Betsy Robinson's Blog - Posts Tagged "resistance"
DEFLECT YOUR ENERGY OUT OF MISERY PORN
From The Spectators (Kano Press, Nov. 2024), a love-letter to the Upper West Side of NYC, friendship, and how to survive our current debacle.
"It is hard to avoid our herd’s proclivity for misery porn—an exaggeration, an addiction, a distraction like any other—and still stay informed. Leslie and I moan only to one another about the latest events in the fast-moving devastation known as the forty-fifth President of the United States, and, in an effort to become spectators who also act, we have become demonstration buddies—marching, carrying signs, and relentlessly calling our representatives to express our outrage, while abstaining from adding to the heat with social media venting."
Discount ($10) paperbacks in USA available at:
IngramSpark
Internationally available wherever you buy books.
ebooks sales that benefit your local indie bookshops
Bookshop.org
DOING BATTLE AS A ZEN MASTER even without martial arts training
I'm 74 and all my life I've been a late bloomer.
When I was an actor in my twenties, a roommate advised me to do my own thing since I was already writing my own audition monologues. It was the time when performance art was exploding in downtown Manhattan. Singers were singing, actors like Whoopie Goldberg were creating their own material: finding a way to work when there was no work.
But I wanted to jump through commercial hoops. After 10+ years of leaping, my final swan song was writing and performing a one-woman (me) play called Darleen Dances to much acclaim for two workshop audiences and subsequently having the opening monologue published in a popular actors' monologue book and being performed so often that it's on a "do not do" list for university auditions. But no commercial production or work of any paying kind followed, so I got off the dead-end show-biz road.
For years I've worked as a journalist and editor while I've written novels. Some have won awards and been published by small presses. But the last two were languishing, unread despite a good-hearted agent's submissions.
Why?
Because I'm not famous, I don't have a big sales record on Bookscan, and … Who know? I don't really care.
But as the 2024 election approached, my whole being went into alarm with thoughts of "Time's up!" My psychic voice was screaming that no matter how big Kamala's crowds, a blood bath was encroaching. And I had something to say about dealing with it in the second of my two languishing novels, The Spectators.
So I started Kano Press and published it two months before the debacle erupted.
What did I want to say so badly?
The Spectators is a novel about our herd nature and dealing with it as a person who prefers to think independently and observe. And my epiphany when I got to the end of my story was that it is not an option to divorce the herd. We can tell ourselves we are independent, but that is a lie. As goes the herd, no matter how we resist, we will go as well.
And since you cannot control anybody else in the herd, all you can do is try to find an inner truth and live by it. Doing that is by no means a passive action—witness Cory Booker's marathon. But acting with an impermeable sense of truth is like Zen Master fighting. You do battle in a relaxed, energized state, knowing exactly who you are and why you are playing your part.
Part love letter to NYC’s Upper West Side, part an ode to friendship between a writer and her creations (reluctant psychic protagonist Lily Hogue and her loner friends, with guest appearances of real and fictional historical events and people, from Bernie Madoff to Paul Simon to terrorists), The Spectators’ cast of characters battles the problems of foreknowing disasters we cannot control and being part of an uncontrollable human herd.
Discount ($10 in the USA only) paperbacks here: https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?jp...
E-books are sold everywhere you can buy books (even on Bookshop.org).
And here’s a short reading:
https://youtu.be/4GOZTPxQ6H8
When I was an actor in my twenties, a roommate advised me to do my own thing since I was already writing my own audition monologues. It was the time when performance art was exploding in downtown Manhattan. Singers were singing, actors like Whoopie Goldberg were creating their own material: finding a way to work when there was no work.
But I wanted to jump through commercial hoops. After 10+ years of leaping, my final swan song was writing and performing a one-woman (me) play called Darleen Dances to much acclaim for two workshop audiences and subsequently having the opening monologue published in a popular actors' monologue book and being performed so often that it's on a "do not do" list for university auditions. But no commercial production or work of any paying kind followed, so I got off the dead-end show-biz road.
For years I've worked as a journalist and editor while I've written novels. Some have won awards and been published by small presses. But the last two were languishing, unread despite a good-hearted agent's submissions.
Why?
Because I'm not famous, I don't have a big sales record on Bookscan, and … Who know? I don't really care.
But as the 2024 election approached, my whole being went into alarm with thoughts of "Time's up!" My psychic voice was screaming that no matter how big Kamala's crowds, a blood bath was encroaching. And I had something to say about dealing with it in the second of my two languishing novels, The Spectators.
So I started Kano Press and published it two months before the debacle erupted.
What did I want to say so badly?
The Spectators is a novel about our herd nature and dealing with it as a person who prefers to think independently and observe. And my epiphany when I got to the end of my story was that it is not an option to divorce the herd. We can tell ourselves we are independent, but that is a lie. As goes the herd, no matter how we resist, we will go as well.
And since you cannot control anybody else in the herd, all you can do is try to find an inner truth and live by it. Doing that is by no means a passive action—witness Cory Booker's marathon. But acting with an impermeable sense of truth is like Zen Master fighting. You do battle in a relaxed, energized state, knowing exactly who you are and why you are playing your part.
Part love letter to NYC’s Upper West Side, part an ode to friendship between a writer and her creations (reluctant psychic protagonist Lily Hogue and her loner friends, with guest appearances of real and fictional historical events and people, from Bernie Madoff to Paul Simon to terrorists), The Spectators’ cast of characters battles the problems of foreknowing disasters we cannot control and being part of an uncontrollable human herd.
Discount ($10 in the USA only) paperbacks here: https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?jp...
E-books are sold everywhere you can buy books (even on Bookshop.org).
And here’s a short reading:
https://youtu.be/4GOZTPxQ6H8
