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December, 2025

Dec 9

I'm surprised to have found some seriously helpful posts on the BookBaby blog, especially in their "Self-Promotion" category. I ought to explore more of these as I prepare to promote my next book:

• "How to Plan a Book Tour on Your Own"
• "About the Author Examples to Get You Inspired"
• "Author Speaking Engagements: Tips for a Successful Event"

Here's another I found thorough and high-quality, from a website I hadn't heard of called Sidebar Saturdays: "Seven Steps to Your Own Self-Publishing Imprint".

Dec 10

I think I have a new favorite line of Eminem's, from "Renaissance":

Soon as I stopped giving a fuck I started to sell a bit.

The beginnings and ends of sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and books are naturally emphatic. So, it is the author's job to place the content they want to emphasize anywhere other than in the middle.

Dec 11

Yin/Yang Energies in Volcanoes and Glaciers

On the surface, it may seem that compared to one another glaciers are feminine and volcanos masculine, but it's not so.

The volcano is pregnant, dormant, until it erupts. It is feminine, until it is masculine. The glacier protrudes and grows and carves the landscape to suit itself, slowly. It is only feminine because it flows.

The body of a volcano is like a womb, containing future earth, gestating new mass, save for its conduit and vents, which are phallic and explosive. The body of a glacier is masculine—rigid, crystalline, dense, rough—save for its depths, which are liquid, chaotic, always in flux.

Both are parents. The volcano births new earth; the masculine eruption thrusts out flowing magma that eventually freezes into new earth. The glacier carves valleys and feeds streams and lakes and oceans; as carves, it also cleaves and melts and shrinks.

Volcanos are feminine creatures with rare yet critical masculine expressions, and glaciers are masculine creatures with subtle yet essential feminine features.

I've never thought about this until now, but childbirth and male ejaculation are almost perfectly analogous. Of course, pregnancy is an archetypal feminine thing (yin): receptivity, spaciousness, gestation. But birth is a masculine thing: force, effort, material contribution, imposition of form. Both male ejaculation and childbirth mirror the process of a volcanic eruption (or that of a geysir).

Most of the time is spent in preparation, magma developing within the deep-earth reservoir (womb, testes). Once the reservoir is full and the generative material ready to be expelled, it moves from the reservoir through the conduit (vaginal canal [starting at the cervix and ending at the vaginal opening], urethra and penile shaft). Finally, in a fleeting moment, the mass once contained is expelled through the crater (vaginal opening, penile glands) in an eruption (childbirth, ejaculation).

Dec 18

Tennis taught me how to navigate my mind, how to be mindful and present, and once I achieved a certain level of zen-like skill, I no longer felt like I needed tennis in my life. (This was not something I was conscious of at the time I was playing tennis or before my senior season in college when I decided to quit.)

One principle that I should certainly follow but haven't always followed when doing warm-outreach marketing is: Go until "No." for people who are already warm leads, there's already a relationship and "permission" to sell my services (explicitly expressed interest), so my being sales-y is not an imposition but an expectation, and follow-ups put the onus on the potential customer to make a decision. A warm lead who hasn't said "No" is a "Maybe," and "Maybe"s take up cognitive bandwidth that could be used elsewhere. The function of a marketing funnel should be to resolve every lead into either a "Hell yes" or a "No." (That's true even if it's "No, not right now," because re-entering later would be moving back down the funnel again—reverting and then progressing through lead-statuses.)

Dec 19

Compartmentalization is only virtuous if it is the decision of when to feel one's feelings, not whether to feel one's feelings. For instance, EMTs need to compartmentalize so that they can do their job and help people in need, but an EMT could get totally crushed by their job if they practice the vice of avoiding feelings via "compartmentalization."

Dec 20

Just as plants require a certain climate depending on the conditions of the place in which their sub-species evolved, maybe we humans require certain environments based on our nature and nurture, or families, our cultures. A palm tree can't grow in Alaska, the same way I can't thrive in Nee York City, given my values, disposition, and upbringing—which could be summarized as my ancestry (the characteristics/conditions of my sub-species).

This analogy/idea supports my felt sense that New York City is only a suitable environment for New York City–natives (or a person of a co-evolutionary sub-species; e.g., an SF-native).

[[Material for "Community of KC" V2]]

Dec 22

I want to develop the capacity to hold absolutely anything that a person or that life could throw at me without ever taking it upon myself to carry. Holding it means only for a time, not indefinitely. To carry it would be to let the thing encumber me, let it penetrate my psyche. I will hold anything for the moment, but I won't carry anything with me into the next moment.

Dec 23

Beth Peterson, author of Dispatches from the End of Ice: Essays (which I discovered via this blog post) seems like a great person to get in touch with about my book. Of course, I need to read hers first. We're writing as part of the same literary (nonfiction) tradition: Solnit, Macfarlane, Tempest-Williams, Dillard.

Two Dollar Radio is an indie press with a great style. I first came upon their page after seeing their colophon on two covers that I love (which I found while searching for references for my book's cover design): Savage Gods and Some of Us Are Very Hungry Now. Here's a blurb from their homepage:

The last thing the world needs is an indie press releasing books that could just as easily carry a corporate colophon. Our work is for the adventurous and independent spirits who thirst for more, who push boundaries and like to witness others test their creative limits.

They have an in-person headquarters that "stocks indie books, serves vegan food, coffee, booze, and hosts live events."

My favorite thing about their site is how they promote their authors as being real artists and helping them create compelling profile pages, like this one for Scott McClanahan, author of Crapalachia.

The way that the covers have repeating design elements reminds me of McNally Editions. If I were to make my own small press, I would do well to imitate these institutes.

True autonomy is both automatic, acting from a set of pre-established systems of consciousness, and autonomic, each action arising spontaneously via intuition.

Romantic partnerships threaten one's solitude, but solitude is a suitable price to pay for co-creative companionship. That said, solitude is too steep a price to pay for a co-dependent relationship that hampers the growth and evolution of the partners therein. The image here, again, is two binary stars orbiting a shared center of mass; they are not solitary stars, yet they remain independent.

Dec 26

Glaciers are always striving forth, except for when they melt. Volcanoes are always gestating within, except for when they erupt.

// Glaciers are always striving forth (masculine), until they start to melt back (feminine). Volcanoes are always gestating within (feminine), until they thrust out (masculine).

Recently, I was wracking my memory trying to figure out where and how my love for the color orange began, and tonight I think I may have discovered it: Kansas sunsets. I walked out of an office building just now and was affronted by the most beautiful possible gradient of deep-orange hues, clouds wafting, barely moving, carrying that color towards me. It's a soothing calming, gratitude-inducing orange. It makes me grateful for Kansas City, and maybe I love orange because I love my home.

Dec 27

From the term Anthropocene, we can obviously infer an arrogance; it says, "We humans are so powerful that we color the Earth's ecology and shape Her geology." But in that anthropocentric name for our planet's current phase of life, there is a hidden humility. By calling this "the Anthropocene," we acknowledge that, just like every aeon and epoch to precede us, we will become just another stratum subsumed by the flow of deep time.

I saw an owl when I was driving home after dark on Christmas Day. It was standing on the side of the road, on the pavement, which surprised me. I stopped and watched it flit its eyes about, swiveling its head on its wings. I tried to turn my lights down to the parking lights, but they went off completely. (I had borrowed my Grandparents' car.) When I flicked them back on, the owl spread its wide wings and took off into the branches of the nearest tree. There's no metaphorical meaning I have to assign to this experience, but the owl did immediately make me think of my late great-grandmother. It felt like a gift, a good omen.

A new addition to my list of favorite words: Bespoke, especially when used in a more abstract way, for how economically it communicates the description that "this experience as custom-made for an individual in this particular moment."

Dec 30

The siren and the muse are two feminine archetypes of seduction. As long as a woman relates to a man as either a siren or a a muse, their relationship remains co-dependent rather than co-creative, for the two do not regard each other as equal. The siren sees her man as prey, and the man sees his muse as perfect. While these archetypes are real and powerful, they are not the grounds for a sound relationship.

New Year's Eve is a day of magical thinking. If there is such a day annually, NYE is it. The mind is sober, grieving, and reeling, hallucinating, fantasizing about the future—for at least that day, you're in a delusional enough state to believe that you can bring it all about. And maybe tomorrow will be the coming of everything you never had. It's true that to have any chance of such magic happening, you need to have that Day of Magical Thinking.

(That playful holiday-name is an allusion to Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, which was the year following the sudden loss of her son and husband.)

Dec 31

Seven Stories Press is another small press to be aware of. They were founded in 1995 and focus on political nonfiction, alongside many other genres including essays, fiction, poetry, and literary nonfiction. Recently, in 2025, they also acquired Two Dollar Radio.

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