Greetings,
On behalf of the Hanoi Department of Tourism and One Party Neighborhoods filled with millions of well adjusted content poetic calligraphic citizens, welcome to our fair city! Stroll through parks and gardens. Smell the roses.
Enjoy wandering around. See amazing historical and cultural mysteries. Our number is on the wall. Call now. Make new friends. Get lost. Explore. Discover.
Metta.
Greetings,
A new article link and ideas about the world. The world of self-publishing. You write for an audience of one. You write with passion, authenticity and humor. You write with a light heart. You are hopeful. You expect the worst.
You play the publishing game. Every fall you buy a copy of Writer's Market, the bible. You research markets. You craft a query letter and synopsis. You send the query letter, synopsis and first five pages to a literary agent. You wait. You write.
The agent reads your synopsis. They thumb through the five pages. Their first thought is, "Can I make 15% on this?" If the answer is no, you get rejection letter wallpaper to decorate your room. If you take the rejections personally and bang your head against the wall all the letters become wild word birds and fly away.
Or, you consider self-publishing. This is what I did in 2007 while finishing a teaching job in China. I researched options and purchased a publishing package with iuniverse. It was a good choice. A viable option considering my work was experimental, non-linear and filled with nomadic storytellers and their adventures.
You have many self-publishing options now. Look around. See what meets your needs.
Few have read it. Fewer have understood it.
Metta.
Greetings,
Ostim: an industrial wasteland manufacturing zone near Ankara.
It's time to go a wandering...inside the reality magic show, welcoming the opportunity, the gift as it is to receive, shifting into another zone of influence and experiential discovery. (Bursa)
As they know you are leaving, this distant. Perhaps they have repressed, regressed into their real way. I appreciated seeing, knowing, understanding how it is, how some people feel, O so sad and withdrawn in their personal way. Their Zen: Awareness. Moment.
As usual my ghost moves through a transparent knowing. Tell me a secret. Screwing up is a virtue.
Sit by the cafe window. Sky, clouds filled with light: gray production pollution, dust, winter icicles, vapor, yellow haze, solitary birds on wing, rolling and tumbling...this small cafe and sky window, the kind Kurdish woman's hospitality, her delicious manta, a sanctuary from the chaos.
Take the 1310 metro to Ostim. Strange industrial landscape where men cannot afford gloves inside childhood's winter. Remove their hats and make monkey groom females in exchange for sex, and all the capital people slog in their struggle
remembering Rumi, how a human being is a kind of conversation, dancing down all the days of early winter clean cold silent
The art and elements of a Japanese folding placemat: shapes, designs, edges, art. Free form, free spirit. Play.
Draw, paint, sing, dance, disappear. Seize the day.
I love the smell of garbage in Cambodia.
Metta.
Human business plan.
Nature's business plan.
Greetings,
After class I am walking on green carpeted space (imagining I'm in a small sleepy Cambodian river town) listening to two Frenchmen talk about their boring travels using a Lonely Planet book,
ok, it's a lonely planet, it's Earth after all, understanding how their experience contains all the wisdom of the same-same but different philosophy - what did they expect on a beautiful blue marble dancing in space
droning on like a Predator drone zeroing in on Afghan mountains where shrouded cloth covered humans cowering on THEIR lonely planet inside remote mountain caves near impossible borders
wait for the droning tourists to assault their position with illiterate guides: Sleep here. Eat here. Go here.
Armed with the sharp attentive diamond eyes, a precious precocious girl wrote words with red ink using a new Chopin piston fountain pen on this onion skinned Moleskine paper. It is a medium. M. It has a weight, a heft, a thick solid feel to its base, the black resin manifesting the ink, visceral realists.
Savoring a feeling of tactile sensation - this nib, this edge of finding small joy seeing ink flow, this tactility, this delightful smooth flow, she dances a singularity.
It was a joy, slow and precise dancing ink on paper. The Art of Writing.
Simple on lonely planet.
Metta.
The library at Beng Mealea on a living planet.
Greetings,
As I've said before in the long now, this is the land of MILLING AROUND. You are an object of endless fascination. A stranger in a strange land.
Five boys stand around watching with their curious eyes. They are polite and friendly. They SIGN to speak. Their hands are wings in space. They are from Epic Arts.
A boy signs to his friend, You only take this ride once.
His friend signs, Stay well grounded and do not fear risk.
Her friend signs, If you want to do amazing things you have to take amazing risks.
Her friend signs, Reveal. Bear witness. Be honest. Be visible.
His friend signs, Honor the muse in whatever way she comes.
A girl signs, They stare at you from the vacuum of their eyes and say would you like to make a deal?
He signs, Buy a ticket take the ride.
She signs, Can we find inside of us a source of inspiration?
He signs, My path is Light.
She sings, Phenomena is ambivalent.
A sign land of vacant hope. A sign people of broken distractions. Where attention span is limited to the stimuli of elastic necks. Life is an accident. A cruel joke. Riders slow down on bikes, motorcycles to survey the disaster in a clean 360 degree arc.
What is louder than a group of voiced Khmer people? Another group of voiced Khmer people. It's a small miracle anyone can understand anything when they, Voiced Ones, are so busy all talking, speaking, asking at once. Because they are more interested in what THEY have to say the volume naturally increases exponentially.
They don't get it. Cognitive dissonance.
Someone wants to understand before they are understood.
Two kids are talking. One from the west said, "Where did I come from?"
The kid from the east said, "How did I grow?"
A writer said, Your potential will always go unfulfilled unless it is accompanied by the daily grind of back breaking labor. Nobody wants to hear this. It is not a cheerful message. Writing is a disease. Either you can't stop it or in another case you can't start.
See with soft eyes. Signing off.
Metta.
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