Authorian Adventures in the Ether

Unanimity with Multiformity

While working my day job last week I received an email asking for “Diveristy Champion” nominees. I immedately sought to nominate an individual who heads a group of Baby Boomers striving to bridge generational divdes. And, me being me, my nomination prose HAD to include a defintion of the terms.
Now the first 3 definitions of Champion all focus on fighting and defeating, which is not exactly the kind of terminology I wanted to use. So I settled on the forth definition “promoting a cause or ideal”. But it was the definition of Diversity that really got me thinking. There I saw the word “Variety” followed by a semi-colon and the kind of word I would make up, “Multiformity”.

As we used to say in grade school “you can’t say ain’t cuz it ain’t in the dictionary”. Multiformity cain’t possibly be a real word. But ’tis. The dictionary tells me it is a “variety of appearances in the same thing”. Which is good, but in the context of the nomination process I preferred to think of multiformity as the 21st century replacement for uniiformity. That is, we don’t all want to be perceived as just like all the others in our group, but rather our common experience is capable of creating a whole that is much greater than the sum of our very individual parts.

On the other hand in the context of my individual multiformity, I’ll stick with the dictionary definition. Because, while it may appear that my active pursuit of video productions in the coming year would not allow me to continue being an author or systems janitor, I assure you these are all just facets of my being.

Rumoirs

Okay Okay…Please stop the email barrage. The following are merely rumours that have been circulating since I missed last weeks entry:

1. Members of the new Administration are so taken with the SomeplacElse concept that I will be the next director of Housing and Urban development. (I have been asked to direct all such inqueries back to the transition team)

2. I am going to stop this blog and start a new one about being a Systems Janitor because that’s where the real money is. (Not true)

3. Having accomplished what I set out to do in the literary world, I will not be writing another novel and will instead become a game show host. (This is partially true, but you’ll have to stay tuned to find out more)

4. This souring economic climate has forced me to focus on earning a living rather than doing what nature intended for me to do. (Aw c’mon did you read my book? I saw all this coming and wrote it down 18 months ago. I’m ready are you?)

5. I am very close to understanding my next Natural assignment and just needed some time to reflect on where I have been over the last year and where I am supposed to go next. (This could be true, but if I have learned anything in the past year it’s that man still plans and God still laughs)

A mere 40,000?

As I mentioned 2 weeks ago, November 3rd marked the 1st anniversary of my ebook publication.
I was hoping to hit 40K downloads, but fell just 263 digital expressions of interest short.
However when you combine this with ear book, hardcopy, and the 1 or 2 kindle and mobi versions I have sold we blow thorugh 40,000 with no trouble at all. And as was evidenced in this blog a few entries back, I broke even and now I’m looking at a solid 25% return on a 12K year long investment.

Of course relative to Stepanie Meyer and J.K Rowling 40,000 copies is nothing. Without a movie contract, relative to Stepen King, my work is of little value. Without an endorsement from Oprah or the NY times Best Seller List my words are barely noticed. And of course, when put in the context of Mr. Obama’s ability to command MILLIONS of hits in a single day on the internet, my year long efforts would appear to be just noise.

On the other hand earning 25% per year on an investment in the face of a mortgage meltdown, credit crises and all the other Wall Street madness, seems to make me a money managing genius. NOT having a single copy of my book returned by a retailer when 350,000 copies of the last Harry Potter had to be shredded would tend to indicate my work is much better for the environment.

But, from my persepective, the real success of this effort has come from you, the people that have read my book and/or blog. I want to thank you! You have changed my life for the better.

So, now, I encourage you to share YOUR perspective with others. Whether it registers 40 or 50,000 hits on the digital scale, if Mr. Fuller is right (and I think he is) the success of the planet depends on each of us doing what we were intended to do.

And hey, relatively speaking, you can’t ask for a more valuable use of your time than that.

If I could Fall back…

Did Tyrone Davis invent Daylight savings time in 1970?

In U.S. Football we have offsetting penalties that result in a do over.

But in life, even if you live in a state where you turn back the hands of time once a year, there are no do overs. It’s interesting to me that in HG Wells Time novel(mine too), his focus is on springing forward in search of a better place. In most other time tales we find ourselves going back in time trying to correct some mistake or take advantage of some opportunity that we missed the first time around.

But unless some string theory spouting, quark jumping physicist really builds a Flux Capacitor, our movement through time will remain one way…FORWARD.  So if you want to truly change the future all you have to do is make the right choices in the present based upon your past experiences, and the knowledge that you will not be able to wake up tomorrow and find you are still in yesterday.  

Unless of course you are one of those that argues that time doesn’t really exist, in which case, I wonder, do you still change your clocks twice a year?  Or do you live in Arizona and ask the question from another circa 1970 Chicago tune but really don’t care? Or maybe it’s always 25 or 6 to 4?

Untouchable or just not from Chicago?

As we approach the first full year of my Authorian Adventure I am reminded of Officer Jim Malone’s ( Sean Connery) dying words in the Untouchables, “And what are you prepared to do NOW?”

In my story Nature is the adversary, coldly maintaining control by extorting its pound of flesh for every dream we choose to pursue. Bucky Fuller would be my Jim Malone explaining all the details of Nature’s operation and defining success as going home alive when your shift is over.

So here I stand,alive, just one week away from the anniversary of my e-book publication. I look back at all the amazing people I have met, all the friendships rekindled and all the consideration that my story has prompted and I want to do it all over again. But that would not be what I have been prepared to do.

To paraphrase my metaphoric nemesis,
“A man becomes preeminent, he’s expected to have enthusiasms. Enthusiams… What are (yours)? What draws (your) admiration? What is that which gives (you) joy?”

I love to write. but I AM a preeminent Systems Janitor.

Champagne Sellabration

Many thanks to the folks at the Champagne Sundays Radio Show for talking to me about my book this morning.

Lisa and Nancy run a very professional and entertaining show with Shannon adding some refreshing literary style! I will continue to tune in!

To express my appreciation for YOUR kind attention I have set up the $5 dollar discount code FALLSOFF at my SomeplacElse Amazon Store front.

Thanks again and I hope you will continue Considering SomeplacElse.

Listing toward Destiny

I am not now nor will I ever be a sailor. And even though I heard once that 70% of us live within 30 miles of some coastline because “we are all drawn to the sea”, I live in the desert on purpose. I don’t know my aft from a hole in the ground and that’s just fine with me. However, when it comes to “listing”, I find myself quite the expert.

Some Captains of Industry and Navigators of our psyche will chart you a course to your dreams. Others will have you set sail on a vision quest. And, it seems, all hands on the good ship self help will insist you have some admirable goals. But for me, just listing things to do appears to tilt me in the right direction.

I have this very large master list of todos. Some are things I need to do, some are things I want to do, and some are things I just wish I could do. I update the list almost every day usually adding many more things that have occurred to me since last I looked at it. The time and resources necessary to accomplish everything on the list always far exceeds any hope of achieving these things in the short term. And I believe this is exactly why I do it.

Beacuse the magnitude of the list reminds me that I can’t possibly do it all, I carefully choose no more than five items to become immediate priorities. These are the things I will focus on until they are either completed or placed back onto the master list as, “just not ready to be done yet”.

There are times when it seems I am just treading water but when I look back at some specific point of origin I find that I am continually learning the ropes of this voyage.

Face Off Space Out

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of listening to a presentation on the Milennial generation.  This is essentially anyone born after 1982.  They have also been called Generation Y but Millenial seems to be the politically correct term these days.  The 24 year old woman giving the presentation opened with an anti stereotyping volley, but then proceeded to make sweeping generalizations about this “group” of people whose principal common trait is being born in the same 21 year time span.  I have a 5 grandchildren who were born between 2000 and 2003 and I can tell you for a fact, these 5 share very few common traits amonsgst themselves let alone the young woman giving the speech.

Be that as it may, the speaker painted a portrait of a technology savvy group of 70 million or so U.S. citizens who are extremely confident in their abilities and are ”ready” to take on any challenge.  She sang the praises of social media and hand-held communicators as the wave of the future.  She even told a story about going to a romantic dinner with her husband and texting sweet nothings to each other while they maintained ongoing electronic conversations with their “friends”.  When she was finished, I asked one simple question that I have been asking myself for the last year,  “Why do you have a facebook account?”

Her reply was echoed by exactly half the 516 respondents to an adhoc survey I found myself conducting this past week. 
“It’s just a great way to connect with my friends.”

The other half of the respondents had a near opposite sentiment,
“I don’t know. It seemed like a good idea at the time”

You may find, like Marty Fahncke that
“when I do my live teleseminars and webinars, Facebook has allowed me to market and promote with substantially better results than email or blog.  I’ve made tens of thousands of dollars just from Facebook alone.  More if you include other social networks”

Or perhaps you go along with Sid Savara when he says,
“It’s definitely a growing trend. My Myspace “friend list” has gone from 250+ to around 120ish, all from friends just deleting their accounts. My facebook page however IS growing - but not because I use it to keep in touch with friends. I am now using Facebook to network with contacts, sort of like a middle ground between LinkedIn and Myspace”

Or maybe Richard Kellerher, a mediarelationsexpert@yahoo.com is speaking to you with,
“People have Blackberries and similar devices…(and use them) all the time. When I see this, I realize these people are not managing anything in their life. Their families are probably stressed and they aren’t achieving at work what they could be”

After nearly a year of chasing social media connections, I have decided to close my FaceBook and totally vacate MySpace.  It’s a personal decision based on ensuring I allocate MY resources to things that are going to add value to MY life and there are, oh so many, better things I can do with MY time.

Spending Time?

There are over 7 billion people in this world and I would venture to say at least half of them have an opinion on how you should spend your money.  I wonder, though, how many of them have an opinion on how you should spend your time.  Everyone gets roughly 24 hours of this commodity every day.  There are no time billionaires with more than they will ever be able to use.  There are no time accounts where you can put away some of your time for retirement or a rainy day.  But you can invest your time, in things that will save you time,  and/or compund your interest in your time.  You can also waste your time.  But wasting time is a relative term.  While many of your relatives may perceive what you are doing as superfluous, in your mind you are super charging your brain cells in preparation for your next challenge. 

One of the smartest time investments I ever made was to actively pursue doing nothing of substance for awhile.  SomeTimes, if we are wise enough, our thought to be timely expenditures are way ahead of the cosmic tumblers and the smartest thing we can do is to wait for the rest of our world to catch up.

This past weekend, Paul Newman died.  A man who spent his time here with great respect for the opportunities presented to him and a refreshing humility relative to the hours he spent in front of a camera.  I also saw a special about Albert Einstein, wherein the prevailing opinion among today’s genius’ is that Einstein “wasted the last twenty years of his life”.  But as I said above and I’m pretty sure Einstein said it first, “time is relative”.

All of these deep thoughts are presented to help me in contemplating the fate of my Facebook and MySpace accounts.

Thinking about Juke Box Jumpin?

For me, the single most amazing and influential man-made system I have ever seen is the Juke Box.  A robotic arm moves silently to the selected disc, extracts it from it’s vertical storage position, places it horizontally on a turn table and then perfectly positions the needle onto the first groove.  All of this, because I deposited a dime and pressed two buttons, one alpha, one numeric that corresponded to the tune I wanted and needed to hear.  IF I had put in a quarter, it would allow me to press two more alpha numeric sequences and it would REMEMBER not just the songs I wanted it to play but the order in which I selected them.  As others deposited and pressed, it had the wherewithall to hold everyones place in line.  Many of these devices contained sound systems so sophisticated that it was many times preferrable to listening to  the live music of the day.  We needed no training manuals, no Juke Box for Dummies books, people of all ages could work these things.  Installation?  The proprietor of the establishment just had to plug it in.  Maintenance?  Periodically your local mafia would send over a technician who would restock with some of the latest tunes and replace any worn out favorites.   I ALWAYS wondered what it would be like to have one of these in my house, stocked with my entire collection and ready to play any of my (or anyone elses’) SELECTIONS at the touch of two buttons.

I tell you this story because many of you have asked me to join a side in the MAC vs PC, or more approriatley Apple Operating System vs Microsoft Operating System battle and this is my answer.  Whichever tool comes closest to costing YOU a dime and allowing YOU to achieve YOUR desired result by pressing just two buttons is the one YOU should go with.

And remember the defintion of juke is “to make a move intended to deceive” so don’t let ANY of these New Media boxes fake you out!