Rhino Puzzlings

It's been ninety days since I first put TheRealJoyG up on Amazon as an eBook , a return to self-publishing after more than a decade away. Reading books might be passé  and AI might be making us dumber , but I'm choosing to ignore the gloom and keep publishing. So three months ago I clicked the buttons and turned it loose on the world as much as an act of defiance against tech-driven dumbing-down as my own social experiment.  Is anyone actually reading? For all of Amazon's might and muscle, the life of a creator still demands a huge amount of hustle.  My experiment from last October was: given no real marketing at all, would I even be a blip? Well... yes and no. The yes  half of the equation is, I've sold a couple copies, enough to warrant an actual payment back from Bezos & Co. in another ninety days. I'm officially calling myself "not non-selling" as a result. And historically, I did sell a handful of copies of my first experiment in a published nove...

I've mentioned to people that I've slipped (reluctantly) back into social media, mainly as a promotional device for my writing. Good or bad, we're in the era of  talking about ourselves as content . Writers, being normally furtive, isolated beasts, aren't universally great at this. Judging from the number of people trying to teach (or sell) us ways to  talk about ourselves , I don't think I'm the only author who struggles with the act of having something to say. [Gestures to this blog] As part of the "well, I'm back on social media a little more now" conversation is the qualifier "but I'm trying to limit my own time on it." The machine has managed to dial in that sweet spot between our willingness to surrender our attention span and the ability to deliver entertainment. The landscape of my day job commute on mass transit has surely changed over the decades, going from a sea of newspapers and books, to texting/messaging, to pure consum...

Because of course I don't have enough going on right now, I'm looping way back to a craft that I dabbled in around the time my very first book came out: linocut carving. I've never outgrown my childhood fascination with print and type (as the many typewriters can attest) and linocut occupies a weird liminal space of creative endeavor, printing, and noodling around with sharp things. I dug out the old cutting tool and the erasers I'd used way-back-when, and I've been haunting the relevant section of my local art store. I've very much got a DIY aesthetic going on, too, and I've been trying to shunt my tiny social media presence over to things creative and not things time-sucky. These all landed in a perfect storm of "I should find a secondhand hobby die cutting machine and do my own printing." Enter the local secondhand craft store and a lucky find, and now I'm one "Cuttlebug" richer for a very low outlay, preventing me from taking on...

2025 was a rough one, I won't lie. It's early days here in 2026 and I'm still in hunker down mode from the previous year. But looking back wasn't all bad.  2023 was the year I finally stepped up and pledged to move forward with the writing hobby that I'd dabbled in for over fifteen years with only one "complete" work to show for it (more on that) 2024 was the year I learned how to complete something 2025 was the year I completed it For all the running and rushing, and the weeks of learning, I finished 2025 with an actual paperback book in my hands, and in the next few weeks, will continue the self-publishing experiment of "going wide" with distribution beyond just Amazon. It all feels very new--it  is  very new--but in the looking back, and going through those fifteen-plus year of drafts, I've also overlooked a work that I put up, many, many years ago. Just two years into my journey, I banged out a silly fractured-fairy-tale work, and spent ...

We were discussing the "one day novel" in our informal writer's group meeting this week, as in "one day, I'll write a novel." Looking back, I've overcome a lot of personal one-day bucket list items: One day, I'll clean up that draft and send it to beta readers One day, I'll incorporate those comments back into the draft One day, I'll proofread it One day, I'll publish another ebook One day, I'll learn how to typeset One day, I'll learn this drawing software One day, I'll set up the author web site and blog (hi!) One day, I'll go back to social media   One day, I'll do a public reading  One day, I'll find a reader It's good to take inventory now and then, to realize how many one-days are done. It's hard, sometimes, when we see all the steps ahead of us to realize that the only way we have this new view is by taking steps to reach it. Yes, there's another mountain again, but don't lose sight of the ...

📕 After literal months of writing, reading, re-writing, re-reading, hounding beta readers, finding typos, wrestling with cover art, learning typesetting  and all the other tiny fussy bits, I pulled the trigger and ordered a printed proof of @TheRealJoyG and this week, it arrived! View this post on Instagram A post shared by Michael P. Clemens (@mpclemens.writes) So far, I've just handed it to people and said "look through this and tell me that it looks like a real book to you." I'll obsessively hunt for typos another day, but for now, I'm just enjoying the heft of this simple thing, this proof-of-work and a delightfully human analogue artifact. It's going on place of pride on the writing shelf for sure. 🧩🦏