Ronnie Blackwell

Today I got to do something very unusual for me—I went birding. And I wasn’t in my backyard! My writing schedule and my summer cold have held me prisoner for most of July. John Atkins and I broke out of the hub city and headed south for a day of playing hookie. Our first stop—Picayune and Trietlers, a real Cajun chaucuterie shop transplanted from Saint Bernard Parish after Katrina. Mr. Trietler’s sausages and hogshead cheese are a taste of old Chalmette when its butchers were famous from Slidell to Baton Rouge. I was crushed when I drove up to an empty shop and what should be known far and wide as a Blackwell note taped to the door. Closed for Vacation.
Something about my leaving Hattiesburg causes people to shut their barbecue shacks, potteries, ice-cream stands, hot dog parlors, plant nurseries, and four-star restaurants to flee before me. What can I say? It’s a gift.
We soothed our disappointment by going to Rouses Grocery and buying cheap wine and liquor. Then we went and ate at T-LeBlancs, a great family-run Louisiana home-cooking restaurant. I see people eat all kinds of great pot-food and blue-plate lunches here, but I just can’t pass up their sloppy roast beef po-boy, and John always eats red beans and hot sausage.
Then we spent the rest of the afternoon poking around Slidell, Bayou Sauvage, Irish Bayou, Chef Menteur, The Rigolets, and White Kitchen. Birding was slow, but we did manage to find five Swallow-tailed Kites, two Anhingas, and a really big gator at the White Kitchen boardwalk. The once-beautiful roadside park there is ravaged now, and the live oaks and cypress along the slough are still broken and ragged. But there is plenty of water now, and the marsh seems healthier than I’ve seen it in years.
There was a time Lin and I visited that marsh almost every week, going and coming to and from New Orleans. I stopped there so often on Sundays that I started calling it going to church. In those days to walk through the live oaks, thick with resurrection fern then stroll the boardwalk through the shady gallery of moss-laden Cypress and finally emerge into the brightness of the vast freshwater marsh, teaming with herons, ibis, warblers, egrets, and eagles was…. Well, it was my church and more beautiful than any man-made church could ever be.
This most beautiful spot has been vandalized, choked with exotic weeds, starved for water, trampled and plowed by wild hogs, blown flat by Katrina and scraped bare by FEMA, but the eagles still nest on Eagle Slough, and the Gray’s Tree Frog still sings in hope at every passing cloud. Today it felt like Church, again.
Take care,

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Two articles published in four days! The Hattiesburg American ran my article on butterfly counting on Thursday and my article on our trip to Balticon on Sunday. It has been a red-letter week for the newspaper-writing part of my job, but I ended up missing the weekend’s butterfly count in the Delta National Forest. I’ve had a grim summer cold for the last week, and I’m tired of it. I am hearing that the Delta counters saw good numbers of butterflies and had very pleasant weather for butterfly counting. Just my luck!
But I have been making some progress as a homebound writer. I wrote an article on spec about Qito and his bird-calling abilities that will appear in the American Birding Association’s newsletter, Winging It. It should make the fall issue. And I’m doing some serious work toward self-syndicating a bird/nature-related column. Right now our working title for the column is Things with Wings. Yes, it’s an allusion to Emily Dickinson’s poem. Hope is the thing with feathers. Maybe I should call the column The Thing with Feathers. What do you think?
And I’ve written two more articles, one already submitted to the Hattiesburg American. The other one is a bit long for that venue, but I think it will find it’s own market. Just when I think I’ve thrown this cold off, it reaches up and bites me, again. I can’t believe I’m writing this but I’ve got to go get under a blanket and warm up a bit.
Stay warm,
Take care.

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I’m now twelve days into being a full-time working writer, thanks to the incredible support from Lin and being kicked out of my comfortable academic nest by my former employer. It’s an exciting time to be a writer but very scary. This month I’ll make more from my jury duty check than from my writing. I’m writing every day and loving it. I’m also working the business of writing every day and tolerating it. Still the biz seems to take up way too much time. This entry is about my latest battle with the biz.

Lin and I published my first mystery novel, Serve It Cold, in 2005 under our Ronnalin imprint through a revolutionary print-on-demand business called Lulu.com. Lulu gives the power of the press to the author. It also gives the author the responsibility. I have to keep track of all the edits, format documents, create covers, convert documents, upload documents to Lulu, and on and on. When this train runs off the track, I’m the reason it does, and I’m the one who has to get the smokestack pointing up, again. But this is me we’re talking about. I haven’t dedicated a nationwide podcast to my attention deficit like Paul (ADDcast.net), but I am attracted to shiny toys, things with wings, and road trips. You can say that I have a tendency to wander.

While wandering this past winter, I failed to notice that Lulu was upgrading their distribution system to reach more retailers. When I did notice, I checked my links at Lulu.com and Amazon.com and found everything working. I went ahead and bought the upgrade in distribution, and polished Serve It Cold through the spring before hitting the publish button in June. A new button appeared which said, You have to order a copy of your book and approve it before the distribution process can begin. Last week in the wee hours of the morning I decided that the book was ready for world-wide distribution. I opened my project window and was warned, Each additional modification to your work after approval will incur a hefty printer/distribution fee. No problem, Lin and I have been editing this version for months—I clicked that button. The screen blinked and printed Thank you for approving your book for distribution. Are you sure your ISBN# appears on your copyright page?

What? Is my ISBN number on the copyright page? I have no idea. I grab my review copy and check. Of course it’s not. OK, I’ll have to do that again. I’ll just hit the back arrow.

Welcome to the Lulu, would you like to start a new project? Arrrrrggh!
I convert new files to pdf then distill them to embed fonts, upload cover art, wrestle with the pricing wizard for an hour, and I find myself back at the publish button. I click it; it asks about my ISBN number and I swear to the machine my number is correct and present; the approve for distribution window appears; it says, You have to order a copy of your book and approve it before the distribution process can begin. Kracken Spittle and Brimstone!

It’s now 3:30 in the morning. Only me and the swat teams are still awake, I can’t see well enough to count my fingers, and I sure as hell don’t remember how many fingers I started the night with.
But by damn, I’m a working writer living my dream.

One day Serve It Cold will be available to stores all across the country and beyond. For right now, please order from Lulu.com. And check out the two special Podiobook versions, each with its own Jonny C short story. These special editions are ONLY available at Lulu.com.

Take care all,
Ron

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Last Saturday we conducted our annual Audubon Hattiesburg butterfly count, otherwise known as the bugs with wings death-march. I’ve just written a column about butterfly counting that is in the queue at the Hattiesburg American. Suffice it to say, counting butterflies is hot work, miserable work, excruciatingly difficult work. I have always thought we should do this count in early March, but the butterfly folks continue to point out that we count butterflies when the greatest number of butterflies are out there to be counted—poor excuse, I say. I’m not really good with butterflies, anyway. The critters do too much flitting around to suit me, and trying to distinguish among the many almost identical species while they’re on the wing makes me long for a big flock of gulls to sort.

  But on the other hand, we do get to look at butterflies. And not only do we see different species than the ones in our own yards, the count gives us an excuse to really examine even familiar species. The Greeks called the butterfly psyche, their word for soul, and they remain both familiar and exotic, even today.

Our next count will be held on July 21st in the Delta National Forest not far from Rolling Fork and Onward. Chuck Gramling stumbled on this butterfly paradise in 2002, and our group has been back to count every year since. This is prime overflow bottomland and the potential for woodland butterflies is staggering. One year we reported more than 140,000 butterflies (give or take 10,0000). After just a few minutes in the blood-warm heat of the delta, I become a sweating butterfly magnet and get blanketed with them. People flock to me to count the butterflies and leave with their own constellations of winged psyches.

“It feels funny,” someone said. “What are they doing?”

I said, “Don’t worry. They’re just trying to suck out your soul. It won’t hurt at all.”

I suddenly had my flock of flutter to myself. I have to admit that it is a strange feeling to be proboscis-probed by dozens of little gray and green creatures—wait, wait a minute, that’s another story altogether.

If you’re interested in taking part in our July 21st Delta National Forest butterfly count, call Chuck Gramling at 601-268-3859.

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