will be weather?” No – I don’t (although sometimes it makes me want to fold up and quit because I already (in JANUARY) see this year’s goals slipping under a barrage of illness, accidents, and other pleasantries.
You can’t get things done if you have to wait for all the lights to be green before you do anything. You have to do what you can, when you can. If you’re a blogger, maybe you wind up writing a post about the futility of trying to keep a schedule under a barrage of life. If you write longer works, maybe there’s a story in there.
Don’t let Life’s interruptions get to you. When you get back to your plans, you may find that what you just went through adds to your accomplishments rather than reduces them. And for a writer, all this living, ESPECIALLY the kind you didn’t choose to do because it was too difficult or because you didn’t have time for it in your schedule – all this living somehow adds gravitas to your writing that might have been missing without it.

What doesn’t kill me…
I’m not the greatest when it comes to organization of any sort.
I’ve spent the last 10 years trying to convert(via Franklin-Covey), and my wife says she’s seen a marked improvement in that now I write things down that need to be done so I don’t forget about them. But my list was still more reactive than proactive – more tasks than goals. I knew certain things needed to be done on a schedule, so I’d schedule them. When new tasks came along that required attention, I added them to my list.
Every once in a while I would look at that list and see how many times tasks were sliding into tomorrow and despair. Well, no, I really didn’t care enough about it to despair. I just shook my head in frustration and wrote them on tomorrow’s list, until I decided I needed to do something about the colossal waste of time of manually rewrite those tasks into the future in my planner. I solved that by switching to software so all the things I failed to get done automatically moved to the next day.
I could solve the task problem if I just had someone else to do it all. Still, we’re talking tasks – not goals.
I’m a late-comer to goal-setting. I realized after 5-1/2 years of saying I wanted to be a writer (meaning actually writing stories, having people read them, AND get paid for it) that the only way it was going to happen was for me to stop saying it and just do it (thanx, Nike.) I set myself some goals (words per week, number of stories per year, how fast I had to get a rejected story to another traditional market, an ePublishing schedule), and “suddenly, overnight” I was producing stories in the double-digits (instead of 1 story in 2 years.)
The frustrating thing is, there’s this thing called life, and it keeps happening no matter how many times I try to avoid it. I look in my resolutions, goals, and schedule, and even though I never wrote down “Get rear-ended at a red light,” it still happened.
Planning is good for laying out the things you want to do, but who puts on the calendar: “Here is the week that my child will be sick?” Or sets aside time for a string of accidents that seem to come along so regularly that it make me wonder if they really are accidents, or if FATE just has it out for us.
I suppose you could block time in anticipation of this – leave yourself a contingency gap to cover when these things happen. But do people in Tornado Alley block off a couple of months in the spring and say “I won’t be doing anything here because there will be weather?” No – I don’t (although sometimes it makes me want to fold up and quit because I already (in JANUARY) see this year’s goals slipping under a barrage of illness, accidents, and other pleasantries.
You can’t get things done if you have to wait for all the lights to be green before you do anything. You have to do what you can, when you can. If you’re a blogger, maybe you wind up writing a post about the futility of trying to keep a schedule under a barrage of life. If you write longer works, maybe there’s a story in there.
Don’t let Life’s interruptions get to you. When you get back to your plans, you may find that what you just went through adds to your accomplishments rather than reduces them. And for a writer, all this living, ESPECIALLY the kind you didn’t choose to do because it was too difficult or because you didn’t have time for it in your schedule – all this living somehow adds gravitas to your writing that might have been missing without it.
What doesn’t kill me…

 <<<>>> 

My story experiment with making my story B.I.T. free on Smashwords will last one more week at:  https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/134102?ref=notimetothink 

Check it out! Give it a read, and then rate and review it, and tell your friends. Thanx!

<<<>>> 

William Mangieri’s writing can be found in many places, including:

·          His Amazon Author page: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B008O8CBDY

·          Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/william-mangieri?store=book&keyword=william+mangieri

·          Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/NoTimeToThink

Connect with him on Facebook at:   http://www.facebook.com/NoTimeToThink

Free Dumb? Let’s Try It for (a) B.I.T.

<<free eBook notice at the end of this posting>>

So. I’ve been at this ePublishing thing now for two years. I’m proud of the fact that I’ve been meeting my writing and publishing goals (the things I can control.) On the other hand, I am PAINFULLY AWARE of my deficiencies when it comes to self-promoting and marketing. My sales so far amount to less than 2 per month, so one of my new goals is to research what I need to do to PUMP UP THE VOLUME.
I’m done reading, and the one thing that comes closest to guaranteeing me a boost in my sales is: GIVING MY WRITING AWAY FOR FREE.
This seemed totally counterintuitive to me at first, but the more I looked at it, the more I thought about it (I spend entirely too much time thinking), the more sense it made. Here’s the idea:

1.      If you give away your book, more people will read it.

2.     The more people who download it, the higher you go in the volume rankings, which makes your book show up in higher in the searches.

3.     The more people who read your book, the more reviews you’ll get, and getting more reviews will also increase your search ranking.

4.     The more people who read your book, the more likely it will be recommended to others.

5.     People who read your free book (and enjoy it) will now be more likely to pay to read another.

And of course, you can always go back to charging for your book once it’s built up some reviews and recommendations.
Be aware of how alien this is to me. How many of us with a NORMAL job would say: “Hey! I think I’ll go into work today and not charge my employer for my time”? I know I wouldn’t – I’m not into slave labor, and it might even be illegal for my employer to let me do it. Well, my stories take me a lot of TIME (the only truly nonrenewable resource), and as much as I enjoy the creative process, I don’t do it so I can give it away.
Still, I thought it through enough that I’m willing to try it. I’d pick a story, make it FREE at all my retailers, announce it to the world, and study the results to see if it really is as good as they say.
But I can’t do that, because I am being thwarted by vendors who don’t want to give me the FREEdom to set my books FREE.
I publish through 3 venues:

·          Barnes & Noble, which won’t let me price below 99 cents, and I can’t let the list price be greater on B&N than at any other retailer,

·          Amazon (which will only let me make my book FREE for a limited amount of time, and then ONLY if I sign up with Kindle Select, which means I can ONLY sell my book through Amazon.) They also dictate that the price on Amazon not be greater than at my other retailers.

·          Smashwords, which not only allows me to make my book FREE, but encourages it.

So it won’t be the pure give-away that I had hoped. If I want to make a book FREE, it can only be published on Smashwords. If it’s a new book, I’ll have to publish on Smashwords only, then when I’m ready to end the FREE promotion, I can add it to Amazon & Barnes & Noble. A FREE promotion for an eBook I’ve already published will require that I withdraw the book from sale at those two retailers while the promo runs. Hopefully, this will increase my volume and visibility on Smashwords, and eventually bleed over into increased sales on the other two sites via increased word of mouth. Let’s see if it works…

<<<>>> 

For the next two weeks, I will be experimenting with the concept of FREE: My story B.I.T. will be withdrawn from Amazon and B&N so it can be FREE at Smashwords at: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/134102?ref=notimetothink 

Check it out! Give it a read, and then rate and review it, and tell your friends. Thanx!

<<<>>> 

William Mangieri’s writing can be found in many places, including:

·          His Amazon Author page: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B008O8CBDY

·          Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/william-mangieri?store=book&keyword=william+mangieri

·          Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/NoTimeToThink

Connect with him on Facebook at:   http://www.facebook.com/NoTimeToThink

Who Am I, and How Did I Get Here?

When I was five, I wanted to be a fire fighter (or a soldier; I know I wanted to fight something…) Then as I progressed through school, I decided I wanted to be an oceanographer (this is WAY BACK when Jacques Cousteau was cool.) All of these professions had one thing in common – they had nothing to do with my experience, they were just something I thought I’d like to do, with no connection to my reality.

I read all about snakes and insects when I was under 12, I caught snakes and watched ant colonies battle with each other whenever I could, but neither one called to me as a profession. I loved math when I was in grade school and junior high (not so much now) - enough that it carried me through getting my Computer Science degree when I went back to school the second time. Although I did have a passion about these things, they were all more interesting than occupational.

I started playing brass instruments in 4^th grade – trumpet, French horn, E-flat horn, alto horn, trombone. Played around with piano and guitar a little. Over the last thirty years, almost all of my musical endeavors went away from instrumentals and into singing (karaoke and grocery stores – listen for me.) For the first time in decades, I knocked the rust off my trumpet and my lip last week, and was surprised how much I remember. This year, I hope to teach myself the harmonica (thank you, Taylor Hicks.)

I actually thought I might become a professional musician until the acting bug caught hold in 9^th grade. That dream carried me through a couple of years with the Tewksbury Teen Theatre Workshop, high school and my first three years at Richland College for thirty shows or so. I think I was pretty good, but didn’t have enough determination to continue auditioning beyond college (you may be able to play a 60-year old when everyone in school is your age, but when you’re out in the real world, you’re competing against REAL 60-year olds. Come to think of it, I’m almost one of them now; I wonder…)   

Throughout my life I’ve been a dilettante – a jack-of-all-trades (and master of none. I’ve made a shirt and pants, costumes, designed a set, directed a couple of times, decorated a goose egg, done some non-competitive distance running, war gamed, played indoor soccer (I wish THAT had been non-competitive), cooked, wrote music, sketched, juggled, and done countless things well enough to say I have without doing them well enough to get paid, Learned some French and a smattering of Russian, but don’t remember either anymore.

I’ve been in I.T. for a quarter of a century now. I didn’t start out trying to get there, and I did go back to school for some of it, but strangely, I can find ways that almost everything I’ve listed above has come into play in my current occupation, either by directly contributing to my skills, or giving me a different way of looking at things that let me see patterns others didn’t, and added to my personal value on the job and what I can contribute to a team.

None of us knew when we were born what we would become. We don’t decide at age five what we’ll be doing at age thirty (I think most of us don’t know the answer much better when we graduate from college.) And yet, somehow, we get there – and everything we have been informs what we are.

I’ve been writing (seriously) for at least a couple of years now. Lots of odd things come out on my pages, and all of these things had to have come from SOMEWHERE. Alien abductions, ghosts, mutations, murders, extra-dimensional hitchhikers… everything in them came into my mind somehow. You be the judge…

William Mangieri’s writing can be found many places, including:

•           His Amazon Author page: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B008O8CBDY
•           Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/william-mangieri?store=book&keyword=william+mangieri
•           Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/NoTimeToThink

Connect with him on Facebook at:   http://www.facebook.com/NoTimeToThink

Wealth Creation Versus Theft

Every day I despair that our country has been split into two alternate realities.
In one reality, you have the Confiscators. Here, wealth is not created – it never grows. There is a finite amount of it, as though it is a single pie. If a person, or a country is wealthy, they’ve stolen it and don’t deserve to keep it.
If anyone wants to get more pie, it can only happen if they take it from someone else – either by stealing it themselves, or by getting someone else to steal it for them. Someone like the government.
The government doesn’t create wealth – it REDISTRIBUTES it. It takes from the producers and gives to… whoever it feels like (including itself – that’s where they take out their “overhead.) People who have no interest in producing (because they have no belief in their own ability to create wealth), live lives of envy – they consider themselves the “have-nots”; because they can’t imagine wealth creation, they resent the “haves”, who could have only gotten that way by stealing pie from someone else.
People tend to assume that others would behave the same as themselves. If you think that the only way YOU can gain wealth is to steal, then the only way someone has more than you is because they stole it. Why not just sit on your backside and collect “free” money that’s been taken from others, Why not? If you don’t believe that more can be created, why bother trying? Especially when you’ve been incentivized by the system.
In the other reality, you have the Creationists - people who believe they can create wealth, that they can actually “grow the pie”. When they see someone who has wealth, they try to figure out how they can copy them and create some for themselves. They use their time and treasure and ideas and find ways to provide goods and services that consumers want, and create jobs and negotiate for services from others that help others so that they gain wealth, too. The more they create, the more there is for everyone. A rising tide raises all boats.
An advanced country can find ways to use an undeveloped country’s resources that the poorer country can’t, and improves the quality of life of the poorer one in the process. If you believe in wealth creation, you want EVERYONE to do well, because this increases your customer base.
Where is the truth? Can wealth be created?
Let’s play “Let’s Make a Deal”. You get to pick what’s behind one of two doors. Behind door number one is 680g of raw materials – metals, chemicals, and the like.  Behind door number two is an original, first generation iPad. Which do you choose?
Whether you’re a Confiscator or a Creationist, you’re bound to pick the iPad – I think we can all agree that the raw materials have been made more valuable by transforming them into a machine. WEALTH HAS BEEN CREATED.
Look around you. See the buildings? The vehicles? The jewelry? Think of all that’s been created over the history of mankind, to get us to where we are – a far cry from what the Cro-Magnons could go out and gather. Look at ALL THE WEALTH!  
In the 2012 election, I thought our side made a decent argument about how the OCCUPIER OF THE WHITEHOUSE and his party was committing generational theft – forcing our children and grandchildren into a debt they would never be able to get out from under. How did we get to the point where half our citizens (or whoever it is that’s voting in our elections) DON’T CARE WHAT HAPPENS TO THEIR COUNTRY OR THEIR NEIGHBORS, LET ALONE TO THEIR OWN CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN, as long as they can have “free stuff.” They’ve lost their moral compass, as well as their faith in themselves, and would rather sentence themselves and successive generations to poverty instead of lifting a finger to improve their lives?
The pie is always growing unless something stifles it – until something makes people stop believing that it can be better for everyone. Something that inspires envy and distrust, like a divisive, overbearing, power-hungry government. A government that’s making more and more of us feel hopeless, like there’s no point in fighting it.
Don’t give in! Don’t let it do this to our country. Don’t sit back and turn your children into slaves. GET OFF YOUR BUTTS and create something instead of taking what isn’t yours. Stop being an accessory. Get some pride and self-reliance, and make your own life better in the process.

Just saying.

What Do Our Stories Mean?

Here’s my list of movies I can (and DO) watch again and again until it makes my wife sick:

 Invincible

A Knight’s Tale

Lord of the Rings

It’s a Wonderful Life

They Might Be Giants

What do these say about me? What’s in there? A heavy dose of underdog, some nobility, People changing their destiny. People realizing their worth – people discovering what’s important and acting on it. Heroism – imagined and otherwise. Redemption. LOTS OF REDEMPTION.

These are all external to my – other people’s stories. But all of us also have narratives we tell others (and ourselves) to help define who we are. If you’ve known someone long enough, you’ll hear the important ones repeated over and over again. The touchdown on the school playground by the un-athletic kid, or run-ins with the law confessed by someone too honest and straight-laced to have REALLY done those things. Stories we tell about things we remember doing (even if we didn’t.) Memories are malleable, so we shape them to make it easier to live with ourselves.

Is it what I’m living, or what I wish I was living, or what I should be? Where is reality? Caught somewhere between the Dreams of my Past and the Fears of my Future.

I’ve heard that people go into psychiatry / psychology (as a profession) because they have issues to work through (there’s admonition that a lawyer who defends himself has a fool for a client that might apply similarly, here.) I’ve also heard that Writers use their stories in their own way to work through personal issues – exposing (if they’re brave enough) much of what troubles them.

I think my movies tell you where I think I should be – what I ought to be striving for, and the stories I tell others in person about myself reveal what I wish I’d been and done. But if what I’ve heard is true, the fictions I write may say more about WHERE I AM AND WHERE I’VE BEEN than any of those.

I’ve written some strange stories so far. I wonder what it says about me. There’s a lot of them (and me) out there now on Amazon, Smashwords, and Barnes & Noble (ALMOST SHAMELESS PLUG.) Maybe if someone were to read them, they might be able to figure me out.

Just saying…




 

I Don’t Like What Big Data Has Done to My Mail

I’m not happy with what I get in the mail.
First, let me clarify this. For those of you who think I meant email (those born after 1985 or so, most likely) and those who thought I meant through the U.S. Postal Service (those born before the other group), I mean both types of mail. They’re really the same thing, sent through different methods. I’ve noticed that I seem to get far more junk emails each day than the physical junk mail I used to receive – probably because its so much cheaper to send. And so much more politically correct to send us all this annoying, unsolicited advertising without killing as many trees. How many trees will it take me to build a barrier to all these emails? LET THAT BE A LESSON IN UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES. But I digress.
I used to get mail for things that were at least mildly interesting for people with some life in them. Tours. Cruises. Fitness club memberships. Singles groups. All you email generation people can probably understand me so far – you are probably getting these even now. This is where I’m going to lose you.
The mail I get now isn’t like that. Instead, I get reams of targeted ads that the marketers have determined to be more appropriate to my stage of life. Retirement communities. Colonoscopies. Hip replacements. Funeral Plots. Really gives a guy something to look forward to, doesn’t it.
I don’t think this is a problem with my age – it’s a problem with technology.
You see, in the old days (when I wasn’t old), I used to get mail that wasn’t right for me. Mass-mailings that went to everyone, instead of a select demographic, because they didn’t have the sophisticated computers or mailing lists to make it possible to fine-tune their message. But all that’s changed, and it’s going to get worse.
Already, the targeting of communication has gotten narrower – each demographic group is being exposed to their own “suitable” subset. Soon (or maybe already), when you search for something online, it will narrow your search based on YOUR history and demographics. The results will be modified by what the search engine thinks is best for you. Instead of getting a wide exposure to the world, you’ll be looking at it through an increasingly small filter. It will be like trying to explore the universe through the peephole in your door.
What will happen when the day comes that they can alter a piece of entertainment so that it appears differently to each viewer? The same technology that will allow a 3-D television to project a clear image to 4 people by knowing where they are in the room, will also know who they are and what demographic they belong in. We’ll all sit in a room together watching an episode of “Friends”, but we’ll each be seeing a different production. Even the stupid ads that pop up in the corner of the screen will be “just for you.”
When this transition is complete, what will we all have in common? Sure, “Friends” will be the Number One rated show ever, but we won’t be able to talk about it around the water cooler. Instead we’ll spend our time arguing over the differences. I think we do enough of that already.
I remember some time back there was talk of engineering Artificial Stupidity, to get machines to do unintelligent things that would make them seem more human. I think we could use some of that now – it may be the only thing that can save us from becoming totally Balkanized. Have the computers go haywire on purpose and send me a little of someone else’s world for a change.
I’m waiting for something different to show up in my mail – then I’ll know we’re safe. Maybe it will be the Little Golden Books Catalog. Or Better Homes & Gardens. Who knows what form salvation will take?

DE-Sensitivity Training

Apparently, this is anti-bullying month. I could make some jokes about what are we going to do during the 11 pro-bullying months, but I’m not really in a joking mood. This is unusual, because I can usually joke about just about anything, and occasionally find myself being skewered for my lack of sensitivity.
The fact is, this gets to the heart of my problem with the ANTI-BULLYING agenda. As much as I believe that bullying is wrong, there is no way to completely prevent it – there is always going to be some level of bullying. As much as we need to try to stop bullies, I believe the real problem is that VICTIMS DON’T KNOW HOW TO REACT.
There are different levels of bullying, each requires a different response. Sometimes, you need to punch the bully in the nose to get your point across.
Oh, wait: in today’s PC climate, your child is no longer allowed to defend themselves. If a bully comes after your kid and he defends himself, BOTH of the students are violating a ZERO TOLERANCE, NO FIGHTING policy, and BOTH the bully and the victim will be punished.
ZERO TOLERANCE POLICIES are symptom of an inability to make judgments. Part of it is an intellectual failing – we are not training people to be able to use common sense. The biggest part is a failing of character – we have made people afraid to use their own judgment, to make a decision and stand by it. We are training ourselves to be constantly in retreat.
A PUNCH THROWN IN SELF-DEFENSE SHOULD NOT BE CRIMINALIZED. Of course, this is a variation of STAND YOUR GROUND, which drives some people crazy (if they weren’t already there.)
 People who think this way also believe that if you pass laws to make guns illegal, there will be no more gun violence. As if criminals (or bullies) care about the rules. Why does this mindset insist on disarming the law-abiding? Tell me – how does a 100-pound woman defend herself against a 200-pound assailant – even if he’s un-armed? By pointing a finger at him and telling him he’s under citizen arrest? GUNS IN THE HANDS OF LAW-ABIDING CITIZENRY ARE A GOOD THING.
I will confess that I felt bullied recently when someone tried to get me to wear a specific color to prove that I’m opposed to bullying. I find it horribly intimidating to be pressured this way. Should I:
A) Complain about it to the authorities?
B) Get over it?
I don’t know about the rest of the world, but my country has turned into an easily offended, beaten up victim-hood. When did this happen? Somebody needs to tell these people that they don’t have a right to NOT be offended.
Somebody looks at you without smiling – you don’t know what they’re thinking, but it can’t be good. Are you going to make a law about people frowning?
 One of the biggest disservices we’ve done to the generations behind us is to try to take disappointment out of their lives. Everyone gets a ribbon for participating. Don’t hurt their little self-esteems by rewarding a winner – tell them they’re ALL winners. Where’s the motivation to try harder and improve? And more importantly, HOW WILL THEY LEARN TO COPE WITH DISAPPOINTMENT WHEN IT HAPPENS? (AND IT WILL.)
Isn’t it sad to see grown adults, ten, fifteen, thirty years after high school, appearing on a television talk show to confront someone who bullied them back then? Couldn’t someone have helped these people GET OVER IT AND GET ON WITH THEIR LIVES?
This is the crux of the problem I have with Anti-Bullying showcases. You will never completely prevent bullying. Teach kids to cope with it.
Teach them what to do when it’s really serious – where and when to get help, and who to get it from.
Teach them how to defend themselves when it’s necessary (and don’t punish them for it.) And when it’s what used to be a normal part of life, help them by giving them some DE-SENSITIVITY TRAINING: teach them how to cope with people looking at them funny, or calling them names, or not inviting them to parties, and teach them how to not let it rule and ruin their lives, and GET OVER IT.