I couldn’t sit still and edit and lay out articles at the kitchen table all day, so I had to go out and cut our acre of grass on my riding mower to calm me down. I’m restless that way. It’s not the grass that’s important to me; it’s the sense of mental order cutting the grass gives me. It used to be that prior to deadline I’d reorganize all the office furniture. Employees thought it was a bit peculiar. But I knew that if I rearranged all the office furniture I’d somehow get the mental order I needed so I could relax and do deadline. Weird huh? Most people think I’m sane, but it’s possible I have a screw loose. I find that a sense of order in my life frees up my mind. I cannot think well among disarray. I also don’t like crowds, or giving talks in front of more than a few people. In fact, in the few times I have had to give a talk in front of more than a handful of people, my mind just about short circuited and my body did it’s version of hyperventilation. It’s probably all connected somehow. Now that the grass is cut after two hours of riding my mower, I can sit down and proceed with deadline. The hens laid 10 eggs today. There are only 13 hens so they are in a groove, which, of course, adds to my sense of order that things are going well around here. One egg was a little tiny thing, which happens rarely. Our chickens typically lay AA eggs. I’m going to enlarge their enclosed yard shortly after deadline. They are free-range chickens when we don’t have a garden, and it doesn’t seem fair to coop them up in a small yard for the growing season. What a softy I am, in addition to having a screw loose. The issue looks strong, has the right “mix,” but there’s still a lot left to do by Thursday the 19th. Lenie, my superhuman wife, goes into overdrive during this deadline week. She does the final detailed layout of the entire magazine, right down to filling in left-over white spaces with small ads or articles so we don’t have any “holes’ in the issue. She also does final read-thrus of the articles. It’s 68 degrees today. The ocean is probably flat, although I can’t tell due to the cloud cover between my sunny deck and the ocean a mile or so away. But I know there are fish down there.

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Deadline progresses as usual with everyone doing their jobs efficiently and quickly. We’ve got it down pretty good now. My presence is still needed, but not as much. The ladies–they’re all ladies on deadline except me–are very capable and work well together under Lenie and Lisa’s guidance. We picked a cover today. It will be a photo, rather than a Don Childers painting. Going back and forth from issue to issue between a painting and photo for a cover is supposed to be a big taboo in this field, but we violate the “rules” all the time.

Silveira’s main article won’t be in until this weekend. He’s always late. Drives me nuts. I’ll stay at home today and edit and finalize articles, leave spaces for ads, trim Ask Jackie down to size. Lenie and Annie will spend today through Monday setting articles. Monday we’ll set ads. That’s always tricky and requires me, Lenie, and Lorraine, the ad manager, working closely together for about four hours. Have to get the ads right, with correct placement and correct codes, if the advertiser has a tracking code.

Everything is electronic now. It seems like only a few years ago we pasted stuff eight-up on boards for the camera. It’s so simple now that anyone can master the technical end of things, provided they are willing to take the time to learn the necessary computer programs. But it still takes a lot of work. I sit back mostly and act like the big shot, giving my blessing to tasks like I’m the Archbishop.

As I am about to post this, Annie has just emailed me the final layout of Dorothy Ainsworth’s article, which is our lead. Looks great!

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The ocean is flat as a pancake today but I’m already committed to deadline tasks at the office in Gold Beach. Isn’t that a shame? After a week of a rocky Pacific, its blacks, lingcod, and halibut beckon me to come and catch them in my underused boat and I have to work. My two youngest boys aren’t too happy either as I’ve committed them to come in with me and cut the grass and pick up the papers around the office building. I’m paying them, but that doesn’t matter. They want to fish.

The bright side is I’m into the Letters section of the issue, and I always get a thrill out of reading letters. BHM is important to many readers and sometimes I don’t realize just how important until I begin reading the stacks of letters we get. I have to pick and choose which ones will get printed, and I cut out parts of some (I leave three dots in the place of words cut) because they are simply too long. If you want your letter printed in its entirety, make it short. Many letters are redundant with others, such as the ones praising us for wrapping the mailed issues in plastic, so I choose only one to use. Some people have sent two letters so I use only one to give other readers a chance.

I’m also reading Jackie Clay’s Question and Answer section. Because we didn’t use the column last issue, I now have 13 pages for that section. That’s too many so I’ll have to cut at least five pages. So far I haven’t found many letters to cut because the information is so good. Hard decisions, but most readers want variety. As popular as Jackie is, the issue can’t be all Jackie. Mas Ayoob is also back after being cut last issue. The omission of these two writers’ articles from last issue generated a lot of letters and emails asking why. What can I say; I try to introduce new stuff, or longer articles that cover other topics in more detail. Someone has to be cut. They’re back this issue though. Richard Blunt only goes in every third issue or so, so his absence will provide some room. His presence in last issue generated letters praising his return to the magazine.

My nearest neighbor, Jamie Carpenter, dropped by some more wood yesterday. He lives on 500 acres behind me that is owned by his father, Arnold, a man of about 80 years. Jamie is my age and has never been on a computer. I told him I’d use his photo in my blog. I don’t think he has any idea what a blog is. He and I are good friends; I sometimes bring him the extra eggs our chickens lay. His son, Shannon, often works for me doing odd jobs.

Time to go and put this magazine together.

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So here we are on deadline again for the 107th time in 18 years. Drop dead day, which is when we must Fed-Ex the issue to the printer, is July 19. From now til then will be hectic.

Lisa has done a lot of the layout prep work on the articles, and both she and I have talked to various writers as they prepared their articles. I spent all day yesterday going over them, deciding which one will lead the issue, and whether or not the “mix” of articles is okay. I make a lot of important decisions at this point on how to play stuff in the issue, which articles still need art by Don Childers, what needs beefing up or cutting back. I often make a quick scan of suggested headlines and change some of them, or change their font size. I edit the articles that need a tweak, but leave most of the proofing and grammar correction to others. I look for the important stuff; a minor error in grammar is not as important as omitting a necessary ingredient to an article.

I’m very good at all this and fit into a day what a run-of-the-mill editor would take a week to accomplish. Experience and knowing what I want gives me the speed. When an article does need a good edit, I’m careful to leave the writer’s voice intact. This is important so the whole magazine doesn’t read like it was written by one person. Too many editors have a heavy hand when it comes to editing writers. They think their personal view of writing and grammar is everything. This is a weakness in an editor’s ego, I believe, or they are simply not skilled. If you have a good writer who knows his or her subject, let that writer alone to the greatest extent possible. If you have a writer who is strong on knowledge but a bit weak with his words, still edit him or her with care. People have their own voice, and that voice does not have to reflect your college professor’s English.

If you have a writer who is weak on knowledge, then we made a mistake buying the article. I generally kill a weak article, even if I had previously requested it from a writer and have already paid for it. You never know until you actually have the article in hand whether or not is is good enough. There are times, however, I have had to cancel a good article simply because it was off target for BHM’s audience. I’ve done this with my best writers. Very often it is my mistake by failing to give the writer the direction I wanted taken. Other times the writer makes an erroneous assumption about what the readers need to hear. In the end, I use my best judgment and I don’t let a writer’s sometimes sensitive ego influence my decisions. Some people think I am stubborn, or downright dictatorial. But that’s okay. When it comes to editorial content, BHM is not a democracy. Committee decisions don’t exist in my editorial office.

That said, I have a strong cadre of writers, many of whom run their own successful businesses. They are as determined and as qualified in their businesses as I am in mine. And I have a very good staff. Lisa Nourse is my right hand gal. She coordinates nearly everything in the office, including the entire staff, writers, and articles. By the time I get to the articles, she has organized them, set (layed out) many of them, and made critical suggestions about whether or not they are strong enough. We are on the phone several times a day, and emailing back and forth. She also works closely with the writers and with my daughter, Annie, our editor-at-large who has the artistic skill to lay out the key articles. Every successful magazine needs a Lisa.

I have yet to go into the office since our Midwest trip. I like working out of my home. When I’m tired of doing magazine work, I go out on the deck and hit golf balls into the woods. Lenie goes into the office every day, thank goodness. That’s another story for a future blog. She’s gold for BHM. Good thing I took that walk on the pier.

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Getting back to my July 7 post, “One of the secrets of BHM.” It is important for any of you aspiring publishers out there to understand that you don’t really need to know how to write well to publish a successful magazine. My good friend, Dave Belanger, publisher of Countryside and Small Stock Journal, is not a writer, yet he is a far more successful publisher than I am. He took over Countryside from his father, Jd Belanger, a writer like me, but neither Jd nor I possessed that gift of business sense and management that a Dave Belanger has. For Dave, the writing and editing are secondary to the actual business part of the magazine business.

I approach the magazine business from a different viewpoint than businessmen like Dave. I want to change the world to my view of how it should be. That’s why I delve unabashedly into politics, with both John Silveira and I ticking off a good percentage of the readership on occasion with our one-page commentaries at the font and back of each issue. To me, magazine publishing is not just a business, but a passionate, and needed, undertaking to make the world a better place, which to me means making people more free of government and more reliant on themselves. BHM, to me, is really a magazine about freedom.

A magazine like The Mother Earth News also includes politics, but they hopped aboard that popular, safe environmental bandwagon that half the world is riding. Many of their articles have a “green” slant: Save the planet, stop global warming, etc. I think most environmental politics is pure bunk and opportunism, but it’s a good movement to hitch your sled to if you want a lot of subscribers. I know Bryan Welch, the publisher of TMEN, a little bit and I think he’s doing a pretty good job with Mother, much better than the previous couple of publishers did with it. Like Dave, he’s a very good business manager.

If I didn’t have Lenie backing me up on the business end, I’d probably stress BHM to its financial limits with my insistence on freedom (spell that political) articles. But I can’t help it. Once I stop publishing commentaries about freedom, Libertarian politics, destructive Big Government, self-serving politicians, phony environmental scams, and the like, I might as well get out of the business because I won’t be interested in publishing anymore.

But there is an upside to tackling political topics in a how-to magazine, at least if you write about them with a lot of thought. Silveira and I approach our topics carefully, writing with logic and moment. We make people think deeply, and despite how ticked off some of them get, they cannot justifiable accuse us of being just political hacks (like many mainstream newspaper columnists) with a political agenda to push. That makes BHM a magazine of some note, in part because we are the only magazine on the planet that dares mix Libertarian and relatively conservative politics with family type how-to topics. BHM is read for its political content almost as much as it is read for its how-to articles, and that says a lot for a magazine that devotes only two pages of each of its 100-page issues to commentary.

It also says a great deal about how to persuade more people that freedom itself is a worthwhile goal. We don’t push politics into the faces of readers. We give them plenty of other useful articles to read. If they want, they can even skip over the two pages of politics, and the magazine is still the best how-to self-reliant read out there. Maybe it’s this small dose of politics we inject into BHM–well thought out and well written, and limited to a small portion of the whole magazine–that makes John’s and my commentaries more digestible to many people. The commentaries themselves typically support the idea of self-reliance, which is the theme that underlies most of the how-to articles. Since being more self-reliant grants an individual more freedom, it is a pretty good combination of how-to articles and commentaries.

In the Feedback section of the Backwoods Home Magazine website is a letter from a reader, Ken Young, that also speaks to this point. It was posted July 9.

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Lenie cooks 95 percent of the meals at our house, but I’m the main weekend breakfast cook. I have one specialty: fried potatoes, which are sliced thin and cooked in hot olive oil so they get nice and crusty. In a separate pan I cook up sliced onions, green peppers, mushrooms, and carrots in Canola oil. At the end of cooking, I marry them together in one pan, then drop in some scrambled eggs that our chickens probably layed the day before. This morning Lenie made up a nice fruit salad of grapes, melons, bananas, cantaloupes, nectarines, and plums. With three different types of hot sauce and ketchup, it was delicious. We eat good at our house, often barbecuing off one of the decks. Eating is one of life’s great pleasures, and Lenie loves to cook. The only rule at meals for the boys is you can’t eat, then bolt from the table. You have to stay awhile and have conversation. We typically eat off our large front deck, which is one of three Trex decks I’ve built onto the house. I chose Trex because I was tired of scraping and refinishing a wood deck every few years. The price was comparable to good grade redwood. I built the underpinning of the decks with twice as much wood and fasteners as most people use, so they will outlive me, my kids, their kids, and the house. When you jump up and down on them, there is not the slightest movement. “Built like a tank,” is my motto. We’ve got an acre of lawn off this deck, and I actually enjoy cutting it with my ride-along if it’s not too hot. It’s too hot today at 90 degrees plus, so I’ll do some indoor jobs and read and write. Beyond the lawn we have a nice conifer forest that is now home to about a thousand golf balls my boys and I have hit into it from a pad on the deck. I really like this place. Five acres is just about the right size piece of land for us because we’re so busy putting out the magazine. We have a large garden and 14 chickens. We’re surrounded by forests, with our nearest neighbor on one side a half mile, and on the other three quarters of a mile. We have no neighbors looking out about a mile to the ocean, and our back door has forests clear to the Kalmiopsis Wilderness. There are lots of locations like this in America, believe it or not. Our 6373-mile trip just completed a week ago revealed many of them, just looking from the highway. Can you imagine what’s out of sight of the highway!

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Publishing a magazine involves a lot of coordination among various people such as writers, editors, office staff, artist, webmaster, weblog administrator, distributors, printers, mailing outfits, list marketers, etc. At BHM, Lenie and I divide up these jobs, with me taking care of most of the things that have to do with writing and the internet, and Lenie taking care of the entire business side of the magazine, plus dealing with various printers and list marketers. Her job is much bigger than mine, but mine is time consuming nevertheless. With whatever time I have left, I write.

When I began the magazine back in 1989, I had the romantic notion that I was starting an enterprise that would allow me to do a lot of writing. Writing has turned out to be a small part of what I have to do to keep the magazine alive and of good quality, but it does allow me a middle class living while I pursue writing on the side. That’s actually not a bad thing, since most writers barely make any living at all from their writing output. It’s just the nature of the game. The market does not pay writers well, unless you are among the fortunate few who make the big time. It’s sort of like the life of a basketball player; if you make the NBA, you get paid big, but if you don’t you starve.

Since coming back from our three-week driving trip to the MREA Fair a week ago, I’ve been doing a lot of coordinating with BHM’s webmaster, Oliver Del Signore, our weblog administrator and editor-at-large, Annie Tuttle, and our editorial coordinator, Lisa Nourse, to get the magazines new weblogs up and running smoothly and to get the next issue ready. At my level, I mostly delegate the hundreds of details that must be accomplished. I look over everyone’s shoulders to make sure that what they have done works to my liking.

Publishing is like any other business, requiring a manager to keep tabs on all the important tasks that must be accomplished. But as much as I do, and as important as what I do is to the making of BHM, it is not the most important job at BHM. The most important job is making sure there is enough money in the bank to implement all the other tasks. That most important of all jobs falls to Lenie, who is always on the lookout for a proper mail list to which the magazine can be marketed.

Most magazines, in fact, do not even have the luxury of employing a person like me who can look after the writing that goes into a magazine. Most magazines have business managers at the helm who look after keeping the money flowing in, while employing an editor like me much further down the totem pole. It is this fortunate marriage, literally and figuratively, of my skills as a writer and editor and Lenie’s skills as business manager that, I think, sets BHM apart from many other magazines. The key guy at BHM is an actual writer, but I have a strong financial manager backing me up to make sure I can do my thing. When it comes to maintaining a quality magazine, that’s an enormous advantage over other magazines.

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Ever had an F-14 Fighter Jet dive on you? We did at Gold Beach Harbor at the start of July 4th celebrations yesterday. We had gone down to the harbor entrance anticipating the flyover of two jets. While my family stood on the north jetty at the entrance to the harbor, I was looking up the coast expecting the jets to come in from the south. Suddenly a lone jet came out of the Rogue River right above our heads. By the time I got my camera cocked it was out of sight as it went into a steep climb. Then it dove on us, leveled off near the water, and headed back up the river. What a sight! All the while a large Coast Guard boat guarded the entrance of the harbor to keep boats from crossing the bar into rough seas. Every year we lose at least a couple of boaters who venture across the bar when it’s too rough. Last year we lost a crab boat plus its entire crew of four right at the harbor entrance. We have one of the most treacherous harbor entrances on the Oregon Coast. You can get out of the harbor in safety maybe two months out of the year. I take my boat out of the harbor in Brookings, 27 miles to the south. You can get out of that one in safety about 11 months out of the year. Tons of stuff to be done after you’ve been gone for three weeks. We’re very busy here at BHM. Notice that we’ve launched David Lee’s blog. Jackie Clay‘s is taking a bit longer than expected. We also expect to launch John Silveira‘s blog right after this issue’s deadline of July 19.

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I don’t mean to criticize the rest of the country, but my area in Oregon is a better place to live than anywhere else. I don’t even have to wear my sunglasses anymore because the cedar and pines absorb enough light so you don’t have to squint in the direct sunlight. The water out of my spring tastes better than any I’ve drunk in the last three weeks. The temperature is a humidity-free 75 degrees. My garden soil is thick, rich loam that will grow anything. The air I’m breathing, which comes off hundreds of miles of Pacific Ocean, is probably the cleanest on earth. Even my neighbors are nice, and the nearest is at least a half-mile away. Dorothy was right. But I guess I’m just bragging, as people are wont to do of their own country neighborhood. We stopped in the redwoods, at the Richardson Grove in northern California, 70 miles south of Gold Beach for our final relaxation spot. Hundreds of different types of wildflowers seemed to line the highways leading to our home. When we did get home, about 11 pm, we unloaded quickly and slept for about 10 hours. One of our cats, a black one named Blackie, died while we were gone, but the other four and Molly, our black lab, were well cared for by Silveira. The chickens were fine too, even Larry Bird, out rooster, who Silveira said he would have liked to have killed at 4 each morning. But there was lots of work to do today after three weeks away from home. The garden beds were overgrown and the grass was high, so we all spent the day outside cutting grass and pulling weeds. We even had a couple of cords of wood that a neighbor had dropped to stack. Jet lag began to set in about 5 in the evening, and I realized the best thing for this Irishman to do was write a blog entry and have a beer.

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