Blogcritics

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

On Writing: The Truth of Why I Write

John Spivey — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 17:10:52 EST

"To give your sheep or cow a large spacious meadow is the way to control him. So it is with people: first let them do what they want, and watch them. This is the best policy. To ignore them is not good; that is the worst policy. The second worst is trying to control them. The best one is to watch them, just to watch them, without trying to control them." - Shunryu Suzuki My life has been a long sorrow broken by moments of incandescent grace, a grace that sometimes threatens to permanently overwhelm me, but the time is not quite yet. There are too many details to the sorrow -- my father's alcoholism, rejection compounded by rejection, a large inquisitive mind confined by the narrowness of circumstances -- so a Zen brushstroke will have to do.The grace has come in different forms. There has been the grace of the Sierra Nevada standing high outside the front window of my youth and looming over the fields where I worked with my grandfather -- a grace of place that worked to ease the pain of existence.I encountered the grace of family when I was 42 and a good woman and her five-year old daughter entered my life, allowed me to be husband and father. There is a grace to the willing sacrifice, of loving a child so much that one can no longer hold on to the old habits and opinions that governed reality for so long.Once I was asked how I could be such a successful parent with the history that I had had to endure. I replied, "I was always present for my daughter and I gave her a large pasture. Her pasture was always slightly larger than her reach so that she never felt imprisoned. She always knew that I loved her." This type of love requires a full presence and awareness, qualities of which I would have been incapable without the sacrifice of my prejudices and complaints. She is now a happy woman, intelligent, caring, and free.There has been the grace of old men who stopped to show me the way. It began with my grandfather in the fields, wordlessly connecting me to the soil beneath my feet. Another old man just let me tell him stories and in turn told me stories populated with men searching for the true nature of things. He once told me of standing unseen behind me and my and new family as my daughter sat upon my shoulders to take in the view. He wept with joy for my good fortune.And then there was Robert. He picked me from a crowd in order to further awaken me to who I really am. When I asked him why, he replied, "Someone once did this for me. Someday you must do it for another."I carry what I call a glorious debt, so I write. I write of the mountains of my youth, of old caring men, of a loved wife and daughter, of life constantly trying to expose itself, and of what it means to be a human in the face of mystery. There are very few takers. If there were the grace would surely overtake me, for I could pay down my glorious debt.The Dusty Feather of FlightGreat red rocks tower over the Santa Ynez and the ancient spirits of time and place seem as real as the stone. Young people come here restless to party and drink, then climb the red towers and throw themselves down to the river barely missing the rocks. Some do not miss. A few hundred feet away we walk the dirt road lined with sedimentary rock and white sage and by the road a redtail dead from some unknown cause. I kneel, turn it over, gently pluck a long feather from its wing to hand to my daughter, Keep this I say, it is an omen a gesture from the spirits to you. Behind us the young ones throw themselves down over and over desperately seeking the sensation of flight. Here is the dusty way, its creatures, its gifts, this poem a feather.

John Spivey is a writer and woodworker who lives in Santa Barbara, California with his wife. He owns a small publishing company CrowsCry Press and maintains a personal blog. He can be contacted here.

On Writing and Self-Publishing: Part 5

John Spivey — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 08:49:13 EST

All articles in this series "On Writing and Self-Publishing" have become part of an ongoing feature called On Writing.I've been waiting to write this next post for a few days because I knew my book was hanging out there for review. I had arrived at a point in writing this series that I had to put up or shut up. I'm not one to grease the skids of my success with bullshit. Either my work expresses the art and craft of which I've written, or I walk away knowing there is a lot more work to be done. Actually there is always more work to be done, that's the nature of craft. But you don't want to overwork it either. It has to preserve a natural grace.I know my work is not perfect. It's ragged in the way human life is, but also dignified and graceful in the way human life can be, a paradox. Perfection is a phantom construct, a killer of the human spirit. Can anybody show me perfect? It's like saying there's a largest number. The kids I used to teach would say, "How about a googal?" I would reply, "How about a googal plus one?" A conception of perfect is a static model and it can't deal with the dynamic reality of what life really is. Let's say that's a lot like publishing houses. Though no one would put the perfect label on them, they are certainly static models that cannot deal with the dynamic reality of life. But this is true all the way down the publishing food chain. When an agent will only look at work recommended by established writers on their client list, the process becomes self-referential and misses some new dynamic. They don't want to work hard at sorting the field or establishing a procedure to do that, so they skim the known. I equate it to the white buffalo hunter practice of taking only the tender hump of the beast and leaving behind the heart and other vital organs to rot in the hot prairie sun. Better to take the whole thing; make shelter from it, bowstrings, clothes, a whole life. Better to be reverent toward that which gives of itself.The fact is that the whole world of books is a living ecosystem. Whereas nature moves toward a greater diversity in order to protect life--all her eggs are not in the same gene pool--the corporate hierarchical structure of the book business pushes toward consolidation, less diversity, and greater exposure to calamity. Many years ago the publishers made most of their sales on the midlist books, which allowed for greater diversity. Now everything hangs on blockbusters and clones of blockbusters with fewer and fewer viable publishers. It is a system with no flexibility, adaptability, dynamism, or life. Within the ecosystem of a colony of ants, their organizing principle is to promote ant life. In the present ecosystem of the corporate book world, the organizing principle is not the promotion of book life, but rather to extract money. Books are not viewed as or promoted as repositories of cultural symbols and wisdom as much as they are viewed as a means for extraction of profit. As such any shit can do.A rediversification of the book world needs to happen in order for some new vigor to come to the fore. I could see a larger publisher creating a great web of relationships with quality small independent publishers. The larger publisher would limit their exposure while the smaller publishers, who usually occupy their own niche, would probably take more risks to find quality writing. The small publisher would have the benefit of the larger publishers clout in marketing and connections. I could even envision a sort of network on the web as a source for analyzing new work and funneling the best work to the appropriate small publisher. Maybe there could be a bounty, a finder's fee, for the good work. Of course a referring source's reputation would begin to count for everything, so those sources would have to become literate and intelligent. What we would have is a nutrient network that begins to feed the whole system. I know there can be other solutions, but I hope to stimulate some real thinking.I'd like to skip to the other end of the spectrum, to the writer. For writers of fiction, narrative non-fiction, and poetry their ancient roots lie in the storytelling mystery at the fire. Most of us don't treat writing with awe any longer, don't treat it as a means to contact one of the muses and tell a story with roots in the other side. If writing is held in awe, then language becomes a living delight that threatens to part the veil of existence. These moments of living delight fall within the realm of art. Bringing them to the world involves craft.I imagine that the storytellers of old had to serve an apprenticeship to get it right. Not only did they have to remember the tales, they had to learn delivery. The storytellers had to be able to weave a spell that could bind their people together. This is in the realm of craft. It takes practice and more practice, hopefully with a skilled guide, but not always. It goes beyond sentence construction that contains a few descriptive adjectives. Nailing a couple of boards together does not make one a master carpenter. Shall we describe a writer as one who knows proper syntax, or is it more than that? These days everyone is in such a hurry that an apprenticeship to words is unthinkable. When we combine a basic impatient narcissism with technology, we not only lose the apprenticeship, we lose the last vestiges of awe and living delight in language. It becomes a daily cataloging of opinions, sorrows, and complaints that keep us mired in our pain. The mystery of language that is supposed to lift us is lost to sight and ear. Salvaging the the world of language and books is akin to returning awe to the world and bringing a failing ecosystem back to life. Are we ready for this apprenticeship, ready for the long run?

John Spivey is a writer and woodworker who lives in Santa Barbara, California with his wife. He owns a small publishing company CrowsCry Press and maintains a personal blog. He can be contacted here.

On Writing and Self-Publishing: Part 4

John Spivey — Sun, 26 Feb 2006 22:12:37 EST

When I started this series of posts I envisioned a series of short factual pieces that would travel in a straight line from point A to point B. As a mathematics teacher I can of course do that, but it's not the way my mind works natively. As I read the comments that follow the posts, I see snippets of thoughts and questions that stimulate whole new formulations to explore. These diversions circle and arc from the straight-and-narrow, but somehow come back to the point at hand. To me good writing is about the journey, yet ends up simultaneously being the destination.Yesterday I read a comment that gypsyman made on Part 2 of this series concerning the difference between writing and blogging. His comment provided the stimulation for this post. I like commentary when it has the effect of friends sitting around a fire sharing ideas and stimulating each other's creative process. I find myself disappointed when there is no commentary, in small part due to ego, but mostly because I enjoy the sitting around the fire. I wish this fire could be a bigger part of internet life.In Part 2, I explored my reasons for writing. I'm going to revisit that a bit and actually take you inside this writer. In Myth and Education I took you a bit inside the symbolic, mythological world. I live inside that world. It is a world of energy swirls and flows, of raucous crows alighting in the trees to awaken me to something I need to know, of numinous plants and trees, and of the mysteries inherent in a piece of wood as my plane passes over it. When I write at the deep level a mysterious force rises up and begins to flow like a river through me. Some people might call it a muse, but the gods, goddesses and muses are just images of the energies at play in the deep mind. In the midst of this flow, this process, the mind feels whole and complete, enlightened and aware even as it struggles to masterfully describe the indescribable. So this can be described as flowing water or a stream of electrical current.Like an electrical current this energy flows from pole to pole, from a place deep within to another receptive pole. For me, that other pole has existed in my imagination; a reader somewhere who understands what I'm saying and revels in the way I say it. After finding that person in reality the flow of energy grew and I imagined the faces of others. In the course of this process I sent off more book proposals to publishers and agents. Their negative response or lack of response was like a door slammed shut on the energy flow. It was a short circuit in the current, a sudden blockage or dam in the river that caused it to back up and flood. It seemed that I wouldn't ever be able to reach those other readers, the other pole disappeared and I lost my power to imagine the faces. My mind would seize and I became fearful of again raising the mysterious force and risking the pain. Despite the fear, I constantly fought to reclaim my power to imagine the other pole and to allow the energy to flow once more.I made it through those times because of a self-discipline learned from both martial arts and building houses, but I'm a battered old warrior who doesn't know how long he can keep up the agility to rebound. Compared to this process, the posting of random opinions and the rehashing of news seems small change indeed. I lay up words up like gluing up pieces of wood, then saw and plane them into shape.After I designed my book and it was finally published I joined an organization called Publisher's Marketing Association that is designed for small presses and self-publishers. One of the attractions was the fact that every six months they have a competition among member books for selection to be handled by a distributor. Every book is supposed to be given an evaluation, so I was positive that with the care I had put into my book (see Part 3) it would be a sure selection. When the results came in I was an also-ran. The evaluation was a terse,"The cover made us think it was about Native Americans, but it only appears to be about the author's life."The flap copy had far more information about the book than was represented in the comment, so I knew they hadn't even opened it. The book WAS about Native Americans and it WAS about me, but it was also about the magnificent landscape of the Sierra Nevada and the landscape of the internal symbolic mind. All this was represented on the flap. The selections were dominated by books that fit a formula--cookbooks and how-to books--books with a definable audience. Literature is a hard sell.A person I know has extensive dealings with book distributors. At one meeting she asked the head of the distribution company if he had looked at one of the books she represented. He picked the book up, looked at the front and back, made a few comments. She asked if he had read the cover letter that came with the book. His reply was, "You know I don't read things."In light of all this, my writing and self-publishing path is not easy. Some of you are wondering what success I have achieved. The answer is that it's still a struggle. My experience of the publishing industry is that it is an 1890s model trying to survive in the 21st century. The present model can generally only rely on formulae and is not flexible enough or creative enough to deal with the quantity of writing out there in order to find the quality. I'm cynical enough to believe that finding quality writing isn't any longer part of the mission statement. Marketing is the dominant driving force. I find I can't fight for my market share in the same old way though. It's not who I am and not what is represented in my writing. So, I have to create a new way or go down with the effort.In many ways I have imagined your faces as you read this. The vision of them is what keeps my creativity alive at the moment. You are part of the key to creating something new that can bring quality and creativity to the fore. I value your responses because you have no idea what it will spark in me. Like open source programming, maybe we can build here with the internet what corporations can't. If you really resonate with all this, I'd like you to weigh in with the briefest of comments just so I know I'm not alone in the struggle and in the seeking of alternate solutions. Ideas are welcome. Next post I'm going to describe the distribution and marketing structure as it is and offer a few alternative thoughts. I don't know where I'll go from there. Can we build this? On the personal level I want my own writing to succeed if it's worthy, but I also want leave behind a structure that can benefit others. You'll have to tell me if this series has value to you and if you want it kept alive. You can even offer ideas for the direction.

John Spivey is a writer and woodworker who lives in Santa Barbara, California with his wife. He owns a small publishing company CrowsCry Press and maintains a personal blog. He can be contacted here.

On Writing and Self-Publishing: Part 3

John Spivey — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 00:08:59 EST

In my last post about writing and self-publishing I asked the question, "Why do we write and why should our work compete for shelf space?" With this post I want to delve more into the actual process of publishing and distribution.When I completed the writing process I took my book to an editor for evaluation. She is actually more than an editor. She calls herself a "book shepherd," a term used to describe a person who helps a would-be publisher through all the steps required to bring a book into print and then to market. A would-be publisher could follow all the steps laid out by Dan Poynter in The Self-Publishing Manual, but for a person like myself with an otherwise full life, it's a difficult feat to keep track of all the necessary tasks. Poynter lives here in Santa Barbara, but he is a pretty high-priced commodity these days. My book shepherd both knows Poynter and is recommended by him. I chose to not go with Print on Demand (POD) services because I wanted my book to have all the qualities of a book published by a New York house. POD books generally start even further back in the pack than books self-published using regular channels of production.One of the luxuries allowed me as a self-publisher was the freedom to design the layout and cover of my own book. If words are important to you, then the way they are presented has to be important also. I am a good designer and I wanted to couple that talent with the writing of the book for maximum effect. In the "real" publishing world, a writer gives over all rights to his/her book upon signing a contract. The writer has no input on or control over the book's presentation. It's a bit akin to putting a baby up for adoption and giving up all future rights to how the baby will be raised and how it will interface with the world. The front cover was designed around a lithograph of a raven made for me by a friend, Davis TeSelle. The name of my press is CrowsCry Press, "crow's cry" being a translation of the word Kaweah which is both the name of a subtribe of Yokuts Indians and the name of the river near where I grew up. Davis is a noted, prize-winning artist who now lives in Vermont. We used to share a woodshop here in California where we wound through many interesting conversations. I scanned his print and then separated it into layers in Photoshop. I then extracted an image from the fractal Mandelbrot Set and used it to create the background for his lithograph. I was even able to animate the layer separation in Flash to use for my website. The idea was to use the raven as a gatekeeper symbol for the rising dawn Mystery that encompasses the horizon.In designing the cover I looked at all the books I had on my shelves that really attracted my eye. There was one designer common to most of them, David Bullen, so I studied his style to find why I liked it so much. I also searched through the different typefaces used on the covers to see what really worked for me. There are so many fonts available that it's an overwhelming task to sort through them, to even know where to begin. I wondered how I could possibly identify the particular font that I liked because there was no colophon at the end of the book to help me out. Fortunately I discovered a free and virtually instantaneous service at Myfonts. One has only to scan the font in question and then upload the image to the Myfonts website where it is quickly computer-analyzed and identified.For the back cover I managed to get permission from another favorite artist, Tom Killion, to use one of his images. Tom works in the style of the great Japanese woodblock masters, only he has created his own unique style that he applies to the California landscape. His latest book, The High Sierra of California, combines his images with the writings of Gary Snyder and John Muir. The image I used is called "Kaweah Lake" and is a rendering of a high Sierra lake set in a granite bowl framed by snowfields and wildflowers. Since my book in large part is set in this high Sierra backcountry of the drainage of the Kaweah River, the image is a perfect fit and captures the intended spirit of my writing. All this would not have been possible if I had gone with a traditional publisher. I took these layouts and images to a local graphic artist for refinement. Again I needed someone completely familiar with the process to smooth my ideas together and to get them into a press-ready state. We had a fruitful relationship for several months as we discussed our ideas and layouts back and forth. She once told me that I was very unusual in that I could critique my own work and see what worked and what didn't. I think this is a skill that anyone seeking to delve into the world of self-publishing should cultivate.The result of this process is a book that looks and feels like it really belongs on the shelf with high quality books from the large publishing houses. This is important in the bookstore setting because you must be able to invite someone to pick up your book and then, having achieved that aim, you have about three seconds to capture their attention for further exploration or purchase. I can remember the trepidation I felt as I went home on a lunch hour to finally pick up my two proof copies. I felt fear, anxiety, and excitement as I opened the package. I picked up the book and turned it over in the light, slowly opened it and riffled through the pages. This was finally the moment and they had done a good job--the colors, the detail, the quality--everything was spot on. I rolled the book around in my hands as I had once rolled images and words around in my mind. The words had indeed become manifest. I had achieved everything I had visualized in the layout and printing process and now I felt a moment of ecstasy. I had successfully walked a hundred miles to base camp, but ahead lay the Everest high peak of distribution and sales.Next: Sales, distribution and a few suggestions. Edited: [!--GH--]

John Spivey is a writer and woodworker who lives in Santa Barbara, California with his wife. He owns a small publishing company CrowsCry Press and maintains a personal blog. He can be contacted here.

On Writing and Self-Publishing: Part 2

John Spivey — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 16:29:42 EST

The fact has been bandied about that 80% of the U.S. population wants to write a book. Since this is greater than the number of book buyers in the country, we face a serious problem. Who are we writing for, and why? Language skills are in decline and so is the interest in reading.As I mentioned in my previous post, I love books. I love the tactile feel of them in my hand, their portability. I can't imagine reading the screen of an e-reader while I am camped in the high granite of the Sierra Nevada, angling it about while I try to make out the words in the sunlight. The ideas that move me lie far below the formation of technology.I prefer my dog-eared copy of Gary Snyder poems. On one backpacking trip during the seventies a friend pulled out his worn copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and introduced me to a different world. Books (at least some) have this quality of shopworn knowledge handed down through the generations. Can the same be said of PDF files?I bow in the direction of John Muir, or Whitman, Thoreau, and Emerson. For me, books are a living, breathing organism of communication, while to others books are only commodities, more merchandisable items on which to make money. Can the worlds intersect?There are so many books and so many potential writers. The world is flooded with books, most of them of dubious quality. Desktop publishing has liberated us, but unfortunately it has liberated us to pay no attention to the art and craft of writing or to the basic notion of why we are writing in the first place. We publish simply because we can. The bookshelves are crowded, with many more books vying for space. How's a reader to know where to begin, to know what's good, what's interesting? In her autobiography, Natalie Goldberg talked about her background in Zen where she found herself to be a poor meditator. Goldberg's teacher told her that writing was her path to understanding the nature of things, as meditation was for others. I find myself in that bracket. When I am writing, things fall into a crystal focus even while I struggle with the words.I write to communicate that state of mind, to actually communicate period, and communication requires someone at the other end. It's also nice to be able to make a living doing it (which I'm far from), so that the communication can continue. As writers, maybe we need to sort this out. Exactly why do we write and is there a good reason our work should be on the shelves? I've drifted afield from the nuts and bolts of my self-publishing process, but I think we need to start here. Exactly why do we write and whom does it serve? Things became clear to me when a good friend was visiting from Pennsylvania several years ago before I published my book. He wanted to know what I was writing so I printed out about half the manuscript for him to take home. He in turn gave the manuscript to a woman in Pennsylvania to read. I received an email about a month later from the woman asking for the second half, because the first half had moved her beyond words.After I sent her the second half she wrote to me of her experience, of how she had come to herself in a new way from reading my work, that somehow my story was her story. But strangely, it's also other people's story. This is why I write. This is why I risked self-publication. It was for those moments when someone spontaneously says, "You touched something in my experience and my experience of the world is better for having read your work." I risk making a fool of myself to experience the moment of communication. This is why I clutter up the shelves.Next: Back to the nuts and bolts (I hope)

John Spivey is a writer and woodworker who lives in Santa Barbara, California with his wife. He owns a small publishing company CrowsCry Press and maintains a personal blog. He can be contacted here.

On Writing and Self-Publishing: Part 1

John Spivey — Tue, 7 Feb 2006 05:19:25 EST

This article is the beginning of a multipart series about writing and self-publishing. I won't profess to be an expert in the area of self-publishing, but I hope to stimulate some fruitful dialogue.When a musician decides to create their own label, they are many times thought of as visionary, entrepreneurial, or brave. When a writer decides to self-publish they are generally regarded as losers within the publishing world, despite the presence of authors like Walt Whitman in the ranks. My hope in these posts is to not only help create a forum for writers, but to also stimulate creative thought that might lead to revolutionizing how books are handled. Last year there was a big industry conference regarding new directions for publishing. The major publishing houses were represented as well the big distributors, Amazon and B&N, and more. They even threw in Dan Poynter and Steve Harrison. If I remember right, they had the conference in the round with an audience of paying interested observers who could only watch, but not participate. The problem was that everyone at the table had a vested interest in things not really changing all that much. The silenced audience probably had a greater interest in something new coming into existence than the heavyweights. What I think we really need is something of an Open Source movement of ideas to create a new structure with the web at its core. Maybe we can do something here, free of the vested interests.I love books. I always have. It pained me to teach so many students who dreaded books. I love the play of imagination that books afford me. I will loll on a page with no thought for speed, reread a certain phrase several times to savor the flow of the words through my mind. I don't have the same experience with video. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but the right words can convey a cascade of levels of meaning beyond the quick video image. The pause, rewind , and replay are no match for the reread phrase that tumbles through the mind, sparking neurons, forging synaptic paths. Reading is a one-to-one relationship with the mind of the author, for better or for worse. I always knew that I would end up a writer, though I was a math and science major and made my way through the worlds of carpentry and teaching. I didn't know what I would write about. I just knew that someday I would. In 1994 I stood on the top of the granite dome of Moro Rock in Sequoia National Park with my wife and 10-year-old stepdaughter and suddenly things became clear. From the granite dome I could look deep into the backcountry to a range of peaks called the Great Western Divide. The name intrigued me, beckoned to me. The peaks beckoned to me. The peaks divided the waters of the Kaweah and Kern Rivers and my great-great grandfather had settled along the Kaweah soon after the Gold Rush in 1853. The peaks were the source of the waters of reality for both my family and me. I not only knew that I had to hike into that backcountry, but I knew I had my book. Ideas suddenly seemed to come my way along with reference works that seemed to appear from nowhere. The words began to flow.I spent the next ten years weaving together a narrative laced with history, science, and mythic imagination. Along the way I would send out pulses of book proposals and writing samples. The editors who did respond with any kind of personal message would say, "Excellent writing, but we don't know what to do with it." I became depressed because I didn't know where to go from that point. I would stop writing, then start again and repeat the cycle. Contacting agents was a study in masochistic frustration. It's harder to find an agent than to get a publisher. One agent sent a rejection notice that was blurry and smudged, skewed about 30 degrees to the page. It looked like the hundredth copy of the hundredth generation copy of a copy that had been picked up off the floor. There is not a lot of respect given to an author in these interactions.The positive aspect of this long process was that it allowed the work to really gestate and become something greater than it had been. It also allowed me to become more. When the book was at long last finished I was still faced with the same problems of publication and I agonized over the problem till I finally made the decision to self-publish. I suddenly felt freer and in charge of my destiny, but I also knew that I was moving from the frying pan into the fire. I've never considered myself a businessman and I've never wanted to be a tireless self-promoter. Pitchmen make me head in the other direction. My life is one of art and craft. I was faced with the traditional demands of the publishing world, yet I wondered if there was something different to be had, something that could be invented on the fly.Next: The world of self-publishing.

John Spivey is a writer and woodworker who lives in Santa Barbara, California with his wife. He owns a small publishing company CrowsCry Press and maintains a personal blog. He can be contacted here.