New June

By admin | June 28, 2021

You’re in the right place
for a mix of stories you just won’t find anywhere else…
“Here’s to the allure of the obscure!”

Dateline June 28, 2021
Location: Southeastern Minnesota

Drink it in…

"June's Picture" 

 Let me paint June's picture—first I take some gold,
Fill the picture full of sun, all that it can hold;
Save some for the butterflies, darting all around,
And some more for buttercups here upon the ground;
Take a lot of baby-blue—this—to make the sky,
With a lot of downy white—soft clouds floating by;
Cover all the ground with green, hang it from the trees,
Sprinkle it with shiny white, neatly as you please;
So—a million daisies spring up everywhere,
Surely you can see now what is in the air!
Here's a thread of silver—that's a little brook
To hide in dainty places where only children look.

Next, comes something—guess—it grows
Among green hedges—it's the rose!
Brown for a bird to sing a song,
Brown for a road to walk along.

Then add some happy children to the fields and flowers and skies,
And so you have June's picture here before your eyes.
by Annette Wynne

In this issue:

New Memories
New Book Release
Not-So-New Institutional Insanity
Featured Guest (A New Perspective)
Did You Know?

1. New Memories

We’ve officially tumbled into summer where a new freedom is born, at least for Miss Kay and myself, along with four robin chicks in a nest just outside the door of our motorhome—a metaphor reflecting our own emergence from the Jurrens’ Florida COVID bunker after a year-and-a-half of isolation! Now, healthier than ever, we remain parked in Southeastern Minnesota, at least for a few more hours.

However you feel about COVID vaccinations, these injections have yielded such emotional relief for Kay and me, not only for our own protection, but for doing our part on behalf of all humanity to deprive this nasty little virus and its spawn a couple more hosts within which it can no longer grow and spread and mutate.

We are of a lighter spirit more so now than in the last eighteen months! For that we are grateful.

We celebrated Juneteenth quietly, without fanfare. After all, this first new national holiday in decades arrived so suddenly, we barely had time to truly understand its significance (click the link above if you’re interested in diving a little deeper. This new holiday possesses a fascinating heritage. So we made no elaborate plans other than educating ourselves over a dish of homemade dairy-free ice cream with a topping of personal reflection.

While our bus wasn’t parked under the now-famous heat dome out west during this last red-hot month, we did share in mid-90 temps even here in the upper Midwest. Thankfully, our two rooftop air conditioners performed flawlessly; however, I studied several articles on how to add a third. Maybe next year. The 2021 bus budget is now officially and irrevocably busted!

This was a memorable June, to be sure. Now here’s to creating more memories in July and beyond !

2. New Book Release

My latest non-fiction book entitled Why Write? Why Publish? is now available on Amazon as of Juneteenth! In this new book I lay out my approach to an end-to-end paperless writing and publishing process for the aspiring writer (or for the seasoned author). Even non-writers will appreciate the “how” behind the “what,” even the “why!”
If I can make this process work efficiently for my own writing and publishing, anyone can!

So why paperless? Because Miss Kay and I live in a beautiful old bus—and have for most of the last five years—but like most motorhomes, we lack wall and bookshelf space. So I had almost no room for endless post-it notes, timeline charts, a murder/mystery board, and even less space for a decent library of hard copy reference books. So I use this virtually paperless process that has turned out not only to be effective but efficient. And my rather extensive reference library weighs about the same as my iPad, although I do keep a few dog-eared paperback favorites on my end table.

I originally wrote this 170-page writer’s reference with generous help from some of the best authors I know or have studied so I could offer it as an instructive ebook to my seminar attendees this summer. But early reader response encouraged me to publish this in a paperback edition as well. I call this book a self-guided seminar. One early reader —an aspiring writer—said, “This just might be the best first book I’ve read on the craft of writing and publishing.” Holy moley! Alrighty, then!

For your edification, I offer you this book’s back-cover text:

“Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of independent writing, editing, formatting, publishing, marketing and selling. This book simplifies an otherwise daunting process.

“Are you an aspiring author? Or a published author looking for more control over your work? Either way, this book comprises a comprehensive self-guided seminar that starts shallow and dives deeper as we progress, but at your own pace, unlike most seminars.

“Are you struggling to spark your inspiration for the book you know is inside of you somewhere? This book’s initial chapters will jump start your creative journey.

“Do you wonder how to efficiently begin and sustain progress on this writing journey? I will ask you: why should you write, and where should you start? Then what? Find answers in this book that will streamline your own efficient and effective writing and publishing process, including a valuable survey of free or cheap software tools, cheat sheets and pointers to a treasure trove of resources for authors and publishers.

“Why should you spend your precious time and creative energy on all the other stuff that comprises the business of being an author and a publisher? Or should you even bother? I’ll point you toward the condensed wisdom of dozens of my favorite industry experts who will answer the why and how. Fast.

“Get started now writing and publishing just one book, or embark on a fulfilling career. Sip or gulp. The choice is yours.”

So check out my latest title now offered in both Kindle and paperback editions: Why Write? Why Publish? Get yours now on Amazon by clicking here. Or grab a free peek by clicking the link and then click “Look Inside” above the cover image.
Remember, you can read the Kindle edition of this book on any smart device (phone, tablet or computer) by downloading the free Kindle reader app also available by clicking on the link above!

3. Not-So-New Institutional Insanity – For Friends and Loved Ones of Authors (you know who you are!)…

Are you an author, or do you know someone who is so afflicted and you’re seeking a peek behind the purple curtain to see if the wizard is in the house? If you’re either, this article is for you.

Are you a stranger in a strange land? Do you feel like everyone thinks you are plagued by a creeping insanity? All because you represent this weird caricature—that of an author?

Do you especially perplex your friends and loved ones who perhaps unintentionally offer you that pitiful look? You know the one. Mostly because they either don’t read books at all, or more likely, the books you write don’t appeal to them?

So they naturally believe you don’t know what in your own unique brand of Hell you’re doing. All because you’re not yet banking a bazillion bucks, or because you’re not a household name. Maybe never will be. Or you’re investing a crazy big percentage of your life that takes away from other stuff, like what’s important to them?

If you’re even a quasi-serious writer who has publicly professed your allegiance to the craft, you know of what I speak.

“You write books? Oh, that’s nice. Good for you! So have I ever heard of you? Why haven’t I seen your stuff in my local library?” Or, “I’ve thought about writing a book, but just haven’t gotten around to it.”

Like it’s a trivial pursuit or an amusing parlor trick.

Or have you heard this?

“Why do you write about stuff nobody (meaning them) cares about?” or, “If you don’t make a lot of money with your little stories, what is the point, you poor thing?”

This latter clause usually isn’t spoken aloud, but you can see it in their eyes or hear it in their commiserative tone, can’t you? Bless their empathetic hearts. How could they possibly know until they’ve bled with you, sacrificed with you, died with you and your characters? And with me and mine.

Let’s face it, my fellow purveyors of prose, or worse, poetry, ours is a unique passion, not well understood by most earthlings, and that’s okay, isn’t it? We write because it is our passion, maybe even our destiny. Like I tell my seminar attendees, “Write because it makes you uncomfortable. You’ll write with greater authenticity.”

***I’m most creative at 2AM, when I’m half asleep, incapable of plying pen and paper, or operating my iPhone voice recorder app always uselessly within reach. Part of our torturous trip, right?***

Now that I’ve vocalized what many of you might be thinking or have heard, let’s get real. We write because we must. There exist worlds of wonder in us that scream to be set free. They keep us up at night. We imagine if we don’t stab them with our quills onto organic or digital parchment we shall surely burst. That can get messy.

If you’re like me, you’re feeding a need you likely can’t articulate with any precision. You are afflicted. But if you are anything like me, I know you want to do this, you must do this. And if you are very much like me, you’d have it no other way.

“Ours is a progressive disease. Many a life has been subsumed by the affliction of stabbing pen into parchment! For myself, I would suffer nothing less sublime, even IF I had a choice.”
GK Jurrens

When I started my literary journey years ago, I drove myself to finish just one book while I learned as much about the craft of writing as I could absorb while trying to balance that with everything else in my then-hectic life. I finished that book, a contemporary mystery/thriller, learned how to publish it, and did so.

Next, as I listened to other writers, I feared the self-sullying image of a “one-book wonder.” Not me, I quietly muttered! So I wrote and published another thriller—a sequel to the first. Yes, I had acquired the thirst I could not quench.

Then I wondered what it would it be like to tackle a different genre? So I invested two years in writing and publishing a science fiction trilogy, or so I thought. Not enough science, readers told me, but I had conjured plenty of solid twenty-second-century mysteries and thrills, I was told. I also created a reader magnet as an informative companion guide to this trio of gripping tales, two of which were of epic proportions (in other words, real thick books).

So now I’ve just completed my third work of non-fiction (mentioned above), adding it to a pair of earlier (non-fiction) coffee table books that failed to inspire all but a few hundred readers within the micro-niche of hard-core voyaging sailors. This, however, is my first book on the craft of writing. That makes seven new books in six busy years. All except the companion guide to my Mayhem trilogy will have been published worldwide in both ebook and paperback editions. With the two older non-fictions already in my backlist, my latest historical novel—very much a work in process—will comprise book number ten. At least I’m no OBW (One-Book-Wonder), damn it!

All this genre-hopping impacts my commercial viability, but I don’t seem to care because I believe my books represent metaphors for something that needs to be heard! And wait until you get a load of my anthology of, um, irreverent poems, essays and original images. That will be book number eleven, hopefully by year-end 2021, although this is also likely to be a real thick book!

All of this is to ask if you can relate to my smoldering dilemma, family, friends and fellow word players, an affliction that compels some of us to serve both readers and our own egos. And don’t even get me started on distractions!

***Distractions suckle on the flesh of creativity. So just say no! (yeah, right…)***

Ultimately, I cling to one inalienable literary truth. If I quit, I will have surrendered, and that is not an option, soldier! At least not yet. There are still mythical battles to be fought and won, characters to be punished, worlds to incinerate and victories to celebrate!

4. Featured Guest (And a New Perspective)

Meet Dorothy Ann Jones. More quickly than I could ask the question, she recounted precise details surrounding a storm on October 10, 1949, the year I was born!

As a writer, she makes me proud. Dorothy has documented every significant event in her life on the family farm they’ve held together for seven generations. She has witnessed events most of us can only read about and wonder.

I spent a few hours with this amazing matriarch to research topics I had only read about. I’ve mentioned my historical fiction project before, and I sought an understanding of direct visceral experience from someone who had lived through the 1930s and 1940s. You cannot Google that. Dorothy did not disappoint.

Her father had immigrated from Denmark to continue his profession as a blacksmith in the logging camps of Idaho and Washington state. There was still money to be made sharpening plow shares (blades with earth-turning points on the business end of a plow). Her father’s first wife grew ill, so they moved to Rochester, Minnesota where they could be close to the Mayo Clinic for her treatment.

After the tragic death of his first wife, this stalwart Dane later met and married Dorothy’s mother in 1930. They moved to the nearby small town of Eyota where Dorothy was born in the scorched summer of 1931. When she married Bill Jones in the late 1940s, they lived on the nearby farm that had been in his family since 1858.

As I was primarily researching the 1930s for my novel “Black Bllzzard” (which you may know I called “Jake’s Flame” before changing the working title), I needed to draw on Dorothy’s direct memories of her childhood as well as stories told to her by her parents. Like elsewhere in America, that period tested their mettle. Dorothy told me such a story. She said,

***Between the*** *Great* ***War (World War One) and the*** *Great* ***Depression (1930s) some children spent hours daily in a horse-drawn school bus . We define the word* “Great” *somewhat differently these days, don’t we?***

“The Depression came along. Husband Bill’s mom and dad couldn’t pay the mortgage on the home place, so they held an auction. They retrieved enough from the sale to make the mortgage payment, but they moved to the woodcutter’s shack on the farm and rented the rest until they could recover. They started over. Bill’s dad said of that time, ‘we weren’t living, we existed.'”

After Dorothy shared this with me, we both fell silent for a time. I asked Dorothy what routine tasks occupied them since working the land and attending church occupied all their time.

“Well, as kids on the farm in those days, we picked corn. Snapped it right off the stalk in the field, one ear at a time, to feed the pigs. Dad penned up stalls for the little pigs to separate them from their mothers who might accidentally lay on top of them and kill them. I also had to regularly check the heat lamps over our five hundred baby chicks. We were lucky. A lot of farms had no electricity. It was cold, and without the heat from those lamps, those chicks would huddle up so tightly together for warmth that they’d smother.”

Now this city boy had no idea, and you just don’t get such authentic stories like this from Internet searches or even from reading period novels! So I asked some more questions, and gained even more insights:

Shocks of wheat hand-tied into bundles with twine, waiting to be threshed.

“Life was quite primitive by today’s standards. My father worked in a dying profession. Less and less call for a blacksmith, but I can still smell the pungent smoke of red-hot metal. That smoke stung my eyes when I got too close, and I still remember the sound of Dad hammering a new point on a plowshare ringing in my ears. I can also remember the smell of strong coffee and cold sandwiches we’d deliver to the men in the field during threshing. The dusty wheat chafe they stirred up in the air clung to the sweat on our necks. That was so itchy!“

***A threshing machine separates stems of the wheat stalk from the precious grain generating the always unfortunate bi-product of exquisite itchiness*** ***and a bone-tiredness that defy description.***

She shuddered as she thrust herself back into that vivid memory. I shuddered too. She helped me remember my own distant memory when I was only five—before we “moved to town” upon losing our farm). I had forgotten.

Illuminating recollections poured out for two full hours with me furiously typing copious notes. What I found most remarkable was how intellectually intimidated I felt by this ninety-year-old amateur historian! I learned fascinating operational details of horse-drawn drags, plows, manure spreaders, threshing machines, and how hay and straw was hoisted up into a barn’s haymow with pulleys, ropes and literal horse power. This greenhorn bathed in a delightfully refreshing perspective. This was exactly the type of material I sought for my new book which I hope to finish by the end of this year.

This genre of historical fiction has spawned an unexpectedly ambitious project for me. But I’m finding this to be fulfilling as I just begin to scratch into a surface understanding of the non-stop chain of hardships these admirable titans of the period endured. They not only endured but thrived despite a lifestyle almost inconceivable to most folks alive today.

Thank you for moving my research forward, Dorothy, and for your delightful company on a sunny June afternoon on the farm!

5. Did You Know?

The Amazon rain forest produces more than 20% of the world’s oxygen supply.

The Amazon River pushes so much water into the Atlantic Ocean that more than a hundred miles at sea off the mouth of the river one can dip fresh water out of the ocean. The volume of water in the Amazon River is greater than the next eight largest rivers in the world combined, and three times the flow of all rivers in the United States.

With pen in hand,

Gene

P.S. After a prolonged period of unnatural isolation, we reveled in seeing and hugging so many friends and family this month. A cornucopia! Thank you all!
And just days before we were to leave Minnesota, we reveled in an extended family gathering that was so heart-warming, we were both close to tears. Mil gracias to Jim and Ellie White for hosting this party for nine-day-old great-grand-nephew Felix on behalf of his new parents, Will and Andrea. What a joy to see and hold this stout little fellow, but a greater joy to meet and talk and reminisce with his extended family! Yes, you now belong to him!
Jacob, you inspire me with your micro-wildlife tracker inventions! Jim, thanks for your tutilage in foraging for wild mushrooms (fabulous breakfast with your oyster ‘shrooms this morning!). Chuck, thanks for the stories of Europe and South America! Ellie, thanks for bequeathing my mom’s diary penned in May of 1930! Big sis Carol (80 going on 60), you’ve created an awesome family, and I look forward to the extraordinary journal you’ve described. Nicole, I hope you are soon reunited with the love of your life in Santiago, Chili. Becky and Gordy, so glad you and the girls could leave Alaska’s severely short summer to be there too! How long has it been?
So many other side discussions, so much love, so much food!