some more late thoughts (a post by the Little One)

Not so little any more, I suppose. Studying for her driver’s license. This was written two years ago. Original at http://fionacanfield.com/2017/12/06/knowledge-in-passing/

once i went to a coffee shop and in one room of that coffee shop was a white piano and a white bench and a marker and people had written stuff all over the piano and the bench with the marker and honestly i thought that was so cool.

i really like that kind of stuff.

i think it’s really neat.

people years from now may never meet you, never know you, never know anything about you, and you can scratch something into a tree or a wall or write it on a chair and someone out there will see that and know you exist.

you know what would be cool

when you’re about to move out of a house, leaving a note somewhere. maybe a letter. or part of a journal. or would that end up getting cleaned out? either way someone would see it.

i like thinking about that kind of stuff. i want to do that kind of stuff. leave notes in cracks and write on trees and just. leave little messages for people who will never even know me.

it sounds like something out of a story. well i’d read that.

someone moving into a new house and finding a journal about the life of whoever lived there before them.

i think that should be a thing people do. leave notes all over the world. maybe it is. maybe not. i guess people don’t really think about that kind of stuff.

not just because i want people to know i exist. i want people to have the experience of finding messages from someone they’ll probably never meet. messages meant just for them.

because that sounds really magical.

Free: How’s That Working for Ya?

front-cover-perspective300x420Just fine, thank you very much.

Best Beloved finally had time to put on her accountant hat this week and gave me numbers about book sales this year.

The numbers themselves are small. It’s sad, but I’ll get over it.

Here’s the wildly unexpected part: sales of Through the Fog, which I give away free just for signing up for my fiction newsletter, are the highest of all my books, and higher than they’ve ever been for this book.

Continue reading “Free: How’s That Working for Ya?”

Why Knowing (and Respecting) Your Genre Matters

isn't it cozy?Another musical analogy: young bands call their music “like nothing you’ve ever heard” so often it’s a cliche.

Really? Klingon opera has some similarity to music I know. Hey, Ornette Coleman’s free jazz has similarities to music I know, and that’s more of a reach than Klingon opera.

When I tell folks my music sound like Bob Dylan meeting David Gray for drinks at Roger Miller’s house, that doesn’t diminish my artistic individuality. It just gives potential listeners an idea what they’re getting. It prevents lovers of Klingon opera or free jazz from showing up for my living room concert and smashing up the furniture because they don’t like the music, thank you very much Igor Stravinsky.

But if they show up and don’t witty lyrics, a country feel, and occasional darkness or melancholy, they’ll have every right to riot because I set expectations I failed to meet. Continue reading “Why Knowing (and Respecting) Your Genre Matters”