2nd Installment on Autobiography

ESSAY 2

Andre Malraux once said that what interested him in any person was "the human condition." Malraux was interested not so much in people's personality but, rather, in their "particular relationship with the world." He went on to say that he was interested in the "form and essence" of anyone with claims to greatness. If a person was saintly, what was the character of that saintliness. It was not only things, events in a person's life, that mattered to the exposition and analysis of the character, of the person--in determining the overall result of the autobiographical exercise. Perhaps the reason Malraux found the wider world, society, crucial in any delineation of autobiography was that he actually found himself uninteresting. Perhaps, writes the editor of this book Ralph Cohen, this was because Malraux had not learned the art of self-recreation.

To H.G. Wells an autobiography was a description of a man's effort to achieve his persona. This was no easy task because the persona changed frequently in life even in a day for some people. It was rarely a whole, a singular entity, he thought. So the autobiographical journey was an imperfect one or at least there existed various tensions between the inner and outer, the subjective and objective, the cross-cultural perspectives, that made the achievement of this persona, even in the long term into the evening of a person's life, difficult, complex and sometimes impossible to do through the written word. The explorer Scott, for example, gave up his journal because he felt it was making him into a solitary egoist. Anais Nin was advised to give up her diary because it caused her to withdraw and to be preoccupied with her own completeness. T.E. Lawrence wrote that living in two cultures, English and Arab, resulted in his loneliness and a certain madness, certainly no sense of wholeness.

"The suspended and wandering tonalities of the past," wrote Nabokov, are gathered by memory into its fold and memory makes innate and densely particularized harmonies from them. These harmonies are memory's supreme achievement. Writing an autobiography could be described as a rapid invention of the universe; all space and time, or at least selective portions of space and time, participate in the emotion of the autobiographer. An utter degradation, ridicule and horror is experienced, according to Nabokov, as a part of the infinity of sensation and thought that is the writer's experience--within the finite existence that is hisw or her life.

This infinity of sensation and thought is dealt with by autobiographers in different ways. A sense of place informs the memory of writers like Gide, Ruskin and Yeats. This sense of place usually has a human aspect or connection but, to writers like Sartre, the facts of place, of his life, make an imperceptible and shifting frontier. A sense of mission, a sense of that most familiar trio family-work-friends, a sense of obsession: there are various driving forces and activities that take that infinity of sensation and thought and skew it down some track. Memory, a frequently emphasized aspect of experience, provides the writer's only reality no matter what fills the spaces. A panoramic visual impression, an intense and mysterious continuity of sensation comes to replace past reality by means of the mechanism of memory. Perhaps part of this mysterious continuity provided by memory is conveyed by Dahlberg when he writes that "precisely as my life ceases to be solitary, it ceases to be distinct." For others, though, I think this distinctness is achieved as a result of the social not the solitary. Human interaction gives distinctness and specificity to life. For still others it is a mix of the two. Perhaps part of this mysterious continuity is the intermingled discontinuities which form autobiographical truth and these discontinuities can be born in many birth canals.

Some autobiographers are preoccupied, obsessed, with form. Memory imposes for each autobiographer spacial form. Gibbon found form so problematic that he left six "finely formed, differently focused, and overlapping fragments" or drafts or editions of his autobiography. Nothing was finalized. Henry Adams, who idolized Gibbon, wrote that "from cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has been?the task of education." It is also the task of autobiography to achieve rich coherences, elegant if whimsical patterning and focusing and a working out of the laws of history, if any in fact exist.

Selectivity, of course, changes as memory's focus moves from childhood to adolescence. "The self," wrote Goethe, "is an irregularly moving expansion" an "ever-widening arc." Goethe had a lifelong tendency to use his imagination to put his mind at rest. He used poetry to fix that which was confused or unstable in himself, to repossess the past world, to achieve stasis through form. Writing autobiography involves a continuous refocusing of expectation and intention as each autobiographer "discovers his own fluctuating mixture of confession, apology and memoir."

In some ways an autobiography is a retrospective personal account of events that are unique and cataclysmic, significant and not-so-significant, experiences in a single life in the flow of history. Sometimes this autobiography is translated into the form of a memoir: Orwell's Homage to Catalonia and Mailer's Armies in the Night are examples of "personal accounts of events that are unique and significant parts of their lives." Each of these books centres its chief attention on the life of the author as it was lived. Not all of the life of the author is involved but, then, not all of a life is necessarily involved in any autobiography.

An obvious part of the life that is lived is the perceptions, the changes and varying intensities that make up that life. In some ways the task is like searching for a missing person, a buried treasure, a corpus delecti. The life of the subject lies in waiting to be discovered. Inevitably there are questions that can not be answered, aspects of life that are conjectural, portions of life that can not be recalled, no matter how much we discover and recollect. There are also facts that are beyond doubt, although their meaning is often multiple. Autobiographers are caught between two poles: the interest of the reader and the facts of their life, a certain inevitable thrust that the autobiography takes and the vast array of unobtrusive and contingent facts which send a life in a thousand directions. As the autobiographer writes, the reasons for things sometimes protrude, like previously unobserved finger posts. Causes, where they were never seen before, swim like a swarm of possibilities, like shades which might eventually cease to count or which might become significant, often nebulous, part of an endless exercise, give rise to the old tennis game: 'What would have happened if?' It is unavoidable.

Although I have pointed this out before, the social nature of our being, the sociological nature of our reality, needs to be given more stress than it normally is by autobiographers. Much of what we are, as the sociologist Emile Durkheim put it, comes to us from the outside and is beyond our control. We are determined by what is within as well as what is without, by grand passions as well as large impersonal forces. "We are all prompted," wrote Dr. Johnson, "by the same motives, all deceived by the same fallacies, all animated by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled by desire, seduced by pleasure." Of course, within this overall sameness and pattern, the degree, the extent, the variability is enormous. Autobiographers often underestimate the explanatory power of various factors in their lives: money, sex, ambition, history, etc. It would be difficult to overestimate these factors. Even when alone, for example, individuals are enclosed in a social group and "determined in their behaviour by the nature of their social being." The nature of the individual is intimately connected with group affiliations. For people like Cezanne the social world is seen as a mirror reflecting the glory he saw in himself.

Coleridge noted that people often strain after an unlivable identity, strive for what cannot be attained. Many aspects of life can only be achieved or known vicariously through some form or medium of the arts. However much the person strives for progress, coherence, a unified self and closure, disorder, discontinuity and patterns of distortion face the individual along the road. Mindless detail, sudden vivid glimpses even epiphanies exist along the same road. And we have to watch we don't overplay the epiphanies, as Bertrand Russell did in his autobiography. In some ways it is not what happens to us but what we make of what happens that is crucial. However important childhood is, autobiographers must watch they don't marginalize their adult experience. It is difficult to balance the various aspects of one's life; in many cases balance is not important.

It is not easy to alter habits and patterns of behaviour, what some might call one's nature. It is also not easy to set up some pattern of behaviour that allows one to persist in the study and development of a chosen line of work or interest and thus achieve that fulfillment that comes from love and work, two of the crucial aspects of life. Much attention can be devoted to this theme in an autobiography since this feature of life often occupies so much of the individual's attention. I trust in my third edition I can elaborate on this theme as well. Some are able to do it and not be distracted, Cezanne for one. He was able to withdraw from the group but yet remained dependent on it.

It is difficult to know what people really think of us; it is also difficult to know what we think of ourselves because this changes with the time of the day, the month and the years. William James says there is "a certain average tone of self-feeling" which we carry with us. As we chart our inner life often we pay little attention to the wider society. Jane Austen is a good example. In all her novels she hardly ever refers to what was going on in European history at the time. In her case it does not seem to matter.

The autobiographer can immerse himself in diaries and letters to give the account a strong sense of individual control. "Private documents are redolent with the feeling we almost all have of making choices and exercising our free will in ways that shape our lives," writes David Ellis. And so, he continues, "the impression these create must be balanced by a consideration of all the determing factors of background?.which suggest that the subject is not, and never has been, free at all."

Finally, autobiography serves as a stimulant, not an inhibitor, to biography. And so, I trust, all that I have put together here about my life may be useful to a future biographer as he attempts to discover the relationship between an emerging world religion and an individual caught by circumstance and by some element of personal choice in its world-embracing fold.

31 August 2002

About the Author:

Ron Price
A BIRD'S EYE VIEW OF 60 YEARS
A: EMPLOYMENT POSITIONS HELD
2005-2000-Writer/Poet: George Town Tasmania -Program Presenter, City Park Radio, Launceston
2004-1999-Tutor and/or President: George Town School for Seniors Inc
1999-1988 -Lecturer in General Studies(1996-1988); Lecturer in Human Services, West Australian Department of Training
1987-1986 -Acting Lecturer in Management Studies and Coordinator of Further Education Unit at Hedland College in South Hedland, WA.
1985-1982 -Adult Educator, Open College of Tafe, Katherine, NT
1981 -Maintenance Scheduler, Renison Bell, Zeehan, Tasmania
1980 -Editor, External Studies Unit, Tasmanian CAE & Resource Centre Association, Launceston
1979 -Lecturer in Organizational Behaviour, Tasmanian CAE & Radio Journalist ABC, Launceston
1978-1976 -Lecturer in Social Sciences & Humanities, Ballarat CAE, Ballarat
1975 - Lecturer in Behavioural Studies, Whitehorse Technical College, Box Hill, Victoria
1974 -Senior Tutor in Education Studies, Tasmanian CAE, Launceston
1973-1972 -High School Teacher, South Australian

Writing With Power: 5 Snappy Rules For Success

Almost everyone could profit from enhancing their writing skills. From writing more crisp meta-tags ? which search engine bots find quite sexy ? to turbo-charging your blog readership by writing with punch, a skilled pen can propel any online effort in the right direction. But who has the time, money or know-how to tackle this daunting task, right? On the contrary, I have just the free and powerful writing clinic for you. We have named it "Writing With Power." And did I mention it's free?

Here, we ? my friends and I ? aim to lend a boost to your writing skills fast. We do this for people all the time by showing them how to use George Orwell's oh-so-practical principles of good writing. Today, I will offer five of them, and show you how to use them with ease. But first I must introduce you to an odd sort of person, whom I call, "Homo Graphicus," and he stars in a very popular fib dubbed the "Myth of the Great Writer."

What does he do? He sits far back in the recesses of your mind, whittling away at another masterpiece. For, you see, he flawlessly crafts only the finest specimens of the literary art, and he does so day-in and day-out. No piles of crumpled paper wads litter his desk or the floor, and he doesn't DO erasers. He simply presses the "insight" button, absorbs the inspired notion, and, with a flick of the wrist, returns to churning out his next scripted champion.

Now, the good news for those of us with all the creative flare of peet moss is this: this man does not exist. There are no great writers. The world knows only great rewriters. The way to produce a fine piece of writing comes by outlining briefly what you wish to say, filling out the floor plan with a few data from your research, and then by sifting carefully through the first draft many times ? systematically. Just follow the rules, step-by-step.

So where's the love? It comes by filtering the unruly items from your draft (with our rules), and replacing them with the beloved features of good writing. Here, you take your very rough draft ? and some will prove rougher than others ? and purge from it all the dross in a step-by-step fashion, with rules simple enough for clever pets to follow. Even Cocoa could do this.

Our first rule, we shall say this way: prefer concrete nouns to the abstract. By "concrete" I mean to suggest that you should employ the kinds of nouns we can all see, taste, smell, hear and see. This would include peanut butter, cars, frying pans, and DVD's. Abstract nouns, on the other hand, insist on playing hide-and-seek from our five senses. Most of the badly overused ones end in "-tion." These include words like marginalization, utilization, and transportation. Good rewriters will make every effort to paint pictures, so to speak, in the minds of their readers. Do not simply tell them, SHOW them. Now be assured that no one has the foggiest idea what "marginalization" looks like, but we all know a marshmallow when we see one. Paint vivid, lustrous ? even golden ? pictures in your readers' minds. Use images that drip honey. So replace the do-nothing abstract nouns in your draft with smoldering wicks, chandeliers of fiery brass, and shimmering scarlet wine (preferably California Cabernets).

Moving on to rule number two, we encourage good rewriters to supplant verb forms of "to be" (e.g. was, were, are, am, will be) with active verbs. Adorn your draft with highly-caffeinated words that careen, thunder, swoop, roar, derail and dance. Comatose words like "is" barely manage to register a heartbeat as verbs. They portray nothing at all. Some politicians, it is rumored, do not even know what the meaning of "is" really is. Yet, who can blame them for wanting to defrock such a flimsy and haggard word? As a good rewriter, you must convict and impeach these lackluster, worthless, and dull-witted imposters ? meaning, of course, lazy verbs ? not the politicians.

Under the rubric of rule three, good rewriting will insist that you vary your word choices. Do not employ the same words too often. This means you must scan the draft to spy out the repeat offenders, so you can give their space to an underemployed synonym. You can plunder any good thesaurus to get these. Variety remains THE spice central to good writing, so spice it up.

Rule number four for good rewriting warns us to keep it short and snappy. Take a step back form your paper for a moment to clean it up now. Go ahead and give your draft a clean shave, and take a little off the top. Trimming from your draft excess words, phrases, and perhaps even sentences, will ensure clear writing that gets right to the point. If your sentence says it in twenty words, find a way to say it in, maybe, fifteen. But watch out for nicks and cuts. Never toss out any important ideas or words essential to your writing task. Yet, when it doubt, throw it out ? or at the least ? give it a fair snipping to keep it lean.

Finally, rule number five bids good rewriters juggle their sentence lengths. Mix it up. If your first sentence spans only a few words, follow this with a lengthier one. Then chase that one with a mid-length sentence. This creates an almost enchanting, writing "flow"? where your readers wonder what will come next. This subtle variety in your writing style draws the reader in, and keeps her coming back. And we know that keeping readers interested remains the best way to keep them.

Now these rules work very well and can improve your writing immensely almost at once, but only if you put them to use. On such topics as these, of course, I have much more to say. And I hasten to do so at: http://scriberight.blogspot.com, giving examples, tips and great resources along the way. Remember, you will need to rely heavily on a fairly comprehensive thesaurus. Don't be afraid to invest a little in this venture.

All the best efforts of the academic world have not managed to prevent the current shortage of good rewriters. Most folks still cling to the "Myth of the Great Writer," and this hinders them from jumping straightway into the river of personal advancement. Don't let a literary fiction keep you from securing your own set of extremely marketable and valuable skills with a little effort and practice. Start today, and come on in ? the water is fine. And did I mention that it's free?

Carson Day has written approximately 1.3 gazillion articles and essays, many with very insightful, if alternative, viewpoints. He presently writes for Ophir Gold Corporation, and specialized in the history of ideas in college. He has been quoted in the past as saying "What box?" and remains at large despite the best efforts of the civil authorities.

You can visit the Ophir Gold Corporation blogsites at <a target="_new" href="http://scriberight.blogspot.com">http://scriberight.blogspot.com</a> (Writing With Power), <a target="_new" href="http://ophirgoldcorp.blogspot.com">http://ophirgoldcorp.blogspot.com</a> (OGC's Free Web Traffic), or <a target="_new" href="http://ophirgold.blogspot.com">http://ophirgold.blogspot.com</a> (Church and State 101)

How To Cut the Clutter and Win Readers

Most of us hate housework.

Nevertheless, even the most hopeless slobs amongst us would agree that we love having a clean, organised house. It looks more inviting. It's easy to find what you want, when you want it. If only it didn't take so much time to get it that way!

If you're lucky enough to have a cleaner, then you've solved the problem. It's someone else's job to clean up and get rid of the dust and the mess. Most of us don't have that luxury. If we want a clean and clutter-free environment, we have to work to get it that way.

It's exactly the same when it comes to writing. If you want a fresh, clutter-free piece of text - you have to clean it up yourself. Readers don't like to be surrounded by clutter any more than you do.

What Is "Clutter"?

"Clutter" in writing may be described as anything that clogs up the channel between the writer's imagination and the reader's experience. If you have a hard time identifying what is clutter and what isn't, use these points to guide you. <li>Be guided by the viewpoint character's thoughts, emotions and reactions. Climb inside the skin of the viewpoint character. What does he/she feel? Think? Decide? When something happens, what would this character's logical reaction be?

<li>If something is not noticed by the viewpoint character, or is not important, don't put it in.

<li>Don't over-explain. Remember that we all come to any novel with a host of experiences behind us. Readers and authors share many common experiences. For example: mention the word 'vomit' and that is quite enough for most readers to fill in the gaps. They don't need you to go into detail about the smell, texture, colour and so on.

<li>Avoid the temptation to personify inanimate objects. If you attribute human characteristics or emotions to anything from a mailbox to a rock, it (a) distracts the reader, focusing his/her attention on something that is not important and (b) reduces the impact of the human character's emotions. (In a fantasy novel, of course, you may have all sorts of strange objects or creatures that take on human characteristics.)

<li>Avoid repetition. This means repeated words or phrases (often repeated because the writer is too lazy to find an alternative) and repeated ideas. You don't need to explain the same thing three different ways.

<li>Avoid words that will be unfamiliar to most readers. Don't take the high road and decide that it's your job to improve your readers' vocabularies. Most of them won't thank you for it. They don't want to put down the book and go find a dictionary. One unfamiliar word isn't a problem; a book full of them annoys the reader intensely. Do you want to annoy your readers? I hope not. An Example Of A Scene Filled With Clutter

Gasping for air, Marcy raced through the dark green forest, not daring to look behind her in her state of raw panic. Tripping on a protruding root she half-fell, but recovered quickly and maintained her reckless headlong course through the knotted vines and lashing branches that were taking evil swipes at her as she ran. She had to get away from her pursuers.

"Ouch!" she yelped as yet another branch attacked her, the 'thwack' of its savage assault echoing through the half-light. Almost falling again she managed to recover, grabbing on to a handy nearby swinging vine to save herself. Wishing she had never set out on this trip, she decided to stop to catch her breath. Taking the opportunity to look around, she suddenly saw a strange plant, its leaves an odd mottled purple that was at odds with all the greenery that surrounded it on every side. What a strange plant, she thought.

Going over to take a closer look, she was intrigued by the way the plant seemed to be in a space of its own. No other plants grew close in the dim light of the forest; this one was entirely by itself. What's Wrong With The Above Scene?

Plenty! I'm amazed you've persevered this far. (It made me nauseous just having to write it.) Okay, I've exaggerated the problems in the above excerpt somewhat to make my point - but I've seen worse. Much worse, actually.

Here are some of the problems in the scene I created: <li> Over-explaining; repetition. We are shown that Marcy is in a state of panic by the way she's racing through the forest 'not daring to look behind her'. It's not necessary to add 'in her state of raw panic' or even 'her reckless headlong course'. Ditto for the words 'strange' and 'plant' - look for the instances of repetition. The fact that a vine is 'handy' implies that it is nearby, and it's in the nature of vines to swing - so we don't need the words 'nearby' or 'swinging'.

<li> Trees are just trees; vines are just vines. Marcy is getting caught up in them because she's running blindly to get away from her pursuer(s). Unless she's in some kind of enchanted forest, the trees could not be taking 'evil' swipes, and they are not 'attacking' her in some 'savage assault'. The writer should be showing Marcy's fear through her thoughts and reactions, rather than attempting to generate suspense through giving the trees human attributes.

<li> Marcy's main aim is to escape her pursuers. Put yourself in Marcy's place. If you were running from someone or something, what would be your main concern? (a) to get away and (b) to make sure they were nowhere close if you had to stop. If you had to stop to catch your breath, is it likely you would suddenly forget your pursuers to look more closely at a strange plant? Of course not. You'd listen for sounds of pursuit and decide whether you needed to keep going or hide.

<li> Make sure your characters act logically. Anything else is clutter. (In this case, if the strange plant is important to the plot, think of a more convincing way to bring it into the story rather than plonking it right in Marcy's path and having her 'suddenly' notice it.)

<li> Avoid long sentences with lots of detail when you are trying to create the impression of haste and fear. For example: "Tripping on a protruding root she half-fell, but recovered quickly, maintaining her reckless headlong course through the knotted vines and lashing branches that were taking evil swipes at her as she ran." Do we feel Marcy's terror? Can we feel the burning of her lungs as she runs, gasping for air? Can we feel the pain as she falls? No, no and no. The writer is telling, not showing. In this sentence, the main character seems somewhat removed from what is happening to her. We're reading about her rather than looking through her eyes.

<li> There's an over-reliance on the '...ing' construction. This is one of the main culprits in making a passage of text slow-paced and repetitive. In the example above we have sentences starting with "gasping"; "tripping"; "wishing" and "taking" - not to mention the other "ing" words that pepper the text: "protruding", "maintaining", "lashing", "echoing", "falling", "taking", and "swinging". Check all your work to make sure you're not showing symptoms of the "ing" disease! These are just a few of the things that can clutter your writing and make it hard for the reader to struggle through. Cut the clutter - and keep your readers turning pages.

(c) copyright Marg McAlister

Marg McAlister has published magazine articles, short stories, books for children, ezines, promotional material, sales letters and web content. She has written 5 distance education courses on writing, and her online help for writers is popular all over the world. Sign up for her regular writers' tipsheet at <a target="_new" href="http://writing4success.com">http://www.writing4success.com/</a>

Writing Personal Statements - Top Tips

WRITING THE PERSONAL STATEMENT TO GET INTO UK UNIVERSITY

HOW DO YOU DO IT?

And the only way to do that has been largely ignored or is unknown by most students.

The failure of the vast majority of students to get admission to their chosen university is one of the great unpublicised stories of our time.

Why do they fail?

Because they think in their terms and do not consider the reader: the admission officer.

They don't even know they are doing it.

But THAT is why they fail.

IN THIS ARTICLE

?????????????????????????.

<li>SECRETS TO SUCCESS

<li>MAKING A POWERFUL FIRST IMPRESSION

<li>AVOID AMBIGUITY

<li>MAKING A PROFESSIONAL IMPRESSION

SECRETS TO SUCCESS

Your first aim is to make sure that your personal statement gets read; start with a powerful selling point that catches the admission officer's eye. Admission officers usually give each personal statement a quick scan before picking the best for a more thorough reading.

Your personal statement must therefore clearly show the most perfunctory reader what you have to offer.

This means that your words need to be short and punchy. See <a href="http://www.getintouni.com" target="_new">http://www.getintouni.com</a> for examples.

MAKING A POWERFUL FIRST IMPRESSION

The first and main section of your personal statement will almost certainly be a career and achievements, as this is the crucial area that shows that you can do the course on offer. Within each paragraph of your personal statement, put details of your most impressive or relevant achievements at the top of each section.

Always end your personal statement on a high note so that you leave the reader with a final positive image of you as they put the personal statement down. Make sure you describe yourself in a way that does you justice:

<ul>

<li>Give evidence supporting your claims

<li>Quantify your achievements

<li>Show that you are a high performer in the most important aspects related to your course

<li>Use clear and positive language

</ul>

AVOID AMBIGUITY

Phases such as 'I supported the change process' or 'I assisted with financial planning for the company' leave the admission officer none the wiser as to what you were actually doing. Make it clear what your contribution was. For example:

'..The position involved analysing past financial performance to identify areas for future improvement and preparing budgets to ensure sound financial planning'

MAKING A PROFESSIONAL IMPRESSION

Your personal statement should have a highly professional image.

<ul>

<li>Be clear and easy to read

<li>Draw attention to the most important points

<li>Be attractive and professionally presented ? utilise the online UCAS form!

</ul>

Your personal statement is crucial to your application. Planning your personal statement is therefore your fist step to success. Gain competitive advantage and order the best editing service on the web.

Our qualified professional writers will edit your statement to perfection ? ensuring your application gets noticed. We recognise that you are unique and, therefore, you will receive customised advice from your personal writer. Increase your chances today!

Wishing you great success,

About The Author

Elaine

FREE personal statement samples? Sign up for our newsletter visit <a href="http://www.getintouni.com" target="_new">http://www.getintouni.com</a>

Keep your Book Dream Alive

Is your book nearly finished, finished, published, or even in its early stages? Do you want to know how to promote it with ease and low cost?

Maybe you have already tried other methods to sell you book and felt tired of?

- Submitting unseen or unheard media releases

- Chasing book reviews that yielded small negligible results

- Selling only a few books at your book signings

- Exerting a lot of effort to travel, to speak, only to reap mediocre book sales

- Experiencing radio and TV talk show low book sales results

- Wondering why your bookstore or distributor has stopped selling your books

- Worrying about who will promote your book now that your publisher has stopped

- Feeling dismayed your book isn't giving you the ongoing, passive income you hoped for

- Feeling discouraged about all the wasted time and money you have spent

Keep Your Book Dream Alive

Just like you, I wrote Ten Non-Techie Ways to Market your Book Online because as an author, just like you, I was tired of the old ways to get my books sold. Lackluster sales and chasing a low-results pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, I turned to the Internet four years ago. I haven't looked back yet.

If you want to keep your book dream alive, become well-known as the savvy expert, share your unique and useful ideas, and make enough money from book sales to take a Caribbean vacation or buy another car, this book is for you. You also won't have to work so hard, travel, or spend so much time and money on marketing or promotion.

If other marketing and promotion campaigns have brought few book sales, left your wallet thinner, wasted your valuable time, and left you with a garage full of unsold masterpieces, you may now be ready to set up your book's virtual marketing machine-the Internet.

Any newbie and non-techie can grab this opportunity as I did. It's as available to you as a friend, a business associate, a support group you attend, or a professional bookcoach.

You can start right now, even if you don't have a Web site. Read these how-to, low-techie ways to start your lifetime book promotion journey like you would eat an elephant-one bite at a time! Watch your sales grow!

Judy Cullins ?2005 All Rights Reserved.

Judy Cullins, 20-year Book and Internet Marketing Coach works with small business people who want to make a difference in people's lives, build their credibility and clients, and make a consistent life-long income. Judy is author of 10 eBooks including Write your eBook or Other Short Book Fast, Ten Non-Techie Ways to Market Your Book Online, The Fast and Cheap Way to Explode Your Targeted Web Traffic, and Power Writing for Web Sites That Sell. She offers free help through her 2 monthly ezines, "The BookCoach Says...," "Business Tip of the Month," blog Q & A at <a target="_new" href="http://www.bookcoaching.com/opt-in.shtml">http://www.bookcoaching.com/opt-in.shtml</a> and over 170 free articles.

===============
Email her at <a href="mailto:Judy@bookcoaching.com">Judy@bookcoaching.com</a>. Phone: 619/466-0622 -- Orders: 866/200-9743

Tell the World About You

You have a new website, or a new business, or both ? or your site isn't getting the kind of traffic you want and need. How are you going to tell the world about what you have to offer and where to find it?

If you have deep pockets, you can start buying ads in newsletters and ezines and hope somebody reads them. If you have even deeper pockets, you can have press releases sent out in major markets all over the country, even around the world. (Actually, those are not deep pockets ? they're more like mine shafts!) OR...

You can write articles for other people to publish in their ezines and newsletters. Who, me? Write? Right. It isn't that difficult, assuming you have an average command of the English language. Or, more correctly, the American language, which is quite similar yet substantially different from English. George Bernard Shaw said, "England and America are two countries divided by a common language." But, enough of that.

The Internet is awash in "gurus", the vast majority of them self-appointed. I make no such claim. I am a practical writer and editor who believes the primary goal of this kind of writing is clear, concise communication. On that basis, I offer some advice and tips:

<li>Write about what you know. If you're Joe or Jane, an office worker whose hobby is gardening, don't write about search engine optimization. Your goal is to publicize your new gardening website or ezine (or both). Write about gardening, and let someone else handle the SEO.

<li>Write a "conversation". By that, I mean write as though you were speaking to another person, one-to-one. You're not writing for some literary journal, but for folks pretty much like yourself. "Talk" to a friend, and avoid expressions like "some of you", which is impersonal and puts distance between you and your reader. Bad idea. Instead say "some people", or something similar. Keep it conversational.

<li>Facts count. If you're not sure about something, find out before including it in your article. Otherwise, you'll become known as unreliable, which can be fatal in business.

<li>Grammar counts. Let me guess: you hated English class and just barely passed. Well, if achieving your goals is important to you, make the effort. Here's a free site that can answer more grammar questions than you can likely ask: <a href="http://www.grammarnow.com" target="_new">http://www.grammarnow.com</a>.

For punctuation questions, get my free guide (in Adobe PDF) at <a href="http://www.catnipchronicles.com/ebook/punctuation_power.pdf" target="_new">http://www.catnipchronicles.com/ebook/punctuation_power.pdf</a>

<li>Be concise. If you want people to read your articles, give them something of value and make them easy to read.

<li>Numbers count. The more your articles get published, the more you will be thought of as an expert, and the more people will visit your website or subscribe to your ezine..

Once you've written an article, how do you market it to publishers who might want to use it? Well, you can:

<li>Search for ezines and newsletters covering your topic and email the individual publishers, offering your article. I used to do that ? time consuming and frustrating. OR

<li>Do what I do ? use <a href="http://OpportunityUpdate.com" target="_new">OpportunityUpdate.com</a> and have them do it for you (No, I am not an affiliate, but we are friends.) Here's what they do:

<li>Promote your article to hundreds of publishers

<li>Send it directly to all their registered publishers

<li>Give you the advantage of great positions with Google and Yahoo, and others (but they're the monsters)

<li>List your article in their "Authors We Recommend" section

<li>List your article in their search directory

<li>Your article gets a full search engine optimized Web page, including your website (in your Author's Resource Box).

<li>Promote your article for a full year ? or more

<li>Submit your article to 40+ search engines and directories

Is it free? Of course not ? would you do all that for free? But, I guarantee you this: it's dirt cheap and much less than it would cost you to do it yourself! So what good is writing if nobody reads it? You want results, right? Go with the pros.

Recap: If you want exposure ? publicity ? and increased traffic/subscribers, write decent articles and have them extensively marketed by <a href="http://OpportunityUpdate.com/doorwaytosubmit.html" target="_new">http://OpportunityUpdate.com/doorwaytosubmit.html</a> .

I don't believe in "luck", so I'll wish you: Good Writing!

About The Author

Kent Butler is an entrepreneur, writer, and editor, who publishes a free cat-lover's digital magazine called Catnip Chronicles . He has a service that makes fully-personalized, custom-made crossword and word search puzzles at <a href="http://Personal-Puzzles.com" target="_new">http://Personal-Puzzles.com</a>, and he edits the weekly journal of iCop, the International Council of Online Professionals, where he is a Founding Member.

? 2004 Kent Butler All Rights Reserved

<a href="mailto:publisher@catnipchronincles.com">publisher@catnipchronincles.com</a>

A Series of Articles on Autobiography

ESSAYS ON AUTOBIOGRAPHY: NUMBER 1

Preamble:

Nearly seven years ago I wrote my first essay on the nature of autobiography. It was some two years after completing my initial draft, the first edition of my own autobiography. I am now working on the 5th edition of that autobiography some twenty years after the inception of this project. I trust this 5th edition will be the final one. I am overwhelmed with a sense of complexity, with feelings of indifference and with a vision of the magnitude of the task at hand. I think I could find the motivation to pursue this 5th edition if I could get a clear sense that the work I am doing in the field of autobiography. I certainly hope that this work will be of quite practical use to my fellow-man in the decades and even centuries ahead. This very notion seems presumptuous and this presumptuousness militates against the pursuit of the goals I began with when I set out to write this autobiography twenty years ago.

Since I find the study of autobiography more interesting that the writing of my own I continue writing these essays. Today I read an article on autobiography and what follows is based on that article. My intention is simply to write a summary of the relevant parts of that article with the long range aim of drawing these ideas together into some meaningful whole.

Even as a retired person with far less on my plate than during my thirty years of employment, life still takes me into corners of activity that keep me away from the kind of academic pursuits that this brief essay involves. My wife's illness, my class in creative writing at the Seniors School, family duties and obligations of home and hearth however minimal, a necessary amount of physical activity to keep a sound mind in a sound body, fatigue after ten or eleven in the evening and an endless assortment of odds and ends have kept me from continuing this simple task. So it is, a day later I approach this essay with continuing enthusiasm.

Errors, omissions, even lies, are part of the fiction or imposture that is autobiography. The creative writer turns to autobiography out of some creative longing that can not be satisfied through fiction. Such a writer finds some peculiar closeness and intensity of effect. It is difficult, in writing autobiography, to keep history and fiction distinct. Nabokov says that the tracing of images into intricate harmonies is what autobiography does. Writers also try to repossess the realities of the past from what appears to be a sterile and fictive world to which he has sacrificed himself. The historiographical transaction that is autobiography does not contain the total freedom or imaginative response of, say, poetry or fiction. Unreliability is an inescapable condition of autobiography. The reader can watch the writer wrestle with truth.

It is important for the critic to understand the organizing principle or purpose behind the work. For the conscious shaping of a life, an informing purpose, exists behind the work. A voyage of genuine self-discovery is an essential component of such a work. This voyage takes place in a narrative past juxtaposed with a dramatic present. Confession, apology and memoir exist side by side as various contradictory and often unstable selves battle it out.

I have been married for 37 years. My wife is a Tasmanian, aged 58. We've had 3 children: ages in 2005 are 39, 35, and 28. I am 60, a Canadian who moved to Australia in 1971, and have written 3 books--all available on the internet. I retired from part-time teaching in 2004 and full-time teaching in 1999 after 30 years in classrooms. In addition, I have been a member of the Baha'i Faith for 45 years. Bio-data: 6ft, 225 lbs, eyes/hair-brown, Caucasian. See my website for more details at: <a target="_new" href="http://bahaipioneering.bahaisite.com/">http://bahaipioneering.bahaisite.com/</a> and go to any search engine and type: 'Pioneering Over Four Epochs' for additional writings.