EXCERPT FROM M.R. - CHAPTER ONE

Sun Bear told Morning Star that free food would draw people like flies. He was right. Two hundred people showed up that rainy Sunday afternoon to eat lamb stew and fry bread in the great circular room of the church. They came out of curiosity for the most part. The advertising called it a Potlatch, not a familiar word to most people. But the second line said “Give Away’ and that was the hook. He wanted as many people as the room could hold to announce publicly the formation of the new tribe. When they’d secured the round church he told her it was a good sign, that it would be a great day. The room was like a kiva and he said the folks from the Indian Center would know this was a sacred event.

Star had never heard the word potlatch before a month ago when they had begun working steadily getting this organized. She stood off to the side of the room, her blonde braided hair decorated with thongs that hung down her back and quail feathers nearly reaching her waist. A beaded headband encircled her forehead. She was wearing every medicine object she had. Every feather had meaning, every bead had been sewn in prayer. She had put them all on to strengthen her for what promised to be another very long day. As her eyes scanned the gathering she felt the ache in her gut return. She looked for Sun Bear.

He was easy to find in any crowd in his old, black cowboy hat. He usually threw it in the back of the car when he traveled. The creases were crinkled and dusty, but successfully covered his unruly black hair that wasn't coarse and straight like most Indians’ hair. It was soft and full and usually tangled if someone didn't brush it for him. His plaid shirt was dutifully tucked in behind his huge turquoise belt buckle that marked him as prosperous, along with two turquoise rings and a row of the bright blue stones on his gold watchband. Somehow his baggy Levi's and worn black boots added to what she now understood was his charisma.

The word had never meant much to her before last fall. She associated it with fundamentalist preachers and canvas tents surrounded by a sea of parked cars in dry, dusty fields. But she had experienced his magnetism the first time she laid eyes on him. She'd met him with a group of parents from the Free School her son went to. They'd heard he was a good storyteller. They were hoping he'd come regularly to talk with the children about Indian life. But as she was introduced she felt an electrical current pass through her that was unexpected and unexplained. She rounded up the littler kids and took them across the street to play. Her body was reverberating, down to her fingertips, and she had no idea why. She resolved to give him plenty of room. He felt dangerous.

He was motioning to her from across the floor. “Morning Star, come here and meet these people. They live down by Santa Cruz.”

She walked over, extending her hand to an older couple whom Sun Bear had been speaking with for quite some time.

“Morning Star is one of our tribal sisters. She and her husband, Grey Wolf, began our first survival camp, Medicine Rock. It is up above Placerville. Frank and Jenny have property in Santa Cruz they might let us use for the winter. How many acres was it again, Frank?”

“There's three that are level, and seven all together. I was just telling Sun Bear that we are considering trading it for some kind of income property. In the meantime, there’s a small house there that’s not being used, and the well was just re-drilled. Tell me about Medicine Rock. By the way, Morning Star’s such a lovely name.”

“Thank you, I like it. Well, we’ve been there at Medicine Rock since November. We started out with about eight of us and several children. There are 20 acres. It’s a mining claim, so we will be improving it each year to maintain the claim. It's full of manzanita, there’s a pond and some ponderosa pines. It’s quite nice now that we've begun the gardens. There’s a cabin, but we use it only for cooking, and folks have their own campsites for privacy and comfort.”

“How many children do you have, Star?” Jenny turned warmly toward her.

“Star is taking some time in the city to help us out,” Sun Bear said, ignoring the question and putting his arm protectively around her. She realized she was holding her breath as he gently squeezed her shoulder and turned to face Jenny directly.

“We have two camps in Sacramento, one in Elk Grove, and one in Davis where we’ll be harvesting fruit. We harvest for the commercial growers and then take a percentage of the crop for our winter food supply.”

Jenny was unaware he had diverted the topic. “How do you preserve the fruit? Canning or freezing?”

Star refocused on the conversation with this gray-haired woman who looked so conventional in her light blue polyester suit. She wondered what brought her today.

“We actually dry most of the fruit. We lay it out on long screens, cover it with cheesecloth and let the sun do its job. We are trying to live in the Old Ways, not to rely on electricity or gas. Of course learning these skills takes time and a lot of patience. For the time being, we're also driving cars and using telephones! How did you happen to come to our celebration today, Jenny?”

“Well, I teach literature over at the University at Davis. We often have Sun Bear over for dinner. He is such a fascinating man. This tribe of his sounds very intriguing. You know I’m too old to be changing lifestyles, but you young people have so much to learn from him, and from the Indian way. I traveled in the southwest last summer and met some lovely Indians who were selling jewelry by the side of the road. Now you know that really cuts out the middleman! Just sitting there under their shade roof, letting their kids play right in the dirt, and selling this amazing turquoise and coral jewelry!”

Suddenly conversations stopped as the sound system whined and howled for a moment. Then a smooth, confident male voice began welcoming the people.

POLLY-ANNA MATH

Thanks to one of my devoted readers, Miss Prune, I've seen the error in my math and am once again facing the financial strain of being a writer. I will be thankful for what trickles my way, anticipating a flood at some future date, knowing the inspiration of the book has led me this far without starving!

Words spoken in the wilderness are vibrations resonating over and over into the universe. Words spoken in the presence of other humans have more life force and longevity. Words in a book that feed one's soul/imagination/heart transmit a unique force within the mind and body.

So far I've scheduled a signing at Chapter One Book Store, in Hamilton, on April 10, from 11-1 PM. I am expecting to have a reading and signing at River Rising sooner than that, but the date hasn't quite been solidified.

In the meantime, I'm sticking to words, not numbers!

THE PRESSES ARE ROLLING

I have a lovely corrected prototype book in my hand, and the electronic data has gone to the printers! This is last step in publishing, prior to the first steps in selling! Well, not really the first, since I've been calling bookstores, trying to imagine book tours, and setting up the website (soon it will be up).

My local bookstore chooses to buy from me, which gives us both a better profit margin. And IU is correcting their technical error to their distributor (Ingrahm), so the world rights itself ever so slightly once again.

In the meantime, check out Quill & Parchment on-line ezine. I submitted two poems to them just for fun, sort of quirky poems, and they loved them! They want three more! I'm told they've been publishing online for a number of years, and I'm excited to flip the pages of my poetry notebook and see what else I can come up with. That was an unexpected surprise. I've also submitted to the local Cutbank magazine out of University of Montana, but I've received no response.

Well, the sun has arrived. I MUST go outside!

LOOK OUT FOR GLITCHES

Yesterday my local bookseller wrote a note that he was unwilling to work with me through his distributor, Ingram, because he couldn't return unsold books, according to Ingram (one of the biggest distributers). I was appalled because I definitely paid for that service in my original contract with IUniverse.

After a phonecall and email, today I have a note from IU that they had a technical error that created that message, and they are manually trying to change it on all the distributor's lists.

If a bookstore was willing to purchase books through me personally, the discount to them is 40%. Certainly this leaves me with a better profit than the $3 through a distributor. Our local store is willing to do that, and if he can't sell them, he can return them to me. At least there's options!

I have a description of the book that I wrote on Beth's Book Review Blog:

http://bethsbookreviewblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/guest-post-morning-star-author-of.html

It will be fun to see if anything comes of it!

SECOND "DUMMY" COMING THIS WEEK

I want to be sure to share with you how quick IUniverse's response was to the "glitch" of having two Chapter 15's. At this point in time the second "author's copy," that I call "dummy book," is in the mail, and should arrive today or tomorrow. THEN I call IU and they RUN THE PRESSES! Shortly thereafter I get 205 books in the mail (i.e. clean the garage asap), and can start selling them. They've been fast, I've been waylaid by a little surgery and a family crisis. Both are coming along nicely.

My daughter and I started working on the website with very little success through godaddy.com. Warning: between the challenge of working with their web builder and their sexist advertising, we're discouraged. But she's the boss on that so we'll wait and see what she comes up with. Should be done by next week: www.Medicine-Rock.com

AND, the book is "LIVE" on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc. If you were to order it, you would get a message that it will be a few weeks before it's able to be sent. Through those sources my profit is about $3/book. Buying from me on Paypal it is about $11/book.

I'm starting on the next book, by the way. Just in case more adventures are interesting for you, dear readers. It's all about Montana, the blue sapphire of the west!

And book tours, first around western Montana, then to the coast, are in the making. Stay tuned!

HUMBLE PIE

Checking the mail on a daily basis, hoping the "dummy" book had arrived, I gave up on Martin Luther King day because there was no mail deliveries. I came home from shopping late in the afternoon to find a small UPS package, the size of a book, on the couch. There it was, in all its glory! I ran out to the studio to show my husband, who was building a threshold for a door. He was nearly as excited as I, and we stood holding each other to see this baby born of our devotion to pursue our highest dreams. A new threshold.

We gazed at the sliver of moon in the south west sky, offering good beginnings for the new phase. We celebrated with friends in the neighborhood, and then went out to dinner. The book came with,a silent member of our celebration. I hugged it to my chest like a newborn while I drove through town.

Later, stretched out in bed, I began checking through it for errors, reading here and there, especially noting that the ends of a chapter and the beginning of the next chapter were correct. I came upon an astonishing error that only I could have made: two chapter fifteens, one that by all rights should have been chapter sixteen, the last one in the book. My balloon deflated, another cost, another wait.

I'm not even going to the "how could this ever have happened?" place. Somehow the innumerable edits by me, and the one excellent edit by a dear friend failed to reveal this flagrant error. I can only say the Universe wants this book available later in the spring than I ever imagined, for reasons unknown.

This morning the telephone call to IUniverse (after the email) was difficult. The folks who dealt with me were lovely, sympathetic, informative. But the charges would come to $300 more. I gasped, because I thought they'd only be $100. But it must be done.

The process is straightforward: I have up to 25 corrections I can make on the forms they will email today. I return them, they print a new "dummy" copy and mail it out (this part took 30 days last time). I review it, okay it, and the order is placed for 185 copies (+ 20 freebies) which will arrive in March, with no shipping charges (saving about $155).

Dear reader, if this tries your patience, imagine the level of deep breathing going on in my body today! Many adjustments to be made in scheduling, manifesting and, well, we'll have a lot more time to work on the website (which presented endless difficulties yesterday)!

Dear self-published author: Beware. Edit. Remain open to surprising changes!

THE PROFIT MARGIN

I was excited to receive a call from another "consultant" from IUniverse. By now I know they may or may not be professionals in the publishing field, but they are sales people for sure. Friendly, helpful sales folks.

He had answers to my next set of questions so I could make decisions about how many books to order when the time came. And it's coming right up. I should get the one dummy copy this next week, and he requested I call him with the "OK to print" AND my order for discounted copies. As he rattled off the percentages for discounts, I wrote them down, and then quickly ciphered how much money I'd need to order copies. It looked good, even at this squeezy financial time of the holidays. I let a day lapse and returned to my notes with my calculator.

My notes read: 500 copies: 55% discount; 250 copies: 50% discount; but 300 copies(51% discount, my guess), includes 300 free postcards, bookmarks and business cards, and free shipping. (This information from an email that arrived right after the salesman's contact information. I think they call that the "hook!")

In my original scribbles my new investment would be under $500, but alas, the calculator is the reality check. Were I to purchase 300 books, an outlay of $3511, I would need to sell 152 at full price, to pay back my investment loan. I think I can do that. But I regret borrowing money from friends.

These kinds of deliberations keep one awake at night! Especially one who leans toward right brain activities instead of left brain. But for those of you interested in the IUniverse program, it gives you a clue, and gives me a clue, that to pay back the loan within three months, I need to sell at least 50 a month, in person, to avoid shipping fees!

And lest you imagine there's a big profit margin for books sold over Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or your local bookstore, it amounts to about $3-4 per book. Oh, and IUniverse's first quarterly payment won't arrive till May, 2 months after the closing of the quarter. They need to make their interest, after all.

I need to make a phone call after quelling my fears of asking for a loan. I might work outside a little bit to approach the task. It's the warmest part of today, 32 degrees. The cold harsh realities of publishing on a cold and gloomy day.