Monthly Archives: July 2019

IS THAT A BEAR?

I was minding my own business while parking the car at our hotel in New Hampshire last week. I wasn’t crazy about parking next to the garbage bin, but there weren’t a lot of spaces available.

After getting out of the car, this is what I encountered.

This bear video #1 below was recorded by my husband, while I stuck my head out of the mostly closed car window.

Then I got stupid nerve and recorded the bear for myself.

This bear video #2 which I recorded was cut short when Mr. (or Ms.) Bear looked in my direction, and then jumped down from the bin…

…because well..

I was running and yelling like a banshee…

 

 

Nightmare 2.0

My sleep patterns are substandard at best.

And what little shut-eye I do manage to sneak in, is more than often consumed with a never-ending succession of movie-worthy dreams; chock full of ideas, emotions, and images.

Unfortunately for me, way too many of those visions involve wild menacing beasts, which make them more nightmares than dreams.

These epic brain dumps typically wake me up in the early hours of the morning in a heart-pounding, anxiety-heightened sweaty state.

I call them my bogeyman wake-ups.

My typical bogeyman wake-up goes like this: I open my eyes, paralyzed with fear. I quickly turn on the light and check the room. I pull out my notebook from the nightstand next to my bed and furiously write down everything I can recall. Sometimes this exercise takes ten minutes, while other times it takes two to three hours.

If the image or idea is particularly vivid, I can write an entire essay until I either run out of words, am mentally exhausted, or I’ve self-talked myself to calm it down.

Once I’m calm, I’m usually also wide awake, so I regularly turn on my tablet and research the why of all of it.

I recently found a quote by Sigmund Freud answering his why of all of it, which stuck with me:

“On my way to discovering the solution of the dream, all kinds of things were revealed, which I was unwilling to admit even to myself.”

This past Tuesday my bogeyman alarm woke me up at precisely 3:02 in the a.m.

The apparition was an animal image combined with a question: How can I escape?

The dream started out with a very scary goat.

I know what you’re thinking. Goats aren’t scary.

But this goat was a scary doozy, and because I was in a corner, the goat was even more terrifying.

It was less a dream and more of an idea. Or maybe it was less of an idea and more of a blurry image of that super scary goat and helpless me.

I wrote “scary” and “goat” in my notebook.

And then, with nothing better to do with my drenched and anxious self, I grabbed my tablet and looked up, “scary goat.”

Google offered me several choices:

scary goat
scary goat gif
scary goat meme
scared goat
scapegoat
scapegoating

Oh, my God.

“On my way to discovering the solution of the dream…”

I then looked up scapegoat: A compound of the verb scape, which means “escape” and two Hebrew translations/interpretations. 1) A possible misreading of the Hebrew word ‘ez ‘ozel (goat that departs) and 2) the Hebrew proper noun Azazel (demon).

I also discovered that In Leviticus 16:1-34, a goat was used in a ritual by a rabbi on Yom Kippur; where the rabbi symbolically loaded a goat with the sins of the Israelites and then let it loose into the wilderness to die.

The bottom line in Leviticus 16: that unsuspecting harmless goat who did nothing wrong was blamed and punished for the mistakes and sins of everyone else.

I continued my research.

By definition, a scapegoat is a person who is blamed for all that goes wrong, regardless of the guilt and wrongdoing of others. Scapegoats are repeatedly subjected to character assassination, abandonment, betrayal, and outright hatred by family members.

Scapegoating is also a way for adult children to hide familial abuse by blaming everything negative that happens, on one particular (and innocent) family member.

Further, scapegoating by adult children is usually due to having one parent with a personality disorder. To protect the parent with the mental disorder, the adult child uses the other parent as their scapegoat.

In an abusive, dysfunctional family, keeping their image unmarred is key to the scapegoat coverup. They live in an alternate reality. The dysfunctional family will go to any lengths to destroy the scapegoat because otherwise their abuse and sickness will be uncovered. They will also do whatever it takes to convince others that the scapegoat is a horrible person in order to further isolate and destroy them.

One article specifically used the following example: A wife leaves an abusive marriage, (which in and of itself takes enormous courage).  The family of the husband becomes paranoid that his abuse, dysfunction, and psychopathy will be revealed, and used against him, so the lies, brainwashing, and alienation begin until the scapegoated wife is attacked, denounced, alienated, and ultimately removed entirely from the familial picture. The scapegoating is used to deflect accountability for the husband’s abusive behavior.

“…all kinds of things were revealed which I was unwilling to admit even to myself.

Out of that scary goat dream, I had an epiphany:

The hurtful accusations and condemnation I have endured over the years were explicitly designed to protect an abusive family member. I was scapegoated and sent out into the wilderness to shrivel up and die. But now that I’ve found my way back home, I can finally stop beating myself up. I can eviscerate the self-doubt and let go of trying to work out a relationship that I now see is sadly impossible because the one that I miss the most is complicit in all of it.

The goat wasn’t scary. The goat was scared.

The goat wasn’t the demon; the goat was the target.

What started as the mother of all nightmares turned into a miraculous and most welcome wake-up call.

To Blog or Not to Blog My Novel

I have been going back and forth trying to decide whether or not to publish my fiction book titled My Stolen Diaries, traditionally, independently, or chapter by chapter on my blog The Teri Tome.  

For several weeks I have been thinking about how the process of organizing and arranging the chapters would come together while researching examples of formats other bloggers have used to post their books online.

So far, I haven’t found any articles that explain in detail or show actual examples of how blogged books are laid out.

I’m guessing I couldn’t find explicit samplings of how to blog a novel because writers either aren’t blogging their novels, or they haven’t found a functional fiction format.

I did find a few articles about how to blog a nonfiction single-topic book, but in my opinion, the process of blogging a book lends itself well to nonfiction vs. fiction.

Additionally, all of the articles I found regarding how to blog a single-topic, non-fiction book, suggest that to blog a book, a separate blog needs to be created to support the effort.

But my blog The Teri Tome gets over 30,000 page views a month, so why would I want to start all over with a brand new blog that nobody has ever seen or heard of?

I don’t want to create a blog called My Stolen Diaries. What I want to do is blog my novel My Stolen Diaries within my existing blog, The Teri Tome.

The question is: how to blog my novel within a blog?

An actual novel moves methodically page by page through the storyline allowing the reader to pick up where they left off, so blogging my novel is going to be challenging.

What I hope to do is to cohesively blog my novel and weave it all together post by post or chapter by chapter to tell the story in a way my readers can keep up with it, without having to search around for the beginning, middle and end.

And the last thing I want my reader to do is to get to the end of the book before the beginning. Nobody wants to be the victim of a spoiler, and I would totally never want to be that person.

Since I found nothing to guide me as to how to blog my novel, I decided to make my best effort to test out some formats and see what sticks.

While I didn’t find any articles that showed me how to blog a novel, I did find some generally useful articles, although I disagreed with many of them:

  • A blog should have 10-15 categories. [My blog has a hefty 21 categories before I even add My Stolen Diaries so sue me.] 
  • A new blogger should post often if they want to bring significant traffic to their blog (At least three times per week – each post approximately 300 words long, until they reach a minimum of 1,000 posts). [I never post that often, I still don’t have 1,000 total posts and as I stated earlier, I enjoy over 30,000 page views a month. So there.]
  • A dedicated and seasoned blogger should blog their book daily – each post approximately 500 words long). [Blogging a chapter a day of my novel seems highly unlikely, and as the queen of verbiage I need to write way more than 500 words per post. BTW, this blog post is over 1,600 words! And I would consider myself both dedicated and seasoned. So, as they say in my neck of the woods: fuggedaboutit.]  
  • How to create a book flyer. [Here is my post about creating book marketing flyers. As the late great Yul Brynner aka Pharaoh once said: So let it be written; let it be done. And okay, after a gazillion hours of mailing out flyers, I gave up on that too. Sorry not sorry.]
  • How and who to hire for search engine optimization (SEO). [Now I have to worry about SEO? Who the heck has time to write? But okay I went on the website Fiverr, and I’m working on that.]
    • How to add your blog to a blog directory. [The directory most recommended was Blogarama.com, which boasts millions of visitors, so I happily submitted my blog. There is a free and paid part to their site. Since signing up for the free section, I receive regular emails from them, letting me know that they have been indexing my blog posts. But try as I might, I never found any of the supposed indexed posts, so good luck with that.]
  • The best format for creating an About the Author section is to write your achievements, expertise, and experience in the third person. [I originally wrote my About page in the first person, so I changed it up. Click here for everything you wanted to know about Teri (or not) but never asked or cared to ask. Oh, and speaking of asking;  if you wanted to ask but thought better of it, NO my novel Our Romantic Getaway is NOT about me, and YES I am wearing a top in my author photo.]
  • How to set up Google alerts so you can track your business, yourself, or any other kind of stuff. [I went on Google Alerts and added my websites, my name, blog to novel deals, how to blog a novel, worldpress.org, The Teri Tome, and terischure.com. FYI: My g-mail account is now inundated with useless alerts, but don’t go by me.] 
  • Understanding Web traffic. [Quick and easy: Concentrate on your Monthly Page Views, Visits, and Unique Users.]

Back in 2014, I published my first novel titled Our Romantic Getaway, and while it makes some money, it’s a pittance compared to the number of hours over the five long years I spent writing it.

I know, I need to market it, and I will. I might even blog a few chapters of it.

In 2019, I was finally able to finish and publish my children’s book titled The Day It Snowed Popcorn, which I wrote back in 1970 at seventeen. It has already won an award and I am very excited about its future.

And…I have the beginnings of a cookbook sitting on the back burner. [Pun intended.] 

But My Stolen Diaries has always been the bucket-novel I’ve dreamed nonstop of publishing.

Plus, My Stolen Diaries seems like the perfect novel-on-a-blog project, mainly because of its diary format.

So, after much thought, I decided my novel-on-a-blog should be called a Novelog.

I started writing My Stolen Diaries back in the 1990s. So far, I have 168 pages and 117,653 words.

If I assume that each average post will be 1,500 words in length, I need to write at least 78 blog posts for My Stolen Diaries.

Now I recognize, that’s a ton of posts/chapters, so here’s the dilemma:

How do I present the posts/chapters in a way that readers can easily catch up with the earlier posts/chapters they may have missed?

And will anyone take the time to slog through 78+ posts/chapters?

After racking my brain, trying to figure out what to call each post: Chapters, Episodes, Scenes, Events, Entries…

After going back and forth, I decided to keep it simple and go with Chapters.

What have I got to lose?

What harm could it do to post some of my novel chapters into cyberspace and then analyze the traffic?

Worse case, I’ll post a few chapters of My Stolen Diaries and give up if I see that the Page Views don’t warrant my time.

Plus, what better way to test-market my dream book than sharing it with my readers?

And since my novel is only partially written, it won’t be like I’m giving the entire store (in this case, story) away.

Note to my readers: Your opinion about My Stolen Diaries will help me to determine whether or not to keep on keeping on, so I welcome your thoughts and suggestions. Okay, let’s be honest, I NEED your thoughts and suggestions, so please help me with your comments?

And now tada! Click here to read my novelog My Stolen Diaries.