Baby Killer or Ditching an E-book
[Following on from walking out of a last ditch attempt to make some money, waitressing...]
Like a rabbit in the headlights, I didn’t know which way to turn. But, in a way I only recognise fully now, ‘coot’ helped me.
How? With a realization that turned into an acronym seven months later but was probably already steeping in my mind. The coot then helped me kill the weakest of my chicks…
The acronym aimed to inspire people to take time to have their feet on real rather than virtual land. I became passionate about folk ‘having a COOT’:
C ommunicating
O ffline
O nly
T ime
Chris (my Fiance’s brother), a talented graphic designer, created a COOT emblem suitable for screen use to indicate online unavailability.
Of course I had to promote its use, wrote a catchy and somewhat risqué poem explaining what having a COOT was all about [bear bloggers check out my other blog /loveisverbing if curious].
The irony being that the best place to effectively target users was... ONLINE!
Coots are hopeless fliers. They need a long runway. The acronym is still on that runway despite having shared it with networking groups. May be one day it will take off…
But why a COOT?
Because it’s the perfect bird. Digging deeper - its feet provide the clue. Unique among waterfowl, the coot doesn’t have webbed (ha! web-bed!) feet but a set of long ‘lobate’ toes. It makes for assured and stable walking on land, while also allowing for surfing on water. The analogy is clear.
Black and white. The benefits to health when limiting screen-time were tangible (and are now well documented).
I became a COOT fanatic! Nothing fanatical lasts long, as I also learned…
My stance got written into the beginning and the end of ‘Tea Trail No 1. ~ Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire’. And naturally involved having to kill the chick of it being an e-book.
‘Tea and poetry go together like scones and jam… You can’t hurry either, nor can you enjoy them online – which is why I took the decision not to publish the Tea Trails as e-books.’
At the end I explain,
‘Seduced by online marketing advice I cobbled it [the booklet] into an e-book withdrawing it a week later, realising it was meant to be kept in glove compartments or bicycle baskets and read out loud.’
What I didn’t know what that Mother Coot was going to drown the booklet completely. She was right to do so, although of course she waited until it had been born.
Tea Trail No 1 was published on my birthday 2014. It died within a week, since two of the tearooms featured closed.
I was about to turn fifty-four – a ‘nine year’ in numerology and one associated with endings.
I’d rather liked the idea of launching a book on or around my birthday. With hindsight, perhaps unwise that year. And in a weird echo, my next launch precisely six years later saw the same kind of early death, this time due to the Covid lockdown.
I’ve ditched it as an auspicious day to host a book launch!
There were other weak ‘chicks’ which disappeared as I tried to raise more physical and offline creative offspring.
I tried caring for a friend’s elderly anorectic mother – and lost the friend's friendship in the process. I launched 'Six Small Sips’, a postcard sized monthly newsletter on a subscription basis but only managed to pour two cups…
But some there were also some poetic jewels, some of which have been reincarnated.
One from that Tea Trail has lodged in The Menagerie, a perfect prelude to where we’re headed next: The Aviary [coming up next post but one bear or bubble blog readers!].
Chris also lost a precious ‘chick’: a four-wheeled friend who’d kept him safe for tens of thousands of miles towing caravans across the UK and France…
Returning from the Easter Opening of Zippo’s Circus – Chris’s largest client – ‘Mother Coot’, 'Mother Nature’ or something we will never understand, nearly killed us.
In the aftermath I thanked Life we were still alive and Chris - maybe - was a little less atheist and a touch more agnostic.
#e-books #coot #booklaunch