The Adventures of an Arkansawyer

Well, another book goes up on Amazon. This one is called The Adventures of an Arkansawyer. Right now it is print only. It contains two sections. The first one is familiar to some of you. It’s “Days of Beer,” albeit expanded a bit with some fresh memories.” The second section, which is about twice as long, is called “The Adventurers of an Arkansawyer.” Both sections are memoirs.

I always intended to do a print version of “Days,” but it wasn’t long enough on its own.  Back in the spring I decided to a write a companion section with humorous memories from my experiences growing up in Arkansas. I worked on it over the summer and into early fall, until it finally threatened to become overwhelming. I finally subdivided it into two sections, 1) memories from childhood up through graduate school in Arkansas, and 2) memories from the years after I left Arkansas for Louisiana. That latter piece will be called “Tales of an Arkansaw Traveler,” though it is a long way from being finished.

This is the first of my own books that I’ve self published through CreateSpace. I did the Inklings anthology late last year, but that had many other writers in it. Why print only? Well, I figured the biggest interest for my memoir pieces would be around my hometown, but Days of Beer didn’t sell that well there, and I wondered if it was because it was ebook only. So, this time I decided to go print only—at least initially—to see if that would have any effect.

As for doing a later ebook version, I’ve got a question for the blogosphere. Since Days of Beer is already an ebook, I’m wondering whether I should e-publish The Adventures of an Arkansawyer in its complete form, or publish only the section with the new memories. What do you think?  Got to give it some thought.

As always, thanks to my honey for a great cover image. If you want to check out the book itself, here’s the link to Amazon. 

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What I’ve Been Working On

I haven’t talked much about writing here lately, but I have been doing some. For fiction, I’ve had some problems finishing things. I’ve started close to a dozen stories, a western featuring a hero with a burned face called “The Scarred One,” another story about my heroic fantasy character Krieg, called “Where All the Souls are Hollow,” an urban fantasy piece, a sort of schlock horror piece called “HogZ,” and the list goes on.

I still have a number of pieces in various stages of completion from last year, three western tales featuring a character named Lane Gabriel, a YA fantasy tale featuring fox kits called “Farhaven,” and a prequel of sorts to “Under the Ember Star.” I like all of them but haven’t touched any of them in months now.

The Krieg piece will be finished but it’ll probably be a couple more weeks. I’ve had a very busy time at school with the research committee that I chair. The rest of the pieces? I don’t know. I’ll see how I feel when the Krieg story is done.

However, I did make very good progress this summer on another project, which is completed. Quite a few folks seemed to enjoy my humorous memoir, “Days of Beer,” and I wanted to do a print version of it. However, it just wasn’t long enough so I figured I would add some more memoir stuff about growing up in the south. Once I got started, a whole lot of stuff started coming back to me and I ended up writing another forty + thousand words of material about wacky adventures I’ve had. The vast majority of this had no relationship to beer drinking, although I did add a few items to the original Days of Beer material.

I decided to call the collection “Adventures of an Arkansawyer,” and I’m now going through the proofing process on it. It will include the Days of Beer stuff but add that extra forty thousand words. Initially it will appear in print form only, but I will do an ebook version of it down the line.

The reason for starting out in print is because of what happened with Days of Beer as an ebook only publication. I had hoped the book would attract more attention around my home town of Charleston, Arkansas but it really didn’t. A few people did read and enjoy it and let me know, but for the most part it went nowhere. I know a lot of folks in that area aren’t yet into reading electronic materials so I want to see if the print book does better there. Anyway, I’ll announce further information about this work as it becomes available. 

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Summer Routine

Today I start trying to get into my summer routine. I'm going to try and do a few things differently this year. I got up this morning and had a nice vigorous walk around the neighborhood. Only 16 minutes this morning, but I should work my way up some from there. I just don't get enough exercise and I'm getting to the age where I better start now or I'll soon be unable to start at all.

Of course, first thing out the door, the bottom board on our front steps came cleanly off under my feet. I'm still amazed I didn't fall on my ass. I was proud of myself, though. I took my walk anyway, instead of using the board as an excuse to avoid it. Waited until I got home to fix it. 

After that it was breakfast. The Lovely Lana fixed bacon and eggs this morning. And now to blogging. Writing is next. 

First, up, a revision of a piece I wrote several months back called "Big Boy Football." I've got several pretty funny stories about my High School football "career." Depending on how much I've got and how they fit together, I might do another collection of humor along the lines of Days of Beer. Or maybe I'll just blog them. Who knows. 

Speaking of Days of Beer, it's only .99 cents for some funny stuff. If I do say so myself. After all, Bernard Deleo liked it. Here's what he had to say:

"If you read any humorous memoir this year, it should be DAYS OF BEER. Author Charles Gramlich relives his early life experiences with beer, and a teenager's challenges in obtaining the golden substance to consume in mass quantities. Just his hilarious section aptly named the Touborg Sanction is well worth the price of admission. It is without doubt the funniest collection of anecdotes I've read in many years." 

Hope you can check it out.

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Blogging and Days of Beer

I used to post every day, then every other day, then about every third day. Now it seems lucky if I get a post in a week. It's not that I don't enjoy blogging, but so many things consume my interest these days and I've also been working quite a lot on fiction. When I'm writing nonfiction, it lends itself well to blogging, but fiction tends to take me away from it. Not sure why that is. Below is a little piece of nonfiction for you, a small snippet from Days of Beer, my memoir if you will. (It's edited slightly to fit with this post.)

One day, when my son, Joshua, was about seven or eight years old, I opened a bottle of St. Pauli Girl in his presence. St. Pauli Girl is a German beer of exquisite bitterness. Josh, who always wanted to drink whatever I was drinking, naturally asked for a sip. Where before I had always refused to let him drink any beer, I now encouraged him to take a swig, figuring one swig would be enough forever. Holding the bottle in both small hands, he lifted it to his mouth and took a swallow.

The minute that bitterness hit his tongue, Josh’s eyes squinched shut and his face screwed up with a look of shock and dismay. He immediately tried to “chew” the taste back out of his mouth, but St. Pauli Girl is not a lady to be forgotten so easily. I soon took pity on him and gave him a drink of milk to cleanse his palate. He never asked to taste my beer again.

Several months later, Josh and I were at a quick stop store and I saw they had Mountain Dew in the original green bottles, the one with the hillbilly on it holding a jug of moonshine, for which Mountain Dew is named. I bought a bottle for nostalgia sake and offered Josh a sip. At first, he refused. I encouraged him. I could see him looking at me with a speculative light in his eyes; no doubt he was remembering the last time he’d trusted his father’s offer of a drink. But he finally agreed to a tentative sip, and immediately his eyes lit up.
“I like that beer,” he said with a smile.

(BTW, Ty Johnston has a review of Micro Weird up on his blog (http://tyjohnston.blogspot.com/2013/04/books-read-in-2013-no-19-micro-weird.html), and Randy Johnson mentions it on his (http://randall120.wordpress.com/2013/04/01/new-in-the-house-112/), as well as having reviewed it on Amazon.  Thanks, guys!) 

Tales of a Youthful Brewmance

Here's what the brews themselves are saying about Charles Gramlich's memoir of his beer drinking days.
 

“I thought I could have been treated better,” says Bud Weiser.  “It hurts not to be loved.”

 

“Lies.  All lies,” says Coors.  “He drank a lot more of me than he lets on.  And he liked it.”

 

“Come back to Canada and we’ll Eff you up really good this time.”  --The Molson Brews.

 

“I don’t always like being drunk by humans,” says Dos Equis, “but when I do I prefer it to be by Charles Gramlich.”

 

“Only 99 cents, he’s charging for this.  Meshuggah!”  --He’Brew: The Chosen Beer.

Get your copy of "Days of Beer" today.  Before it goes stale. 

 Amazon

Barnes & Noble

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A Drought Breaks

Well, a drought that has lasted over two months finally broke a little yesterday. For the first time since mid-March I actually wrote a new piece of fiction. It was short, a prose poem I'm calling "The Hiss of Angels," and it came with a lot of effort, but it was new and it went down officially on a page. It's not that I haven't had ideas. In fact, the idea for this poem came to me several weeks ago. I've had lots of ideas, have tossed them around in my head, but in the end I just didn't have the drive to get them down. Sometimes it's impossible to escape the thought of, "What's the use?" In the end, of course, there is no "use," other than that I want to do it.

 I also finally got up the energy to check my amazon sales for April and May. One rather strange thing is that "Killing Trail" had been selling a few copies every month since it was published almost two years ago now. But in May that has come to a stop and only "Harvest of War" is still selling anything. I would have thought the audiences for those two books were different. I can understand why "Days of Beer" dropped to zero, since folks buying that would have been only buying something 'from me' essentially. I was hoping "Killing Trail" would continue to have legs. Alas, it looks like not. Of course, I've been doing no promoting for the past couple of months either so that probably had an impact. For some reason, I don't seem to get many word of mouth sales. I could try to figure out why bu the answer might just depress me so I'll leave it be for now.

One thing I have done a lot of is play my Skyrim video game. It's a fantasy quest type game, and I like it a whole lot. It has some interesting writing in it. All throughout the game world you find "books" of various kinds that can be read or used. That's cool. The thing about a video game like this is that it consumes your whole mind while you're playing it, and that keeps you from thinking about other, less pleasant, kinds of things. Writing requires thought, and as soon as you start thinking, the scary stuff can start to creep in. Well enough rambling. Time to visit blogs.

Days of Beer: New Cover

I'd hoped to get it done before now, but I finally got around to revising and improving the original cover for Days of Beer. You can see the results here. The title and name are larger, and they are in line with each other, as opposed to the original cover. I think the color of the title is more festive as well.

Lana took the original photo for this, and then I cropped it and added the verbiage. I did the original using the 'paint' program on my old desktop. Last night, I was having so much trouble I went and tried to work on the revision on my new laptop. I found that its 'paint' program is a revised program and is much, much, much easier to use. I'll be doing any future covers on that.

Supposedly, this version went live this morning but I notice it's not showing up yet on Amazon itself. Maybe it will in the next few days.
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Musings on Days of Beer

Over at his "Musings" blog, Sage has a review of Days of Beer and a short essay on his own drinking experiences. His were a bit different from mine. Check it out HERE

Hope your week is going well. Mine has been far too busy so far.

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So What is Fast Writing?

Once in a while, someone will tell me they wish they could write as fast as I do. Over the years it’s occurred quite a few times, but I’m still a little surprised when it happens because I think of myself as a very slow writer. Of course, I’ve told other writers that I wished I could write as fast as they. That got me thinking about how exactly to define ‘fast’ writing.

Something that confounds the issue, of course, is the difference between writing and publishing. The last time someone made a comment to me about being a fast writer was right after Days of Beer and In the Language of Scorpions came out, and after I mentioned that Under the Ember Star would likely be published this year. That’s not fast writing, though. That’s fast publishing. A third of Days of Beer was completed a couple of years ago, and I wrote the rest throughout November and December of 2011. That’s probably close to 15,000 new words in two months, which is actually kind of fast for me. As for “Scorpions,” the majority of the stories in there were reprinted from earlier magazine publications. I did write a couple of new pieces for that book, and I completed a number of stories that had been in rough draft form, but the total number of new words in that book was fairly small. “Ember Star” was written mostly last summer, 30,000 words over several months. I didn’t even average 500 words a day.

In order to try and understand more about my own productivity, I decided this year to keep word count records. I know many writers who do this routinely but I’ve never really made an effort to do so before. Well, the first month’s data is in and here are the results:

I produced 8033 new words of material that I hope to get published. This counts stories, introductions to stories, and material about stories that might go into a publication. It doesn’t count blog posts or letters of recommendation or other writing that I do as part of my job and life, but which isn’t going to be put on any bibliography of my publications. Although I don’t know exactly what my average monthly output is, I feel comfortable saying that this was actually an above average month for me.

January has 31 days so my average daily output was 259 words a day. That’s a little misleading because I didn’t write every day. I didn’t keep “exact” notes on when I wrote or didn’t, but looking back over my journal it looks like I wrote material that I hoped to publish on about 20 days of the month. That would bring my average daily production count up to a whopping 402 words a day. According to my journal, on my best day in January I did “about a thousand words.” None of that suggests to me that I am a fast writer.

I also realized, though, that word count is only a partial record of writing activity. I do a lot of revising and rewriting on my stuff. In other words, on the days I wrote I tended to work a lot harder than a new word count of 402 would suggest.

So if I’m not a fast writer, who is? Stephen King? King says he writes about 2,000 words a day. Considering that he’s a full time writer while I’m not, even two thousand doesn’t seem all that fast. But if he writes six days a week, that would give him a production of 634,000 words a year, or one and a half books considering the size of his novels. To average a million words a year would require around 2740 words a day, every day. Since I don’t imagine anyone writers 365 days a year, we’re probably talking about million word a year folks averaging 3,000 words a day or better. Now that seems pretty fast to me, but I’d like to know how many hours a day this writer works, and how much revision they do.

So. Is Stephen King a fast writer? What does it take to be considered a fast writer? Is fast even about word count? Or it about an attitude? Is it about a writer wanting to churn out the biggest word count possible in the least amount of time necessary, without worrying about achieving anything more than the lowest level of quality needed to get it published? What do you think?
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Kindle and Nook Collections

Some folks I know who are self-publishing on Kindle are talking about hundreds of sales for their works a month. (I don’t know any of those folks who are claiming thousands.) I have two self-published titles up on Amazon and Nook, Killing Trail and Days of Beer, and I haven’t come close to that number yet. Sales for Days of Beer have pretty well flatlined, but Killing Trail is still selling a few copies a month.

One thing the folks are saying who are publishing more is that it 1) helps to have more titles available, and 2) it helps if they are all basically in the same genre. I’m never going to be able to pull off the second one. I don’t read in any one genre and I just can’t focus my writing in one. I like stories of all kinds, and I want to write the kinds of stories I like to read. And I don’t want to use three or four different pseudonyms; I’d end up having to tell folks it was me, anyway.

However, I’ve decided that I’m going to put up at least two more ebooks from my own Razored Zen Press in 2012. One of them will not be the erotica collection I was talking about last year. I just decided I didn’t feel comfortable doing it. However, I do have two specific collections in mind that I will try to publish.

The first will be called Whiskey, Guns and Sin. It will be a noir/crime collection. The title story was previously published at Beat to a Pulp, but the ending is completely redone for this collection. The Swampy Jack story, “The Finest Cut” will also be in there. And another story, which I have an idea for but which hasn’t been written yet. I have a cover concept firmly in mind.

The second one will be a “Hauntings” collection. I have one story written for this already, called “Mouth Wet with Rain and Leaves.” There will be at least two more stories but I have to write them first. I have plenty of ideas. I don’t know what the collection title will be yet, but all the stories will deal with hauntings in some way or another. I have a cover idea for this one too, although not as firmly held.

Each of these collections will be shorter in total words than either Killing Trail or Days of Beer, but will contain three stories each and I’ll sell them for .99 cents. I’ll see if this will make any difference in my sales figures on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

For those of you who are saying, oh no, not more Gramlich already after Days of Beer in December and In the Language of Scorpions in January, it’s going to be at least a couple of months before “Whiskey” goes up, and quite a bit longer than that before the “Hauntings” collection is ready.

It’s a crazy new world of publishing out there. I haven’t the foggiest what is going to happen. But I'm going to have my stuff in the mix some way or another.
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A Pub and some Reviews

My last post featured a giveaway and I'm going to let that run a little longer, so if you haven't yet entered the drawing for a copy of Strange Worlds, just leave a comment on the post HERE.

In the meantime, though, I thought I'd go ahead and post a couple of things of interest (at least to me) that have come up. First, an article I wrote about Sword and Planet fiction, and which Steve Servello expanded, is up online at ERBzine, volume 3566. If you'd like to know more about that genre, you can find it here.

I've also gotten some very nice reviews on Amazon for Days of Beer. I thought I might copy them here. Thanks very much to Steve, Randy, Travis, and Kent. I much appreciate it.

5.0 out of 5 stars A Frothy Adventure, January 3, 2012
By Travis D. Erwin "Travis Erwin"
A quick, enjoyable read as tasty as a cold one on a hot summer day. Reading this book is like sitting down and with great friends on a Friday night. The stories will make you smile, reminisce, and forget all about the hangovers that went along with them.

4.0 out of 5 stars great fun, January 2, 2012
By Kent Westmoreland
I love this book. It reminds me of my own mis-spent youth, but in North Carolina. Charles is a great wit; he'll keep you in stitches.

5.0 out of 5 stars How well I remember . . . well maybe not, December 31, 2011
By Pleasure Reader "Steve"
Charles has created a wonderful coming of (drinking) age tale set in rural Arkansas. Growing up in Oklahoma, may of the images and events he describes bring back vague memories for obvious reasons. Charles tells his stories with such self-deprecating humor and a wonderful descriptive voice that pulls you into each successive tale even if they do not always turn out successful for him. Great fun.

5.0 out of 5 stars Funny!, December 31, 2011
By George R. Johnson "Randy Johnson"
Charles' humorous look at his "love affair" with beer, from his first taste to his first drunk to various adventures he went through over the years. Some eerily mirrored things that happened to me. Maybe it's a universal male thing.

Had quite a lot of fun reading this. He mentions not liking Budweiser. Same here and I used to love to infuriate "Weiser drinkers by saying I'd rather have a Blue Ribbon.

Recommended.
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Days of Beer: An Excerpt

Here's a little piece of Days of Beer that no one has seen before. Well, that is unless you've already read the book.
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In my first week in New Orleans I stopped at a local gas station to fill up, and then went inside for a snack. I noticed several large, barrel-shaped coolers stuffed with ice and single beers of various kinds. The sheer beauty of the arrangement stunned me for a moment. I felt the wick of tears come to my eyes. It is for such wonders as this that terms like “smorgasbord” and “cornucopia” were invented.

I’d never been to a place other than a bar where you could buy a single serving of beer, but in front of me now I saw a pirate’s hoard of single servings, the gorgeous colors of their containers vying for my attention. And this was at a gas station.

A sudden terror overwhelmed me then. I feared I was experiencing a flashback from my graduate school experience with that hallucinogenic. Surely, this vision could not be real!

Before the mirage could dissipate, I quickly plucked two tall golden bottles of elixir out of the ice and rushed to the checkout counter. The woman behind the register asked me: “Would you like me to open those for you, sir?”

I stared in confusion at her for a moment, knowing that she spoke in English but unable to quite translate her meaning. Finally, I replied, “I’m…driving.”
She leaned a little closer to me, and in a louder voice to make sure I heard her, asked again: “Would you like me to OPEN those for you, sir?”

I finally understood, and managed, somehow, to choke down the emotion threatening to well up inside of me.

“Well, maybe just one,” I replied.


The link at Barnes and Noble is here
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Days of Beer Goes Live

I said I had an announcement for today, and it’s big for me at least. I was complaining earlier this month about having many projects going and none finished. Well, I’ve finally finished one. Days of Beer is now live online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I am happy, and somewhat relieved. Apparently I still can finish things when I have a little time to write, as I’ve had over the Christmas break.

I’ve talked about the “Days of Beer” project quite a bit. You’ve seen pieces of it. The full title is “Days of Beer: A Memoir of a Beer Drinkin’ Man.” Although some folks suggested changes to the title, and taking out the word memoir, it is a memoir of sorts, although with the emphasis on funny incidents rather than a serious examination of my life. (That would be incredibly boring.)

I also did a fair amount of researching what books were available already, and this title comes closest in my mind to conveying what audience I’m trying to reach. I could be wrong. But in the end you’ve gotta go with your gut.

I decided to introduce the book at 99 cents, although it’s actually got slightly more words in it than “Killing Trail.” I plan to raise the price after a month.

Lana took the cover photo but I added the title and author name. There’s a second cover version inside the book. Lana was going to help with it but after her surgery she just couldn’t stand any time on the computer so you get the best that I could do. I want to get better at doing covers since I’d like to publish more ebooks down the line. Once Lana is back on her feet, she'll probably up the quality on this cover and I’ll replace it. I didn’t want to wait until then to get the work out, though. I’ll be back in school and time will be a precious commodity again.


The link at Barnes and Noble is here.

I'm happy!
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Updates of Various Kinds

Lana is in quite a bit of pain and discomfort after her surgery. She's having trouble sleeping for more than a couple of hours at a time. Her throat gets sore when she sleeps as well, from the tube used during surgery, no doubt. All of this is standard and to be expected, and much what she experienced with her last shoulder surgery. I hope she will get stronger every day now.

I will be at home with Lana for another week or so, but our school starts back on January 4, this year, which seems awfully early. I had hoped to get a lot accomplished over the break but it doesn't look good at the moment. However, Days of Beer is pretty much finished and I've been working on the cover. It will be up soon.

I checked Blogger this morning and had 220 plus posts in my reader. I did a quick scan through and didn't see anything earth shattering, so I decided I didn't have the strength to do my usual commenting. I'll try to get back to visiting and commenting today.
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The Urge for Memoir

I was never very interested in memoir writing. Until lately. Before my fifties, I wrote a few short pieces of memoir. Most were intended to be funny. One was called “When Electricity Came to Arkansas,” about an unfortunate experience with an electric fence. Another was a short piece called “Death by Prose,” about the humorous pitfalls involved in selling stories to the Small Press. I did a different kind of piece about my Hurricane Katrina experience and its effect on my writing. That wasn’t funny. I also wrote an account about adopting my son, called “Long Strange Road to Fatherhood.” While it was accepted for publication once, in the end it never saw print.

Then, just after I turned fifty, I put together the pieces for Write With Fire and ended up adding a longish memoir about how I became a writer. It was almost 4,000 words long. For some reason, I felt it was time to tell that story and that book seemed like a good place. I don’t really know if anyone paid much attention to it, but it was fun to do.

A year or so ago I posted several pieces on my blog about my teenage experiences with beer drinking. I called them “Days of Beer.” They were favorably received and a couple of months ago I suddenly decided I was going to write up those experiences more fully and publish them as an ebook. That work is almost finished now, and it’s 18,000 words long. I couldn’t believe how much material was there to work with until I started, but I believe the thing holds together well and I think it’s pretty funny. So far, the writing group that I’ve shared about a third of it with have agreed.

In the next weeks, then, a new piece will be coming out from Razored Zen Press. I need to finish the final read through, and get the cover ready. I have an idea for that and will get Lana to take the photo. I’m using the actual names of folks in many cases, but if I feel there’s any likelihood of embarrassment I’m changing the names or just leaving them out. I’m planning on opening it at 99 cents for the holiday season. I’m also toying with titles, but am leaning toward just calling it “Days of Beer: A Memoir of a Beer Drinkin’ Man.” What do you think?

The biggest question is “why now,” though. Is there something about getting older that naturally makes one want to look back and recall your life? Or is it something that most people have when they’re younger and I am just now finding it of interest? Are you interested in memoir? In reading it? In writing it? Is it a recent thing for you? Or long-term? Do you have any idea why?
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