Thank you for your support

I just wanted to start this out by thanking everyone who has bought or read one or both of my books. For the rest of you: What's taking you?

Both books are offered on Amazon, and the first one is available in other formats at just about all online book sellers. And because of the ease of self-publishing, now even you can feel like a movie mogul. I say this because I've become obsessed with my numbers. At least three time a day, I'll log onto Amazon and see how many people have bought my books. Now I know how Speilberg must feel on an opening weekend. Well, maybe it's not the same, but I do get a bit of an ego boost when I see I've moved some books.

I'd share those numbers with you, but one of the things I've learned about talking with other writer friends is to never reveal how your books are doing. I'm not sure why, but in comparison to someone like Stephen King or Dan Brown, my sales are very modest. In terms of my own expectations, it's still modest, but I should be able to make back the cash I've put into getting my own book out there. (Not counting the time I spent, I'll never get that time back.)

What I'm getting though, is much better. I've been getting a lot of support, words of kindness and sometimes exclamations of surprise. I'll get astonished “This is really good!” from some folks who expected something crappy. You might be saying to yourself, “Rory, they're lying to you.” Well, folks, I can tell when someone is lying. After years as a journalist, I can pretty much tell when someone is giving me the business. That was a skill developed over my years as an actor.

Friends would come back stage after seeing me in a play to tell me how wonderful I was. I could tell though – as an actor, I was marginal at best. This isn't to say I'm now this wonderful writer – I know I'm not. But I'm working at it and I appreciate those of you offering your words of support and spending your hard earned money on my books.

I've got two out now, and hope to have a collection of the columns I've written for the newspaper over the years to be out later this year. I anticipate that my third novel, which I'm working on right now, will be completed by the end of the year. I'm debating whether to go down the traditional publishing path with it or just self-publish again. I've finished a rough draft and it's a pretty decent story, with lots of potential. We'll see when its ready for some first readers.

Speaking of which, I will be looking for people who are interested in helping on a first reading, to give their impression on what works and what doesn't. Yeah, I know, I should just join a writers group for that kind of thing. Those groups are fine but usually find myself cast in a self-imposed editor role and get little of my own stuff done.

Again, thank you everyone for your support.

Hot, Sexy Photos

There is an inherent danger in entering your own name into a search engine. You never know what part of your past is going to pop up, or other scary things.

As a writer, though, you got to to it. You've got to at least attempt to see who might be stealing your stuff and selling it as their own. There are numerous sites that claim to be giving away my book for free, but so far none of them are really doing it. Mostly, those sites are looking to sucker people into buying something or trying to pass on a virus or malware.

Fortunately, a Google search of my name brings up the things it should on the first page – links to my work pages, links to buy my books and my social media accounts. The second page is nice, too. That's where you start to learn what I've been up to over the past 20 years, the awards I've won, the stories I've written for the newspaper over the years. I used to be a business reporter for a zoned section of the Albuquerque Journal. As such, I wrote a “focus on business” feature twice a week for about five years.

I used to tell people I was the most read writer in Albuquerque because of these stories – business owners would clip the story, frame it and put it on a wall in their establishments. So a customer would come in and read it.

It's been some years since I've written those stories, but I still like the kind of articles I like to call refrigerator stories – the kind of stuff that folks would cut out of the newspaper and post on their fridge, or keep in a scrapbook, or mail to a grandchild. (My grandmother used to do that.) Now, folks will post them on their websites, blog posts or social media. These stories aren't exactly hard news, but they're still fun to read and to write.

Then, there are links to issue stories and columns I've written. A couple years ago, for instance, I wrote a column about how I love libraries. That one spread to just about every library advocacy website in the world and still pops up on searches. And if you all are under the notion that I didn't do “real” news, there are links to stories I did on abusive priests, the lack of water in New Mexico and huge land development deals. Some of my stories have even been used in academic studies by people much smarter than me.

An article I did is even used in a biography of Barry McGuire. I had got a great quote from him about “Eve of Destruction.”

Other hits on my name turn up information on where I went to high school, when I was in the Air Force and a bit on my acting career. In the internet age, much of our lives is available for scrutiny online. Although I value my privacy, I know that my vocation is such that much of my life is played out in public. And having the unique name I have, it is easy to find me online.

But sometimes the internet gets a little confused. Some years ago, a film maker friend asked me to help him out on a short movie he was making. I took a day off from work to play an office worker. I'm not sure if I had a line, but it was fun and I got paid 30 bucks or something like that. Then I forgot about the movie until I recently ran across my page on imdb. The only problem is that imdb lists me as an actress, as in a female actor. I thought about updating that information – I'm not a woman despite what my PE coach in high school thought – but didn't care enough about it to go through the registration process at the website and let it slide.

Then a couple days ago, I was doing a Google check on my name when I came across a link that said this: “Hot Sexy Photos of Rory M. McClannahan: Cleavage, Boobs ...”

There are so many things wrong with that sentence. I'm 48 years old and I have no delusions about how I look. I look 48 years old. It's been some years since anyone could have used the adjectives “hot” or “sexy” to describe me. And while gravity has had its way with me, I don't think it's very nice to make fun of me because of it. So I need to do push ups, there's no need to laugh at me or tease me about cleavage and boobs.

Did I click on the link offering hot sexy photos of me? Of course I did. It takes you to an aggregator for celebrity wallpaper. No photos.

But what if there was? Is there really an internet fetish site for middle-age man cleavage? And furthermore, am I going to have to start keeping my eye out for the paparazzi?

Well, I guess if it helps my writing career ...

A sign written in the rocks

Another old column, this one from 2008. One day, I'll plan this blog site a little better. But, you know, I get busy doing other things. Enjoy.

     We all look for signs as we go about our daily lives. It comes from a basic distrust of our own instinct, and sometimes all we need is a something to lead us in what we perceive is the right direction. A nasty cough could be telling you to give up those cigarettes. Or perhaps the proverbial lipstick on a collar leads you to leave a mate. Who among us hasn’t asked the Creator for an indication of what to do?
     Signs relieve us of responsibility and places our lives in the hands of fate.
     The signs I look for are the ones telling me that no matter how messed up the world may be, there is something to confirm the basic goodness of mankind. A smile from a pretty girl, a complete stranger who lets me merge on to the freeway, or a parking space close to the store are all minor reasons to celebrate, and too often we let these signs dissipate into our stressful days.
     This is where Janet and Russ come in, because people who care about them have transformed road signs into a metaphysical marker.
     I don’t personally know Janet and Russ, but they make me smile every time I drive to the transfer station in Tijeras or into Albuquerque. I don’t know their last names and, really, it isn’t important information. I like to think that Russ and Janet are a couple, but I can’t say that.
     Both old Route 66 and Interstate 40 through the canyon have warning signs telling motorists to watch out for falling rocks. Some of these signs have the silhouetted illustrations of a large rock getting ready to smash a car. All of them have a small rectangle sign simply warning “ROCKS.”
     Someone, I’m thinking it might have been Russ, attached a small white plywood rectangle above one of these signs so that it now says, “Janet ROCKS.” To those of us born after the Kennedy Administration, saying that someone rocks is one of the greatest compliments — it means that we are deserving of a seat at the cool kids’ table. It means we are relevant.
     Someone cares for Janet and wanted to let her know as she commutes to town.
     Sometime after I noticed that Janet ROCKS, I discovered another road sign stating that “Russ ROCKS My World.” I’m assuming that Janet scribbled this with a marker, but really, I don’t know if was her.
     I do know that Russ is one lucky guy. It’s one thing to rock, but quite another to rock someone’s world. Put it this way: it’s one thing to love, but quite another to be loved.
     Both of these signs got me to thinking about the people I care about and what I do to show them how I feel. Hollywood has taught us that the only valid gesture of affection is a grand one. And those are fine, but who has the energy to maintain that, and flowers can get expensive. There are many small things we can do for our loved ones to show we care, such as scrape the ice off the windshield in the morning, take out the garbage, give a back rub, keep the kids away during a weekend nap, return the videos to the store or do the grocery shopping.
     And there are many things my loved ones do to show they love me, like when my father buys breakfast or when my wife just looks at me like she did when I asked her to marry me. These are signs that I rock someone’s world and it humbles me.
     So while at least two people tell us through simple acts of vandalism on road signs about their feelings for Russ and Janet, we learn that love still exists and showing it isn’t that difficult.
     Thank you Russ and Janet.

A Press Release

“Time in the World” by Rory McClannahan now available in e-book and paperback

Following a modern tradition started by Mark Twain with the 1889 publication of “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court,” author Rory McClannahan unleashes his own take on time travel with the release of “Time in the World.”

Daniel Monroe spends his days walking around his neighborhood looking for the meaning of life in the faces of the people he meets. After an existential crisis, Monroe cashed out of his life of a corporate cog, leaving behind his nice apartment, cool friends and bright middle-management future. After four months of healing his damaged psyche, it was time to get back into the job market. His cashed out retirement account was running low and, of course, there was the pretty girl behind the counter at the neighborhood deli who didn't have much interest in an unemployed layabout.

As luck would have it, there is a job available at Serendipity Antiques, a shop that specializes in finding items no one else can. It's owner, Jaspar Cummings, is a little odd and he doesn't seem that interested in running a business. The store is a mess where valuable items are tossed aside and forgotten. It isn't long before Cummings lets Monroe in on a secret – Cummings works for a few select clients and is able to acquire almost anything because he is a able to travel in time. And what's more, he will soon give Monroe the device that makes it possible – a device that has been passed from one traveler to another for centuries. There is just one more job that needs to be done.
However, there is more to traveling in time than twisting a few dials.

Author Rory McClannahan is an award-winning newspaper editor and columnist in New Mexico. His first novel, “Blind Man's Bluff” is available at all major e-book retailers.

“Time in the World” is available in paperback and e-book format at Amazon.com.

An electronic review copy has been included with this e-mail. Interviews with the author can be set up by email at writerrorymcc@gmail.com. Check out Rory's blog at www.sageofbarton.blogspot.com.

Young Fogey

Over the past decade or so, I've written a weekly column first for the Albuquerque Journal and now for the Mountain View Telegraph.
Today, I'm working on other projects that need to get done, so I offer regular readers this column from 2011. -R

We’re all doomed to become old fogies. I became one on March 26 at 10:03 p.m. I was in bed reading while the TV played the over-the-air music video channel when Lady Gaga came on with her latest hit, “Born This Way.”

I was completely baffled. I didn’t “get it.” I don’t understand her popularity. I don’t understand why people — kids — would pay for that.

At first, I was a little scared. I’m part of a generation who were latchkey kids and slackers. Music videos, and video games, were invented for me and my peers. I’ve gone to concerts with 100,000 other people my age. I’ve grown my hair long, stayed up all night listening to music in a girl’s basement apartment just in hopes of getting a kiss. I married a woman who when I first met her had green hair.

I’ve experimented, for crying out loud! I wasn’t supposed to become a fogy.

And yet, all I could think as I watched Lady Gaga dressed in only her underwear go through the poses of the Kama Sutra was that this must be some sort of joke.

And then I felt sorry for my kids; and I especially felt sorry for anyone who has daughters. I felt sorry for my sons because this, and Britney Spears, and the Black Eyed Peas, and Miley Cyrus, and Beyoncé, and all of them is what they have for popular music.

There’s no Elvis there. No Beatles. No Duran Duran. No REM, U2, Blondie, Nirvana or AC/DC. All they have is a veneer of pop culture that is completely contrived and interchangeable. This isn’t to say that pop stars haven’t always had an eye toward fashion, or the popular things I liked as a kid weren’t contrived by some record company executive to sell more records. But there were also stars who rebelled against the facade — that’s what made rock ’n’ roll so appealing.

I feel for anyone with a daughter, because their pop stars are creating an image that no one can live up to. And of course if you don’t try, peer pressure will assure you are cast as an outsider. This also gives our young men and boys a measure of beauty and morals that no one could or should aspire to.

I was raised during a time of feminism, when women were striving to be treated as something more than objects. And while I don’t consider myself a feminist, I grew up thinking that someone was fighting for the right for women to be taken seriously for their brains instead of their breasts. Now we have young girls who believe the only way to become popular is to sexualize and objectify themselves.

How does a parent fight against that? How do you instill a work ethic in your children when their pop stars are discovered more through chance than talent?

I find my hope for the future, though, in my own children. My oldest son, Connor, is 13 years old and plays the drums, the guitar, the bass and sometimes he fiddles around with an accordion his uncle gave him.

He hates current popular music. A mention of the Jonas Brothers or Fall Out Boy elicits a look and sound of disgust. If anyone can save rock ’n’ roll, it will be him and the kids who listen to so-called “classic” rock that is popular on video games like “Guitar Hero.”

In the meantime, I have to quell my fogyness lest Connor look for something to use in a rebellion against me.

Lady Gaga would do the trick.

Middle Age Dread?

“Only the young have such moments.”

That's the opening line of “The Shadow-line; A Confession” by Joseph Conrad. It's one of my favorite stories ever about the existential threshold one crosses between youth into adulthood. Conrad even comes out and says that in his second paragraph of the story:

“One closes behind one the little gate of mere boyishness—and enters an enchanted garden. Its very shades glow with promise. Every turn of the path has its seduction. And it isn't because it is an undiscovered country. One knows well enough that all mankind had streamed that way. It is the charm of universal experience from which one expects an uncommon or personal sensation —a bit of one's own.”

I first read this story in my late 20s about the time when I had finally convinced myself that getting a college degree might be important. It struck a chord with me because, at the time, I had recently crossed my own shadow-line, I was an adult but I could look back and still see the sharp outlines of my youth.

I had finally reached that point of maturity that I had always longed for as a child. The story was assigned reading in a literature class and some in that class I know were turned off by the nautical setting Conrad uses, but the language is pure and the emotion is sincere – you believe the author knows what he's talking about. Some of my classmates, though, were still on the naïve side of that line.

The shadow-line, the story implies, is that the changes from one era of a life is not always so easily defined in the moment, but a fuzzy line that you only realize you've crossed in hindsight. What Conrad doesn't explore in this story, thought, is that a lifetime is filled with numerous shadow-lines. Where are the romantic notions of crossing that shadow-line of simple adulthood into middle age? I'm sure they are out there, but right now I'm too immersed in that transition to want to read about it. Things like this are best left to nostalgia.

The author in his "shadow-line" phase

I think about these things as I nurse a sore, arthritic knee. When I tore the thing up at 17, the orthopedic surgeon at the time that I would one day face a knee replacement. Over the past 30 years numerous orthopedic specialists have repeated that diagnosis. Each time, I laughed it off, that was “in the future.” And, of course, I convinced myself as a young man that when the time came, medical technology would be such that I would be closer to the Six Million Dollar Man than some gimping old man.

Now, the decision on knee replacement is getting closer and closer, and I'm a little offended about that. I've got an appointment with the ortho doc next week about the prognosis on my knee. Talk about confronting middle age.

All of this is swirling around at the same time I've been going to regular check ups. Last week, I had my six month dental cleaning and am now set up to get a partial bridge installed where I had a tooth pulled years ago. I had my annual physical exam, which I usually schedule closer to every other year. If you are an egocentric kind of person, the physical can be either the best or worst kind of experience. For starters, the experience is all about you – your blood, your weight, your blood pressure, your hearing, your everything. If you don't like to hear criticism and judgments about how much ice cream you eat, you probably won't enjoy it.

I don't need a doctor to tell me I'm 48 years old – I feel it every morning – so it doesn't bother me that much to hear what's going on with my body. Plus, going in, I figured that the results were going to tell me what I already know – I got some extra pounds I need to shed. My doc had scheduled this physical when I came in for a referral to orhto. I could see the concern and judgment or her face – she had my weight and blood pressure numbers for that appointment. Both were too high in her estimation, but she didn't ask me if I had just finished an energy drink before my appointment. Those things are great for a jolt to wake you up, but don't really help on blood pressure checks.

The author in middle age

So, I got the blood work ups and came in for the once over. I think the doctor was a little surprised and perhaps disappointed that my cholesterol levels are well within normal and that my triglycerides were only slightly elevated. My good fats are a little low and my heart is good and strong. My PSA levels on my prostate are fine – but not well enough to forgo the physical check of that tricky little organ. Whose idea was it to put the prostate right near a bodily exit?

So, barring some unfortunate event or illness, it looks like I'm destined to be around for a few more years. The one test I flat out failed was my hearing test, a new test where a machine does a radar mapping of your inner ear, or something like that. I can still hear well enough, but I know a hearing aid is somewhere in my future – a genetic disposition toward hearing loss is coded in my DNA.

So I get to confront my middle-agedness.

As I've been thinking about this over the past week or so, I was trying to convince myself that the shadow-line into middle age is marked by physical ailments. Conrad would have laughed at me for my narrow thinking. It's true that the physical gives us constant reminders that shit eventually falls apart, but it is our emotional health that tends the suffer the most. It comes down to the fact that there is very little anymore that is surprising and new.

Think of it like this: Remember all the firsts in your life – your first crush, your first kiss, your first love, your first broken heart. These induce very strong emotions, and even their memory can move us and we savor those emotions. There are days when I long for the feelings I had when I was younger – it's more addictive than cigarettes and just as bad for you. When you begin to reach middle age, you come to the realization that the world doesn't hold much surprise anymore, so you go seeking those things. But in the immortal words of Admiral Ackbar, “It's a trap!” You can only fall in love for the first time once. That doesn't make second and third loves any less valid or fulfilling; but it's just not the same.

I know I'm passing into this garden of middle age, and I know that all of mankind has passed there before me. And I'm actually looking forward to “the charm of universal experience from which one expects an uncommon or personal sensation,” as Conrad wrote. It's something new, and I can only experience once. It seems, like a first love, to be something to savor.