www.amazon.com/Books-Semon-Strobos/s?rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%3ASemon+Strobos
For professional editing services, inquire at [email protected]
Published books. Click "more," above on header, then Published Books, for descriptive list and link.
I'm a published writer who stopped writing ten years ago to work as a field paramedic. Then recently I wrote a memoir about weird, funny and memorable 911 calls, published here as EMS: Earn Money Sleeping. (See Memoirs.) I put up this site to publish new work and old work. As for money, if you feel like sending me a check, that's great, but I don't intend to get rich off this nor did I ever write for money. Rather than publish old style as I used to, I like the idea of on line electronic downloads. Publishing evolved over time. In Gutenberg's day writers self published, but that was in disrepute for the last couple hundred years, until recently. The sneers were kind of self serving on the part of professional publishers, who wanted readers to go through them, and on the part of the creative writing crowd, who wanted to be gatekeepers , so they could publish writers based on whether they knew them, and whether the writers showed proper respect by following the "unwritten rules": the eternal laws of written art the workshops imagined they had discovered, mostly because they didn't like critical theory. Many agents and publishers were well meaning and published some very entertaining writers. Still, they were fallible. As a whole, published work is better than unpublished, but I've seen an awful lot of good unpublished work and read a lot of awful published stuff. The whole idea of a gatekeeper between the reader and the writer is somewhat distasteful. Besides if, as in the music industry, publishing evolves so writers can no longer earn a living at it, this would solve the whole starving artist problem Writers tend not to be to happy to start with. They're different. There's lot of narcissism in feeling people should read your work rather than you reading theirs, even when it' s true. Most writers feel they've failed, either commercially or critically. Or they feel their successful work is not really what they wanted to write. Or readers have weird attitudes toward them. But if no one can earn a living at it, due to lack of readership and pirating, then no one fails. Everyone is an amateur. If there's something to be said for rewarding artists for their work, there's something to be said for not monetarizing every human activity. People could write what the want to write, find their readers, and hang on to their day jobs. And their marriages, sobriety and suicidal impulses. (continued on blog)
Meanwhile, though, I hope you enjoy some of this work. Besides EMS, the novella Discord of the Barbarians is funny and accessible, about adjunct faculty scrounging a living in Boston. A lot of the rest is literary fiction. Thousand Doors for example is about the marital problems of a school teacher, in his own whiny voice. The plot roughly follows the Odyssey. I think that's been done before, but this is an easier read. Each site has introductions so you can find texts of interest more easily. Enjoy. Tell Tom Dick and Harry I rose from the dead.
It'll take me a while to get this all on line in reasonable shape, so be patient.
For professional editing services, inquire at [email protected]
Published books. Click "more," above on header, then Published Books, for descriptive list and link.
I'm a published writer who stopped writing ten years ago to work as a field paramedic. Then recently I wrote a memoir about weird, funny and memorable 911 calls, published here as EMS: Earn Money Sleeping. (See Memoirs.) I put up this site to publish new work and old work. As for money, if you feel like sending me a check, that's great, but I don't intend to get rich off this nor did I ever write for money. Rather than publish old style as I used to, I like the idea of on line electronic downloads. Publishing evolved over time. In Gutenberg's day writers self published, but that was in disrepute for the last couple hundred years, until recently. The sneers were kind of self serving on the part of professional publishers, who wanted readers to go through them, and on the part of the creative writing crowd, who wanted to be gatekeepers , so they could publish writers based on whether they knew them, and whether the writers showed proper respect by following the "unwritten rules": the eternal laws of written art the workshops imagined they had discovered, mostly because they didn't like critical theory. Many agents and publishers were well meaning and published some very entertaining writers. Still, they were fallible. As a whole, published work is better than unpublished, but I've seen an awful lot of good unpublished work and read a lot of awful published stuff. The whole idea of a gatekeeper between the reader and the writer is somewhat distasteful. Besides if, as in the music industry, publishing evolves so writers can no longer earn a living at it, this would solve the whole starving artist problem Writers tend not to be to happy to start with. They're different. There's lot of narcissism in feeling people should read your work rather than you reading theirs, even when it' s true. Most writers feel they've failed, either commercially or critically. Or they feel their successful work is not really what they wanted to write. Or readers have weird attitudes toward them. But if no one can earn a living at it, due to lack of readership and pirating, then no one fails. Everyone is an amateur. If there's something to be said for rewarding artists for their work, there's something to be said for not monetarizing every human activity. People could write what the want to write, find their readers, and hang on to their day jobs. And their marriages, sobriety and suicidal impulses. (continued on blog)
Meanwhile, though, I hope you enjoy some of this work. Besides EMS, the novella Discord of the Barbarians is funny and accessible, about adjunct faculty scrounging a living in Boston. A lot of the rest is literary fiction. Thousand Doors for example is about the marital problems of a school teacher, in his own whiny voice. The plot roughly follows the Odyssey. I think that's been done before, but this is an easier read. Each site has introductions so you can find texts of interest more easily. Enjoy. Tell Tom Dick and Harry I rose from the dead.
It'll take me a while to get this all on line in reasonable shape, so be patient.
