I got a speeding ticket earlier this afternoon. It seemed like I was going with the traffic but got singled out. That put me in a “why does the world hate me?” mind frame. I have also just received a “No” from Bill Kurtis on a request for a blurb for Tripio. On top of all of that, I am a lifelong, die-hard Ohio State Buckeye football fan and Urban Meyer announced his retirement a few days ago. Why does the world hate me, indeed?
I was still considering this on my couch after dinner, when I glanced over to see my downstairs computer. It was not at all far from where I had parked my backside. With just little effort, I could check my Tripio gmail inbox. Maybe some good news awaits me there? Or, wait! What if there is no news? Or worse, bad news? I was in the thralls of “intermittent reinforcement”, at least as I understand the concept. If I knew one way or the other, I would not be tempted at all. I had just recently discovered the term in the Alan Jacobs’ “Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction”. I congratulated myself on my new name for not being currently able to do anything constructive. That afterglow didn’t last long however. No longer able to contain myself, I had to check the Tripio gmail. It was five steps and a click away.
You read before you the words of a changed man. I did in fact receive news. News I consider to be great, in fact. In my email was a response to the first blurb request I had sent for Tripio. It was from Kevin Knox. The response I read in my email was a the first real review of Tripio. This was from someone who was the Head of Coffee Quality with Starbucks during the time Tripio was set. Mr. Knox appears in the book as the “coffee God.” He had just finished Tripio and found it “a vivid and authentic journey through the heady early days of Starbucks expansion.”
Wow. Damn. It is hard to say just how great I feel. I simply say this: Even if the world still hates me, it’s alright because Kevin Knox liked Tripio.
As I promised in my first post, this is not a quick path to writing a bestseller. Before I go on, I cannot help but tell everyone that I just received a commitment for a blurb for Tripio from retired Starbucks President, Howard Behar.
As an author who has written a novel of historical fiction in which Starbucks is a third of the plot, this is very exciting news. I am planning to publish Tripio on Amazon KDP on April 11th, 2019 by the way. But that is getting ahead of myself.
“Every thought is a force sent out” -James Allen
It would have not been possible for me to have written Tripio if I have not first come to understand, at least to some degree, how the mind works. The words that appear on any page at any time anywhere do not just pop out of the blue. They are a product. They are a result. In fact, many times they are a collaboration of our three minds.
The above image was useful for me in the year I spent at the School of Metaphysics (SOM), unlocking my thoughts and enabling my mind to be moved to a place where it could, and eventually, would create Tripio. From there, I have used, and for the purposes of this blog will continue to use, the term my “Mind Garden” to encompass all three minds.
My mind garden was still a wreck as I sat down for my first class at the SOM on April 28th, 2016. It was a rocky, weedy plot of ground. It was not ready for planting, growing, seeding. There are many reasons for that: grief, stress, self-pity, lots of drinking. You get the point. Did I mention drinking? I did not yet understand as the class started that I had the shovel in hand, ready to crack open that plot of rocky, weedy earth and plant the seeds of Tripio.
Has it been a year since that was posted? Tripio has been published and is doing what it should be doing. I have been using my mind garden to work on my next novel entitled “Back outta the World“. I feel like I’ve done so much since I started this blog. I could go into it all. I have in fact. Right here in this blog. Well done, Jerry. I hope the next year is as rewarding.
It is Saturday morning and later I will head off to my local Get Fit for a weekend workout. Sure, I go for my cardio workout. My goal, as suggested by my GP, is to get my heart rate up to 150 at least once during my time on the cross trainer. It isn’t easy. But the getting up, the climb, to the accelerated heart rate is what does the most good. Simply running in place for 20 minutes with only a slightly accelerated heart rate apparently has little benefit.”It’s the climb” as Miley Cirus would sing.
While exercising I have my Pandora app selecting some workout appropriate music. Recently, I’ve been favoring Abba. If “Mama Mia” doesn’t get me moving, then it just isn’t my day.
Since Pandora is free it has commercial interruptions. I know I could move on to an upgrade or source my music by some other means, but this task never seems to make it to the top of the pile of things to do. So, I stick with Pandora and the commercials, even if I hate them more and more. How dare they try to steal my thoughts at the time they are doing me the most good? It is almost a physical pain to be moving, sweating and cleansing my body, mind and spirit and have a commercial begin “Hey!”
I used to simply rip out my ear speakers and toss them violently off my head until my phone said the commercial was over. I was then safe from a commercial violating my mind for several more songs or hopefully until the conclusion of my workout. Still, I felt cheated of a minute of my precious and wonderful workout time. A time I use as much as mental cardio as physical. But, I have recently found a solution.
It is not switching apps, accessing a different source for music or ditching the phone altogether. No. I decided to use the interruptions to make my mind healthier, just as interval training makes my cardiovascular system stronger by making it climb and stop and restart.
Now I use the commercial interruptions as my interval training for my mind. You see, typically I have found that when the body is moving the mind, especially the subconscious mind, it says “Hell yea. I’m free to do things”. So I listen to my mind while working out and it usually brings me pure, fearless thoughts for my books, the blog and my life as a whole. I later use these healthy thoughts to affect my life in positive ways. I have seen it work. To have an unwanted voice try to reach into my head during this time is unacceptable to me. The challenge can be to remember them. I use voice memos or even post it notes to help do this. This is especially useful when a thought of a scene or character in Tripio or BotW would show up and it would be hours before I could get to my laptop.
So, this morning when I’m on the cross trainer and a thought stealing commercial comes on, I will smile. I will simply remove the ear speakers calmly and begin my mental interval training. I will start “the climb”, which to reiterate, the part that does the most good. It strengthens my mind against unwanted distractions, interruptions and commercials. It make them easier to ignore, which of course is the last thing the folks behind the commercials want out of me. So, to them I say, bring them on. Make my mind clearer and stronger.
And the question is this. The following is the question: Do you know what a Tripio is? Have you heard or seen it used anywhere in any context? I know that is actually two questions but there may be two parts to any given answer so…
The reason I am seeking help from you all is that I have recently taken a class at the IWC called “How to sell more books on Amazon”. As a self-published author (I prefer to be described as direct published-but that’s not in question here) I had to attempt to come up with a real, sustainable strategy to sell Tripio on Amazon. Fair enough.
Snag is, according to the wisdom I learned at the class, a novel’s title should be easily searchable on Amazon, Google, etc. And the word “Tripio” is not.
What to do about it? I have already created a post that defines a tripio and will post it again, and again, again if I have to. I have made a video showing me creating a tripio on an espresso bar, in real time. Is that enough? Have any of you all seen or read the above? Another question, I know.
I just don’t feel in my heart that I can change the title. It defines the book in so many ways. There are three story line running alongside each other through the entire book. Three shots make a tripio. Three story lines make Tripio. I just don’t know if I can do it, just for the sake of searchablity. That is why I am asking for help.
So, back to the original question, you know what a tripio is?
Recently, I was at a coffee house on a rainy Sunday afternoon with a good friend. We were catching up on life and it’s challenges. This was a local coffee house with art on the walls and old couches situated against those walls. After an hour or so of coffee and camaraderie, my friend and I got up leave and as we headed out the door she encountered a man she knew. After a quick intro, my friend, who has already read Tripio, said “You should have Jerry on your podcast.”
And that was it. He asked me to be a guest in a couple weeks. This was after I ran to my car to retrieve a copy of Tripio. As any good direct published author would do, I always travel with a copy of my book, just in case. This time it paid off.
I have tried numerous times over the past year to be guest on a podcast but to no avail. A podcast spot had taken a lower priority on the journey of Tripio. Is was still an aspiration, yet one that had yielded nothing positive so it was hard to keep trying. And now, without trying, I was to be on a podcast. “Damn. What the f*** do I do now?’
One thing I did do was read a post entitled ,”77 Pieces of Advice for Podcast Guests from Hosts” by Dan Moyle. That helped. Yet as the day neared, I questioned Tripio, my coffee acumen, my ability to match verb and subject to form a coherent sentence.
On the fateful day, I was told that I was the third guest, sitting behind two regular contributors. Everyone was friendly but I still felt like the odd man out. This only enhanced and further agitated the swarm of butterflies in my stomach. Once the first guest had completed her segment, I did something the old me would have never done: something.
I am shy and introverted. A fairly typical writer type. All good. But in order to get the world to notice Tripio, I have had to do things that I was new to and uncomfortable with. Lots of them. Maybe that is the real value in all this? Then,out of the blue, I recalled a favorite wisdom. This one from Elanor Roosevelt, “You must do the things in live you think you cannot do.” I feel that putting Tripio out for the world to read has caused some personal growth in myself. Faith? Belief? Maybe. Whatever it is, it got me off my chair. I walked over to the guest and her friend and made conversation. She was human. I began to feel more at ease. In a few moments, guest two was finishing and it was my turn. Now, after hearing myself speak for few moments and not be laughed at, I was ready.
I felt like I did well for my few minutes and will put the results up on the blog when I receive the edited Podcast. For now, I have four (not 77) tips from my experience that helped me. For fun, I’ve paired the steps with those needed to make a great cup of coffee.
1) Use the best coffee beans you can find = prepare, prepare and prepare more. Listen to a couple podcasts in advance. Review your book for new things to talk about. A lot may have happened in this world since it was published. It is helpful for the book to be topical and appear fresh. Don’t rely on old or dated beans.
2)Grind the beans for the coffee brewer= If you are using a French Press pot, grind the beans coarse. For a cone shaped filter, a finer grind is needed. Do not force your message or book if it isn’t’ the right fit. Don’t use the time given you to do an infomercial for the book. I able to work in Tripio several times during the podcast even though our actual topic was coffee culture as a whole.
3)Use hot, just-off boiling, water to extract maximum flavor when brewing=Let the host guide you. He or she will be able to fill in or pull back when needed. And don’t forget, the podcast may be further cleaned up before posting.
4)Enjoy the cup= Now that the coffee is done, share it with your host and listeners. Relax and tell stories. Tell fun and quirky stories about your book, how it came to be. As a writer. it is expected that you will have stories. I had done my research and was able to recall the story of Kaldi and his goats, who are given credit for “discovering” coffee, after the host unintentionally prompted me on topic.
There you are. I hope it helped. If not, try to brew another pot tomorrow morning…
I saw that Terry Gilliam was in the headlines saying things that get one on the front page of Yahoo. I was outraged. I was offended at his lack of sensitivity to people everywhere! How could he say such things? My hands trembled in a state of self-righteous indignation, clutching my phone, ready to send a self-inflating response to protect the defenseless whom Gilliam had assailed. Then I realized that Terry Gilliam is the American member of Monty Python so what he says doesn’t really matter.
The member of Monty Python who is most relevant to me these days is the deceased parrot-No! Sorry, deceased Python member, the late Graham Chapman.
I was fortunate to see Graham Chapman live on my college campus in the early 80’s. His performance then was simply a Q and A as he sat on folding chair on the stage. The auditorium was full and I was thrilled to see a member of Python in person. I had started watching the original Flying Circus as a pre-teen when the series first aired in the States back in the early 70s.
One bit of Chapman’s show I still recall was of him requesting “abuse” from those of us in the audience. This was a reference to the famous “argument sketch”, which Python fans know verbatim. For a minute or so the audience gladly complied. We called Chapman names and tossed paper wads at him. I remember one woman going on stage and tapping Chapman gently on his shoulder with her first clenched in a parody of physical abuse. Chapman thanked the woman. All in good fun.
I post this recollection, spurred on the American Python being in the news because it strikes me that we may be taking things too seriously these days. Can you imagine if Chapman were still alive and asked for abuse from an audience today? Chapman had already come out as being gay and had a well-deserved reputation as a boozer. Can you imagine? I think everyone would look around to their fellow audiences members and shrug their shoulders or not say a word. They would be terrified of offending not only Chapman but all the other audiences members. “Not me, I’m not insulting this man! Even if he asked for it! How would it look?”
Of course, the very same audience members would have no problem abusing and insulting the living shit out of anyone and everyone via their phone. Taking advantage of distance and the courage it gives one, the offended blast all those who dare even question their sensibilities. In the case of Terry Gilliam’s comments, they are completely missing the point ( hint: he has a movie coming out). To conclude, I ‘m sure that Graham Chapman would find all this finger pointing and name calling via the phone to be “very silly indeed”
I have done it now. I have just signed up for a class at the Indiana Writer’s Center called “How to sell more books on Amazon”. As some of you know, my historical fiction , or “Starbucks”novel, Tripio, was published on Amazon last year on April 13th. I’m sure a lot of you are asking yourselves, why did he wait so long? In order for you to lose sleep no longer, I will attempt to answer that question for you.
One part of the answer may be that I am old enough to know a world when Amazon was just a river. In fact, a good deal of the writing I plan to publish on Amazon was written before Amazon, the company, was known to all. The novel I’m revising now, Back outta the World, has it’s beginnings in the late 1980s and the first draft was written long hand on yellow ledger paper. So there is that.
There is also, I think, an effort on my part to prevent Amazon from dictating how I feel about Tripio, and when published, Back outta the World.
In the case of Tripio, I just talked to two lucky individuals who just finished reading it. In both cases, I was honored and excited to hear from them. Their responses to Tripio can each be put into one word: “Sad” for one and “Good” for the other. I will gladly take both. For I have learned as more and more people read Tripio the responses I get vary greatly. The parts of Tripio I like or am most proud of are usually not mentioned. I am realizing and understanding that everyone reads their own Tripio, and it has little or nothing to do with the one I wrote.
After these brief talks on Tripio, I was excited about the prospects of the book. My enthusiasm for it’s future had returned, having been derailed by the Holidays and a personal down period for me. So, even though I knew better, I checked my sales and author ranks on Amazon. Tripio was at possibly it’s lowest point ever. The arrow was pointing down so steeply that it had to be continued on a computer screen under my laptop. “Damn” I thought. “I suck after all. Tripio sucks.”
Wrong! So wrong! Amazon don’t got nothin’ to do with how I feel about Tripio and even Back outta the World. Both are creating and telling their own stories with me. And that is far more interesting to me at least, than what some sales graph manufactured by a logarithm somewhere has to say.
None the less I am taking the class in a week or so. I do want to sell more books on Amazon. It will make an interesting bit in the story of Tripio. But, in will NEVER be the story of Tripio.
“I’m sittin’ in first class and they can all kiss my ass, ‘cuase I’m goin’ back baby, back outta world.”
Terry Allen & The Panhandle Mystery Band – Back Out Of The World – 1987 album – Amerasia
Headed Back outta the World
In Tripio, Jay is writing Back outta the World, which is his first novel. It is a road book. One of Jay’s literary heroes in Tripio is Jack “That’s not writing, that’s typing” Kerouac. It is in character for Jay to have attempted his first novel based on the two month road trip he had taken as part of his aimless post college graduation life. Tripio starts as Jay is nearing the end of writing Back outta the World. He is not exactly struggling with the ending of it. After all, it is finite. The book will end with end of journal he kept on the road trip. Jay is more concerned by the fact that he is afraid he doesn’t even know what his book is about.
Writing Back outta the World as part of Tripio
In real life, that was also true. Today, I describe “Back Outta the World” as a road trip in which the main character’s mind and body are on two different trips and meet at the end. I only came to that conclusion as I reworked Back outta the World(BotW) prior to starting Tripio. I arrived at that conclusion approximately 20 years after I finished physically writing Back outta the World. You will have to buy and read Tripio to find that section describing how I felt upon finishing BotW. I will tell you that it is one of the few parts of Tripio that remains word for word in the novel, as it was recorded in my SotM on that day in my apartment those many years ago.
If I am promoting and publishing Tripio as a Starbucks novel, reflecting on it daily now as the story of my early adult life, then I am writing about my writing twice over. In other words there could be no Tripio without BotW. Yet, I was hesitant at first to even name it. Early in the writing of Tripio, I referred to BotW as “my writing” or “the novel”. Then, as I began to feel confident and came to see potential in the publishing of Tripio, I made it a point to name and embed BotW intoTripio. In fact, I had to. In order for Tripio to “work” (you be the judge), BotW had to be a powerful, named presence in Jay’s mind. It had to be identified so that it could carry it’s third of the book.
I believe it worked. Again, you be the judge. Either way, I hope to find a path to publishing BotW at some point after Tripio. That would be the least Tripio could do for BotW since Tripio would not have come to be without it.
“I’m sittin’ in first class and they can all kiss my ass, ‘cuase I’m goin’ back baby, back outta world.”
Terry Allen & The Panhandle Mystery Band – Back Out Of The World – 1987 album – Amerasia
In Tripio, Jay is writing his first novel. It is a road book. One of Jay’s literary heroes in Tripio is Jack “That’s not writing, that’s typing” Kerouac. It is in character for Jay to have attempted his first novel based on the two month road trip he had taken as part of his aimless post college graduation life. Tripio starts as Jay is nearing the end of writing that novel. He is not exactly struggling with the ending of it. After all, it is finite. The book will end with end of journal he kept on the road trip. Jay is more concerned by the fact that he is afraid he doesn’t even know what his book is about.
In real life, that was also true. Today, I describe “Back Outta the World” as a road trip in which the main character’s mind and body are on two different trips and meet at the end. I only came to that conclusion as I reworked Back outta the World(BotW) prior to starting Tripio. I arrived at that conclusion approximately 20 years after I finished physically writing BotW. You will have to buy and read Tripio to find that section describing how I felt upon finishing BotW. I will tell you that it is one of the few parts of Tripio that remains word for word in the novel, as it was recorded in my SotM on that day in my apartment those many years ago.
If I am promoting and publishing Tripio as a Starbucks novel, reflecting on it daily now as the story of my early adult life, then I am writing about my writing twice over. In other words there could be no Tripio without BotW. Yet, I was hesitant at first to even name it. Early in the writing of Tripio, I referred to BotW as “my writing” or “the novel”. Then, as I began to feel confident and came to see potential in the publishing of Tripio, I made it a point to name and embed BotW into Tripio. In fact, I had to. In order for Tripio to “work” (you be the judge), BotW had to be a powerful, named presence in Jay’s mind. It had to be identified so that it could carry it’s third of the book.
I believe it worked. Again, you be the judge. Either way, I hope to find a path to publishing BotW at some point after Tripio. That would be the least Tripio could do for BotW since Tripio would not have come to be without it.
I do not think I am alone in breathing a sign of relief at the end of the Holiday Season. There was not much evidence of any Holiday merriment and good cheer as I went about those two weeks. My current job takes me to approximately one hundred work places of all sorts every week. The most commonly repeated appraisal of the two weeks consisting of Christmas and New Years Day was that it “felt like four Mondays”.
In my own case, I made a very bad decision a few weeks prior to this Holiday Season. I will exercise my self-editing prerogative and leave it at that. I will only say that the results of that decision were that every day for several weeks in early December were “dark, cold and ugly Mondays” for me.
It is said that all types of writing, whether it is labeled Science Fiction, Fantasy, you name it, is “emotionally autobiographical“. I could not agree more. For me at least, writing has little to do with agonizing over the right word to describe a certain character or complete a description. It isn’t a beautifully constructed sentence or a brilliant metaphor or allegory . Hell, I can’t even tell you the difference between the last two.
For me, writing is about making contact with myself. And if that is done in a way that a reader can recognize emotionally in themselves in some way, then it works for both of us. In revising and renewing the novel I wrote 25 years ago, Back outta the World, I am making contact with myself as a young man. It is illuminating to look under those words I wrote then and see what I see now. One theme I see emerging from the protagonist “Jay” was that he was taking his road trip in an attempt to both see new places and flee others. I see, and now describe, Jay’s road trip as ” his attempt to escape conscription into the American Dream”.
I could try to change Jay from Back outta the World. Re-write his story and thus mine. Sounds like a good sci-fi novel actually. I rewrite my old autobiographical road novel and it changes my current life as I go along….hmmm?
Got sidetracked. No, on second thought, I’ll leave Jay alone. Let him contact me and maybe learn something about myself as he goes on his trip. He made his decisions back then and he has to live with them. Come to think of it, so do I.
Coffee Novelist 
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