…where everything goes from roses and sunshine to something much more akin to the southernmost drafts of northbound horse?

I never was all that great at geography, but something about all this just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I'd much prefer talking about it. Always had a knack for the storytelling part of it, anyway. And the editors over at The Ocotillo Review and Kallisto Gaia Press seemed to think so, too, because they recently notified me that they planned to publish my fourth story from my Long Gone & Lost collection, which I’ll be turning in for my MFA here in the very near future.

I’m fairly certain that the two fellows from my story would know all about those ill tasting after effects I mentioned, however. They may be all fiction themselves, but they were indeed inspired by real life events in a real life newsrooms. Dave Kindred wrote about a few folks just like these two who, mere days after everybody was riding a high that only those who win six Pulitzers will ever truly know, them and most everyone they knew were handing walking papers from their jobs. That's right, they were fired!

Sure, they may be one of the best papers anywhere, as the Pulitzers might suggest, but they would soon be so with half as many people.

Trust me when I say this, but if that don’t leave a bad taste in your mouth, nothing will.

I read Kindred’s Morning Miracle two years ago now. He wrote about the world famous Washington Post, and how after one of their best years ever, editorially speaking, half the people employed there lost their jobs because subscribers had dropped off and Facebook could do for free what no newspaper ever could.

What’s that, you might ask, that Facebook so excels at? Namely, creating a platform whereby complete strangers could hound and annoy people with enough asinine questions about the glorified junk somebody is selling that folks will actually give shit away–cars, furniture, boats, livestock, you name it–just so they don’t have to answer, yet again, what color that the blue 1985 Ford Tempo that's for sale might be, or what year model it was again, or what make of that model it might be, or–did I happen to mention the color already? I forget…

(I've had some questions arise on that last paragraph from the original posting of this this blog entry on my author website, so I thought it might need some explaining. You see the Marketplace feature of Facebook, the very culprit responsible for obliterating the common classified ad in a newspaper which in turn all but sank your average newspaper in terms of operating revenue, actually rewards such idiotic lines of questioning a product, because its algorithms push to the top of people's displays those items which are most talked about, so a series of completely useless details about said car, or likewise, 110 people entering one word exclamations, like " Nice!" or "P.O.S!!!" the more likely modifier of an 85 Tempo, especially those that receive a response from the author, actually get shown before those that have none. As a result, people now obliterate said site  with needless words, getting friends to help even, just to have that piece of crap car show up every time you refresh your page, thereby increasing its likelihood of someone purchasing it. I have no idea, but it was a fact I picked up from a fellow who bulls and resells POS cars on a regular basis. And now you know, as Paul Harvey used to say on the radio, the rest of the story).

But there at the Post, they threw parties one day. Couldn’t be prouder of how hard everybody worked to be just like a blood kin family. A few days later, they had security guards following people out to make sure they didn’t take a stapler that wasn’t theirs. They even fired some of the folks who won Pulitzers, I hear. They had to. They couldn’t afford them anymore.

Sadly, that sort of thing is still very much a reality for some of the folks I know well. In fact, newspapers are nothing like the bastions of economic security they once were. And sure, you gotta feel bad for the guy who tops his profession, only to be rewarded for his efforts with a layoff. But what if those employees fired–the ones the reader gets to know best in the story–are complete and utter slacker morons? I mean they serve a function-- albeit, doing something I don’t want to do--but somebody has to, I guess. Or not. But how would that dynamic affect the story?

I wondered. So, I wrote.

Wound up calling it “Forget the Alamo” (which isn’t near as heretical as it sounds to all my Texas purist friends. At least, I hope not, anyway). I can’t say much more about it, for now. Not until it publishes. They want first publication rights and all.

For more information, and to see a full compendium of items published this year, log on to my author website at https://outlawauthorz.com.

So here I am, checking my email and lo and behold I find a link to this wonderful social network.  I'm pretty excited about it for its not often that there are networks that I assume cater to authors or artists, so this is quite nice.  I first wanted to take the time to introduce myself.  

Once upon a time there was this crazy broad named Julie.  Yep, she was crazy but in a good way.  People had this tendency to call her 'Jewelz, Julie-bird, The Jeweled Canary' etc. which she didn't mind so much.  Pet names I suppose but the final nickname became a sort of totem for her.  This girl loved to sing as much as she loved to write.  Dancing around her house, in the shower, in the middle of Wal-Mart produce section with her two children in tow she'd belt out a song that would resonate through the entire building.  She's never had security called on her for it...yet...but she has received countless stares, giggles, and shaking of heads as the common folk of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan walk past.  

This woman has such a story to tell though.  If you give her the chance, she'd be apt to talk your ear off.  She'll tell you the tales and woes of her past battling the monster called Divorce and severing the ties that bound her into a miserable existence.  Of her forthcoming rebirth within the arms of her knight in vomit colored PJ's.  She'll talk of her struggles through distance and time apart from her love, and how soon her soldier will be returning for good this time.  This girl is a dreamer, you see, creating blankets with the yarns that unravel through her subconscious.  From pen to paper she draws the reader in like a deep breath and with quite a hypocritical stance on the subject, she has nary a whisper of a care for grammatical faux pas, but meticulously grinds down, and polishes the rough edges of others' work.  She takes her time much like a samurai perfecting his form, though she is much too quick in her thoughts to spend too much time on the trivial; always in a hurry and rush in her own life.  For others, though, she gives so much time.  

Creator of a reinvented household where she learned the tools of her trade and went far beyond that in the literal sense; she reinvented her house and transformed it into a whimsical world full of pleasantries, paint jobs, new cupboards and walk-in closets.  From there, architecture and renovation was simply not good enough for her, no, she wanted more (and she was bored) so she started a company with a namesake that plagues the writers of history.  The proverbial cinder block to the head upon where the silent dead and dumb reside behind.  Writerz Block.  From there, she would transform the work of independent authors and dreamers such as herself with the help of her magical friend, Caffeine.  These two became inseparable; accomplishing so much that even Time became quite jealous.  With their powers combined they wrote, compiled, edited, formatted, and published a book of poetry with none other than Aramey, another kindred spirit.  Once the dynamic duo (this Julie chick and Caffeine) had finished this venture, they began on others including following Irony, Karma, and Fate around observing how these three goddesses tormented a tryster among others in epic poetic fashion.  They swam within the Faces in Still Waters and became haunted by the spirits and souls within them.  They ventured hand in hand in two other books while during a third, reflected upon the past while doling out advice during a warped mental time-traveling excursion (memoir).  Unfortunately, they went without a TARDIS and had to foot it.  They also didn't have an interpreter available to decipher the scrawling but they made away with it anyway and remembered the peculiarities.  They also developed a sort of warped codex.  On their adventures, they happened upon other adventurers with their own mega bosses to defeat.  So they stopped along these side-quests and lent a hand.  

Now, currently this adventurous, perhaps slightly twitchy and overworked individual manages to live her caffeinated life much like a cyborg (it has been said that her energy level far exceeds that of a fictitious pink bunny rabbit who apparently spent copious amounts of time being the wall-flower bandgeek in school, sporting shades and dancing about drumming his drum as she skips to its beat.  She and that bunny go waaaaaaay back not unlike Alice as well (no, not the future-seeing sparkly vampire Alice although she's kinda cool too and probably the best out of the lot of them.  Well...Jasper's cool too.).  Aside from her day job raising two angels (angels in disguise,mind you.  Terrible twos and sanity severing six's) she finds other ways of keeping herself too busy to breathe such as taking a few courses on coursera.org to further develop her craft or bragging  about (Development and Marketing Director) a miraculous literary magazine, Miracle E-zine.  

She looks forward to sleeping roughly once a month which is about two seconds after she collapses into a heap and power naps for 12 hours then wakes up ready to go it again!  At 32 years young, tattooed, pierced, and 32 flavors of all kinds of funky, this girl...well...is honestly quite modest yet obscenely quirky.  When she does something, she opts for flair because subtlety isn't exactly 'her thing' or so she says.   

So this Jeweled Canary takes flight and soars through the mind, body, and soul in search of adventure, personal ethical philosophy and wisdom whether its domesticated adventures or following the jet-stream within the mind.  If you close your eyes and listen really closely though, you can probably hear her belting out 'The Sound of Music' as she does the dishes.