Whole Lotta Love

Ian Cooper

Brice Catlow was just plain thrilled to drive Aunt Jane to Bismarck.

It was too bad Uncle Ed had killed himself. That sort of ruined it for everybody, but Brice didn’t get a chance to drive a car very often. Brice liked driving and wanted to be a race-car driver some day. He would take all the driving practice he could get.

Brice had always liked Uncle Ed, a cheerful wrasslin’ bear of a man. That’s what Ed had always said.

He’d always had the hots for Aunt Jane though.

Brice was sixteen, and he had his driver’s license. She needed help to clean the place up as it would have to be sold.

She was silent beside him.

Brice was only half enjoying the 1970 Duster, which he told her was a brick. It was good driving experience. 

That’s what he told her. It had a slant six and bias-ply tires. Not like a real car. It actually belonged to Uncle Dave and Aunt Marcy.

Aunt Jane didn’t have a car.

She was the youngest, the most beautiful of his mother’s sisters.

The first time he saw her, he was about five or six years old and she was fourteen. Her legs were long, smooth and white. She was dressed for ballet practice. He dreamed about her all the time after that, even as a young kid.

In his dream she was a princess. She was being held in a dungeon and he had to rescue her. In his dream she would shower him with kisses after he had suitably proven his love for her, his bravery, hacking up scores of brutish oafs on the way in and out. She was his first real innocent crush. It was just a crush, with no sexual overtones back then.

The song on the radio faded as they motored through the night. He felt like a real man. He was driving on the I-94 at seventy miles per hour. He’d already driven right past a cop sitting at the side of the road. Brice was speeding a little bit, trying to save a little time. The cop ignored them. Brice was watching the mirror, aware of the traffic up ahead slowing and eddying as it caught up to two big-rigs, the one on the left attempting to pass. He eased off the throttle. The I-94 was a piece of cake.

“Ah.” Brice reached over.

He turned up the tune on the radio.

“This is my favourite song.” He told her all about it.

He told her all about Led Zeppelin. He told her all about Whole Lotta Love. He told her about the sort of musical orgasm during the solo, and turned up the volume when it came. No pun intended, he told her.

He thought she liked the song too, which was a good sign. She smiled tiredly.

He’d thought of her a few times as he masturbated, no more than any other woman though. She was in the rotation, along with half the girls at school and a smattering of older women, teachers, nuns, and a couple of his mother’s friends. Most of his female cousins were pretty good looking. Jane was babysitting the first time he ever did it. He’d been reading some book on anthropology. Hard to believe. She was in the house, downstairs watching TV. That was the first time he ever thought of it. She’d almost walked in on him, as if suspecting something. There was this look in her eye.

He had often wondered about that. What might have been…what if I had let her catch me?

She might have been looking for just the thing. She might have had sympathy. She might have helped me out, and taught me things. They could have kept it secret.

Stranger things had happened.

That first orgasm wasn’t very good. It just felt funny. It was only after a few more times that he got the hang of it. The first really good one was revelation.

He wondered what she was thinking as she turned to the side window again, her reflection pale and forlorn.

It was too bad. To lose your husband so young. She really was a beautiful woman. She had the worst luck, thought Brice.

They would be sleeping in the place overnight. Just the two of them. Uncle Ed’s ghost would be there, most likely, if there was such a thing. His skin prickled at the thought.

But surely Ed of all people would understand. They must have done it, thought Brice.

Of course they had, as thoughts of her naked tormented him. His pulse went up.

He had to be ready for anything tonight. They might just talk for a while. Surely she would cry…

He’d help her pack a bunch of junk out to the curb. They’d take what they could, anything of value, in the car. An auctioneer might come and have a look at some of the bigger items of furniture.

Brice figured this was it. It was the first time he’d ever been alone with a girl.

Why did she ask for me? She could have gotten Uncle Steve or Uncle Ted to go. But those guys were married to her sisters.

I can keep a secret, he thought.

I know she likes me, she always did.

Maybe tonight, he thought. His pants were bulging at the idea.

Her head twitched and the chin came up, staring down the road.

“Where are we?”

“We’ve got fifty miles yet.” He sounded confident, relaying such important information.

He was right up to date. Everything was under control.

She would need some comfort, needing simply to be held perhaps. It would begin there.

They were a hundred and forty miles from home and her husband had just blown his head off with a 12-guage.

You never know though.

That’s what he kept telling himself.

It was a nice dream, and she did say she liked the song and everything.

END

That Is So Cool: Paperbacks.

Ian Cooper

That is just so cool.

My first two paperbacks have been produced, and are available from Lulu.com at what sure looks like cut-throat pricing. This is one attraction of the 4 x 7” format, (a pocketbook.) The other is pure esthetics. If I have always wanted to write pulp fiction (and I have) then putting them out in the regular ‘paperback’ size makes some kind of sense. They are the modern counterpart of the dime novel.

Each file took a couple of hours to prepare, upload and publish. We’re using existing cover shots, hopefully costumers on other platforms are hip enough to read the product descriptions. On this project, we’re using Lulu as a single, stand-alone online store. We don't have any ebooks on Lulu  at this point in time. We’re not using their extended distribution channels. For one, Smashwords does a reasonable job of that, and we have gotten books into iTunes through OmniLit, (although it’s their only other distribution channel so far.) We do sell books on OmniLit, so it’s important to learn every site.

Using some pretty basic covers and Lulu’s older cover creator keeps the investment of time and money down.

Both books are still processing through Createspace in the 5 x 8” trade paperback format. This allows us to take advantage of Createspace’s six full expanded distribution channels. We’ve published one of those titles directly through Createspace into the Amazon website.

We just want to see what happens.

There’s a form for that at the end of the publishing pages. This saves the uploading, although you have to sign into the account and go through the publish pages, set prices and territories, etc.

There is some difference in formatting from what I would have normally done. In that sense, any new thing has the potential to be a learning experience. For one thing, going through Createspace probably precludes internal and external navigation (hot links) in the ebook product.

That’s because there is no real good reason (we assume) for Createspace to make provision for live links…my logic here is that they are useless except as website names in a paper product. You could put them in, I don’t know if they would be live in the ebook.

Going through Smashwords, for example, iTunes insists on internal navigation, i.e. the table of contents, which takes a few minutes to create. Some authors report good results with external navigation, taking readers off to blogs, websites, previews of new stories, social media interaction, etc. We have put some thought into that…but perhaps not enough.

The paperbacks rarely have a web address or anything. It’s just something we don’t tend to think about when making a paper product. That’s backwards thinking, out of touch with the 21^st Century. Much food for thought there, but is really is a learning curve, ladies and gentlemen.

Looking for Love is something we all do once in a while. The results can be surprising, from lonely middle-aged bachelors, to college boys with a plan, or Cro-Magnon raiders and predatory beachcombers.

Here is the pocketbook on Lulu.com. $4.49

Love, or lust, is a many-splendoured thing. Moonshine, a collection of short stories by Ian Cooper, will raise the pulse rate and possibly the eyebrows.

4 x 7” paperback for $4.99 (erotica.)

END

Punching Through Those Personal Barriers.

Photo by Robert A. Hoover.

Ian Cooper

When Chuck Yeager broke through the sound barrier, it was not so much a personal achievement as a scientific breakthrough, a leap forward for mankind. It was an epoch-making event.

Sometimes people need to break through their own personal barriers. 

And if you ever hit rock bottom, and decide not to stay there, there are all kinds of barriers to getting back up again.

People hit rock bottom for all kinds of reasons.

It can be drugs or alcohol, it can be divorce, or bankruptcy, a serious illness in the family, or an accident in the car, the workplace or in sport.

It’s never that simple, either.

It’s never any one thing that throws a person to the bottom of the heap. Issues feed on each other and contribute to the whole picture of that person. A person forced out of work due to an injury may become dependent on painkillers. They may get depressed, and suffer from financial problems. They may turn to drink, a bad mix with those painkillers…begin fighting with the spouse, et cetera. It all builds on itself until a situation spirals out of control. It can happen quickly.

There are the questions of character, and then there are the questions of circumstance. If your spouse is killed by a drunk driver, leaving you solely responsible for three small children under the age of seven, that is a circumstance. How a person deals with such tragedy indicates something about their character.

It reflects not just the choices that they made, but the choices that they had to begin with, for surely choices are limited at the best of times. Sometimes there are no good choices.

There is no such thing as choosing the lesser of two evils, sometimes. Based on the reader’s own personal experience, isn’t it really more a matter of choosing between a whole bunch of lesser and greater evils, some of which involve pain, suffering or sacrifice on our own parts and so we don’t want to do them? A good example would involve quitting smoking. Smokers know they need to quit, the problem is, they also know it’s going to hurt—and so they continually put it off. And of course it never happens.

So here’s my personal sound barrier: how do I take, what is at most a couple of hundred bucks in book and story sales per month, less than a grand a year essentially, and push it through that magical barrier, where I can get off the Ontario Disability Support Program and live on the proceeds of my work?

I read a lot of blogs, many by long-standing professional writers. Mention has been made of ‘editors with a million dollars to spend,’ or ‘hundred-thousand dollar advances.’

It’s true that would be enough to get me off disability. The problem is that the more likely scenario involves a five, or ten, or twenty thousand dollar advance. I would be an unknown, first-time author in a pretty big pond.

Some would say that I would be extremely fortunate to get that. Not everyone gets the professional book contract, after all.

And they would be correct to a certain extent.

In fact; they’re absolutely right.

Not everyone gets the chance.

The trouble is that at a certain level, I would be giving up the benefits, with small chance of qualifying ever again. That’s because I would have to prove to a tribunal that I could no longer write, not just no longer haul 12” concrete blocks around in wheelbarrows, or weld, or carry ladders around on job sites. It’s a whole ‘nother kettle of fish at that point. The onus of proof is always on the client or applicant in this particular system.

The other scenario involves continuing to build up the independently-published book sales, simply by writing more, and following that curve as best one can these days. It really is early days and information goes out of date notoriously fast. The fact that I am selling any books at all proves that it can be done, I’m just not doing it well enough…or something.

Even then, in terms of my personal sound barrier, there’s a time where we’re at Mach .95 and there’s a lot of buffeting and you need to be structurally sound. You have to have the surplus power to punch through that barrier. Otherwise you’re going to break up and it’s game over at that point.

Living in a one-roomer, lining up at the soup kitchen and the food bank, and earning four or five hundred a month (when you’re lucky) is a distinct possibility if one should lose the pension for any reason.

It really wouldn’t be worth it on those terms. You can do exactly the same thing and not have to work at all. It’s called Welfare, right? Why bust your ass putting in sixty or eighty hours a week of thankless and minimally-paid work just for the privilege of calling yourself a writer. I know, we’re supposed to do it for the love, but you have to be practical as well.

At that rate, I might as well stay on ODSP, make my hundred or two a month—and maybe be a grand a month ahead some months on that deal. We know book sales fluctuate pretty markedly for reasons that are difficult to analyze and therefore predict.

If there was a quick way to go from a couple hundred a month in sales, to two thousand a month, I suppose someone would have to be a fool not to do it.

Punching through that barrier involves questions of circumstance, and questions of character. There are questions of knowledge and application, and then there is the factor of time.

For all we know, simply plugging away and doing exactly what I’m doing now may turn out to be the right path, over time. 

There is also a kind of psychological barrier to be overcome.

***

They say there’s a certain amount of luck involved and they are probably right.

Here’s what happens if I get a $20,000 advance one month. I immediately lose $1,100 roughly, that’s my pension cheque for that month. Then the ODSP says I owe them fifty cents on the dollar from the ‘earnings.’ 

That costs $10,000, add that to the eleven hundred. Then the ODSP tells me that I got too much money in the bank, and that I must spend it down—as long as I don’t spend it on food, shelter or clothing. I can only have six or seven grand in the bank. So I would have to go out and piss away three grand by the end of the month. Then I would be back to getting my pension chequel and yes, I would have six grand in the bank, or whatever I'm allowed.

I would still also be on ODSP. It's either that or taking my full advance, going off ODSP and living in that one-roomer I told you about earlier.

That's where the psychological barrier really comes in. That's because I now have an actual, one-bedroom apartment and that monthly pension coming in.

I don’t know about that personal (possibly even psychological) barrier any more than Chuck Yeager did—I mean, I think it is possible, it’s just a question of going for it when we’ve got everything right.

It's a question of having all of our shit together.

It could be a while yet.

END