Monday, June 27, 2011

Hooray for E-Books!

Well, here we are, a few weeks into the book launch and the most incredible thing to me is the Kindle sales.  Right now, Death Is A Relative Thing is number 22 in the Kindle-ebooks-Humor category.  Since Thursday I've watched it go from 43 to 31 to 27, 26 and now 22.  That is so cool.  Thanks to all that have been walking and talking the book.

People ask me questions about the book all the time- how did I come up with the characters, is it biographical, how long did it take me to write.  That stuff I expect.  Some things throw me though, like the guy who came up to me and said "I just want you to know that I really liked the ending of your book." 

Hmmmmm.  Did that mean he like the ENDING of the book or that he liked that it was ENDING. One is good, the other as you can well imagine, is well, bad. Ok, we clarified, (whew) but wow....

Anyway, thanks to everyone!  Keep the good word going.  I appreciate it. 

I'm shooting our another recycled post from the old blog from New Years I think 2 years ago...

The Olden Days

“Mom?” asked my seven year old daughter from the back seat of the car, “can we talk about the ‘olden days’?  I like when you tell me about them.”

“Sure honey, let me just turn up the volume on my hearing aid, ok?” Jeez!

“Ok.  Hey mommy, did they have cars like this when you were a kid?”

“No baby, not like this.  Have you ever seen “The Flintstones? No I guess not, they aren’t even in reruns. Well we had to stop our cars with our feet, roll down our windows manually and there were no portable DVD players for us.  We had to rough it by watching the scenery as it went by.”

“Oh.  Booooring!”  She sat quietly for a bit.

“Mom?” 

“What?”

“Was there TV when you were a kid?”

“Yes honey, but not like you are used to.  There was no 24 hour children’s programming. We had only 7 channels and no do-overs.  If you missed a show, you were out of luck.  If my room was clean, I was allowed a few hours of TV on a Saturday morning.  If it wasn’t clean, grandmas made me weed. We watched black and white ‘follow the bouncing ball’ cartoons, Captain Kangaroo and Lassie.  There were no “on screen guitars”, belly buttons or talking back to teachers.  Oh! And we had to take turns holding the rabbit ears on top of the TV to keep the picture viewable.”

“Oh”  She thought for a moment.  “Why did you keep a rabbit on the TV?”

“It was the 60’s version of cable”

“Oh.    Mom?”

“What baby?”

Did you have stoves in the olden days?”

“No hon, we rubbed two sticks together and the whole family did a dance while sacrificing small woodland creatures to fire gods.  Of COURSE we had stoves!  Ask your grandmother about the stick rubbing thing though, she may have some insight for you.”

 “Mom? Was I in your belly in the olden days?

Egads!  “No hon, not until much much later. After marriage- but we will discuss all of that after you get out of the monastery daddy wants to send you to.  And even though mommy looks like she still has you in her belly, we all know that you aren’t there because you sitting right here in the back seat asking me all these wonderful insightful questions!”

“Everything was so different then.” She looked a little sad.

I felt badly.  Maybe my answers hadn’t been what she was looking for. 

An acute case of ‘Mother guilt’ set in.  Because of it, when she asked “Mom, can you help me build a snowman?” I said “Sure”, instead of “Uhhhh, well, I think sticking a fork in my eye would be a preferable activity.”

We got home, and set to work.  I made a small snowball and started rolling it around, watching it grow as it collected more snow.  Soon it was large enough that we were both pushing it around the front lawn, laughing, huffing and puffing.  We made two others and stacked them all up, shoring them with more snow where they met, making them bigger and rounder.  My nose was running and we were both red faced and frostbitten.

I sat down in the snow because my legs were killing me. I called out “Hey Marisa, do you know how we built snowmen in the olden days?”

“No”

“Exactly the same way we do it now.”

She looked at me, grinned from ear to ear, ran over and gave me a hug.  “I’ll go get a carrot, ok mom?”

“Ok baby, you go get a carrot.”

My butt was frozen to the ground.  I laughed and waited for the spring thaw.

***


May the New Year bring you much joy
Here’s to embracing change
And to touching lives around us
Looking ahead to the future

But may we never move forward so fast however,
That we forget from whence we came
Simple pleasures and tradition
Or how to make a snowman with a child.

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