Reno – The Biggest Little City in the World!

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Got a late start my first day out – very late. Wound up spending the night in Reno. Ah, good ol’ Reno – The Biggest Little City in the World!

The El Dorado Casino. Strange, but I’ve never struck gold there!

The quiet streets of Reno on a Monday night.

Reno sidewalk awash in the glow of a casino. Amazing how blinking lights can beautify a city!

An all-too-common sight in gambling towns – the pawn shop.

***

If you would like to see more photos from my cross-country travels, please follow my new Pinterest account at http://www.pinterest.com/lorilschafer/.

For updates on my forthcoming memoir The Long Road Home, which I am drafting during this road trip, please follow my blog or subscribe to my newsletter.

The Loneliest Road – Photos

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How wonderful it is to be completely alone sometimes…

Just me and the telephone poles…

Rock “graffiti” along Highway 50 in Nevada. There’s miles and miles of it – “signatures” assembled from dark rocks on the desert sand. What a creative way of leaving your mark! I considered making one of my own – but I thought this question mark spoke pretty well for me…

It was a dark and stormy night on The Loneliest Road – with no cars in sight.

I spent my last night in Nevada in a mid-sized (for Nevada) town called Ely, which is at the eastern end of The Loneliest Road. I slept in the parking lot of a casino, which are often good places to sleep because they have round-the-clock traffic and it’s fairly easy to escape notice, at least in low-security venues. This one also had a readily-accessible bathroom – and the above sign in its front lobby.

***

If you would like to see more photos from my cross-country travels, please follow my new Pinterest account at http://www.pinterest.com/lorilschafer/.

For updates on my forthcoming memoir The Long Road Home, which I am drafting during this road trip, please follow my blog or subscribe to my newsletter.

The Loneliest Road in America

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August 12, 2014

I’m on Highway 50 in south central Nevada. They call this “The Loneliest Road in America.” I’m happy to be here. It’s one of those days when I desperately feel the need to be alone.

A few days before I went out of town, I attended a social function. I’m afraid I made rather an ass of myself. Not for the first – nor, I’m sure, for the last – time; however, in the process I fear that I may have offended some people whose opinions are important to me.

We all make these social errors from time to time. We know that other people make them, too. Yet somehow when you’re the one doing it, it feels as if it’s only you. Everyone around you seems the picture of social aptitude and grace. Other people never make these mistakes, never humiliate themselves the way we have done, on more occasions than we care to enumerate. And sometimes it’s difficult not to despise ourselves for not being more capable, for not knowing when to speak and when to be silent, for not knowing what to speak, and what to be silent about.

I don’t necessarily believe that we should refrain from punishing ourselves when we do things we know we ought to regret. We’re past the age of having parents to discipline us, to admonish us when we go wrong, or to explain to us what we should have done instead. Any punishment we receive must be self-inflicted; any atonement we make must be self-imposed. And perhaps these steps are necessary; perhaps the punishment and the atonement are what make you remember, the next time, not to behave in ways you might soon regret.

I’m not opposed to the process. I only wish it ended sooner. Because I’m ready to let go of the hurt in my heart. It just doesn’t seem to be ready yet, to let go of me.

Our friends forgive us our flaws so long as they’re not too flagrant. They overlook our oddest opinions so long as they’re not too offensive; they refuse to resent our rambling rants so long as they’re not too rotten. There is a great deal of inertia in a friendship. Our opinions of our friends, and theirs of us, do not change as a result of one day or one night or one weekend, as a result of one misspoken sentiment or one misinterpreted gesture. It takes months, even years, as our intimacy with one another waxes and wanes, for our impressions to truly change, for our evaluations of one another to shift positions on the social scale of bad and good. There are certainly people in my life whom I have grown to like more and more as the years have passed. And likewise, there are those whom I care for less and less. And undoubtedly other people’s estimation of me has risen and fallen in a similar fashion.

There is little in this life that is truly unconditional. Love, friendship – these ties between us and the people we care about are built on solid foundations which may be difficult to rock. But they can be rocked. Even destroyed. Any relationship can be toppled. If sufficient force is applied against it.

I think myself very fortunate that, on a day in which I would like nothing more than to crawl into a hole and die, that I’ve managed to find myself such a tremendously impressive hole. Because here on The Loneliest Road in America, I could commit a series of faux pas such as Miss Manners has never even dreamed about and my secret would forever remain between the sage and the salamanders and me.

But while I’m glad to have made such a timely escape, it only prolongs my torture. Because now I have no way of knowing what these particular individuals think of me now. Because they’re there, and I’m here. Out of touch, out of sight, and – I hope – out of mind. And now I have no choice but to wait. It will be many weeks, if not months, before I learn whether things have indeed changed between us, or if this, too, will wash casually under the bridge like any of the other countless instances in which I’ve said or done something I shouldn’t.

For those of us who suffer from these bouts of social ineptitude – and I suspect that it’s more common than any of us would care to confess – it’s tempting to long for an alternate solution. A stronger inner censor. Or perhaps an outer one, a tiny angel to sit on our shoulder and whisper “No!” in our ear when we’re about to deliver a speech we can’t ever take back. Perhaps we wish that we could be forced to edit our words before we’re permitted to speak them. Perhaps this is even why some of us become writers. Because in writing, there is always time to think and rethink before we speak. There is no blurting out our words; no chance of releasing them before we’ve had time to reconsider what we want to say – or what we ought not to say.

Of course, it would never work. Somehow I think it would put a serious crimp on our conversations if we had to respond to every inquiry with “How am I? Um… wait while I write down my answer. I’ll get it to you in half an hour.”

No, I’m afraid there’s nothing else for it. But to try again, and to try harder. Because most of the time, there is no escape. There is no Loneliest Road; no vast, vacant desert to which we can unburden our fears and frustrations, no wilderness into which we can release our pathetic whimpers and cries. We can take that road whenever we want to, take it away from our town, away from our friends, away from our most painful memories and most repented mistakes. We can take that road away. But eventually, we must also take it home.

On a happier note, here’s Newton. Because all of us could use a few more dancers and cheerleaders in our lives.

Why Didn’t Anyone Tell Me That Being Unemployed Was Going To Be So Much Work??!!

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I simply must be doing something wrong.

As some of you know, I quit my jobs a couple of months ago. Yes, I said “jobs” and yes, I do mean all of them, even the private tax and bookkeeping clients. Call it a mid-life crisis, call it an adolescent rebellion, call it a cry for help; I don’t care, just don’t call upon me to do your financials anymore!

I didn’t kid myself when I made this decision. I knew perfectly well that being a full-time writer was going to be just as much – if not more – work than being an employee, and also that the pay was going to be a lot less, a starting salary of zero dollars per annum being fairly easy to beat. But I thought, heck – if I’ve written half a million words in two years while I was working my day jobs, imagine what I’ll be able to do when ALL of my time is my own!

No, no, no! And no!

The sad fact is, in the two months since I’ve been working at home, I’ve barely written anything at all. Ironically, I simply don’t have the time.

It started to go bad about the middle of June, just two weeks after I kissed my last job goodbye. I decided to release several free eBooks of some short stories and essays that I’ve written. Now eBooks aren’t really that hard to put together once you know how to do them, but they do take time. There’s the interior formatting, writing and assembling the front and back matter, and let’s not forget the all-important cover design. Of course, my logic was, these are free eBooks; I’m not about to drop hundreds of dollars having professional covers designed for books that I intend to be permanently gratis, so I supposed I should just suck it up, learn some basic image-manipulation software, and design them myself. Easy, right?

No, no, no!

I suppose you might say my foray into graphic design was more time-consuming and less rewarding than I had hoped, although I did at least get the job done and was relatively pleased with the results. I’m also confident now that I can assemble a fairly decent-looking free book cover or fancy picture-tweet when called upon to do so, which came in incredibly handy last week when the books came out. More on that later.

However, learning some basic cover design turned out to be only the first crack in the iceberg. My dream of being a full-time “writer” really started to come apart a few weeks later, when I decided to record audiobooks of my forthcoming short memoirs, On Hearing of My Mother’s Death Six Years After It Happened and Stories from My Memory-Shelf: Fiction and Essays from My Past. Doing my own recordings sounded like a fabulous idea. There’s a certain appeal, I think, in having a memoir read by the person who wrote it, and in some ways it actually sounded like less trouble than auditioning narrators and coordinating with the one I chose.

No, no, no!

Well, okay, maybe. If you’re in it for the long haul, I would say it’s generally worth the trouble, particularly since, if you’re your own narrator, you earn both shares of the royalties – assuming you sell some books. Here’s the problem. It’s not just the money you have to drop on equipment and soundproofing; it’s the time you have to spend learning what type of equipment and soundproofing you need, and what kind of setup and software you want to work with, not to mention the many hours it may take to construct a home studio if you don’t want to fork over the cash for a professional space, which I did not.

And then, of course, you still have to record the books. I’m going to do a whole separate post about all of this sometime soo – um, sometime – because I think my experience may prove invaluable to any of you who are considering recording your own audiobooks, and I want to be able to describe the process with more objectivity than my current overwhelmed-and-exhausted state of mind will permit me to do. For now, let me just say that deciding to build an audio studio from scratch and then record two books in the four weeks before I was supposed to go out of town for two months was not the smartest decision I have ever made.

Finally I had made enough progress where I felt comfortable making my annual trek down to Ventura County. Although I desperately needed a break, I didn’t kid myself about this trip, either. I planned on working the entire time I was there; I just figured it would be nice to work on the beach for a change, and enjoy some ocean noises and views while I was at it. I even bought one of those keyboard protectors for my computer so I could start the intro to my next memoir, The Long Road Home. I took a picture that I might have shared with you, but I found something strangely sad about a woman in a bikini sitting on the sand in a chair with a laptop, so I deleted it. Not, perhaps, my most relaxing week at the beach.

But the real problem was that while I was down there, I received an offer from videoblocks.com for a week’s worth of free downloads of stock video footage, up to twenty clips a day. Great! I thought. I’ve been meaning to begin assembling some video trailers for my upcoming books; this will give me a good start.

No, no, no!

First I had to research clips that I thought I might want. Then I had to wade through the seemingly endless results to find the few I thought I could actually use. Then I had to download them, which, what with the lousy wireless signal I had at my motel, took numerous attempts. And finally, of course, I ultimately came to the conclusion that the clips I was finding weren’t quite what I’d had in mind. And that maybe what I really ought to do is just buy a video camera and some basic recording equipment, and shoot the footage I want myself.

At this point, I’m sure you can already envision the horrible hole into which I’ve dug myself. Because now, of course, not only do I have to learn how to use this wonderful new camera, I have to learn how to edit, and add text, and captions, and music, and oh, by the way, then I have to go searching for music I want to use, and what if I can’t find what I’m looking for?

Forget it. My skills on the clarinet were never that good. Besides, I’ve taken music theory and I know I don’t have what it takes to be a composer. I suppose I could use music that’s in the public domain, but who would perform it? Somehow I’m not convinced that two minutes of me humming Beethoven’s Greatest Hits is going to inspire the mood I’m seeking for my trailers…

And if all that wasn’t enough? My free eBooks finally came out last week. Frankly, I hadn’t planned on doing much to promote them because I figured they’d be mere drops in Amazon’s vast bucket of indie-published work and would entirely escape notice. I was merely hoping to get some reviews, and maybe earn a few new readers. You can therefore imagine my very great surprise when all five of them, without any effort on my part, landed in the Top 100 Free (and some as high as the Top 20) in their respective categories – which, granted, isn’t saying much, not when Amazon has categories as narrow as “Kindle Books – Kindle Short Reads – 30 minutes or less – Romance.” Still, that’s certainly way better than NOT appearing in the Top 100, so I thought, oh, what the heck, I wonder what would happen if I did do a little promotion? Several hours a day of it later, I was in fact able to get each book into the Top 20 in its category, which is, of course, very cool because that means you’re on the front page of the Top 100 list, which means more people see your book, which means it gets more downloads, and so on – it’s a partially self-perpetuating cycle. I’m actually going to do a whole separate post about this, too, sometime soo – um, sometime – because I think my experience with this was tremendously educational and I truly have some awesome and very concrete insights to share.

Unfortunately, since I used a third-party publisher instead of going through Kindle Direct, I lost most of my “new release” window – which I will explain in this other post I will someday write – and in the last few days my eBooks have subsequently lost a ton of ground in their rankings, which takes some of the satisfaction out of putting in the time to promote them. The best performers (for the curious) were my romance shorts “Anything Can Happen” and “The Sublet,” which reached #9 and #10 respectively in their category, although the eBook version of my essay “Is Your Anxiety Real?” climbed as high as #16, and my short story “Squirrel Revolution” did well enough to rank in Literature and Fiction as well as SciFi and Fantasy. Links to the Amazon pages are below if you want to check them out.

Each of these free eBooks is, or soon will be, also available on ITunes, Kobo, etc. – I simply haven’t had a chance to assemble the links yet. How lazy am I? you may be wondering. Well, not very. Fact is, I’ve been working my you-know-what off nearly round the clock trying to get things done to the point where I can take them with me. Because you see, this past Monday was when I was scheduled to leave on my big trip through Canada and Alaska for the next couple of months. That clearly didn’t happen, for the simple reason that although I can edit on the road if I must, I can’t very well record audio in my truck or out in the noisy wonders of nature. And if I still want to do this trip – and gosh darn it, more and more ever day, I do – there are certain things I am simply going to have to let go. I accepted this a couple of weeks ago, when I took days off of Twitter so that I could get other work done. Late last week I finally closed the windows on all of the blog posts I had hoped to read from the two weeks prior, so that now I have no idea what’s going on with any of the people I’m following (I hope there haven’t been any major disasters). And, as I mentioned, I gave up on the idea some time ago of actually doing any writing – except for tweets.

But there are certain things I cannot let go. Packing, for example. Rather an important detail, particularly since I plan on sleeping in my truck a fair portion of my nights on the road and therefore won’t have the space to simply “bring everything,” as I often do. Picking a route? Not quite as vital – although I probably ought to have at least the first day planned. But then there’s the shopping, and the laundry, and figuring out what clothes and books to take, and organizing all of my wonderful new office equipment so that it doesn’t get squished or bumped around but is readily accessible when I need it. And then I still have to install that fancy new voice-to-text recognition software I bought so that I can dictate while driving – one more thing I have to learn how to use.

But that, of course, is the one saving grace of this whole dreadful summer of overwork and underpay. Because as stressful as this “holiday” is going to be, with as much work as I will be hauling along, and as many projects as I’m now committed to complete, there is one aspect of it to which I am eagerly looking forward, and it has nothing to do with any activity I have planned, any sights I want to see, or any scenery I intend to enjoy. Because when I climb into my truck on Sunday – perhaps, at the worst, on Monday – and begin wending my way north, there will be one aspect of being unemployed for which I can be truly grateful. I will finally, finally, have time to write. And do you know what I say to that?

Yes, yes, yes!

***

NOW AVAILABLE! The following FREE e-Books by author Lori Schafer.

Anything Can Happen: A Romance Short

“I figured I’d better backtrack fast before he started thinking I liked him or something. But it’s hard to backpedal when you’ve got your foot in your mouth.”
Is it really over when it’s over? A self-contained short story excerpt from my forthcoming novel My Life with Michael: A Story of Sex and Beer for the Middle-Aged.

http://www.amazon.com/Anything-Can-Happen-Lori-Schafer-ebook/dp/B00M77WVGA/

The Sublet: A Romance Short

“On my other side, a man I’d never expected to see again was crawling into bed with me.”
When there’s nothing tying you down, how do you decide whether to stay or go? A short story excerpt from my forthcoming novel My Life with Michael: A Story of Sex and Beer for the Middle-Aged.

http://www.amazon.com/Sublet-Lori-Schafer-ebook/dp/B00M77WVDI/

Careful: A Romance Short

“On bad days I wondered how old people ever even did it. Sometimes walking seemed like too much effort, let alone all the aerobicized contortionism that went with sex.”
How older people do it. A short story excerpt from my forthcoming novel My Life with Michael: A Story of Sex and Beer for the Middle-Aged.

http://www.amazon.com/Careful-Lori-Schafer-ebook/dp/B00M77WUHA/

Squirrel Revolution

A whimsical look at the long-term effects of human activities on our furry little neighbors. Short story / speculative fiction.

http://www.amazon.com/Squirrel-Revolution-Lori-Schafer-ebook/dp/B00M77WVIS/

Is Your Anxiety Real? One Woman’s Experience with Mental Disorder

Read my story of how I was misdiagnosed with anxiety – and what the problem really was.

http://www.amazon.com/Your-Anxiety-Real-Experience-Disorder-ebook/dp/B00M77WW1E/

Like to party? Hop along the Hump Day Blog Hop on Julie Valerie’s Book Blog. Click here to return to the Hump Day Blog Hop.

A Fifty-Word Horror Story

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The zombies crashed into the house.

“Brains!” they moaned.

The family was gathered around the television, watching. None of them moved.

The zombies scratched their heads. The parents were staring at the screen. The children’s mouths hung open.

“No brains!” the zombies moaned.

And moved on to the next house.

Scooby-Doo’s Mystery Machine – Another Reason Why I Love Oxnard!

The Beach at Oxnard

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And it’s mine… all mine!

Heads of the Line: Flash Fiction in Word Riot

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My short-short “Heads of the Line” has been published in Word Riot. My commentary follows.

http://www.wordriot.org/archives/7084 (print version)

http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/a/b/1/ab110a9430fb41a6/20140715-schafer.mp3?c_id=7388729&expiration=1405960069&hwt=c671a6151875883dbc45283362dbfd2d (Podcast with my commentary)

As it turned out, I was unable to attend college my first fall after high school. My status as an unemancipated minor made me ineligible for the financial aid I’d been expecting, which necessitated a quick – by which I mean long, arduous, and painful – change of plans. I did eventually land a minimum-wage job at a bakery, and being now a veritable miser with money, by the following spring I had three hundred dollars saved. I decided to invest this massive sum in a trip to Alaska, where I had been assured by all manner of people who had never been there that you could earn colossal columns of cash working in the canneries. “Big money!” and “Signing bonus!” and “Free room and board!” the newspaper ads all promised. What they didn’t tell you, of course, was that the people who earned the “signing bonuses” and “free room and board” were those who went to work on the boats themselves – and that the reason they made “big money” was because the living conditions were horrible, the job was tough and scary as hell, and they worked twenty hours a day whenever there was a catch. I opted for the more palatable version, which was not actually a cannery, but a fish packing plant –several notches further down on the dirty jobs scale.

It wasn’t a bad job, all things considered. Yes, you worked fourteen hour days whenever there was a delivery, but since that was when you made your overtime pay, nobody complained too much about that. And yes, your feet and hands were constantly cold and cramped – it was months before I could comfortably hold a hairbrush again, and it took more than a year for all of the feeling to finally come back into my fingertips. On the plus side, you got to camp for free on site, and my particular facility even had an indoor bathroom and hot showers – a true rarity in those parts. To help pass the time, they cranked up the radio on the plant’s loudspeakers and let us listen to it all day – the unfortunate part being that the only station that came in clearly only played Top 40. Can you even begin to guess how many times a day a Top 40 radio station plays the same songs? So many that eventually you adapt and learn to enjoy it. You have to. Otherwise you go crazy!

I never got my big money – in fact, shortly before I was due to come home, my station wagon died, and I ended up having to spend what seemed like an eternity of days riding a bus all the way back to California. I wound up with forty bucks in my pocket and the satisfaction of knowing that even if I never travelled again, at least I’d been to Alaska, which is so unbelievably worth seeing that I’m not even going to begin to talk about it now. And a good thing, too, because here we are, twenty years later, and I’ve yet to have the chance to go again. It’s the one place I want to make sure I revisit while I can still travel, which is why I’m making it the primary destination for my road trip this summer, during which I’ll be drafting my second memoir, The Long Road Home.

I don’t think I’m going to go searching for employment, though. Somehow I think I may be past the age for factory work, particularly when it involves fourteen-hour days, Top 40 radio, and thousands of pounds of bloody, frozen fish. But who knows – perhaps when I get up there I’ll be inspired to try it, for old time’s sake.

Just don’t put me on the header.

***

“Heads of the Line” is one of the stories featured in my autobiographical short story and essay collection Stories from My Memory-Shelf: Fiction and Essays from My Past (only $2.99 Kindle, $6.99 paperback). To learn more about it, please visit the book’s webpage or subscribe to my newsletter.

Igpay Atinlay Oetrypay / Ashflay Ictionfay Ontestcay

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http://backhairadvocate.wordpress.com/pig-latin-poetryflash-contest/

Literary humor magazine “Back Hair Advocate” is running a contest for poems or flash fiction written in Pig Latin. Come on, you know you’ve already got a bunch of them written – all you need to do is submit one!

“Morning After” in Erotic Review Magazine

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My erotic short story “Morning After” has been published in Erotic Review Magazine:

http://eroticreviewmagazine.com/fiction/menage-a-trois-morning-after/ (Adult Content)

The inspiration from this story came from my second novel, Just the Three of Us: An Erotic Romantic Comedy for the Commitment-Challenged. The style of this piece differs somewhat from that of my novel – the humor here is more restrained – but it’s very much in the same vein. Frankly, I was delighted to revisit the concept because I really, really enjoyed writing that book. I love the characters, I love the setup, I even love the rather silly premise that three friends could just “happen” to fall in love in almost exactly the way that two friends might. In fact, I liked it so much that I’m halfway through writing the sequel. Plus I wrote this story. And then I got the idea for another short story called “Avalanche!” in which three friends… well, you get the drift.

The funny thing is, I never would have thought I’d find the whole threesome concept so intriguing. And honestly, I’m not sure that I really do. For me it’s not threesomes in general, but more this particular threesome that’s so endlessly amusing. Of course, maybe that’s how it starts. Maybe it always begins with plain old monogamous, monamorous folks who, by chance, meet the two other people who make the perfect corners on that kind of triangle. One day you’re hanging out with your best friends – the next you’re in love. It could happen to you!

Okay, probably not. But don’t discount the idea entirely, because you never know. And if it does happen, and it does work out, would you let me know? I could use another idea for a sequel…

***

You can also read “Morning After” in my recently released collection of erotic short short stories To All the Penises I’ve Ever Known: Erotic Shorts by Lori Schafer, only $0.99 in digital formats on Amazon (Universal Link), Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, ITunes, and Lulu. Large print paperback is only $5.99!