Category: See the World

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It has now been one year and three days since I last published a book. See the World! has been out there since June 10, 2025. I browsed through the pages Friday afternoon and saw that a few of the prose poems I selected for the next book are already in STW! I will have to consider that as I approach the final edit.

I’ve been collecting blog posts into books since 2010, when I gathered a group into Refuse to be Afraid. See the World! is my 10th such collection. I also have seven books of fiction in print-on-demand and ebooks. I don’t exert a lot of energy on marketing, and so my 17 books each sell zero to a half-dozen copies in any given year. Who would have thought? If you build it, they will not come if you don’t point the way.

Like the nine books that preceded it, See the World! is a roughly organized group of these reflections I share every day. This particular grouping is 72 entries including the Introduction and post-concert Author’s Note, one entry for each year I had lived as of June 10, 2025, but that’s only interesting as a number, it wasn’t intentional.

Perhaps I am not a famous author because, as I admit in that introduction, “There is little rhyme or reason to what I share.” You never know, when my daily post drops at 3 a.m. Central,  what sort of content you will find, so I don’t appeal to any specific target audience. Still, continuing my introduction from a year ago —

“… I do have a couple of themes.

“First, I want what I write to encourage, enlighten, and/or entertain.

“Second, I want to reflect what Jesus said were the two greatest laws on which all of his teaching was based: Love God and love our neighbors, and by the way everyone on Earth is a neighbor.”

I have found, especially with my books from the last six years, that you can open them to any page and find something that will expound on one or more of those themes.

For that matter, you can just scroll back through this blog and find the same thing for free, but spending a modest number of dollars will give you a “Best Of” collection or two, or 10. (One of the titles I considered for the next book was Please Buy This Book, I Could Use the Money, but I think readers might expect that to be a humorous book, and sometimes I’m not [intentionally] funny.)

My books are all less than 20 bucks in print (except for Myke Phoenix: The Complete Novelettes, but hey, you would charge more for a 700-page book, too) or less than 5 bucks in ebook form  (even Myke!), and so you could read my entire canon for less than 85 bucks, less than 375 bucks if you spring for the paperbacks.

This post, for now, is as much marketing as I ever do. Did it work? Go to your favorite online book store, search for “Warren Bluhm,” and find some light summer reading — either “Buy It Now” or, even better, take the information to your favorite real book store and have them order it. You should have the book(s) within a couple of weeks.

And if you’re not enticed, let me know why — really. I do want to improve my “pitch” to potential readers.

If you know, you know

Satchell Paige is supposed to have asked, “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?” It’s a sweet question.

Some days I would be 73 years and 16 days old, maybe even older. But then there are the days when I’m 14 again and being dazzled by Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band — imagine hearing “A Day in the Life” for the first time, and now imagine it’s 1967 and you’re hearing sounds you never expected to hear in a pop song and that amazing final crescendo and what the heck is a House of Lords?

Or walking through a patch of wildflowers holding hands — surely I’m twentysomething from the feeling in my heart, but there’s something old and wise in my head whispering, “Enjoy this while you can.”

I know how old I might want to be if I didn’t know how old I am, but that nagging reminder — I think it’s my bum knee — keeps tugging at my psyche and telling me to the day how old I “really” am, and that skews my perception.

I do know one wonderful thing: When I say to myself, “Make believe you’re not this old” or “You’re only as young as you feel,” something lifts inside me and I remember what it was like to be 14 or 22 or 31 or 44 or 56 or 68 or holy cow it can’t be 2023 already, I’ll be 70 then — how terribly strange.

The songwriter poet who wrote in his twenties, “How terribly strange to be 70,” is now in his mid-eighties. I wonder how he’s feeling today.

Miracles in our lifetime

How did records happen? The leaps of faith and logic required seem miraculous. What made someone think they could reproduce sound by attaching a needle to a megaphone and applying it to a rotating bit of wax — and then the evolution that replaced the megaphone with an electronic device called a microphone and developed the means to amplify the needle’s vibrations to fill rooms and auditoriums?

I look at the squiggles etched into the vinyl surface and can scarcely imagine how they will be translated into glorious sound. And don’t get me started on how over the years they have miniaturized the process so the sound from hundreds of these 12-inch records can be condensed into a flash drive, also known as a thumb drive because it is about the size of a human’s thumb.

I am in awe of the technology that brought music into my living room 60 years ago. I am only beginning to wrap my head around the technology that has evolved in the ensuing six decades.

The camera I used to take the photo of a record being played can also shoot video, record sound, take dictation, connect me with countless sources of news, information and entertainment, read me a book, play me any recorded music I want to hear, and oh yes, I can make a phone call with it. 

And it weighs about six ounces.

My father was born three years after the first commercial radio station went on the air. I often marveled at the scientific achievements he witnessed in his lifetime, and lately I’ve been pondering what I’ve been experiencing in my own lifetime. Outside of the realm of politics and government — where the goal seems to be to wreak as much death and destruction as humans can muster — a lot of people have been busy making this a much better world than our forebears could imagine.