ll I can say is that my anime shirts introduce me to a lot of young people. I got me talking to the baristas at Framework (Mattie, Mars, and the rest). And it introduced us to Lily.

She’s a young artist (everyone looks young to me, but not every artist looks like an artist). She works in an undisclosed restaurant that the wife and I go to after the Zen sit. She’s a perky little thing and makes me feel old just talking to her, but she’s trying  to find a way out of  food services and into art. She’s tried a webtoon, some art stickers (I’ve got a cute lama of hers stuck on my dash, and if you know how precious that mini is to me, that’s saying a lot). She also produces game videos. She has a friendly, snarky way of chatting during her broadcasts (of games I have literally no idea about, since I play “grandpa games”) (shit, like Asteroids and Minesweeper). If you’d like to see one video she’s done (one that had my wife and me laughing at her frustrations) check out the link below.

LilySmash and the ‘World’s Hardest Game’

The point is, one of her videos hit over 40k viewers, which is damned impressive. This Dog Ear column (a look at publishing, the internet, and everything media) might get a hundred views. Originally I’d planned it to boost my book sales for a career that never launched (begun on the shores of Carthage, ended in a traffic accident). But I’ll be the first to admit – I don’t relate to modern media and promotion. The idea of sitting on a panel at a book show, not to pass along your knowledge but to flog a book, gives me a cringe. I don’t get it. I come from another world, the world of the 60s (when I grew up). My understanding of media is to send a book to a couple of publishers and hope, and not skydive off a building, write your title in gasoline in the park, and I don’t know what else. Guerrilla marketing. Word of mouth. Buzz. All that shit. I cannot do it. I don’t think that way.

But Lily does and is trying to get some sort of artistic career going. And for that, I wish her well. It sure beats bringing food out to the book-reading, anime-shirted geezers at table 5.

Good luck to her! Search for her under LilySmash.

>>>OLD STYLE PLEAD FOR YOU TO BUY ONE OF MY BOOKS. PLEASE!<<<