Well, it finally happened...

Due to an inconvenient truth and some technical perspicacity, the address of the Jammy blog has changed, but only slightly:

http://jammyadventures.blogspot.com

Hopefully my many adoring fans will allow for this hiccup. All sixteen of you. Join us on the new Blog site and stay up-to-the-minute on all things Jammy Adventurish.

Raising Boys

What is it about boys? I would argue that it takes a special kind of tenacity (read insanity) to raise them, if I knew it would be satisfactorily profound, which it’s not. Everybody’s like, “duh.” Boys are “easy” to raise, though, or so I’ve heard some say.

Now I don’t have any girls, so of course I can’t compare and contrast what it would be like against boys. But what I can compare is how life used to be before I had these little savage warriors tearing around my 900 square foot house versus now.

Can I say it this way? There used to be peace. It used to be boring. Not so anymore.

Now there’s slapping, hitting, pinching, fighting, wrestling, hitting with play weapons, hitting with blunt objects, stunt jumping for sport, stunt jumping with malicious intent, stunt jumping to produce injury upon sibling to greater effect, and so on. It’s chaos.

There’s laundry everywhere. How should I know if it’s clean or dirty? It’s just everywhere, that’s all. Random Legos poke up out of the carpet only at the precise moment when a coincidentally bare foot is most likely to impact the jagged edge of them with the most pressure, pounds per square inch. And spaghetti sauce is not meant to be eaten, dear father, it’s meant to be launched off my spoon, placed just-so against the edge of my plate and thwacked like a wee little medieval siege works. Silly daddy, catapults are for kids.

But at the end of the night, when we’ve looked back over all of it and picked out our favorite parts of the day—for instance, “dad, my favorite part of the day was tickles (a half hour marathon that ultimately required medication for yours truly)”—and we’ve said our prayers, life is good. The chaos is good. And I really wouldn’t want to go back to boring. That would suck.

We're going to be migrating soon

Hi, Jammy Adventurists!

Soon, on the sage advice of Mark Kessler at Meaning Creative (@meaning), this blog will be migrating to Wordpress and will be hosted on the Great Jammy Adventures Web site. This will allow us to put everything in one place, plus gain some much-needed traction in the analytics and SEO departments.

What that means is that you'll be able to go to one place for all things Jammy, which, I think we can all agree, will be much better. The Web site will also have a shopping page that will give you more options, more links to more Jammy products in more places, and even a few surprises.

All that will be rolling out as summer lazes on, and hopefully it will all be in place by the time school's back in. That's your Jammy update for the day. Later in the week I'll be posting up some of my thoughts about spaghetti sauce as a weapon, plus more insights about fathering rowdy boys. I guess the rowdy part goes without saying.

Small Business and Faith

It's not easy to startup and run a small business, especially when the economy is so uncertain. I haven't been around long, but I've been around long enough to know that the outlook now is historically bleak.

My little biz, C. P. White Media, Limited Company, has been up and running officially now for over a year. Unofficially, it's been around since 2008 or so, when I finally started going all-in as a writer. I have been a part of other ventures, but this one is unique because it's all mine. I'm calling the shots on this one. If nothing else, it's a point of pride for me that I've managed to complete the first project (the Flying Cowboy book) and bring it to market while simultaneously keeping the company afloat and steering it past that ominous first year marker.

The funny thing about history is that it looks different from the back. When you're staring down big decisions, in other words, they loom large. When you're looking back and you can see things from the perspective of eventual outcomes, it tends to seem like anticlimax. Right now my little business is in that uncharted inbetween; that invisible bridge in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade right in front of it. Though I can't see where my feet are going to tread on the next step, I have to believe something's gonna be there when my foot comes down. And if it is, great. If not, I know what failure feels like and I'm not afraid of it anymore.

That's what I'm trying to communicate here. For all you writers out there, for all you entrepreneurs--you know what I'm talking about. For anyone who has dared to engage the possibilities in your life, I'm right inside your wheelhouse, aren't I? Because while possibility might mean that your dreams can finally come true, it also might mean that your nightmares will come to life and start walking right through your living room. It's not easy, is it, to even begin to try to live out your calling, destiny, purpose, whatever you want to call it.

But while sales aren't what I'd hoped they'd be, and while my margins are slim to none, I'm not even thinking of quitting. It's sacrilege to even write it out. I'm going to keep going.

Me and my ragtag team of advisors and participants have more projects lined up. The Jammy Books will be going e-crazy soon on the iPad, and you'll be able to color them digitally. How cool is that. We're working on developing two more books this summer, and if all goes well you'll be able to buy them by Christmastime. We may even be developing our own line of--get this--jammies. And that will be awesomeness incarnate.

I'm not sure 100% how it will come about. But I've come this far and by all rights I shouldn't be here. Sometimes the "company car" is held together with spit and bailing twine but you know what, it gets from point A to point B fair enough. To put it another way, it's not a big deal to step out of a boat and walk on top of the water if you don't even care about getting wet. I press on to the goal. Thanks for journeying with me.

Thanks, Jammy Adventurists

A big thanks to all the Jammy Adventurists new and old who came out to the Camp & Education Fair at Expo Idaho this past weekend. We added some new Jammy arteests to the fold, who by now no doubt are enjoying their own Jammy Adventure books. We can't do this without you, folks. Thanks again for all your support!

The Camp and Education Fair

Don't miss it! tomorrow from 11-5, come on down and check out C.P. White Media's booth at the Treasure Valley Family Magazine Camp and Education Fair. This year we've partnered with local startup Verge Rock, Meridian's only school of rock.

You can stop by our shared booth and pick up signed copies of the Great Jammy Adventure of the Flying Cowboy, plus hear local artists jamming and maybe...just maybe...even pick up a tip or two from Verge Rock's guitar instructors.

On top of all that, you can help Verge Rock to win a $50,000 grant from Pepsi's Refresh Everything contest.

So come down and say hi; it promises to be a grand day out! Admission is free to the public.

Rediscovered Books and the Demise of the Local Author

Here’s one thing I never wanted to write about. But as we go through life we encounter the good, the bad, and the ugly in due course; it’s all in one package.

Aaron Patterson, my publisher/partner in the industry, dropped one of my books off at Rediscovered Books in downtown Boise the other day, and it wasn’t long before I received a voicemail about how it wasn’t “a good fit” for their inventory.

And that's fine, but when I returned the call (I had been on vacation) I was given a lecture about how my book will “never be a success” because “full color books at this price point are all hardcover” and since there is nothing on the spine of the book “it will only get lost on the shelf”. I was told in short that my book is not saleable—at least at Rediscovered Books.

And that’s still okay by me. What they fail to understand though, perhaps willfully, is that the book is what it is not because of random chance and arbitrary mindlessness, but because of well-considered and informed choices. There’s no print on the spine, for instance, because it’s not practical to put any there on a 32 page perfect-bound softcover—either it will not show up properly because of manufacturing inconsistencies, or it will simply be way too small to be useful. And it’s softcover because, dear God, it’s expensive enough to print. Their ultimatum to me that I sell it at $8 in their store means that I would lose money on every single copy. The local indie author doesn't have a whole lot of options anyway, but after this experience I'm afraid my options are far fewer than I had suspected to begin with.

During my browbeating over the phone, though, I wanted, at least, to say that she didn’t need to be so rude to me. I wanted to tell her that I have poured two years of my life into the concept and the book. I would have liked her to have known that the book is not in fact a “full color” book, but I’d like to feel safe in assuming that she, in the process of rejecting it, was observant enough to notice that it says all over the cover, front and back, that it’s the OK-to-color-in-picture-book, and that, if one was to crack said cover open, one would notice that it is not printed in full color because it’s meant to be colored-in by the reader. But since she was lecturing me, and also since I understandably wanted to terminate as soon as possible a phone call that amounted to abuse, I didn’t attempt to get a word in edgewise.

What's really amazing to me is that my experience is not the exception; rather, it seems to be the rule. I've talked with authors and publishers who know, and Rediscovered Books--which bills itself as a haven for indie and local authors--has become hostile to us. Some of us are published with major houses, too, and yet, for whatever reason, none of us (or should I say, none of some of us?) are good enough for them. The question is, what now?

I can only speak for me, so sadly, Jammy Adventurists, Rediscovered Books will not be one of our retail partners. I’ll try my luck at Barnes & Noble, in the local authors section. And Hastings. And other kid-focused places like Just Kid’n Around in Meridian. And whoever else wants a piece of the action. Ironically, none of these are as hostile toward local authors as the "local indie" book shop. In fact, none of them are hostile in any way, except Rediscovered Books. Bizarre, huh?

Smackerwackerfantastic

So we have this game we call smackerwackerfantastic. It’s the most amazingly awesomeness-packed activity. I dunno, I guess some weirdos call it “tetherball,” or something totally lame like that. Anyway, it’s awesome, because the object of the game is to get the ball entirely wrapped up around the pole in YOUR direction (not your oponent’s direction) while simultaneously either missing it when you try to hit it or taking one right in the pie hole. Kids are supposed to lose their teeth anyway, right?

I decided the other day to take the boys on a walk to the local public school. There’s a playground there, and I figure if nothing else, I can somehow exact my vengeance upon the tax code by at least using the facilities mischievously (my kids go to a school where they can learn about novel stuff like Biblical ethics). Imagine my hooliganesque delight when I stepped onto the property and discovered two completely unattended smackerwackerfantastic poles calling out to us. Oh snap. It’s on.

And we had tons of fun. You know, there’s a lot to be said for making time (instead of complaining that you just don’t have enough) to do something totally analog with your kids. Leave the smartphone at home, dads. And moms. Take your face out of the social drug dispensary for 30 minutes and enjoy your kids. You’d be surprised how awesome they are. I know I was refreshed by my little warriors—you know, all they really want is to be in your life. And one way or another, they’ll get your attention.

So we played a game that we invented a few years ago (actually while on a little retreat to Hawaii). We walked to and from, stretching the legs a little. And when we got home, wanna know what we did? We played chess! Me, my seven year old and my 2 year old. The best part was hearing my oldest say, “checkmate.” At least it was until I realized he was right.

Kid History

If you haven't seen the Kid History videos, you're missing out. I just have to share this, because it's so awesomely KID. Plus it's hilarious.

Coloring Contest Correction

The coloring contest that features The Great Jammy Adventures at Maui Wowi Coffee and Smoothies in Meridian doesn't start until after Easter, Jammy Adventurists. You can still head on in and enjoy great Hawaiian coffees (I recommend the Molokai), but if you want a chance to win free books, ya gotta hang on for a little longer. More updates to come!

Pajamas Day and Story Time

Mark your calendars, Jammy Adventurists!

Tuesday, April 26th at 11 AM Chris will be reading/ performing the Great Jammy Adventure of the Flying Cowboy at Just Kid'n Around in Meridian. Remember to wear your jammies too...even the author will be jammied up for this one. It promises to be tons of fun, plus you can buy your very own copy of the book! As always, crayons are included.

Free Books!

Pick up your entry forms now: there are three age brackets (sorry grownups, they're all for kids) at Maui Wowi Coffee in Meridian. Click here for a map. This is a coloring contest, featuring one of the illustrations from our new book. Each age bracket's winner (i.e. best Jammy Adventurist) will receive a signed copy of The Great Jammy Adventure of the Flying Cowboy, absolutely gratis. That means "free books".

Book Signing and Sale

Coming up on Monday, April 25th, from 8-11 AM, I will be live and in person at Total Woman Fitness in Meridian. I'll be selling signed copies of The Great Jammy Adventure of the Flying Cowboy, for all you aspiring Jammy Adventurists out there who either haven't got yours yet, or need more. Click here for a map. I hope to see you there!

Kids, Hot Chocolate, and Public Places

Sometimes ya just can't take the kids out and about, ya know? I tried to attend a little writer's meeting with Aaron Patterson at a local coffee shop, Maui Wowi, and thought, "Hey, self, just set them up with some coloring books and some hot chocolate and you'll be golden. They'll be fine."

Yeah, that didn't work out. So the meeting is proceeding without me and I'm sitting with my sugar-amped children blogging about the life of a stay-at-home dad. If nothing else, this much is positive. I get more hang-out time with my boys. Meeting attempted and aborted--it morphed into just dad and the boys hanging out and coloring our Jammy books. And that's a good thing.

Nice Folks in Portland

Hey Jammy Adventurists, the Portland Saturday Market is the thing to see. We met and talked with lots of unique individuals as we strolled along there yesterday. We also met the purveyors of Bella Mi Soap; the most amazing fragrances and product presentation I have personally ever experienced. You've got to check out their Facebook page and see what they've got on offer.

We had a great conversation about entrepreneurism, and they were kind enough to take one of my cards. It's funny; everyone I talk to about this book gets instantly giddy about it--probably because I'm permanently giddy about it--but they seemed to be interested in starting a Jammy Adventure of their own. I'd say go for it. One is never too old to have a little fun.

Blogtalk Radio Appearance, Take 2

Giovanni had to adjust our scheduled time slot, so listen up! [why am I suddenly flashing back to USMC boot camp? weird...] My interview is now scheduled for 11:30 AM eastern time. For those of you in Rio Linda, that means 9:30 local. The cool part is that since it's on the Web, you can cruise on over to the link and listen even if you miss the live show. Don't miss it.

Big News!

This will be quick.

The Great Jammy Adventure of the Flying Cowboy is currently at the converter and will soon be available on Nook color and iPad. Oh snap-tastic. People get ready.

Blogtalk Radio Appearance

This Thursday at 8AM local (10 eastern), I'll be a guest of Giovanni Gelati for an hourlong interview about my book, how we did it, and some of my opinions on all kinds of inane babble. You should check it out, if for nothing else than the entertainment value of a writer trying to speak in coherent sentences. If you want a writer to feel utterly exposed, just take away his ability to backspace and/or delete. I suppose this makes me some kind of jet-setter now.

Thank you!

Jammy Adventurists, thank you so very much for coming out to show your support for our first book signing. Joey Zavaleta, the illustrator, was there signing books with me, which was a total blast. We connected with lots of kids and parents, gave out some crayons, and sold about 30 books. All in all, a respectable turnout. This is something that I believe will grow larger and more special over time, as so many parents and kids who have never met me or Joey before expressed their excitement and delight at our unique concept: the OK-to-color-in picture book.

I talked with Joey in between signings and sales about starting work on the next book in the series: The Great Jammy Adventure of Ninja Agent. We'll be introducing some new characters, a new hero, and some new villains (who will never win). Joey is very excited about getting going on this in the months to come, and so am I. The Great Jammy Adventures may soon be often imitated, but never duplicated! This is a great concept, and I'm convinced it's here to stay.

Again, thanks for all the love at the first signing, and stay tuned to this space for more events...coming soon.

We're scheduled for the first Jammy book signing! Mark your calendars for March 19th (next Saturday). From 10 AM to 2 PM, I'll be signing and selling personalized copies of the Great Jammy Adventure of the Flying Cowboy. Just Kid'n Around in Meridian has been kind enough to allow us to set up in the cafe area for this very special event. Come on out and buy a book or two, and bring the kiddos too, because Just Kid'n Around is a great place to play for kids of all ages. Here's the address:

2374 E. Cinema Dr.

Meridian, ID 83642

Just copy and paste it into Google Maps if you're not sure where we're gonna be. The closest landmark is the new Harley-Davidson store, right off I-84.

Our Jammy Menu is as following:

1 book for $15

2 books for $25

3 or more books for $30

We're able to accept cash and all major credit cards.

This project has been two years in the making, and we're really proud of our work and want more than anything to share it with all of you. Come on out and meet Chris the author, Joey the illustrator, and maybe even Noah and Jaden, the inspiration. We're excited!

Check us out on Facebook, check the Just Kid'n Around Web site for more info, and follow our blog!

Oh and one more thing: bring a box of crayons, because your kids are going to want to get started on this OK-to-color-in picture book right away.

Book Signing/Release Party

Soon and very soon, Jammy Adventurists, I will be announcing the book release party. Location and time/date are still TBD, but I wanted to let you know that it's in the works. Check this space for updates regularly, or you can follow the blog by clicking the "follow" button. Neatofrito. Hope to see you soon.

Shipping!

The Great Jammy Adventure of the Flying Cowboy first run is shipping! Preordered copies should be in your hands in a couple of weeks. I'll be scheduling some events where you can come out and meet us, buy a book, get cool stuff, and get your books signed by the author. Stay tuned to this space for updates, and we'll see you soon, Jammy Adventurists.

Print Update

The cover and the interior are at the printer now! Next step: look over the proofs. After that, if all goes well, we'll pull the trigger on this pea-shooter. Stay tuned.

We're down to the wire! (again)

My dear Jammy Adventurists, the time has come. Judging by how things normally are this time of year, what with the end of football and the temporary insanity that such woeful occurrence bringeth, I'd say it's about time, for crying out loud.

Why just this morning I was looking over the final layout pdf. We've had some problems with colors, illustration formatting, fonts, layout, manuscript (kids' books have MANUSCRIPTS?!), cover, copyright page, and probably my cantankerous nature, but now almost all of those problems have been solved (I'll never stop being cantankerous; ask my long-suffering wife). We are rounding the final turn and the final stretch is in sight.

So hang in there, folks. Probably in 2-4 weeks, this baby's gonna be going to print.