A thousand words

Website of the Week: Conor’s Mildly Thrilling Tales

CONOR’S MILDLY THRILLING TALES

Conor’s website was once named, “How Conor is spending his money.” At that time he was spending it traveling the world for a year and a half, which is by all means is a respectable way to lower one’s bank account.

But then Conor settled down and now he considers his tales to be only mildly thrilling, if you consider settling in Kathmandu, Nepal, founding a home for trafficked children, and searching for the children’s parents in remote mountain villages mildly thrilling.

Not only is Conor’s blog interesting, it is written well. His writing style is funny and conversational. It’s not easy to write about serious subjects and maintain a great sense of humor. But Conor does.

His blog postings have slowed as of late, but he seems to have a lot on his plate: leaving Nepal, getting married, and maintaining his NGO, Next Generation Nepal, from Florida. I expect and hope Conor will continue writing. I for one would like to read a book about the last few year of his life.

If you are still reading this post and haven’t clicked over to read Conor’s Mildly Thrilling Tales you are doing yourself a disservice. I write about my underwear; he writes about orphans.

If you don’t comeback, I won’t blame you.

GO!

I have an agent!

No longer am I alone in this world to sell and promote the writings of Kelsey Timmerman. I have help. Her name is Caren.

I have officially signed with the Caren Johnson Literary Agency. I met her at a writing conference in my hometown, Muncie, Indiana. I sat at a table with agent-hungry writers and asked Caren, “I have a couple of agents interested in my book and I’m not sure what to do. Any thoughts?” To which the agent-hungry writers rolled their eyes and said a version of “oh, you poor thing.”

Yes, it was a good problem to have, but a problem nonetheless. Caren asked me what my book was and she said something like, “There aren’t that many original ideas out there, but this is one.”

She had me at “original.”

I hadn’t really started seriously looking at agents until they started finding me. For nonfiction books you don’t have to have the book completed, only a book proposal outlining your idea, the market, the content of the book, and a sample chapter. My intention was to write my book proposal first and then start looking for agents.

I had been monitoring the book deals on Publishers Marketplace for the past year looking for agents that were selling works similar to mine and I had a rough idea of who I was going to send it to, but, to my surprise, other agents contacted me first. So, instead of doing the whole query-the-agent game where my proposal sits in the slush pile of authorial dreams, I focused my efforts on those who were interested already.

Still, this was a bit overwhelming. Some of them wanted exclusive reading rights, which meant I couldn’t send it out to anyone else while they held it hostage. I read articles on the internet about how courting more than one agent would ruin your career. How much agent shopping can a fella do without pissing off other agents and ending up with none of them interested?

And then Caren called a few days after I sent her my proposal. She was excited. I was excited. She offered to represent me. But even though I was jumping up and down on the inside, I remained calm and asked for some time to think about it. The following few weeks I googled the heck out of Ms. Caren Johnson. She’s been written about on Media Bistro, on Publisher’s marketplace, and many other of the right places. She has 30 some reported sales – more than any of the other agents I looked at. She has a blog.

She met all the requirements I was looking for in an agent:
1. She liked my writing and my book.

2. She didn’t request I snail mail her my proposal. Live in the now people.

3. She lives in New York, the heart of the publishing industry. I live in Indiana where I have absolutely zero publishing contacts and I don’t want my agent to be from Alaska.

4. She’s driven. After working for several different agencies she’s now on her own.

5. Her clients seem to like her an awful lot.

Regardless of how naïve my requirements were, they were mine, and Caren met every one of them.

No one is more excited about my book than me. Trust me. But Caren is close. If anyone can get a publisher excited about Where am I Wearing? it’s Caren.

An excerpt on my underwear

If I was a OneDerWear wearer, I would have never created such a strong bond with my favorite pair of underwear. Here is a passage on them in my sample chapter on Bangladesh:

Multi-colored Christmas ornaments are printed on the boxers and the phrase “Jingle These” runs around the waist band. Eighty-three percent of people in Bangladesh are Muslim so Christmas isn’t celebrated, but its products are exported.

If you look closely, MADE IN BANGLADESH can still be read on the faded tag. I got the underwear as a gift years ago and, ever since, they’ve maintained a regular place in my underwear rotation regardless of the time of year or holiday season.

I wore them my freshman year of college when I rolled out of my dorm bed to bark at my roommates who were having an overly raucous game of Madden football at 3:00 a.m. It’s hard to be taken seriously when you’re wearing Christmas underwear in April.

I wore them when I took the GRE. I remember because they were on backwards, which I took to be a bad omen of my performance on the test. After all, how can you expect to get a score that will impress grad schools when you can’t even put your underwear on properly?

My piece “Explaining Baseball” on the World Vision Report

The piece aired this past week on the nationally syndicated program. Hear what it’s like to be a non-baseball playing American who becomes an international ambassador of baseball for a day.

Listen to it now.

The theme of this particular show was “Helping Out.” You can listen to the full show here.

I highly recommend listening to this piece on Scott Neeson, a Hollywood big wig that turned his back on living the high life and is now giving hope to the children of Phnom Penh’s city dump in Cambodia. I featured the dump in Sundays “a thousand words” photo.

What I’m reading: Nobodies

Nobodies by John Bowe landed on my front porch this morning. It’s about modern American slave labor and highlights migrant laborers in Florida picking fruit, Indian welders in Oklahoma, and garment workers in Saipan.

I’m especially interested in reading the chapter on the garment workers. Saipan is a US Commonwealth and, being such, can label the clothes they produce as MADE IN AMERICA, despite workers’ wages around three dollars per hour.

Kinda makes you feel less sunny inside when you wear clothes MADE IN AMERICA, doesn’t it?

Three dollars per hour doesn’t seem like a fortune, but it would to many of the workers I met in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and China. Even with paying their workers less than half of the national minimum wage, I’m surprised that the factories in Saipan can compete with their counterparts in developing countries. I’m guessing that it has something to do with the lack of regulation and tariffs on Saipan products since they are seen as MADE IN AMERICA.

A few of the questions I’m hoping Nobodies will answer for me:

Ethically, should I feel guiltier about drinking fruit juice made from USA fruit or fruit in Colombia?

Should I feel guiltier about wearing a T-shirt made by, what Bowe refers to as, Slave Labor in the USA or workers like Arifa in Bangladesh?

I don’t think there is a difference. The people that produce much of our stuff live lives much less fortunate than our own. Whether they live in the USA or somewhere in Asia, there’s a big spread between producer and consumer. What I think Bowe’s book is going to bring up is that we are allowing the abuses within our own borders where we have laws in place to protect laborers (but so does China). In the USA, where we verse about freedom, sing the national anthem before ballgames, and recite the pledge of allegiance before the start of the school day. We can stop slave labor in our own country, but we don’t.

But we accept all of this.

Alternating summers, the fields around my childhood home were planted with tomatoes. Migrants picked them. I saw the wood boxes around the corner they lived in and called home. I went to school with their sons and daughters for a few months every year until the fields were picked clean. Isabella Lopez didn’t speak much English. My neighbors, good people and hardworking farmers, were their employers. The migrant workers were paid poorly. I knew it. All migrant workers are paid poorly.

I never thought much about it, really, just accepted it.

Hopefully Bowe’s book can do its part to make our country a fairer, freer place, where we don’t accept injustices without question.

Watch the interview - John Bowe on the Daily Show

OneDerWear disposable underwear

Some people just don’t have any sentimental attachment to their underwear. These are the sort of people that would actually wear OneDerWear disposable underwear.

Google ads are often ridiculous. If I could choose, I would disable them, but the BootsnAll gang has gotta make some money some how and I’m cool with that. Anyhow, I was checking the site yesterday and glanced at the auto-generated ads. That’s where I first heard about OneDerWear.

Here’s some marketing mumbo jumbo:

OneDerWear is an ultra-light disposable underwear created for traveling. Designed to provide the utmost comfort and convenience, OneDerWear disposable underwear is 100% cotton and ideally packaged for maximum space efficiency. Each package contains five compact pairs of individually wrapped disposable underwear that can fit in the palm of your hand. With OneDerWear, you simply wear and toss! By the end of your trip, you’ll be surprised to find plenty of luggage space for gifts and souvenirs.

I have considered the space efficiency of my underwear while packing for a long trip, but only in the quantity I take. I’ve never thought to myself, “Boy, if only there was underwear that would fit in the palm of my hand.” Let’s say I was going on a trip for 10 days. Normally, I would take three or four pair of underwear and wash them as I go. But if you decided OneDerWear was for you, you’d have to take ten pairs or more. It wouldn’t be until day six or seven that you were carrying as little underwear as me.

How comfortable can OneDerWear be? Sure they fit in the palm of your hand, but do they ride up your crack?

From the site’s “USAGE” section:

Exercising
After an extensive workout at the gym, do you really want to put on your sweaty underwear after showering? Just throw some OneDerWear in your gym bag, and you will never have to wear sweaty underwear again!

Or you could actually take a pair of clean underwear in that gym bag you’re carrying around!

Camping/Adventure Traveling
OneDerWear disposable undergarment products are perfect for camping because you don’t have to use limited backpack space with re-packing dirty underwear (peeeewww!). With OneDerWear, you can just Wear and Toss! Also, OneDerWear is friendly to the environment.

How in the world is wearing a pair of underwear once and then tossing them into the woods environmentally friendly? The saying goes, “Take only pictures, leave only footprints,” not, “…leave only footprints and OneDerWear.”

Also, who is the marketing genius that wrote, “…re-packing dirty underwear (peeeewww!)”?

Government Use
OneDerWear is also great for troops whose military stay requires them to reside in areas where access to washing facilities may be inconvenient or impossible. With OneDerWear there is no need to wash! Just Wear and Toss!

“Sir, we’re under attack!”

“How did they ever find us, private?”

“Sir, I think they may have followed our trail of OneDerWear.”

“Aggghhhhh! OneDerWEARRRRR!….I’m hit private.”

“Sir, you’ll be fine.”

“I’m dying. Tell my wife I love her. If you look in my duffel, you’ll find a few souvenirs I picked up for her. Please, give them to her. I had a little extra space thanks to OneDerWear. And they seemed like such a good idea at the…..”

College Students
With the busy schedule of college students, who has time to wash clothes. OneDerWear disposable undergarment products are great for college students and their busy lifestyles.

I’ve never had more free-time than when I was in college.

I OneDerWear they came up with such a dumb idea?

A check is nice, but…

…comments like this are nicer:

Oh yes, I do tune in during “worktime”, it’s just I don’t get paid for changing diapers, cooking meals, hanging up washing blah-de-blah. At least not in money. In fact tuning into WAIW *is* work for me = on more than one occasion I’ve gathered the kids (that’s the work bit) round and we’ve had a look at what you’ve said, and on good days had a chat about it as well. So much more interesting than teaching them from textbooks;-) Thanks.

The first piece of writing I received a check for was THIS. I got paid twenty dollars. It was the best twenty dollar check ever. Over the past three years my paydays have grown in size and frequency, thankfully.

I started out writing for free for the, now defunct, Key West City Paper. Then, paydays were only comments like the one above from Rachael, a kiwi blessed with a boatload (maybe two) of children who took the time from cooking, diapers, and general child-rearing. Now, it’s comments like Rachael’s that provide the warm fuzzy feeling that came along with that first twenty dollar check.

Today, let’s take the time to send a letter, email, or comment to a writer we appreciate. Whether it’s a columnist at a local paper or a blogger, I guarantee you that a few nice words will go a long, long way. This is not a shameless plea for you to reach out to me. Rachael has done that, and I’m good for awhile.

So, with that I’m off to Rachael’s blog, Intricate Simplicity.

A thousand words

Scavenging at the Phnom Penh city dump

A proclamation

In an effort to reclaim my weekends, from now on Saturdays will be “Website of the Week” day. I’ll simply post a link and a short blurb about a site that has caught my eye. Feel free to email me suggestions about sites to feature.

This week’s website:

Go and tell this guy where to go.

Readership is always down on the weekends, anyhow. I might as well save my precious words for peak time. It seems that most of you tune in to WAIW? when you’re at work getting paid. Shame on you. I’ll still probably do some regular posting on Saturdays, when so inspired.

With this proclamation we now have two scheduled days here at WAIW?:

Saturdays – Website of the Week

Sundays – A Thousand Words