Category: Shameless self-promotion

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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.

Got three minutes?

This is my week to stop procrastinating, or so I’ve told myself. One thing I had been meaning to do is to upload Crimson Sky on New Year’s Morn, my new album, to the distribution universe.

It’s a process that can take up to six weeks, so I set a “release date” of May 19 and a “pre-order date” of April 21. But in the meantime you can hear 30 seconds of each track by clicking on the name of the album up there or scrolling to the bottom of this post and clicking on the album cover. The clips each begin about a minute into the song.

These 12 tunes were all written in a burst of creativity that began New Year’s Eve and continued into early February. They’re songs about love, and peace, and Jesus, although not all of them are exactly spiritual. 

This is the 22nd (!) album I’ve made since I started making homemade music back in the 1970s, but only the third I’ve released into the wild so that you can stream it on places like Apple Music or Spotify or however you stream music in these streaming times. 

You should be able to access the first two by searching on your streaming service for “Bluhm Ten Thousand Days” or “Bluhm New Dog Old Tricks” to reach the albums I created in 2010 and 2025, respectively. There’s also a collection of my recordings from 40 years ago over on SoundCloud.com. 

If all goes the way it’s supposed to be, in about six weeks you’ll be able to search for “Bluhm Crimson Sky” to hear and/or download the new album. It’s fun to be living in an era where an amateur singer-songwriter like me can share his little efforts with friends or anyone else with the patience to listen. 

There’s a lot of us out there, and we don’t have to wait for some gatekeeper to discover us anymore. The beautiful thing about modern times is we’ve been granted the ability to open the gate ourselves.

Of course, without gatekeepers there are a lot of us out there who should not quit our day jobs, and I may be one of those in your eyes and ears. But if there’s an audience waiting, it’s easier than ever for us to find each other. That’s what’s beautiful.

Cover reveal

I picked up my guitar on the morning of Jan. 1 and glanced out the front window of my house, which faces east. The sunrise was a brilliant red, calling to mind the old aphorism about red skies and sailors.

I grabbed my pencil and wrote, “Crimson sky on New Year’s morn, Old sailors take it as a warning; Crimson sky on New Year’s night, Sailors ready for delight.”

That seemed like a good start, so I lifted the guitar again. I decided to try starting the song with a more exotic chord than your plain vanilla C or D or G, so I droned out an Asus2, which has a strange, lovely sound made by pressing just two strings side by side (four strings on the 12-string guitar).

I called out the lyrics I’d just written, and my mind seemed to say the moment called for a rather standard transition to G and then D.

Somewhat to my surprise, the words that I sang next sprang from the Old Testament book of Joshua.

“As for me and my house, we’re gonna serve the Lord.”

A short time later, I had a composition of eight verses that have not changed much since then, my first new song of the new year. And the adventure was on.

I had ended the old year by crafting a medley of songs about peace and love that I dubbed “Peace Trilogy,” reminiscent of Mickey Newbury’s “American Trilogy,” and a romantic song for Mary titled “What You Mean To Me.” “Me And My House” continued that musical momentum, but I couldn’t have foreseen what the next six weeks would bring.

Between then and now, 11 more songs emerged — 10 newly minted and one ancient cover — and now I have enough material for an approximately 40-minute album. Wednesday night I fiddled with ideas for the album cover, and a natural title came to me: “Crimson Sky On New Year’s Morn,” my first lyrics of the new year.

They are songs of peace and songs of love, folk songs and rock songs, serious songs and silly songs. I have eight completed recordings that may or may not require further tweaks, and I have six songs yet to be turned into what I hear in my head.

As I said a few days ago, I expect to be ready to share these recordings in the spring. At this pace it may be the very first day of spring. In any case I have the structure of a 14-song album and now a title and a cover.

On New Year’s Eve I made a list of 9-15 creative projects I thought I’d like to produce in 2026. “A collection of new songs” was the 15th idea on the list. I could not have suspected it would be the first project I’m likely to finish. It’s going to be an interesting year.