Ruth King Porter's Blog
May 9, 2018
Promotion
May 4, 2018
A five-star review for The Simple Life by SJL
March 21, 2014
PRECARIOUS
Last fall, a few days before Thanksgiving, our oldest Scotch Highland cow had a calf we weren’t expecting. There was very little snow,
One day old
although it was cold, and the cows were trekking down the hill below the barn to the far end of their pasture. Maybe they thought they might find some green grass. Joyce, the mother cow, had the calf down there, and when the cows came up the hill again, she didn’t know whether to stay with her baby or go with the herd. She went up and down several times, and then Bill carried the baby to the barn. He thought Joyce would follow, but she got confused. She followed almost all the way and then ran back down to where the baby had been born.
Finally, after a lot of running around, we managed to get Joyce shut into the barn and alone with the baby. Joyce is a good mother. We thought the baby would be fine once everyone had a chance to settle down. But the next morning, it was obvious that she had not been on her feet and so she had not had any milk. She was getting weaker.
We called the vet to come and look at her. He said the baby couldn’t stand up because she had a selenium deficiency. That is a common problem in Vermont,
Joyce and her baby
although it is more often seen in sheep. We have mixed minerals available to the cows all the time, but perhaps Joyce didn’t get enough or was too old to absorb them properly. The vet gave the baby a selenium shot, and we began to feed her from a bottle. Joyce would have been glad to feed her, but she couldn’t do anything for a baby who couldn’t stand up. In a day, because of the shot, the baby was able to stand up while she drank from the bottle. Our granddaughter named her Precarious. Her life certainly seemed precarious. The vet said she had about a 10% chance of surviving.
We made her a warm room of hay bales with a heat light in the middle. She got stronger, but it was sad to see how lonely she was. She had us, but only when we came to feed her. After a week, when she could walk, we showed her how to get to the other cows. Bill built a little pen, so she could be near them, but protected. We were afraid the cows might knock her over, although they are always gentle.
After about a week, we opened the gate so she could go in with the other cows
A week old
while we stayed nearby in case of accidents. She was hesitant and afraid at first, but then she must have realized for the first time that therewere other creatures like her in the world. At first she walked around, but she got more and more excited, until she was galloping and bucking in pure joy, thrilled to find that she wasn’t alone in the world.
With the herd
After that, we let her out to spend time with the other cows every day, and soon we were able to fix a gate partway open so she could go in and out as she pleased. Now she has a friend, a calf who is about five months older than sheis. That calf has learned how to use the opening in the gate to go to Precarious� room where there is always hay and a heat light. So they spend a lot of time together, and the other calf has learned from Precarious to be very tame. They both love to be brushed and patted. We are also teaching Precarious to wear a halter and to walk and whoa and gee and haw. It’s always tricky to lead the cows to a new pasture, and we’re hoping that we can use Precarious as a leader.
Trying out the halter
Drinking milk
Precarious at four months
February 5, 2014
March 29, 2012
If You Want To Write
“The guys that wrote the best songs were the guys that wrote the most songs.� That was said by the daughter of a Tin Pan Alley songwriter. But it’s obvious, isn’t it? If you want to be good at writing, you need to do as much writing as you can. And there’s a corollary to that—you need to read as much as you can too. That’s the way to find out how other people have done it. Read the things you like best to learn how to write things you will like. And train yourself the way an athlete does. I spend time every day practicing being able to sit down, pick up my pencil and go, before the fear and doubt have a chance to make me timid. I also spend time writing without knowing what I’m going to say or where my story is going to go. I find that when I write that way, I stumble upon interesting ideas that I didn’t know I had, directions I couldn’t have planned for. But that’s what I do. What you should do is figure out what it is you want to write, what kind of writing you want to get good at, and then practice that a little every day until you train yourself. That seems much more useful than going to writing workshops where you write something and then have other people tear it apart. Quentin Tarantino said, “I didn’t go to film school. I went to films.�
A Writer of Vermont
Until I moved to Vermont I thought I would always be a reader of other people’s stories. But after I had lived here for a few years, I began to want to show people what late twentieth century Vermont was like in all its wonderful complexity. What I try to do is to write the story so that you feel as though it’s something that’s happening to you, that you are there in the place I have described. I take Hemingway as my model. No one would guess that, because my subject is so different. But the method is the same. It’s what people mean when they tell you to show not tell. I try to get myself out of the middle, so there’s nothing between the reader and the events that are unfolding in the story. That’s what Hemingway did. He said that after you finish reading, you feel “that all that happened to you, and afterwards it all belongs to you, the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.� That’s what I try for.
I sent THE SIMPLE LIFE out to agents and to publishers and got no response. I sent it out perhaps fifty times, and I probably should have sent it out five hundred times. I stopped when an agent said that I would never find a commercial publisher unless I had a book that would sell 50,000 copies. Clearly a quiet book about rural Vermont wasn’t sensational enough to do that. A small university press might have taken it, but I was afraid the book would have to be changed in ways I didn’t want it to be changed, and I knew small presses hardly ever had budgets for marketing. So I decided to publish it myself, not with a vanity press, but through a company that Bill and I started for that purpose. If we had realized how much more difficult it is to market a book that is self-published, we might not have taken it on. But we made a beautiful book, so I guess I’m glad we did it. And we did all right. We sold more than a thousand copies and came close to getting our money back. So when I finished ORDINARY MAGIC, we never really considered publishing it any other way. But by that time, there were e-books on the scene, and it was much harder to sell print books.
I feel as though I have learned how to do every step in the making of a book, from the writing to the distribution. There is one thing I still need to learn, and I hope I can, and that is how to get people’s attention for my book. Everyone who reads my books seems to like them a lot, but how can anyone read them if they don’t know about them? Almost all reviewers have a policy of never reviewing self-published books. There is one wonderful exception—Vermont. I have gotten great reviews in lots of Vermont newspapers and in Vermont Life Magazine. It’s just one more example of the independent-mindedness of Vermonters. It’s one of the things I love about Vermont and one of the reasons I want to write about it.
December 24, 2011
Free Books
Would you like a free copy of one of my books? I want to get them in the hands of readers, so I have decided to send them to people who would like to read them. I haven’t decided how many to give away. I’ll decide that later.
I published THE SIMPLE LIFE in 2006. It was distributed by Baker and Taylor and by Amazon. I put it out at the end of January, and by May so many books had sold that I had to get more printed. During the summer I got a contract with another distributor that sounded wonderful. It was 
an exclusive contract, so I had to stop selling books through Baker and Taylor and Amazon. That contract turned out to be a disaster, and I was left with most of the books I had printed the second time. Still, it looked as though I was getting close to breaking even.
I finished ORDINARY MAGIC and published it in 2009. Seeing how successful I had been with THE SIMPLE LIFE, I had two thousand books printed. (It’s much cheaper per book if you get a lot printed at once.) But by that time, everything in publishing had changed. People weren’t buying books the way they did just a few years before.
So here I am with an attic full of books. Well, it was never about the money anyway, but I would like to get my books into the hands of people who would read them and perhaps be moved by my stories.
Would you like a copy of either THE SIMPLE LIFE or ORDINARY MAGIC? 
Send me an e-mail with your address, and I will send you whichever one you would like to read. If you read that one and want to read the other, send me another e-mail, and I’ll send you the other one. It’s as easy as that. If you are pleased or grateful, you can return the favor by putting a comment on my website about the book, and especially what you liked about it. Maybe your comments will inspire someone else to ask for a free book. You could give the book to someone who would like to read it. You could tell your friends to e-mail me and ask for their own copies of my books.
I write because I love to write, and because I want to describe the world I live in and share it with other people, the beauty and the pain and the joy that is around me. I never set out to become well known or to sell a lot of books or even to turn a profit. Considering how hard I worked on writing and rewriting and how many years it took me to produce two novels, it would be pretty silly to think in terms of making any profit at all. So send me an e-mail and ask for a free book, no strings attached. I would love you to have my books. 
November 21, 2011
A Good Chicken House
The Chicken House
Our chickens live in a discarded ambulance. It’s the body of the ambulance mounted on a flatbed trailer, so we can move it. We move the chicken house (with the chickens inside) into the vegetable garden in the late fall when the garden is finished for the year. The chickens spend the winter there, scratching up insects, eating the last vegetables, and fertilizing the garden for next year. In the spring we pull them to a shady spot behind our house. They like to hang out under the raspberry bushes when it’s hot.Fresh Eggs
It’s the best chicken house we have ever had. It has electricity. It’s quite warm in the winter. The chickens roost and lay their eggs in the little cubbyholes where the medics used to keep their medicine.
Inside the Chicken House
We don’t put a fence around our chickens. They can roam wherever they like in the daytime. At night we shut them up inside the house. That doesn’t protect them from all predators, but it does help. The dogs keep predators away too. It’s a pretty nice life for a chicken.October 14, 2011
An Idea of How to Publish a Book
View from the Porch
I published both of my novels myself. I don’t mean that I hired a vanity press. My husband, Bill and I did it by creating a publishing company of our own. We hired a designer and a small press, and they contracted out the job of printing the books. By following the instructions in a book called The Self-Publishing Manual, I managed to get the necessary copyrights, Library of Congress numbers and ISBN numbers that the books needed. The books are beautiful. It was expensive, but we sold enough copies of The Simple Life to get our money back. Since then, the publishing business has changed so much that we haven’t done nearly as well with Ordinary Magic. (There is more information about this venture on my website under Bar Nothing Books section.)However, I made two serious miscalculations. The first was that I thought the book wouldn’t be perceived as a self-published book if it was produced by its own press. The second mistake was just as dumb. I had no idea how important and how difficult the marketing part would be. So, although I’m not sorry I did my books the way I did, I couldn’t recommend that anyone else take the same route. But it doesn’t matter how you publish your book, if you aren’t a celebrity, you still have to learn how to do your own marketing.
Apple Tree
The other day I had an idea of a much more sensible way to publish a book. When the book is finished, get it done by a print-on-demand publisher. I don’t think it’s very expensive. The publisher, if it is a reputable one, would get the ISBN and copyright and other numbers the book needs to have. Then get the book produced as an e-book for the Kindle, the Nook, and whatever others are around, because that’s where the sales are these days. After that, I would concentrate on internet marketing. Later on, when the book has got a large enough audience, it might make sense to do a beautiful hardcover version.
October 7, 2011
Reading To Mother
Mother has always loved to read more than anything else. That’s not surprising since she is the daughter of Max Perkins, the book editor who published Hemingway and Wolfe and Fitzgerald. He said, “Nothing is as important as a
Max's drawing of Mother reading
book can be.� About ten years ago, Mother’s eyes began to fail from macular degeneration. It was the thing she was most afraid of. She was eighty-six. She tried to keep reading with all kinds of complicated magnifying glasses, but the day came when she couldn’t read at all any more. You never go completely blind with macular degeneration, but it’s a cruel disease, because you can only see out of the edges of your eyes. In the center what you see is a gray film. So you can’t see anything you really want to see, only a glimpse of what’s off to the side, in other words, what you aren’t really interested in looking at.Mother listened to audio books, but about six years ago I began to read to her over the telephone every afternoon
Mother when she could still see
for an hour. Both of us love it. We have read hundreds of books together, all her old favorites, War And Peace, my novels, lots of memoirs and histories. We have read all of Thor Hyerdahl’s books several times. She says she likes to hear about people doing adventurous things because she knows she isn’t going to have any more adventures. Once we got interested in the Mississippi River and read Mark Twain and everything else we could find about the river.Sometimes we stop and talk about what we are reading. Sometimes when we are reading one of her old favorites, she will say the next sentences before I can read them to her. Sometimes she makes surprising comments. We read Alice In Wonderland and then Through The Looking Glass. She said, “Looking Glass isn’t nearly as good as Wonderland. He was trying to do the same thing over again. It’s forced.� Well, she’s Max Perkins� daughter, after all. Now at ninety-six, her memory isn’t as good as it was. But she doesn’t forget the books she has always loved so much.
