Big Bang Poetry

Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World

Category: Publishing (Page 1 of 6)

Cowboy Meditation Primer Wins Silver in the Nautilus Book Awards

May 2, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Final-oneside-cover-jpgI received happy news that Cowboy Meditation Primer won a silver award in the Nautilus Book Awards. Yeah!! Whoo-hoo! So very proud to be in the company of these big publishers and prior winners!

And now I have a silver medallion for the cover. This was much appreciated! And a big thanks to everyone who helped me put the book together.

Winners will go up on their web-site mid-May. In the meantime, check out the amazing books on the winners list.

And buy some! I sure will.

Information about the award:

For two decades, Nautilus Book Awards has recognized books that transcend barriers of culture, gender, race, and class, and promote conscious living & green values, spiritual growth, wellness & vitality, and positive social change. Last year, Nautilus received entries from 36 States of USA, and from 12 other nations. Dedicated to excellence and high standards of both message and presentation, the Nautilus program celebrates books that inspire and connect our lives as individuals, communities and global citizens.

Nautilus Book Awards is held in particular high-regard for recognizing and promoting outstanding print books in several dozen genres that nurture positive change to co-create a Better World.

Nautilus is one of the significant Book Award programs that welcomes entries from the full range of the print-publishing spectrum: Author Self-Published, Small Press (2 to 10 books annual & from multiple authors), Small Press-Hybrid, and from Large Publishers. All the books selected as Winners are potent seeds for the growth, coherence, and healing of our culture and world.

The Nautilus Mission is to recognize and celebrate a wide subject-range of Better Books for a Better World.

More Adventures in E Lit

October 25, 2018 / / 0 Comments

ProfSo last May I took a four week, online class called Reading Literature in the Digital Age  on the Future Learn platform. It was taught by Philipp Schweighauser at the University of Basel. It was great, except that Schweighauser was doing a Simon Schama impersonation in every video.

The class was about different reading strategies people employ when reading academically or surfing on the web or in social settings. I learned more about deep reading, distant reading and hyper reading. And I’m a practitioner of all of it, for better or worse.

In fact, I've been noticing reading trends particularly around work groups for almost 30 years. When I started working in offices, desktop computers were rare and windows wasn’t even widely available yet. This was before email and the end of paper memorandums delivered into in-boxes actually sitting on corners of desks. I remember hand delivering stacks of memos.

My job now depends on a light understanding of a plethora of web and project management tools. And instead of seeing an increase in customer service with CRMs, better decision making with data-gathering tools, or quicker decision making with mobile access, I've seen a steady decline in productivity, efficiency and customer service and a steady increase in decision paralysis as each year goes by.

This is primarily because tools (and the frantic drive to develop the next hip one) have become a distraction from the work itself and, more specifically, a distraction from deep thinking and solving problems. We are now so pressed for time due to these "time-saving" tools that we’re forced into a reading survivor mode: skimming, winging-it, the bullshitting that has become prevalent in offices everywhere, the bullshitting that signals immediately: I haven't read it. Add to that the attention deficit introduced when spreading our eyeballs over various online media sites and indulging in fun online things which require even more skim-reading. We're now inundated with noise and a barge of "you should read this." 

And it’s causing already bureaucratic organizations to crack from the lack of deep consideration over real business problems. Hyper-reading seems to me both the cause and the symptom of our online agonies. Here's an interview with Schweighauser about the class.  

XKCD published this cartoon last year about the Digital Resource Lifespan:

CaptureVisit the hosted cartoon at https://xkcd.com/1909/ and roll over the graphic for some funny.

I keep coming back to this graphic and sending it around because it's all about intellectual perishability. The Father of the Internet, Vint Cerf, once warned us that decades of intellectual property would someday perish because it's stuck on outmoded formats. Electronic Lit is particularly vulnerable and perishable. 

The quote above says it all: “It’s unsettling to realize how quickly digital resources can disappear without ongoing work to maintain them.”

Digital is more labor intensive and perishable than books are for this very reason. And as corporations constantly ask us to switch to new media, we spend money re-buying the same things we already have. And why? As a cross-over example from my other blog interest in Cher, one early Cher album from 1965 has since possibly seen six formats: mono lp, stereo lp, 8-track tape, cassette tape, compact disc and mp3. I have a box of my mother's old 78-records but I can't play them. I have many odd boxes of various types of computer storage systems: 8-inch floppy discs, 3 1/2-inch floppy discs, backup zip cartridges, writable CDs, SD cards, external hard drives, memory sticks. I even have some of my mother's recipes printed on the back of old fortran punch cards my Dad used to bring home from work. Read about the history of removable computer storage. 

I also find it interesting that retail stores are now finding “the digital space so crowded” they’re going back to printed catalogs. 

It's good we're not killing trees anymore, no doubt. But how to invent a permanent device that beats it for durability; it's hard.

New CMP Review

October 9, 2018 / / 0 Comments

CMP-cover-6x9-25sep18Many thanks to Ann Cefola for her kind review of CMP in annogram.

"Poet Mary McCray’s astonishing second book, while reading like a novel, integrates highly crafted poetics. A gorgeous immersion into southwestern landscape, the Primer is as much a spiritual as external journey. Easterner Silas Cole finds camaraderie in the company of the mysterious Coyote, the quiet cook, and gambling cowboys who teach him to reel in his soul as well as the herd they drive. While Silas can “extract the holes of bullets” and “save them like buttons”, he ultimately learns "nothing but earth wants your bones.” This is a gritty and lyrical narrative I could not resist."

This year I was catching up on old New Yorker issues and I found this very funny wild west mashup, "Frontier Squad Goals."

Some funny samples:

Avoid feeling guilty for saying no to future social plans that would be difficult to attend because we will be living in a new place, for which we have no map.

Eat more unprocessed, clean food, with no mold, no obvious discoloration, and no parasites.

More Bad Reviews of Good Things: Walt Whitman

October 9, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Whitman2Bill Henderson's book Rotten Reviews catalogs unfortunate reviews of Walt Whitman:

"Incapable of true poetical originality, Whitman had the cleverness to invent a literary trick, and the shrewdness to stick to it."
 Peter Bayne, Contemporary Review, 1875

"No, no, this kind of thing won’t do…The good folks down below (I mean posterity) will have none of it."
James Russell Lowell, quoted in The Complete Works Vol 14, 1904

"Whitman is unacquainted with art as a hog is with mathematics."
The London Critic

"Of course, to call it poetry, in any sense, would be mere abuse of language."
William Allingham, letter to W.M. Rossetti, 1857

"Mr. Whitman’s attitude seems monstrous. It is monstrous because it pretends to persuade the soul while it slights the intellect; because it pretends to gratify the feelings while it outrages the taste…Our hearts are often touched through a compromise with the artistic sense but never in direct violation of it."
Henry James, The Nation

"Whitman, like a large shaggy dog, just unchained, souring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon."
Robert Louis Stevenson, Familiar Studies, 1882

"…his lack of a sense of poetic fitness, his failure to understand the business of a poet, is clearly astounding."
Francis Fisher Browne, The Dial, 1882

"He was a vagabond, a reprobate, and his poems contain outbursts of erotomania so artlessly shameless that their parallel in literature would hardly be found with the author’s name attached. For his fame he has to thank just those bestially sensual pieces which first drew him to the attention of all the pruriency of America. He is morally insane, and incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, virtue and crime."
Max Nordau, 1895

Edits and Edits and Edits and Edits

August 28, 2018 / / 0 Comments

20180729_112321….so then we found out we had to move. On top of everything else. Criminy! The fact that this book is coming out this year is a miracle. It's been rough. The last few months have been packing and planning a move. Not what I had in mind for this year at all.

But we've had a lot of help from friends and family and I'm grateful for that because it's kept things with this book on track, but barely.

But I would not advise putting out a book of any sort in the same year you have to move. It's financially and physically not a good idea. Had I known.

Anyway, I also want to point out how many edit drafts this process went through. If you don't love editing, don't self-publish. End of story. 

This manuscript was originally written in 2014 and went through two (2) drafts of editing by myself and Monsieur Big Bang way back then.

This year the manuscript was professionally edited (probably the most expensive part of the venture apart from cover design). That was edit number three (3). Then I edited the manuscript one final time as I was laying it out for proofs. That was the fourth (4) edit. 

You can see from the post-it notes above, proofs needed many edits too. As of today there have been six (6) rounds of proof editing. 

We're at a total of twelve (12) rounds of edits. In the very last versions, you're often only editing one or two things, but it's time consuming. And you have to enjoy making small changes over and over again. Which I actually do. I really enjoy editing. I find it relaxing and productive. You wouldn't know if from all the typos in this blog but if I had the time I would take every post through 4-5 rounds of editing. But it's a free blog, so you get what you pay for.

This book isn't free and it needs to be error-free. 

Cowboy Meditation Primer: Covers and Photos

July 11, 2018 / / 0 Comments

60964-large-1024x536That dog is me.

Things have been cray-cray in the land of McCrayCray. The project to publish the new book of poems started in January, but since then I've been swooped off into another, more demanding, job. I've been to Ohio and back to bring a truck load of furniture to Albuquerque from Cleveland, where my parents live now. Then we found out we have to move in two months so we're trying to find new digs. Then our car breaks. Then there's a family reunion to get organized for. Actually two. I've been a big grumps 24/7. And of course no problems happen sequentially. They happen concurrently. So while I'm losing my mind, I'm finding some thread of sanity in the lessons of Cowboy Meditation Primer. Not that I'm great at it, mind you, but it's a practice and you just get tons more practice during the hard times.

But the book….is still…on schedule…for September.

It's been rough though. To make matters worse, I decided to write a Traveling Guide/Reader's Companion for the book, a map for traveling along the Goodnight Loving Trail with the characters of the book. The guide is also packed with New Mexico history and Zen Buddhist ideas referenced in the book, as well as where to stop along the way. It will all be a free and downloadable in September when the book goes on sale.

I might not get the eBook done, but…you can't have everything. Anyway, despite my complaining, a lot of great stuff has come together in the past few months. 

PhotographersArtist Emi Villavicencio did the cover for my last book of poems (see right) and I had such a good time working with her for that I decided to see if she was available for the new book. Lucky for me she was. We worked on this project from about late February to the end of June. 

I told her we needed some kind of mashup between cowboys and Buddhists. So she sent me some pictures of belt designs and tattoos just so we could brainstorm off them. By April, she sent me the following drawings to see what would work.

Drawings
I loved the Zen sand garden imagery and I also loved the simplicity of the rope, except it looked too much like a cattle brand. Ouch. So then Emi came up with the following two variations based on that feedback: the first based off of a style of Buddhist guidebooks and the second based off an idea we had for spurs dragging lines across the sand. I loved both of them and it was hard to choose which direction to go in.

Buddhistbook Boots 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From there it was working on variations of the boot idea, which we picked because the book has so references to taking care of your feet and feet being a focus of meditation. We could also focus on the iron-rich, red quality of New Mexico dirt. I was worried the New Mexico sky was the only element missing from the design, it's vibrant white and blues. So we decided the title might be a way to fit that element in.

In the first draft, Emi sketched everything out loosely. Then we tried a translucent boot and a more Zen font for the second version. The final draft returns to the more stylized cowboy boot, richer dirt, and the blue sky font coloring.

  First Final Real-final

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What a fun process. Meanwhile, I needed to get an author photo shot. Stephanie Howard did the photography in Marina Del Ray, California, for the last book. But she has since moved to Atlanta. Finding new people for this part of the project proved difficult. People I contacted weren't available at the same time, strangers wanted money up front. Shoots got planned and cancelled. Finally, my co-worker in Media Production here at CNM, Pat Vasquez-Cunningham, suggested some simple shots with his tintype app. We went down to Old Town Albuquerque one evening and took some great shots.

His app does crazy things to make your eyes look ghostly like a tin-type photo. I call the last one my country-music-album cover. 

4667 4714 4733 4741

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The shirt I'm wearing I just bought from my new favorite story, Soft Surroundings. It's called, (I kid you not), a poet's blouse, I suppose due to its ruffled sleeves, as if it were a shirt Lord Byron would wear. 

Pat also took some shots that didn't turn out for some awesome reasons, including a series where his camera would only focus on my hands. I liked that since my hands did all the work (or a lot of it) typing out the book. In this photo you can also see my great-grandfather's cowboy boots on my feet.

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Here he is wearing his own boots with my Dad and Uncle.

Daddytom

 

How to Submit Poems to Journals

June 30, 2016 / / 0 Comments

HopeHow exciting it is to be sending out poems! No matter how often you receive rejections, keep focusing on the fun of researching, organizing and sending poems out into the universe.

Here are some step-by-step guidelines for you.

 

Step 1: Take a look at your poems and classify them by:

  • Writing style: are they rhymed or rhymed, are they traditional meter (if so what kind of meter) or free verse, are they conventional in language and tone or are they experimental?
  • Content: what are your poems about, what's the subject matter?

Different poetry journals cater to a variety of these possibilities.

Step 2: Research poetry journals to find ones that match these poetry styles. There are two ways to go about this:

The best way is to visit the periodical section of your local libraries or bookstores (if you have any) and read some of their poetry journals. If you don't see any that match your work, don't worry about it. Your poems might fit a niche journal the library doesn't carry. But this will give you a good idea about current popular poetry journals, the top tier to aim for someday.

You can also search some very good databases online to find journals and what they publish:

    http://www.pw.org/literary_magazines
    https://duotrope.com/

The old school way was to buy a copy of Poet’s Market but you’ll have to do this every year or two to get current listings (things change fast out there in poetry land). I found this was not a feasible option for me long term. Plus, what to do with all the old issues? Your library might have an up-to-date copy.

Create a list of possible journals from this research.

Step 3: Create your cover letter. You can list previous publications here or note that this would be your first publication. Different journals aim for different kinds of writers. Some want established writers and some want to find the next new discovery.

Some guidance on cover letters.

Everyone has differing ideas on the details needed in a cover letter. Feel free to experiment but keep this in mind: journals have seen it all. Literally, they’ve already read thousands upon thousands of “creative” cover letters. Don’t pour all your creativity into this. It’s a functional document.

Step 5:  Submit

When you find journals to submit to, peruse their websites for submission information. Sometimes I search Google for "[journal name] + submissions" to get a link directly to the submission information page (because some journals hide the stinker pretty far into their site).

Pay special attention to how they want submissions submitted. They're all different. Determine what format they want the submission to be sent: printed and mailed, attached as a word or PDF or Word doc, or included in the body of an email. And note the maximum number of poems they will accept.

Many journals these days only take submissions through an online service called Submittable (http://www.submittable.com/) so go ahead and sign up for an account there. It's free and the site helps you keep track of every place you've submitted poems and what the result was so you don't have to create an XLS Spreadsheet or other document to keep all that straight, although maybe you should create a spreadsheet or notebook anyway for the few email and mailed submissions you might also send out.

More information on submissions:

6 Submission Shortcuts You Should Be Using (And 3 You Shouldn’t)

10 Rules for Submitting to Lit Mags

What Editors Want; A Must-Read for Writers Submitting to Literary Magazines

Empty Mirror’s Complete Guide

College Reading on Humility

June 1, 2016 / / 0 Comments

BookI'm very appreciative that Joshua Ebert took the time to leave a review on Smashwords for Writing in the Age of Narcissism . (May, 2016)

"The influence of narcissism on today's pop culture has warped the way people interact. The author's commentary was smart and relevant. It caused me to think about the way I treat other people. Even as I criticize vapid, self-aware narcissism, I'm sure I still act that way out of a desire for validation. Like they say, "everybody wants to be special." If I was a college professor, I'd have my students read this book. It provides a good lesson in humility."

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/511496

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