A Million Monkeys

A Moustache Crisis?

2011-04-27T22:06:00.003-04:00

I grew up with a very specific idea of what a "midlife crisis" was all about. First, only men had them. I don't know why, but women didn't have midlife crises. They were doomed to suffer quietly at home, burdened by the weight of children and their man-children husbands. They were never allowed the luxury of a good, obnoxious midlife crisis.

No, it was always men, and it was always a particular kind of crisis. It involved a sports car (usually a Corvette, God knows why). It involved a gold chain and open shirt. And invariably it involved a woman "half his age." So there you had him ... an aging, somewhat pathetic Lothario, driving around in his loud car with his medallion perched on his belly under the steering wheel, his bored and sexually frustrated wife/girlfriend in the passenger seat applying lipstick in the mirror and trying to keep her hair in place.

I don't know how this ended up becoming my image of a midlife crisis, but it did. Was it because I grew up in the '70s? Was it because I actually knew that guy? I don't know. Yes to all of the above.

I'm 39 now, which is crazy to think about, because I don't actually feel a day over about 23 or 24. Well, actually, when I was 23 and 24, I had a 1-year-old baby and two jobs and made about $11,000 a year, so maybe that's not the best age to idealize. Life was freaking hard, a lot harder than it is now. Maybe it's more like I don't feel a day over about 12.

The point is, my own midlife crisis has been in my mind more and more as I near 40, and I'm really curious what shape it will take. I wonder about it sometimes as I'm driving between the various places I drop my kids off. Will I decide to start growing hallucinogenic mushrooms in my laundry room? Will I try to learn Chinese or get into classical music? Mostly, though, I wonder: will I buy a sports car, get a chain and take up with a woman half my age? These images we form in childhood are hard to kill.

No, I don't think so. For one thing, I don't give a shit about cars. I really don't. In fact, I hate them. If I never had to drive again, I'd be happy. If I could live in a city with public transportation, I'd gladly never put my foot on an accelerator again. And as far as taking up with a woman half my age ... oh God no. She'd be 19 years old, and please spare me. Not only do I really and truly love my current wife, but I already went through being 19 and I have no desire to do it again. Lastly, I don't even like jewelry. I don't have a watch, much less have any desire for a gold chain.

If that midlife crisis is out, then what?

I've been working like mad lately—almost literally around the clock. Sadly, when I work like this, my showering habits become somewhat erratic. Let's say that maybe sometimes more than one day will go by before I drag my ass into a shower. And even on the days I do shower, my shaving habits are even more erratic. I've been known to grow almost a full beard from sheer laziness.

Tonight, though, after I showered, I went to shave and looked in the mirror, and I found myself thinking about the kind of man I pictured myself when I was little. I always pictured myself in a suit (which is really funny, considering my previously mentioned showering habits and the fact that I work from home), fabulously wealthy, and for some reason, distracted all the time. Staring at the mirror, I realized fully that I was NOTHING like that guy. I mean, yeah, I'm distracted much of the time, but that's about it. Otherwise, there's nothing about my life that resembles the life I once thought I would live. No suit. No fabulous wealth. I'm not even a Republican, which for some strange reason was also part of the picture.

So I shaved for the first time in a week, scraping away the residue of my own benevolent self-neglect, and I thought, "Maybe I'll grow some crazy ass facial hair." And I didn't shave my moustache. That's right. I left the 'stache. Now this might not seem like the biggest deal in the world to most people, but to me—a guy who's never had a moustache, but who still tells jokes about moustache rides—it was perhaps as close as I've gotten so far to thinking, "My God, I'm getting old. Where did half my life go already?"

My hope is that I'll have the guts to grow a full handlebar moustache. Because one other thing I've discovered about aging is that you care less and less what other people think ... and maybe that's what a good midlife crisis is really all about after all.

So this will be quick

2011-02-11T10:11:00.002-05:00

Because that's about how much time I have right now.

When I decided to e-pub Zig Zephyr and the Forever Diamond, I figured it would be easy-peasy. The book was already done, after all, so it was just a matter of formatting it, getting it up online, and that was it. Ha ha. Foolish man.

Here's just a partial list of the things that have cropped up in the last week ...

1. Rewriting and tweaking the product blurb a zillion times.

2. Revamping my entire personal website to make it more Zig-friendly, which meant switching Internet registrars and hosting companies, taking down my old website, and beginning to rebuild the site from literally scratch. I finally got it to a point where I can BEGIN working on it but I can stand the thought of people seeing it. (I ultimately decided not make a separate page for the book, but fold it into my regular website).

3. Write a sell-sheet slash press release and begin compiling a list of places to send it.

4. Set up a personal Amazon page

5. Oh yeah, and regular work.

The funny thing is, I'm not resenting this sudden crush on my time. It's actually fun. The way I see it, I'm building an infrastructure, and it's kind of like putting up an apartment building. You want it to be nice, and then once it's built, I'll be on the hunt for people to live in it.

This Week ...

2011-02-07T09:05:00.003-05:00

So this is the week. I've finished the editing and proofing, got a cover done, and got the book professionally formatted for Kindle and Epub (thanks to Natasha Fondren, who did a great job and thank you very much, Natasha).

It's funny, because I find myself getting more and more nervous. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that I'm nervous—I am letting this book out into the wild, after all, and it's been cooped up for so long—but I am. It's like in my head, I know all the reasons I'm doing this, and they're good ones, but then part of me is like, "Are you sure? Really and truly sure?"

Yes. No. I dunno. Yes.

Anyway, I think the next thing that will have to happen—besides cajoling friends into reading and reviewing—is to figure out a way to sow the seeds of a MG e-book market. Somewhere out there, there are a lot of kids who should be reading this book. I've always felt that way, and now I have to best figure out how to reach them. Should I do a POD print version? Can I do that without getting an ISBN, which I'm not ready to do? Is there a mobile app that kids are using to read books? What is it? I'll be blogging more regularly, btw, as I try to find answers to all these questions and more ...

And while I'm working on ways to find my MG e-book market, I'm planning on getting as many crossover sales as possible by classifying the book on Amazon as a paranormal vampire erotica romance. Just kidding.

Unless you think it'd work, in which case I'm totally doing it.

Passive Aggression

2011-01-05T08:49:00.003-05:00

I've largely disappeared from sight these past few months, but it's not because I'm holed up in a corner wrapped around a bottle of scotch. Rather, I've been working my way through a shift in thinking and, as a result, devoting every ounce of spare energy to a few new projects. To keep things simple, here's my thinking ...

1. I've been freelancing professionally for a long time now and doing pretty well at it. But it can be a grind. Some years you're up. Other years you're down. If you're not hustling for new work, you're sunk.

2. I've made a lot of money for various people and companies. Last year, I ghostwrote a middle-grade book for an author that went on to do quite well. It got lots of publicity and ended up being adopted into the curriculum of a HUGE school district (they bought 15,000 copies in one shot). Let's just say that watching this author do promotion and rake in tens of thousands of dollars after paying me not much wasn't exactly the easiest thing in the world to stomach—even though I KNEW the deal going in and set my own price.

3. Not only is the publishing world in the midst of a revolution, I personally have learned a lot over the past two years, almost accidentally. I've learned that I like web publishing A LOT, and that I actually have a pretty natural knack for SEO. And I almost accidentally built an audience for a blog that I only started because no one in my real life could stand hearing me talk about growing tomatoes anymore.

4. I think I've finally worked my way through getting my ass handed to me in the fiction world. I still haven't heard of any writer with a story like mine—two books, serious interest and multiple rounds of revisions with top editors at two major publishers, multiple trips to acquisitions at both companies, and ultimately rejections from both companies. It's been a lot to process, raising issues that really struck at the core of my writerly being.

So I put all these things into a pot and stirred and came up with two words. You'll never guess.

Passive income.

My goal for this next year is to develop passive income sources. I've got three projects working right now all aimed at that goal.

First, I'm developing a website. Instead of working for someone else, this is my website completely. I've spent the past few months immersed in web design, writing content, and putting together the basic site. It's about growing tomatoes. My plan is to finish building the site this winter, then add a forum (because veggie gardeners are forum fanatics), then import my tomato blog onto the main site and piggyback on its audience. Ultimately, once I've got some traffic, I'll expand the site to include all kinds of gardening issues. There's lots and lots of traffic out there for gardeners, so my revenue source will be web advertising. The basic site is only about halfway done, so for now it stays under wraps. I'll announce it when it's ready.

Second, because I'm a glutton for punishment, I'm still working on a novel that I hope to finish in the first quarter and shop to traditional agents and publishers. I have a pretty good feeling about this book, but I've learned how little that means. Ultimately, though, I will write the best book I possibly can and hopefully finally knock one out of the park.

Third, I'm going to self-publish the two books that almost made it. This was a surprisingly hard decision to make, and it took me literally months to work my around to it. I've been so fixated on traditionally selling a book for so long, I just couldn't imagine a world in which I would ever self-publish anything. But the world is changing, of that there can no doubt. I can see a future when agents and publishers are ONLY interested in authors who have a proven ability to sell books on their own—it will be the fiction marketing platform of the future. I've been telling myself there is no e-book market for middle grade books for a long time, and that's been true. But I've been watching it very closely, and it's starting to change. They are starting to move now, including self-pubbed titles. If it breaks, I want to be there.

Ultimately, though, here was the truth: I have two finished, polished novels sitting in my drawer, wasting away. I have two finished, polished novels that were vetted by industry professionals—editors who had (and have) books in the top ten of the NYT best-seller list. What do I have to lose by self-publishing these titles? Literally nothing. Even the cover art will cost nothing—I'm trading an editing job for covers. It's 100 percent upside ... and perhaps more importantly, it will finally allow me to release these books into the wild. The thought that these books would never find any audience causes me much more pain than the idea that I'm selling out. I'm giving both books another quick edit, and they'll go up as soon as humanly possible.

So there it is. I didn't get kidnapped by aliens. Rather, I've been trying to get off the hamster wheel, and I'm excited about it. Deeply excited. Here's to hoping.

Editing For Authors

2010-10-27T09:22:00.002-04:00

So today, we're finally ready to make this announcement: that Editing for Authors, an editorial services company for self-published authors created by me and my crit partner, Erica Orloff, is open for business.

I've been working for self-published authors pretty much from the beginning of my career. In fact, for seven years, I ghostwrote books for a guy who started his own company just to self-publish his own books. We were extremely successful (for the world of publishing). Let me put it this way: he owned his own jet based on his book sales. Not bad, right?

Later on, I signed on as a contractor for the largest POD companies in the industry, where I provide editing services for self-published authors who select that option as part of their packages. I've worked with hundreds of authors on their books, which range in quality from needing loads of help to quite good. Especially lately, I've noticed that the quality of books crossing my desk seems to be rapidly increasing.

I think this is an exciting time to be in publishing ... it's not often you get to witness the mass democratization of a whole medium. But it hasn't been exactly easy to wrap my mind around what's happening. For one thing, having actually read enough self-published titles to have an opinion, it's true that many, many self-published books just aren't that good. The stigma against self-publishing was earned; it's not the product of snooty New York editors looking down their noses at rambunctious competition. It's because the majority of the books aren't very good.

And yet, that doesn't mean self-publishing itself has no place in the industry. In fact, it's growing more and more important as the stigma fades and people like JA Konrath and Amanda Hocking show that you can make good money and have a good career without a publisher. Like Erica said on her blog today, they're proving something that nonfiction writers have known for a long time: there is no single path to success in publishing, or even one single definition of success.

So looping back to Editing for Authors ... here's how I view the editing process: when an author hands over a book to an editor (or a critique partner), they are handing over something very precious, something they might have invested years of their life in and sacrificed time away from other pursuits to produce. It's not my job to tell anyone their book is good or isn't good ... it isn't my job to "fix" anybody's book (unless we're talking about grammar and spelling, in which case it's very much my job). It's my job to do whatever I can to help that particular book become the best book it can be.

I Knew This Was Out There Somewhere ...

2010-10-08T11:56:00.002-04:00

So remember how I said I wrote my last book without an outline or a plot? 'Tis true. And it was essential for figuring out the characters and letting them breath and get some space. But guess what I'm doing on the rewrite?

If you said "extremely complicated plot spreadsheet" you'd be correct. I'm going to probably cut half or more of the existing text, shuffle plot elements all over the place, trim at least 10,000 words, and reduce the number of chapters from 55 to 26 (about). I'm tracking three main subplots throughout.

I guess I didn't shake my old habits as much as I thought :)

As I've worked on my own plots, I've always wondered how Rowling did it. I've read her interviews, and I even watched Oprah to see if I could get any glimpse into Rowling's actual process. For one thing, I'm weird like that. I'm endlessly fascinated by how writers work. For another, whatever else you can say about her books, they are complexly plotted. One might even say brilliantly.

So today on Twitter, guess what pops up? A page from the "spreadsheet" Rowling developed while she was writing Order of Phoenix (at least I'm guessing). And check it out! This is how you plot a 4,000-page book with dozens of characters and too many subplots to mention ...

It Finally Happened ...

2010-10-07T11:22:00.002-04:00

This is crazy ...

For the past 15 years, I've used one particular word to hold my place in the documents I'm editing or writing. I remember picking this word and thinking, "It'll be safe because I'll never actually find it in a document or use it myself." So for the last forever, every time I start working on a project, I open the file, do a Find, type in my code word, and zoom right back to where I left off.

The word is "byzantine." I always thought it was kind of appropriate.

Well, today it happened. I opened up my current editing project, searched for byzantine and actually found that the author had used it in his manuscript. I'm still a little in shock. Years and years have gone by ... hundreds of books have passed over my desk in one form of another ... and this is the first one to use the word byzantine.

What's going to happen next? Palin for president? A call from Oprah? I feel nervous, rattled.

Number Eight

2010-09-25T15:59:00.005-04:00

I just typed "THE END." Are there any better words in the English language?

I've disappeared from view lately because I made myself a vow: write every day until my current book is finished. I'm sorry to say that didn't exactly happen, but you know what they say about aiming high ... you can miss the mark and still do pretty well. So in the last 60 days or so, I probably missed 5 days of writing and turned out a 72,000-word novel.

I'm such a tool that I didn't even give myself one full celebratory beer before the "to do" list started piling up. My half-empty beer is sitting next to me right now, in fact. The problem is there's an enormous gap right now between what this book COULD be and what this book IS. I think it COULD be a wonderful, funny, fast-paced, original, and thematically interesting book. It IS a steaming pile of problems at the moment.

Let's not even get into it.

But it's also book #8. It's kind of hard to believe ... I've finished eight full-length novels. That's eight. A tiny bookshelf. I've published exactly zero of them, but I'm not getting into that either.

Anyway, in honor of #8, I thought I'd look back on the ones that came before.

Book #1: Totally autobiographical. Full of self-regard and purple prose. Is there a plot in here somewhere?

Book #2: A doorstop—120,000 words written in seven weeks. Maybe three redeemable scenes and one scene that caused my crit group to question my masculinity.

Book #3: A dirty secret. We don't talk about book #3.

Book #4: A medium-sized leap forward. Sure, it took three years to write, and it suffered from one character who was so toxic that one agent remarked, "I had to set it down when she showed up." Also, this book was the seed for book #7. It contains the idea that has become my own great white whale.

Book #5. A giant leap forward. Plot? Yes. Hook? Yes. Characters? Okay, not so much. But still ... I love you, book #5. You almost made an honest man out of me. We almost went all the way, baby, and I want you to know that despite the crushing rejection we suffered at the end, I still believe deeply in you.

Book #6: Boy, did I love this idea. And boy, did I love writing this one. And book six, I think I did wrong by you. I know you attracted attention from a major publisher, but I think the editor didn't understand you. I'm sorry now that I tried to change you to fit her vision. It was a bad fit, and my heart wasn't in it. Murph, my little buddy, go rebel all you want.

Book #7: A misfire. I went back to the idea from book #4 and tried to write it again—same mythology, same backstory. And while the setting was my best yet, the book itself did not work. A giant step back. I didn't even bother to query this one.

Which brings me all the way back up to this afternoon and book #8 with its pile of rewrite notes. And now I hope you'll forgive me for signing off—I'm finally feeling like there's some celebratory drinking I should be doing.

Podcast to Start Soon

2010-09-03T09:13:00.008-04:00

I had an awful realization this morning: my life is full of anachronisms. I'm teetering dangerously on the brink of forty, so maybe I'm extra sensitive to these things, but I started to worry that if I didn't do something, I'd end up like someone's grandfather. You know, the kind of old man who calls grilled cheese sandwiches "toasted cheese" until the day he dies and doesn't understand how that tiny little cable can carry so many big pictures.

So I've decided to make a list of all the anachronisms I need to get rid of. If I want to enter this next decade of my life as a sleek, sophisticated modern man, I have some work to do.

First, our landline must go. What kind of dodo still has a landline into their house? Sheesh. We might as well use smoke signals.

Next, our ethernet network. Yes, I installed it myself. And yes, I learned how to crimp cable and run ethernet through the whole house so we could we be wired. But the future is wireless, so goodbye homemade ethernet network (which until this moment, I was rather proud of).

CDs. What kind of dork still keeps CDs? Upload them all. Same goes for photo albums and all important documents. Scan, scan, scan.

Body hair. That's probably self-explanatory.

Cable TV. Hello? Ever heard of Hulu? Duh.

Newspapers and magazines. You know what? We'll just discontinue the mail in general as a precautionary measure.

Pencils. Seriously? Can anybody give me a good reason why these things still exist? Do they still even bubble anything in?

Cotton garments. Just because it seems like a good idea to get ahead of the curve on this one.

Friends. By which I mean actual people friends. If you're in my network, you still count.

I'll admit the food thing confuses me. I'm not sure if I get rid of all prepared foods in favor of locally grown, organic, CSA-delivered raw veggies. Or if I should get rid of all home-prepared food in favor of ready-to-warm bags of chicken chunks, flash-frozen veggies and some kind of salt-delivery system. I don't think the future is clear here.

And last but not least, all paper books. Wait. Sorry. I mean "dead tree books." Wait, wait: DTB. Good-bye DTB. I would say I'll miss you, but I also plan on ditching sentimentality in favor of my own weekly Internet podcast where I compare my political enemies to Adolf Hitler at least once a week while simultaneously declaring that only I know God's intentions.

Brave Man's Death

2010-09-03T09:09:00.002-04:00

Besides the commenter who said "This song whips a mule's behind with a belt," am I the only person in the world who likes this song?

Zero for Three

2010-09-02T10:06:00.002-04:00

I don't know what's going on, but the last three—that's THREE—books I've started I haven't had the heart to finish. It finally got to the point that I had to wonder, "Is it me?" Then I thought long and hard about WHY I set each of them down, and here it is ... my list of what kills a book for me:

1. Snooze. The voice is boring, confusing, or full of insider lingo. Or all three. This is probably what kills more books for me than anything else. These are the books I set down in two pages ... if it's just blah, or pretentious, or if it's one of those books where the writer is stringing together all these ridiculous sentences that don't actually say anything. Writing doesn't have to be "lyrical" for me to like it, but jeez, give me something to go on.

2. What?! I set a book down last week after I finally got fed up with asking, "Are you freaking KIDDING ME?!" Listen, I'm willing to go along with a lot of things for the sake a good ride. You want me to believe that Jesus had kids and some crazy secret society has been burying clues throughout history? I'm in. But if you try to present a book as "literary" fiction, grounded in the real world, and then ask me to go along with all these ludicrous plot points that NO ONE else in the whole book thinks are weird, I'll get pissed. Every time.

3. Boring. Here's the thing: my life is fairly boring. I work. I raise kids with various degree of effectiveness. I water plants. I brown meats. I hang out with my wife a lot and friends less often. I watch movies. And every so often, I engage in the utterly impractical, but hopefully healthy, practice of moving weights around. And that's pretty much it. We vacation with family members. I don't have wings; my decisions neither grant life nor death; my profile isn't so shockingly handsome that people must avert their eyes at first glance; I've never killed a living animal with my teeth, a knife, or a bone pick; I've never caught a raging venereal disease from a rising starlet. So here's what I'm saying ... if I'm more interesting than the characters in the book I'm reading, I Am Out.

I did start a book this week I have high hopes for. So far, it has an interesting character, a cool voice, and the plot is managing to hang together. I hope—almost against all hope—that my drought is over.

Guest Post: Zoe Winters on Editors

2010-09-01T08:24:00.005-04:00

If you spend any time around the publishing interwebs, my guest poster today probably won't be a stranger. Zoe Winters can be seen popping up everywhere, advancing the cause of self-publishing, writing the world's longest comments, and promoting her Blood Lust series of novellas (she just released an omnibus version with all three novellas combined into one e-book ... and she's having a promotion this week so go buy it). I asked Zoe if she'd be kind enough to stop by and post her thoughts about where and how editors fit into the self-publishing process and how she personally handles the issue. Then I made her promise not to say anything bad about editors because I have thin skin. Just kidding. So without further ado:

Jon asked me to come by and talk about my views with regards to editing as an indie author. Oh, yeah, hi, I'm Zoe Winters, and I'm an indie author. I don't think there is a support group or anything for that, but there probably should be.

One of the biggest stigmas against self-publishing has to do with the general quality level of the work being put out. No book is perfect. Even NY published books have editing problems. In my reading, I've caught more NY pubbed book errors than I used to. I'm not sure if this is a lessening of the general quality, rush jobs at the publisher, or the fact that I'm so much more tuned in to the issues of editing now.

I suspect it's the latter. It's sort of how when you get a blue car, suddenly every car on the road seems to be blue.

Because of the stigma, if you decide to self-publish, or "go indie" as we super-cool-awesome people like to call it, the most important thing you have to worry about is not living up to the stereotype. Your book needs to have a professional or professional-level cover, and most importantly, good editing.

That cover thing can make or break you, but if readers get past the cover and see problems in the first few pages, all you did was put lipstick on a pig.

Indie authors generally are on shoestring budgets, and most can't afford to hire super-expensive editors. That doesn't mean you can't have a well-edited book. For myself, my editing process for a book is as follows:

After the rough draft, I do as much as I reasonably can do on my own. I use techniques from books such as "Self-Editing for Fiction Writers". I pull out my little "Elements of Style" and "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves" (which is seriously the funniest book on punctuation ever). I use an editing software called "Editor" that is produced by Serenity Software and catches all kinds of things beyond your basic grammar and spell-checker in Word.

I have critique partners who help during the developmental stages. Susan Bischoff and Kait Nolan. They're both indies (I think I corrupted them), and very talented writers whose work I admire. Kait also does professional editing at her job. Susan and Kait help me work out any story issue that's not about "how I say it" but "what happens". (I do that before the nitty gritty stuff with the editing software).

Once everything is as clean as I can make it, I bring in crit partners and beta readers. Then when I've gotten back and applied all reasonable feedback (there is always that one wacky request from someone that I just can't follow, that is more about how "they" would tell the story, than an actual empirical problem), then I send it back to Kait for a line edit. I pay her for this service.

And that's the process. The result is not a perfect manuscript, but a professional one that can, in my opinion, stand next to books published by other publishers.

The biggest challenge with editing (and actually cover art, too), is that you have to have an eye/feel for what's right and what isn't. You can hire a "professional" editor or cover artist and they just not be any good if you can't tell quality editing or cover art from crap. Plenty of people charge for their services in both of these areas, who quite frankly, should not be charging.

When I work with a critique partner, or beta reader, or editor, I have to be able to surround myself with people who can actually write and/or edit, who are literate, who understand grammar and punctuation and sentence and story structure. It's not just "quantity" as in... many eyeballs looking at it, but the quality of those eyeballs. There are people like my CP's/editor who I fundamentally trust. I take about 95% of their suggestions. And what I don't take isn't grammar or punctuation related.

Sometimes I'm wrong about advice I don't take. And I have to take responsibility for that. In Mated, the third novella in Blood Lust, there was one line in the first chapter that turned out to be a pretty local colloquialism. I thought it was a normal thing to say, but Kait caught it and said something about it. That was in my 5% of ignore. And I was wrong. Because I got feedback from a few early readers. If more than two people say something it definitely gets edited no matter how much I like it. One confusing colloquial line is not the hill I want to die on. I edited it after that, and thankfully we hadn't gone to print yet, so it wasn't a costly error.

For other betas sometimes I take less than 95% of the feedback. It just really depends. Usually when I don't take a lot of advice it's because the beta is trying to "rewrite my voice." It's not issues with something being wrong, or unclear, or in the case of story: illogical or poorly paced, but... just not how they personally would write it. And it's a problem you can run into with people who haven't done a lot of beta work before, or people who have but haven't had anyone pull them aside to mention the issue.

When in doubt, I run the advice by my primary CPs. This is important because you can end up with an overall weaker book than when you started if you don't choose your council wisely.

Anyway, for what it's worth, those are my thoughts on editing. I think it's very important for indie authors, and no matter what your budget is... barter, trade, sell your soul... get your editing taken care of. The last thing you want to do is reinforce the stereotype of what it means to be self-published.

To me, being self-published is honorable and a point of pride. That's because I work very hard to produce the best possible book, and I don't take shortcuts. There is no shortcut to awesome.

Also, this week I'm running a promotion for my latest release, Blood Lust, and I'm giving away a free Kindle (maybe two).

Goodbye, Mattie

2010-08-30T09:44:00.003-04:00

We had to put our dog down this weekend. It was a surprise—she had never been exactly healthy, but over the last week or so, she'd been gasping for breath and looking disoriented and uncomfortable. So we took her to the vet, expecting to hear that she needed antibiotics for a chronic illness she's had since puppyhood. But then the vet called and told us she probably had cancer and we needed to make a decision right then. If we wanted to, we could bring her home for the afternoon to spend a few more hours with her. But that would be it.

So that's what we did.

Mattie was a really important part of our family, and the news was like a bomb going off in our midst. We were shocked and sad and everything you would expect. I was guilty for all the times I was a less-than-perfect dog owner (and there were lots of those). I missed her already, even before we had to take her in for her final appointment. But it was the cruelty that really struck me.

Mattie was technically my son's dog—we got her when we he was four years old, and we felt that he needed a playmate. He needed someone to mess up his world a little bit, to introduce a little delightful chaos in to his life. So she was his dog ... she slept in his room, she thought of him like her brother.

But she was also my dog because, in the pack, she clearly viewed me as the alpha dog. I was the one who could control her when no one else could, and I was the one she came to when something was wrong or hid from when she peed on the floor or got into the garbage. So when the vet called with this awful news, my wife and I made a decision that wasn't really a decision, and then we started the wheels turning toward her 2 p.m. appointment.

I'd never felt like such a heartless bastard. I knew she was dying no matter what we did, but once we decided to put her down, it was up to me to usher her toward that moment. She had trusted me her whole life because that's what dogs do. So when I clipped the leash on that final time, she trusted that wherever I was taking her was OK. When I walked her outside and helped her into the car, she looked scared, but she was watching me to make sure it was OK. When I walked her onto the grass and hugged her so she could see the sunlight and grass one more time, she must have thought that things would still be OK, because I was there.

Then I walked her into the vet's office and into the little room where the vet had spread out a blanket. My wife and I both wanted to be present for the event ... we felt strongly that we owed her that much. She deserved to die with the people who loved her. The vet had warned us it could be traumatic because of her illness, that it might be "hard to watch," so we had spent all day preparing ourselves anyway.

In the end, it was peaceful and fast. I had my arms wrapped around her body and my wife was holding her neck and head. I knew I was holding her in place so the vet could find a vein, but she wasn't scared because it was me, because it was us, holding her. She crumpled after the shot was given, and I felt her heart stop beating with the side of my face, and everyone in the room was sobbing. She died with her head in my lap, looking at my wife with her eyes open.

God, I miss that dog. It's only been a day, and I still think I can hear her nails on the terrazzo floors or hear her breathing on the rug behind me. A writer's life can be lonely, and lots of times, she was the only one around for the hours I spend staring at this screen.

I haven't stopped feeling like a bastard. My brain knows the truth, but my heart hasn't totally absorbed it. She trusted me with her life, so when we led her to her death, she went without question. She trusted us with her life, so I hope she knew that we made the best decision we could, that by leading her into that room, we were trying to stop her pain and free her from the disease that had riddled the inside of her body so quickly.

This has been a horrible weekend, and we're still all in shock. I didn't know if I was going to write about this—I was afraid to open myself to it again because there is this sense that life must go on. We still have school and work, and nothing else has changed. Except now there is a hole in our house, and there is silence where there wasn't any before, and there really isn't a bright side or a silver lining to it.

I'm just sad. Goodbye, Mattie. We loved you.

Five Years Later

2010-08-26T09:39:00.003-04:00

I was thinking this morning about how much I've changed as a writer over the last five years and what it all means.

Five years ago, I was a mad outliner. I did these crazy outlines that might run 20 or 30 single-space pages where I mapped out everything that happened. Ultimately, I was after control. I like complicated books with lots of moving pieces; I like books with five or six plot lines that converge in the end to really pop. So I approached writing a bit like a chess player approaches the board—I wanted all my pieces in play, and I wanted to make it all fit together like a clock.

Five years later, I still like the same kind of books, but the way I'm trying to get there is dramatically different. For the book I'm working on now, I've done one page of notes for an outline. I did a few first-person character sketches so I could get the characters' voices right. And that's pretty much it.

The interesting thing about this book, as opposed to others I've worked on, is the element of surprise. I'm continually surprised by what's happening on the page. I go into scenes knowing what just happened, and sort of suspecting who will be involved, but then I'm frequently surprised by what comes next.

I think the real difference is that I've surrendered control over the book to the characters in the book. Over and over again, I've reached points when I thought, "Well, so-and-so would naturally do this, but I don't really want that to happen that way because I don't know what to do next." But then I go ahead and jump and write it anyway the way that's natural to the moment. So far, the amazing thing to me is that it's always managed to work out somehow.

The idea of surrendering to a story is new to me, and it couldn't be more different from where I started years ago. In a way, even though I know how this story ends, I'm just as curious as anyone to see how I'll get there.

Monomania

2010-08-23T10:11:00.001-04:00

I once wrote a newspaper profile about a guy who claimed to have personally imported about 80 percent of the species of tropical bamboo available in the United States. He was a hard fellow to reach, and once I finally got him to agree to an interview, I had to find his bamboo grove hidden in the subtropical scrub in South Florida. When I pulled up, the place looked deserted, but I figured I was in the right place because I was surrounded by towering stands of bamboo.

I honked a few times, and finally the man himself emerged from his octagonal house on stilts (no kidding). He reeked of weed and wore unlaced construction boots and a filthy white T-shirt. He talked about how his competitors had stolen all his best techniques for bamboo propagation, how he traveled through China and Asia, collecting rare tropical bamboo. He showed me where he had built his own USDA quarantine facility for newly introduced bamboo.

As we talked, he drove me around his property—and I was blown away. I fancy myself a little bit of a snob when it comes to tropical plants, but I'd never seen anything like this place. He had plants that weren't even named yet, in some cases, plants that were literally the only specimen of their kind in the Western Hemisphere. Giant green timber bamboos with stalks as thick as my leg. Glossy black bamboo with green pin striping. Blue bamboos. SIlvery green bamboos. Buddha bellies. Gold. Yellow.

One moment stood out. He had stopped his golf cart in front of a clump of rare black bamboos and was regarding the plants thoughtfully.

"I probably know as much about tropical bamboo as anyone in the United States," he said without a trace of arrogance. I got the feeling this wasn't something he bragged about. Rather, it was a piece of knowledge that he carried like a sack full of rocks. He was wistful and isolated all at once, because really, how could I have possibly understood?

Such is the nature of monomania, and I'm powerfully attracted to it.

There are two kind of monomania in books. Books about monomanical people, and books by monomaniacal people.

The first category is pretty much owned by Malcolm Gladwell nowadays, but Mary Roach makes some impressive forays into the land of the monomaniac, and Jon Krakauer has been circling that particular orb in pretty much every book. In his day, Herman Melville wrote perhaps the word's best novel about a monomaniac—in the process, penning my favorite book.

But I think the best books about monomania are the ones actually authored by the crazed lunatic who has devoted his or her life to an obscure mania. These books are like candy and I crave them. I have a book on artisan breadmaking that is so infused with the love of fresh, hand-made artisan loaves that flour virtually puffs from its pages. I have another on fern allies that could only have been written by a person who must be single and unfit for polite society. And I once spent months searching out a particular book on Szechuan cuisine because the book itself is a taste sensation to read, even if the dishes are beyond the reach of any Western cook.

It's no secret why I find myself so attracted to books about monomania—I envy people who have fully given themselves to their passions. I think it must be freeing to give yourself over completely to one corner of this wide world. It must be like a form of security.

One last story: when I was in seventh grade, I entered my butterfly collection in my school's science fair. Typical of seventh grade, I wasn't the only butterfly collection in the fair. But I'm not bragging to say there was no collection like mine. I had butterflies from thirty states. I had case upon case of carefully mounted and labeled butterflies. I'd pretty much lived with my net in hand every summer since fourth grade. I had devoured countless books and field guides on butterfly taxonomy and habitats. This was no throw-it-together on the weekend project—this was the organizing and stabilizing influence of my life at a time when things seemed unstable and disorganized.

Of course I won. Within a year, I'd hung up my net for good and moved onto other enthusiasms—each of which is reflected in my book collection to this day. In a very real sense, if you know my books, you know me.

Book Review: Numb: A Novel (Harper Perennial, 2010)

2010-08-20T11:16:00.003-04:00

As far as opening gambits for novels go, here's a good one: a man with no memory and the inability to feel pain shows up in a small Texas town and goes to work for a two-bit carnival that barely puts twenty paying butts in the seat every night. The man, who has no idea how he showed up in Texas bloody and wearing a suit, starts an act where he shoots nails through his hands every night to the delighted, squeamish satisfaction of the growing crowds. He doesn't know his name, so they call him Numb.

Meet Numb: A Novel (written by Sean Ferrell, Harper Perennial, 2010).

As Numb quickly rises up in the circus to the main act, the other circus freaks have mixed opinions. One, a strongman known as The It, thinks that Numb is just spectacle. He's not a performer. He's a human pincushion who shoots himself full of nails.

It doesn't take long before Numb attracts a more sinister kind of opportunity to exploit his unique condition. A wealthy Texas oilman offers a large sum of money to see him wrestle a lion. Numb agrees, but he's not exactly sure why he's doing this.

Throughout his early adventures, Numb remains surprisingly rooted in the real world and feels very human ... despite the almost garish and painful subject matter. In the first half of the book, Numb loses so much blood, it’s like a horror flick. This poor guy at one point is nailed down, hands and feet, to a stinking bar while strangers pay $100 each for the privilege of driving another nail through his flesh.

Of course Numb is a metaphor—or at least it works like one. In Numb the man, people find a perfectly exploitable human being. Since he cannot feel, and since he is so very different, he is the ideal canvas on which others can paint their ambitions, cruelties and sick fascinations. It's true that the metaphor is carried a bit far; after relocating to New York City, Numb is recruiting by an agent who makes him famous. Yet aside from his freakish nature, it's hard to understand exactly what qualities or talents propel Numb to fame. A great deal of thematic energy is spent on the idea of Numb as an artist, but the exact nature of his art is harder to understand.

But still, I really liked this book—rather, I should say this book really stuck with me. Numb is so perfectly passive, so immune to the world, that when he does awaken, it’s especially sweet and heartfelt. The writing is clean and has moments of pure ambition and insight. And the central conceit—a man who is victimized by his own indifference and unique nature, then slowly awakens to the realization that he is the central actor in his life—is instantly recognizable.

Overall: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Cue Boredom

2010-08-19T08:55:00.003-04:00

I think I was 18 when this happened. I'd just started college as a freshman, and I was taking a Sociology 101 class. During one of the first classes, the professor said something that I thought was pure bunk. This professor had made it clear he liked debate, so I raised my head and told him I thought it was bunk. He asked me where I was from. Then he completely demolished me in front of a lecture hall of people. The cool thing was, I didn't feel stupid or anything. It was a mind-expanding experience that I still remember clearly. This professor was armed with facts and data and perspective I'd literally never been exposed to in my small, somewhat insular hometown. For him, it must have been like an alpha lion batting around a cub for a while to show it who was boss. It's not an exaggeration to say he changed my mind forever that day.

On the scale of "You're an argumentative douche bag," I probably range between a 6 and a 9, with 10 being insufferable.

The thing is, I've gotten a lot less argumentative as I get older. I used to like debating people over just about anything. It was fun, and sometimes I'd switch sides just for the sport of the thing. Now it mostly feels boring and pointless. I want to say, "I pretty much know what you're gonna say, and you pretty much know what I'm gonna say, so why don't we just skip the whole thing and eat ribs?"

Which brings me to my point. I'm ex-haus-ted with the whole "end of traditional publishing stupid New York e-books will take over" debate. It's become a caricature of itself, and I don't even understand what people are arguing about. It seems to me that a very few people are doing very well with traditional print deals, and a very few people are doing very well with self-published Kindle books, and a very few people are doing very well with self-published POD print titles ... and the rest of us are just trying to write the best books we can.

I think it's useless to compare your own journey and goals to anybody else's. It's useless to criticize someone else's choices about how they want to write (really?). They won't change. You won't change. And the only thing that will come out of it is another pointless, long-winded argument about these huge issues over which none of us has any control.

Unless you're Markus Doyle or Jeff Bezos. In which case, call me.

A Capricious Diety

2010-08-13T14:30:00.004-04:00

I've been lousy about posting this week, but I have a pretty good reason—I've been completely, utterly involved in a project. And since I haven't really blogged about it before, I'm going to blog about it now. A little. But not too much.

Some history. I wrote a book earlier this year about dragons. After I finished it, I got a few crit opinions, and they pointed out some fairly major structural problems. I could have rewritten it. I will someday, I'm sure. But that happened to have been the second time I'd written this same story, and it was ugly to realize that I'd gotten it wrong yet again. I began to wonder if I wasn't a good enough writer to handle the story.

So I shelved it, which sucks. If you've ever shelved a book, you know what I mean. I shelved the book before I even thought about drafting a query.

'Cause in the background I had another project kicking around. It felt like a very commercial, very hooky idea, and I just loved the main character. It was the easiest idea pitch I'd ever worked on. The book is a walking elevator pitch.

I had about 5,000 words done on this thing, and I figured to heck with the complicated dragon mythology, I'm switching projects. Which brings me to this August.

About two weeks ago, I promised myself I'd write every day until the book was done. When you make a stupid promise like that, you've got two choices: either give it up in shame or keep it. So far, I've kept it, and the book has been rolling out. It's amazing how fast a book can happen when you sit down every freaking day and pound out 1,000 or 1,500 words. I'm coming up on 40,000 words today, and I expect I'll be done before Sept. 1.

I was telling my wife last night that I probably should be jaded by now. I'm doing at least a novel a year nowadays, which must make me one of the most prolific unpublished writers on the planet. (I believe there's another word for that and it rhymes with snidiot.) But I'm not jaded. Actually, I'm insanely excited about this book. It's been so easy so far, and even though I know there are major things I have fix (like oh by the way, I cut a main character in the middle of a chapter last week—just poof!), the whole architecture feels solid.

And all of this is leading up to a Revelation. See, I'm working like a dog lately. I mean, I still have a full-time job and kids, one of whom just had oral surgery, and an old dog who's been throwing up in her mouth for the last month or so despite the vet's best efforts to figure out what's wrong ... and then I decided to add another hour or two of daily writing on yet another book that, based on my recent past, is statistically doomed. I should quit, right?

But that was my revelation. I don't want to quit because I like this. I guess I'm writing now for the same reason I wrote when I was 12 and 15 and 22 and 31—because I just like to tell stories. It's what I do. There's a certain freedom in knowing that. There's a weightlessness in the knowledge.

I'm not saying I don't want to sell. I do. And I'm not saying I'm done improving. I'm not.

I don't know how people are chosen for their lots in life. I don't know what capricious god decided that I should only want to write my little stories, then make me spend decades first admitting it, then a few years realizing I sucked at it, then more years painstakingly learning to get better at it. Maybe these questions are beyond me anyway—when all that really matters is I'm two weeks away from finishing another draft, and I think that's pretty cool.

Free Steven Slater

2010-08-10T09:08:00.003-04:00

Steven Slater is my new hero.

This man should have been a train robber in the olden days. He should have been a cocaine cowboy in the 1980s. A pit trader in the 1990s.

You know what sealed it for me? The beer.

Free Steven Slater.

My Special Bottle

2010-08-06T09:06:00.005-04:00

I think I have a problem. I think I'm addicted to Tabasco sauce. I've tried all the others, but it's always Tabasco that calls me back.

I was poking around in my refrigerator last night and realized I have THREE bottles of Tabasco. And two of them are the jumbo kind. First, I have my day-to-day bottle. Then I have a back-up bottle. And then I have the Special Bottle.

When I go to people's houses, I often find a reason to poke around their spice cabinet. "Do you have, um, any, ah, Mrs. Dash?" I might ask. "I love that stuff." (I hate it.) What I'm really looking for, of course, is their old bottle of Tabasco. The forgotten one, the one they bought when they first got a place of their own and figured they'd need a bottle of Tabasco, but personally they can't stand the stuff. So they opened it once, used it, then stuffed it in the back of a cabinet and forgot about it.

Tabasco is a deceptively simple little liquid. It's made from a mash of the Tabasco hot peppers, which used to be grown on Avery Island in Louisiana and are now mostly grown in South America. The mash is combined with vinegar and salt, then aged for 12 months in a white oak barrel. The juice that's strained out of this concoction is Tabasco.

And as good as this is, it's only the beginning of the heights Tabasco can really achieve. See, like many wines, Tabasco improves with age. It improves in the bottle for years. Prize bottles of Tabasco have turned a suspicious, vinergary-red and have gunk caked around the bottle opening. By this time, the Tabasco has acquired layers of flavor, depths of heat and complexity, that simply can't be faked.

If I find this bottle in your cabinet, I will ask you for it. If you say no, I will steal it. If I like you, I'll buy you a new bottle.

So this is my Special Bottle ... the one I bought a year ago, opened, and have let sit unmolested while other bottles rotate through my life, sprinkling their lives out over pizza, spaghetti, eggs, stews, Chinese food, pretty much everything.

I don't know when I'll finally use the Special Bottle (an anniversary? after finding out I have a terminal illness? during a night of weakness?). But when I do, I expect it will taste like victory, like spicy delayed gratification. In a way, that bottle is a measure of my adulthood—my younger self would have broken down by now.

And I hope there's a plate of lasagna involved.

Goodbye, Barnes & Noble

2010-08-04T09:17:00.002-04:00

I'm a habitual news junkie—it's sort of an occupational liability. Last night before I went to bed, I read a story that Barnes & Noble was considering putting itself up for sale. "Just considering," I thought. "The board is floating the idea. Nothing to it."

But this morning, I woke up to find out that, indeed, it's true. And one other detail hopped out at me: Barnes & Noble's total market capitalization is less than $1 billion. Woah. That might still seem like a lot of money, but in the world of corporate America, for a company with such a recognizable brand and national reach, it's actually peanuts. I've worked for people who could write a check and buy Barnes & Noble. That's amazing.

Enter mixed feelings.

I know writers and readers wax poetic about bookstores, with good reason, but Barnes & Noble is sort of the Wal-Mart of the book industry, no? Isn't this the bookstore chain that was considered the rapacious villain not too long ago? I remember when local communities would PROTEST a Barnes & Noble going in. In my college town, we had a beloved independent bookstore that was driven out of business shortly after Barnes & Noble came to town. And didn't Barnes & Noble sort of perfect the art of extracting money from publishers for front table placement? And isn't Barnes & Noble the company that uses returns as a way to enhance cash flow at publisher's expense? Isn't there a sort of direct correlation between the trouble publishers are in and Barnes & Noble "wallpaper" strategy of stocking thousands and thousands of books it can't sell in giant stores, then returning them at full cost?

But B&N isn't exactly riding high these days. I looked it up this morning and saw that B&N's profitability has steadily declined over the past three years. I think profits last year were about one third what they were three years ago. Sure, a recession is just ending, but the latest round of corporate earnings reports was actually pretty stellar.

So I was a little conflicted, actually. When I grew up, going to bookstore either meant a Waldenbooks in the mall or a little independent store not too far from my house. I could walk there, and must have spent hundreds of hours in those four shelves of books. When B&N and Borders came along, I had no problem with it. I knew it was wiping out the independents, but hey, I figured, that's capitalism. Markets consolidate. Size achieves efficiency and clout. That's how the game works. And now, when B&N seems like it might get plowed under by market forces and technological innovation, it seems kind of hypocritical to work myself up into a lather.

Either way, this is a pretty amazing moment in publishing and the media world. I'm still getting notices from the bankruptcy court handling the Tribune's recent bankruptcy (they owed me money, so I got stuck in their arbitration pool). My biggest clients right now are either online or POD companies, and print is in third place. And while the money is still in print books, if the B&N tells me anything, it's that this won't be true for long. It feels like pretty soon Amazon will complete its transformation into Random House, HarperCollins, Barnes & Noble, and Borders all wrapped up in one package.

Standing on Shoulders

2010-08-03T09:14:00.005-04:00

This story made me ... angry.

But not as angry as this one.

I can't believe we live in by far the richest country in the history of the world and there is any question at all about providing health care for people who need it. The idea that basic dental care is out of reach in America is just mind-boggling.

In case you didn't follow the first link, it was a story about a massive weekend-long free dental clinic that serves the people of Appalachia. Dentists from all over the region donate their time, set up a tent, and start pulling rotten teeth. In one weekend, they'll pull more than 2,000 teeth from people who can't afford any sort of dentistry. I think it's a great thing those dentists are doing, but one little detail jumped out at me. A couple is quoted in the story saying they grew up with excellent dental care ... their fathers were union miners, and the mining company provided full benefits. Those days are long gone.

The second story takes place in a Democratic representative's town hall meeting. He was challenged by an angry constituent who demanded to know if he thought that health care was a right. He made the mistake of saying yes. She lambasted him, the crowd cheered, and now the video has gone viral throughout the conservative Internet. The woman who denounced any sort of public health care has become a hero.

I don't get this on any level. I know I'm ranting, and I know this has nothing to do with writing, but sometimes I just can't believe what's going on. I strongly believe that you can tell what kind of society you're dealing with by how it treats the least among them. The rich aren't a measure of a country. Rather, it's how the rich treat the poor. The same is true of families, by the way. You can tell almost immediately what kind of person you're dealing with by how they treat their children.

In my book, this means the United States is measured by how we treat our criminals, our poor people and sick people, and kids. And I think we do a piss-poor job of it. Of course health care is a right. Whether you want to call it "providing for the general welfare" or the "pursuit of life," I think there's little question that an advanced, rich society should first see to its own health. It should make sure its people were able to meet a basic level of health. It shouldn't allow an epidemic of prison rape. It shouldn't allow mentally disabled people to live on the streets.

I get the conservative argument. I grew up a Young Reagan Republican, and I still read more right-wing media than I do left-wing media. When I argue with conservatives, I'm not really bragging to say that I often know their own arguments better than they do. But ultimately it comes down to a question of social justice for me, and I think anyone would be hard put to prove a link between providing social justice and the vibrancy of American business and innovation. In fact, the stronger the safety net has become, the greater our country has been. Being a good corporate citizen is not a competitive disadvantage. But being a bad one is ... just ask any Enron shareholders.

When I look at conservative thought, I'll be honest: I see mostly fear. I see a mindset that is consumed with the fear of loss. Loss of middle-class status; loss of economic well-being; loss of prestige; loss of national position; loss of security. This overwhelming fear threads through every argument—any measure is valid as long as it protects from this dreaded, panicky, ill-defined loss.

I get it. I'm worried too. I'll never have the kind of job my dad had. I might never have that kind of financial security or lifestyle, and I certainly won't enjoy those kinds of benefits. I don't know what kind of job market my kids will face. For that matter, I don't know what kind of job market I'll face in six months or a year. I don't know if China will grow beyond us (ironic, for a Communist country). I don't know if someone will figure out how to pack a nuclear bomb into a suitcase. But I never want to be crippled by this fear of not knowing. I can only hope that this fear will never eclipse my humanity so one day I'll find myself justifying why it's OK to sacrifice people who are less fortunate than me as long as I can stand on their shoulders.

Bookstore Blues

2010-08-02T09:48:00.003-04:00

I went to a bookstore this weekend, for the first time in a long time. And I realized I love bookstores, but they're also a little depressing.

Am I the only person who stands in a bookstore, looking at piles and piles of books and thinks, "Jeez. There're just too many books! How could I ever get any traction in a place like this, with the little books I'm working on?" Sometimes, I'll go through a shelf and read the first few pages of every single book, just to get a feel for what's out there. But every time I put the book back on the shelf, I imagine a chill running up some author's spine somewhere.

And holy first person! I write MG, so I must have looked at 60 MG books, and I literally found ONE new book that was written in third person. It was weird. What's the deal with all these first person books?

As always, I looked for all my published friends' books in their respective sections. Sadly, I didn't find any. Which was a bummer. I make it a habit to face out books written by people I know and hide their competitors. No such luck yesterday.

Finally, I found a book called the Billionaire's Curse in the middle grade section. Get this ... in the book, a kid inherits a billion dollars from his eccentric grandfather and is sent on a quest to find a diamond to save his family's reputation. This is EXACTLY the same plot of the book I shopped in 2008, except mine had the added wrinkle of time travel. I know it sounds like I'm obsessing, but I swear I rarely think about that whole episode anymore. Still, every so often, something happens and the whole thing comes whooshing back and smacks me in the face. This was one of those things.

I ended up not buying the book I went there to get. I don't know. I had it my hands, and just changed my mind. I was feeling a little rattled at this point. So instead I picked up a paperback and left, feeling altogether less wonderful than I usually feel when I leave a bookstore ...

Fish Fear Me

2010-07-30T11:08:00.001-04:00

A Hungry Patriot?

2010-07-28T09:17:00.004-04:00

I grew up in southeastern Michigan; left the state at 22; and haven't really been back in a while. So this is the first time in years I've spent a significant amount of time in Michigan, and we ended up driving all over the state, from Detroit to Lake Michigan (and even to Indiana). At one point, driving down one of those two-lane, country highways, I had this funny image that we were traveling along a buffet table ...

Frankly, I'd forgotten how much FOOD you're surrounded by in the Midwest in July. It's everywhere. Fields of corn, row after row after row. Soybeans. Strawberry and blueberry farms. Asparagus. Farmers stands with tables groaning under the weight of fresh-picked tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, zucchini and summer squash. Almost every house we visited had a little vegetable patch out back.

Then there's the lakes. We did a little salmon fishing last week and, in two hours, caught two 14 lb. salmon. Back at the dock, we cleaned 'em, filleted 'em, and then I treated myself to the best sashimi I've ever had—salmon so fresh it was still cold from the lake water. The next day, we went to throw the fish guts away in the woods and stumbled on a freaking wild turkey in the woods, just hanging out, waiting to get basted.

The deer in Michigan want to get eaten so badly they regularly jump at cars.

It's just amazing. The lakes and fields and woods are literally teeming with things people can eat. I know this just sounds like I haven't had breakfast yet (and I haven't), but the sheer abundance really did strike me. It made me wonder how anybody in this country can be allowed to go hungry when there's so MUCH. And I'm not exactly sure this will make sense, but it made me really grateful to be an American. I know we're working on a few things nationally at the moment, and nowhere is this more obvious than Michigan. The state is really hurting—a real estate market that has lost 10 or 15 years of value; among the highest unemployment in the country; a major city that is literally emptying out and decaying before everybody's eyes; auto companies that are pulling back and ripping the heart from the state's economy. But even with all this, underneath all this, it's hard not to marvel at this country. You get the feeling—or at least I did—that we're all going to be OK in the long run.

A Sexy Beast

2010-07-27T14:58:00.003-04:00

So we've been traveling in July, and you know what that means: sleeping in a different place every night, including a top bunk belonging to an 8-year-old little girl who was away for the weekend. It raised a lot of issues.

First, there was the issue that I hadn't slept in a top bunk in about 15 years. I'm laying there thinking, "I better not fall off this damn thing. I'll kill myself." I fell off a top bunk once in college, and I woke up on the way to the ground. Believe me, of all the horrible ways to wake up, waking up in midair a split second before you land on a hard tile floor has got to rank somewhere near the top. I barely had time to squawk.

After the fear subsided, I started to worry what this poor little girl would think if she knew that some giant, gross dad had slept in her bed. I just imagined her squealing and running away from sheets that were totally infected with some cootie-type parasite. But, I figured, her mom was the one who put me here, so maybe the cootie problem was well in hand.

Third came my wife, who was sleeping on the bottom bunk and who didn't really appreciate my thrashing around awkwardly on the top bunk. Apparently, I was shaking the whole set-up. So I tried to stop moving.

After I settled in, I started to pay attention and found myself smack in the childhood of an interesting little girl. It's funny what you can tell about people, even kids, from their spaces. Of course, Hannah Montana was looking down at me, microphone in hand, hip-cocked and smiling. Hi, Hannah, wait till you see what happens after you become Miley.

The bed's owner had also taped a piece of notebook paper on the wall where she could see it. On it, she had carefully written a long title and drawn two columns. The title was "The DIFFERENCE between insects and bugs." In the bugs column, she had written, "They have a triangle on their back." In the insects column, she had written, "All insects are bugs, but not all bugs are insects."

In a weird sort of way, I think I understood exactly what she meant.

And then I got sucked into the Strawberry Shortcake poster, and that was where I got seriously unhinged. I remembered Strawberry Shortcake as a cute little thing with freckles and pigtails. But, my oh my, Strawberry has certainly changed since I was a kid. Now she's a full-on Japanimation wonder, with huge blue eyes, a tiny nose and rosebud mouth, and lustrous hair. In the poster, Strawberry was braiding her pony's hair, and no little girl could ask for more than this pony. It pranced on three hooves, with its head cocked coquettishly, its back delightfully rounded. The pony's mane had been transformed into a cascade of golden locks and its giant, melting eyes were half-closed, its tiny pink mouth half open.

The pony was pitched perfectly at eye level, so you could lay in the top bunk and stare and stare, imagining your fingers intertwined in the pony's luxuriant hair, caring for and pampering the sexy little beast.

I had one of those moments. I could actually feel the longing of a little girl studying her poster, wishing for all the chocolate kisses in the world that she could just crawl into that land where houses are made from cupcakes and love that little pony with all of my heart. Later, I'm sure Strawberry Shortcake will come down and Justin Bieber (or whoever will play his part in the future) will go up, but the effect will be exactly the same: it will be one of those empty canvases upon which little girls draw imaginary sketches of love, of barely understood lust and longing, and a future where they aren't little girls anymore but lovers and brides and wives and mothers.

After I got through thinking all this (and by now was truly getting tired), I wondered if, later on, there would still be room in her life for worrying about the difference between bugs and insects. I hoped so.

Writerly Fantasies

2010-07-16T08:54:00.003-04:00

I've always had a lot of writerly fantasies, but they're probably not the kind you're thinking of.

Or that kind either.

I'm not talking about the kind where I see my name atop the New York Times bestseller list or take a podium before an adoring crowd to accept the Newberry. Or even the kind where normal folks line up fifteen deep, waiting for me to autograph books and body parts. I mean weird fantasies about the actual act of writing itself.

These often involve me with a pen and notebook (for some reason, my writerly fantasies are always low-tech) in some ridiculously windswept setting, scribbling furiously. I stop every few minutes to look out onto the wonder of the world. I sob. I laugh. I pace angrily and tear at my hair, then run back to the notebook and write some more. The words are always there, and before long, crinkled pages are filled with paragraph after paragraph of prose. You can always tell just from looking at the pages how much it cost to write them, how dramatic the view was. Words are crossed out angrily. Things like "MORE! MORE! YES!" and "WHY WON'T YOU DIE, YOU BASTARD!" are written in the margins.

It's a masterpiece.

The most intense of my writerly fantasies always seem connected to travel. Me and the notebook on a train rolling across the Midwest. In a jet cabin with lightning on the horizon. On a bridge in Spain (seriously, wtf, Spain?). Naturally, this means that every time I travel, I dutifully pack my spiral notebook and pen and look forward to those moments on Lake Michigan.

Reality sets in later. I've never written a single word in a notebook while I'm traveling, except once and it was complete crap. Mostly, I just carry the notebook around and feel guilty every time I have to shuffle past it to get fresh socks. But the truth is, I'd feel a little naked without that notebook, without at least the glimmer of a possibility that a bout of shaggy brilliance might break out at any time.

Later today, we're leaving for a weeklong vacation, and you can rest assured that my notebook will be in my bag. But I'm pretty sure this time will be different.

Dad, What Are You Hiding?

2010-07-15T08:14:00.005-04:00

Growing up, I spent a lot of time huddled behind garages, hanging out of open windows in the middle of the night, and learning how to open doors without making a single sound. If you have to ask "Why would you do any that stuff?" then you were probably a good kid and your parents would likely have banned you from hanging out with me.

Fast forward twenty years or so, and one of life's great ironies hit me last night when I was tagged in a Facebook photo by someone who knew me back then: I think I have more to hide from my 15-year-old son than he does from me. I opened the email, checked out the tag and then reflexively looked over my shoulder to see if anyone was behind me (in fact, I just did it again—some old habits die hard).

This was not the case with parents in my dad's generation. My dad grew up just after World War II and was in the service during the Korean War (safely stationed in Canada and New Orleans). Then he went to work and spent the next 47 years or whatever working for the same corporation.

I grew up in Reagan's America, and I was in college in the early 1990s—right around the time of Woodstock Redux and grunge music. So yeah, I've been in a few student riots; I've seen cars flipped and lit on fire; I've had friends make pilgrimages to Amsterdam; and I know a few guys who have things tattooed on their bodies that qualify for protection under the Fifth Amendment.

It seems like everybody's always bitching about kids today, and their computer time and rainbow parties and sexting and prescription drugs, but from where I'm sitting, I just don't see it. To me, it seems like kids today are, well, pretty good kids. They're tech-savvy, they are creative and funny, and they're focused in a way that makes my generation look like a bunch of slackers.

Sure, it's possible my oldest son is hiding all kinds of stuff from me. Maybe he does have a mini-hydroponics grow operation in his closet (like some people I have known). But I kind of doubt it. That's another kids today do: they live almost entirely in public.

But then in the midst of all this, I had another, somewhat unsettling thought. I was talking to my dad not too long ago about smoking—a habit he never started and one I gave up years ago. And he kind of grinned and said, "If it could burn, I probably tried smoking it when I was younger." To say I was shocked would be a HUGE understatement. Then I remembered another thing he said ... something about living just a few doors down from Pat O'Brien's in the French Quarter.

Huh. Now I'm beginning to wonder ... maybe the world is actually the REVERSE of what I thought growing up. Maybe the only reason kids have to go to extraordinary lengths to hide their bad behavior is because, when you're an adult, you own the garage your kid might be hiding behind. You don't have to bother with any spy craft or sneakery.

You can just lock the door.

I Write LIke ...

2010-07-14T12:50:00.003-04:00

J.K. Rowling.

In case you haven't seen this website yet, check it out. Paste in a little text and it analyzes it based on a whole bunch of criteria, then says who you write like.

Click on I Write Like for the link.

And no, I wasn't bummed with my results.

Resetting Yourself

2010-07-14T10:21:00.004-04:00

I just got back an hour or so ago from my weekly guest appearance on a local morning show. We were shooting outside today, and just my luck, it started pouring about 15 seconds before we went live. Fortunately, the spot was shot under a covered walkway at the base of a building—and we were talking about growing things in wet spots—so it was kind of fitting. Anyway, the unexpected makes for good TV.

Those two-and-a-half minutes on air are easily the fastest two and a half minutes of my week. Afterward, I'm usually on a little high that lasts for about an hour or so ... that's how I know I like these things. It takes me a day to get psyched up to do it, then it's two intense minutes of live TV, and then another hour to come down off the rush.

Not all of my segments go perfectly. I did one a little while back that still gives me shivers. I was going along fine, but then for some reason, my mind just went utterly blank. When I watched the playback, I could see the exact moment the contents of my brain emptied out onto the floor. I kept talking for a while after that, sort of babbling, but I knew I was in deep shit. Then I just ran out of stuff to say and I kind petered to a halt, mumbling something about how sorry I was. Ouch.

The host—thank God—had lots of experience with guests who choke, so she recognized it, reset the conversation, and gave me a few seconds to find my center. Then we finished the segment and they "cut to the couch" (the on-set hosts) and finally to commercial. The whole thing took about 30 seconds, but man, those were looong seconds. I felt every one of them.

I haven't choked since. It's like I had to get that out of my system. Now, when I feel myself start to drift or freeze up, I know it and I can reset myself before it gets out of hand. Now, you wouldn't even know that I just experienced a split second of sheer panic and had to quickly refocus before I went gibbering off the deep end.

I think writing is the same way, but much slower. It happens in geological time. Your highs stretch out over weeks, maybe months. But you choke too, when the words just vanish, and those are pretty awful days and sometimes weeks. So you tell me ... how do you reset when you can feel it all spinning out of control?

Moxie

2010-07-13T09:09:00.004-04:00

I don't want to get into name-calling, but I'm thinking of a certain movie director I'm fascinated by. This director is a "type" of artist you'll probably recognize. He's not that good, but he thinks he is. And he's not ashamed of telling people how good he is. It seems half his career is self-promotion.

I find this kind of self-confidence magnetic, intoxicating and compelling beyond belief. Reality TV is full of people like this, and I think explains why I like some reality TV. I have this endless fascination with people who put it out there aggressively, who are loud in support in themselves, and who attract other people by sheer force of their own will power, whether or not they're actually any good at what they do.

If you ask me, Sarah Palin is the quintessence of this personality type. She exudes confidence in herself; she can command an entire audience—and yet when you break down what she says on a sentence-by-sentence basis, it's often actual gibberish. And when it's not gibberish, it's usually content free. She just did a campaign style commercial asking conservative women to rise up and ... what? She said they're mama grizzlies who ... what again? But see, that's the thing. With Palin, the "what" is never important. It's always the "who." It's always about her and her bottomless well of moxie.

I think moxie is a great thing, especially as a spectator sport. I think most writers, including me, could use a little more moxie.

Except for those who could use a little less.

I would say you know who you are, except you don't ... and I kind of respect that.

Down the (Not-So-Evil) Rat Hole

2010-07-12T08:25:00.004-04:00

You know what's annoying? When questions lead to questions ...

Example. I'm working on a book on monsters right now—it's MG, a kid's book, and the main character is part-human, part-monster; his dad is a monsterologist. The last few books I've written, there has been this tipping point right about 15,000 words. I kind of monkey around and go slow, then I hit that point and I get into a groove and the book goes quick from there. Same thing here—it's been rolling out pretty well lately.

I was brainstorming recently, thinking about Sam's dad, the monsterologist. This time around, I've been writing all the characters in first person to get a sense of their voice and who they are, and I ran into an awkward question in my brainstorming.

Evil.

What to do about Evil? When it comes to monsters, I think you can make a pretty good case that, say, zombies aren't really Evil. They're just zombies, doing what zombies do. When you reanimate a piece of dead flesh and give it a hunger for brains, it might not be pretty and it might even be life-threatening, but it's not necessarily Evil. I think the same thing applies to most "monsters." Dragons, werewolves, trolls, ogres, even most ghosts. Big Foot. The Lochness monster. These things aren't really capital-E evil as much as they are dangerous by nature.

It might be just me, but I think true Evil has to have a purpose. It has to have Evil agency. True Evil isn't a hungry animal or a weather pattern. True Evil is a deliberate choice made in the face of alternatives. Calling zombies Evil would be like saying the AIDS virus is Evil, or mosquitoes or Evil, or in a way, Glenn Beck is Evil (I'm kidding about that last one—he really is Evil).

But then in the world of monsters there are clearly some pretty Evil bastards out there. You can make a case for vampires, of course (although, again, they're parasites so it's back to mosquitoes once more). Demons are clearly evil. And unfortunately, people are frequently Evil.

So I'm sitting there with my notebook, pen poised over the page, and thinking, "Oh shit. Now what?" I have no interest in getting all wrapped up in a philosophical tar pit about the nature of evil and how it affects my little story. I just want to crack a few jokes. But then, the story is looking me in the face and nagging me: "Please, you HAVE to know this, or I'll lack any sort of authentic emotional depth. You've got to figure this out."

Grrr. When was the last time a purely philosophical question hung up your book? What'd you do?

BBQ Milkshakes

2010-07-02T08:22:00.003-04:00

I've never been particularly good at remembering the past. I'm sure it drives everyone I know crazy, but I can never remember when things happened, who I was with when they happened, or sometimes really what happened. A lot of times, it sort of feels life is this giant, not-so-connected jumble of anecdotes, floating around the mist of memory. I know some people who have these razor-sharp memories of everything that ever happened to them, and I kind of envy it. It's kind of helpful for writers to actually remember stuff.

I'm also ... ha ha ... not particularly good at living in the here and now. I would make a lousy Buddhist. I rarely know where I am when driving, unless I've been on that road a billion times.

I am, however, VERY good at living in the future. This is my chosen time-space. I love anticipating what's next. I can literally spend all week excited about a dinner on Saturday or a certain day when fireworks will be lit. Sometimes, when we have an open day, I like anticipating the day almost as much as living it. "I know! We can go to the park! No wait, to the movies! Forget that, let's drive to Miami and get Cuban food! The beach! Let's rent a boat! Parasailing anyone! Better yet, let's go fishing! Or maybe I should learn how to play taiko drums!"

I see life as a rolling crescendo ... always progress, each thing building upon the last, always heading toward something, some distant shining goal or city on the hill. I'm almost 40 years old now, and I STILL wonder what I'll be doing when I grow up, even though I'm pretty much already doing what I'll be doing when I grow up because I'm pretty much already grown up.

If aging freaks me out at all, this is why. I can't really imagine a time when the focus shifts from what will happen, from the delicious possibilities of tomorrow, to what has already happened. I can't imagine a time when the future loses its potency because it has already been lived. I don't know how I'll cope with such a thing—and as much as anything about aging, this really scares me. I hate the idea that I'll have to look back to find something to look forward to.

My secret hope is that when that time comes, I'll rescale my anticipation to fit into whatever assisted-living facility my children have stuck us (me and wife) in, or whatever room I find myself lodged in as a codger. Jell-O later? Or wait ... chocolate pudding! Forget that ... I want graham crackers soaked in milk! Wait, wait, wait ... doesn't McDonald's have BBQ-flavored milkshakes now? Let's have somebody get those!

I don't think enthusiasm is much to ask for out of life.

Book Review: The Passage, by Justin Cronin

2010-06-25T09:17:00.005-04:00

The Passage, by Justin Cronin, is one of those books that is less a book and more of an event. I first heard of it a year ago, when news of his sale broke. Cronin, an accomplished literary author, sold the rights to The Passage for $3.75 million, with a film deal to Ridley Scott for another $1.75 million, based on just the first 120 pages or so. So I've been waiting all this time, ever since, to see what kind of book is worth all that money.

The Passage is the story of a government experiment gone terribly wrong. In its quest to create a super-soldier, using a vampire virus, the U.S. government unwittingly unleashes the apocalypse. But this virus is different from other literary viruses: it's victims become vampires. They are fast, they are strong, and they are bloodthirsty. They don't just nibble at necks, and they don't moon around over teenage girls. These vampires tear people apart literally. At one point, a solider "experiences the sensation, utterly new to him, of being torn in half." As the virus spreads, a plague of bloodsuckers draining the continent of people, the world's hopes reside in a young girl named Amy, who is introduced in the first sentence as the Girl from Nowhere, the Girl who Lived a Thousand Years. Amy doesn't talk much, but she shares a bond with the vampires that confuses and confounds the few remaining survivors.

The first act of The Passage is nearly perfect. Cronin is a hell of a writer. He takes time with his characters; he builds them and we know them. The tension is palpable as we wait for the hammer to fall, because we know it must. His observations are razor sharp, and the book possesses a specificity of detail that is staggering. It's complete, thorough world-building—you literally go down the rabbit hole as the vampires take over.

After the virus, or AV, the survivors hole up in a walled compound known as the Colony where they light the night with powerful banks of lights to keep away the virals (or smokes or dracs). At this point, the narrative leaps forward almost a century, and every character we met in the first act is gone. Now the book's debt to its predecessors becomes more plain. We are treated to snippets of the familiar: the paranoid, fearful waiting of I Am Legend, the savagery of 28 Days Later, the mysticism of The Stand and hopelessness of The Road. Unfortunately, Cronin never establishes the same visceral connection with his new batch of survivors—except perhaps Alicia Donadio, who he obviously has great affection for. Nevertheless, the strength and ambition of the original idea propels the book relentlessly for hundreds of pages, so even if the characters themselves sometimes melt into their own narratives, the fact that the virals are out there in the night is never far away.

Read it.

Whew. That was Rough

2010-06-24T16:19:00.002-04:00

Guess what I just did? I just synced up a Twitter feed with Facebook via Tweetdeck. Ha ha! Just this morning, that sentence would have been incomprehensible to me, but it's done now.

Along the same lines, I'm keeping this blog and blog title, but I'm retired LurkerMonkey as my name. Why? Oh jeesh. The thing is, I'm feeling the urge to consolidate all the various chunks of my personality. You know how it feels to stare into a cluttered closet and it just looks like a pile of crap? That's a little how I'm feeling about the whole Internet thing right now, like I've got little pieces of myself scattered all over the place, but it doesn't hang together. Like a continuity editor would look at it and their head would explode.

So there you go ... and from now on, when I comment or post, I'll be doing it under my own name.

Goodbye, LurkerMonkey.

Checking My Twitter Feed

2010-06-24T14:24:00.001-04:00

Yeah, that's right. It's just what it says ... I got sucked into Twitter this afternoon, so I'm setting up an RSS feed from this blog to my Twitter account. And this is just to see if all these magical things actually happen!

A Man in the Mirror

2010-06-07T09:18:00.004-04:00

Kim was a beautiful girl, in a small-town sort of way. She was blonde and, well, built, and she had been crowned the queen of whatever fruit or vegetable her town was known for. Cherry queen? Onion princess? Something like that. She was also her high school's homecoming princess and, when I met her in college, dead set on marrying her middle school sweetheart, who she was still dating from a distance. I always thought it was kind of a shame that Kim was still so attached to this guy hundreds of miles away, because she was completely off the market. Aggressively off the market. Adamantly off the market. To the point that she wore both a commitment ring and his class ring on a chain around her neck.

Kim attracted a fair amount of attention in her small town—she said it used to creep her out when her dad's friends hit on her. But nothing compared to this story.

Kim's house was a single-story ranch house in a wide open neighborhood with wooded lots between the homes. Her bed was pushed up against the wall, facing a large vanity across the room. She slept with her head toward the wall, just under a large window that let in the moonlight and summer breezes when she kept it open.

Her senior year, Kim started to get funny vibes. She couldn't explain it exactly, but she started to feel like she was being watched, that sometimes a car would pass her house a few extra times, or that someone—she couldn't say who—was watching her when she got out of school. Then the phone calls started. It was mostly heavy breathing, but sometimes he would groan into the phone.

Now she was scared. Her dad got involved. The police got involved. Even her boyfriend got involved—I believe he threatened to kill whoever was stalking his girlfriend.

One spring night, Kim awoke in the middle of the night. She said she didn't know why, or what woke her up. But she had the strong feeling something was wrong. She opened her eyes and looked down her bed, to the vanity mirror across the room. She saw the reflection of a man in the mirror, just outside her window. He was less than two feet from her head, separated from her only by a pane of glass. Watching her sleep.

Kim screamed, and he ran.

Later, the police found a footpath to her window, leading out from the trees on her property. It was well-worn.

The next day, her dad installed a motion-detector outside her window that triggered security lights and an alarm. But still, she couldn't sleep with her back to the window anymore. She had to move her bed. Nights, in fact, were terrifying for months afterward, as she watched the darkness outside her window for the flare of light that would mean he was back and had tripped the security lights.

Going to college was a relief for Kim, because it was over. They never found out who it was, and once she moved away, it all stopped. No more phone calls, no more weird feelings, no more stalking.

Erica Orloff recently asked what episode from real life we've used in a story. I used this one in a middle-grade horror-lite story. And you know what? Every kid who read the manuscript made a point to mention that this scene in particular was terrifying.

As for Kim? She didn't end up marrying that guy after all, but by the time she was on the market, I was off it.

Through the Ice

2010-06-03T10:07:00.004-04:00

I remember the morning I showed up in English class and found our teacher crying. Ms. Tyman was my favorite teacher by far—I took an independent study writing class with her and we did nothing that semester but huddle around a table in the library and talk fiction. She showed me her poems, and she read my awful high-school writing as if it deserved serious consideration. She was unsparing in her criticism, but also in her praise. So finding her sitting at her desk sobbing sent the class into a stunned silence.

"Rob Kornwise died," she said. "In a car accident."

It took me a minute to understand what she was even saying. Rob sat next to me, and Rob and I weren't really friends, but we shared one thing in common: we both wrote. I'd read his stuff, and I was impressed. In another life, Rob and I might have been friends. We should have been friends.

As best I can remember, the accident happened during a concert. Rob was in a car full of kids, waiting in a line. Another car tried to cut into the line and rear-ended Rob's car. He was tall, so his head stuck up above the seat-rest. His neck broke and he died instantly.

When a high school student dies like that, the whole school stops. Life seems to stop and mortality makes an unwelcome appearance in the grim halls. For a while at least, all the normal activities are suspended and there is a palpable, dull sheen over everything. I remember seeing girls crying in the hallway.

I didn't go to the funeral. I felt like I hadn't really earned it, because Rob and I weren't very close after all. I was afraid I had no right to show up. But I wrote his parents a letter. "You don't know me," I wrote. "You've probably never heard my name, and I'm just one of the kids who drifted in and out of Rob's life. But I wanted to say that Rob meant something to me. He was a writer. I'm a writer. He was so good, and I'm so sorry for your loss. I would have loved to see what Rob could have written."

Of course, I knew from class what Rob was writing. He was working on a fantasy novel. It was patterned after his favorite author, Piers Anthony, and Rob was serious about publication. When he died, his book was halfway done. In one of those remarkable stories, his friends sent the manuscript to Anthony with a short note about what happened and how Rob loved Anthony's books. Piers Anthony read it. And liked it. And finished it based on Rob's notes. You can order the book on Amazon. It's called Through the Ice, and Rob Kornwise is given co-author credit with Anthony.

I've thought about Rob a lot over the years, with a mixture of sadness, inspiration and regret. I never mailed the letter I wrote to his parents. No one ever knew how much Rob's death shook me—because I didn't tell anybody, and because I didn't really understand it myself. I spent most of those years skipping school and flunking tests, frequently face down, obsessed with my girlfriend, and dreaming of running away. But Rob wasn't running away—he was running toward. Rob had already identified what he wanted in a way that I hadn't and couldn't at that age. He had already engaged in a process that I didn't even know existed.

Ms. Tyman pulled me aside after Rob's death. She was perhaps the only other person who knew that Rob and I had formed this tenuous, classroom connection as writers. She had seen it, and she had nurtured it. She made us writing partners and encouraged us to share our work. I think now that Ms. Tyman hoped Rob had something to teach me—and I can only hope that she also thought I had something to teach Rob. Ms. Tyman had almost made a career out of trying to reach me.

"Are you OK?" she said.

I nodded because there was no way I could tell the truth.

In Which I Rebel Against Social Norms

2010-05-27T10:14:00.004-04:00

I was wondering the other day if I had to write myself as a character, how would I do it? Which details would I choose to get across the essence of my character, so readers could instantly understand the "type" of character they are dealing with?

Then I thought some more, and realized that I might be a deeply weird person. To wit:

I don't own a cell phone. I have no desire to own a cell phone. It's true that I work from my house, so my need for a cell phone is somewhat obviated, but still. Not including my five-year-old, I'm literally the only person I know who doesn't own a cell phone.

I don't own a watch. I think the last watch I owned was a black plastic digital watch in fourth grade. I hated the way it made the skin on my wrist smell. LIke a belly button, but worse.

I wear no jewelry at all, except a wedding ring. And I didn't start wearing my wedding ring until 3 months ago, after almost ten years of marriage. I don't wear necklaces, bracelets, sunglasses, or earrings either.

I can't stand elastic in almost any article of clothing, and I won't wear clothes that have printed words or images on them.

Given the choice, I'll cut my hair twice a year—so it goes through stages. Very short, almost buzzed, then longish, then truly long. Then I cut it.

I'm terrified of cameras—and yet I've recently discovered that I actually really like doing TV. Somehow, that's not intimidating or scary, but exhilarating. I make weekly TV appearances on a local morning show, BUT I have trouble watching myself back on screen, so I often don't.

Even I think I have bad taste in music, but what can I say? I have the musical taste of a 15-year-old English raver. I like loud beats.

I like extremely spicy food, motion in all its varieties (spinning, roller coasters, even "the spins"), swimming in cold water, and being outside in rainstorms.

People often think I'm distant, which is true, but not for the reason most people think. I'm not unfriendly, shy, introverted, arrogant, or anti-social. The truth is, I'm usually distracted by what else is going on—and by what else, I mean what's going on in the immediate environment. I'm less interested in people than is perhaps socially acceptable.

And it goes on. If I was writing myself as a character, I'd look at this list and think they're mostly quirks. But there's a common theme that runs through all this. My wife would say I have sensory issues; I would say that I'm focused on experience rather than relationship, and I'm overaware of sensory input. This is why I can't wear most jewelry, or carry around things like phones and beepers, why I like strongly flavored foods, and why I have trouble focusing on conversations right in front of my face. It's all too distracting. I can't concentrate when I'm constantly playing with a ring or watch. On the other hand, strong sensations tend to focus me on the moment, and it's nice.

Isn't it like this with characters in books also? What looks like a collection of quirks and oddities is in fact united by a common thread ... a fundamental personality type that has both positives and negatives. It's true that I sound slightly autistic, but I'm also hyper-observant. I rarely miss anything going on around me, even at the expense of the conversation I'm currently sort of having.

So that's what I'm looking for as i write: a uniting thread with my characters that pulls together all the little quirks.

A Million Jilted Girlfriends

2010-05-26T09:04:00.002-04:00

I've been edging around this self-publishing question for a while now, and it finally struck me what I find so off-putting about the whole thing.

But before I go there, I'll say this: I have no doubt, zero, that the old business model for publishing is on its last legs. It will morph into something new, in the very near future. The traditional role of agent/editor/publisher will change, and at least for now, individual authors have unprecedented access to mass distribution. A window of opportunity has opened for people who are well-positioned to take advantage of it, and it's exciting to see authors empowered and a new urgency around the book industry. I love it, and I'm even working on a few of my own projects for this brave new world of publishing.

And yet ... I've had this niggling unpleasant sensation about the e-revolution and self-publishing wave. It's like a toothache, but less specific. For the longest time, I couldn't figure out what was bugging me. I'm an entrepreneur by nature, right? I love it when writers get paid for their work. I love the idea of writers finding their own audience and the ability of technology to democratize publishing. And yet ...

I read JA Konrath's post yesterday about an article Publisher's Weekly ran about his deal with AmazonEncore. He called the article an "epic fail" and went on to detail some significant factual errors in the article. Worse yet, in a way, Konrath himself wasn't quoted in the article, and the reporter took some significant liberties with her editorializing. I'm a reporter myself, so I know a lousy article when I see it, and that was a lousy article. And yet ...

Then I read the comment thread and I had this very strong image. I pictured a whole football stadium of jilted girlfriends, all yelling at once about how their ex-boyfriends all got crabs and ha ha, sucks to be them. It's a toxic mixture of triumphalism, thin-skinned pique, gloating, and I-told-you-so. I was almost moved to comment, but then I figured there was no point in setting off an argument on someone else's blog. I wondered how many of those angry commenters have been unable to place books with traditional publishers. Then I realized it was probably all of them.

Like I said, I think this technological revolution is amazing and awesome, and there's no pretty way to create a new future. You have to break some crockery. But I have a feeling ... just a little tickle ... that all of this triumphalism is premature. There is a window of opportunity right now, as e-readers proliferate and people rush to stock up their new gadgets. But let's be honest ... this isn't how markets really work for long. After a while, they organize. After the initial rush passes, they consolidate. Before long, someone will figure out how to control and monetize the distribution channel.

And even if I'm wrong about all that, even if "they" are right that we stand on the threshold of a new era and New York publishing is truly a sinking ship that will soon be vaporized by a million $1.99 e-books, I still think it's a dangerous thing to drink too much wine made from bitter grapes.

What Makes You Happy?

2010-05-14T10:15:00.002-04:00

This whole post is TOP SECRET and will hopefully self-destruct after you've read it ... but I've been involved in this weird episode lately. One of my gigs is editing for a very, very, very large POD self-publishing company. I can't really say which one, and I can't get into specifics at all here, but just bear with me.

Basically, when a self-pubber signs up with a POD press, they have an option to buy various publishing packages. I'm one of the contract editors who might end up with their manuscript if they buy a certain level of editing. Most of the time, I don't think about the writers themselves—I do a lot of these books, so it's just another editing job. But sometimes I'll look up the person and see who they are.

One of the books I recently edited was a YA book, and I felt moved to look the author up. Turns out she's keeping a blog about her experience with this POD company. So there I was, reading about her experience of me doing my job and the various travails of waiting, spending thousands of dollars, and her relatively high anxiety level over the future of her book and her decision to use a POD press.

Boy. Talk about living in a world of mirrors.

I finished her book and sent it back to the publisher. But I was unsettled. For the first time, one of these authors had become real to me, and I could totally empathize with her mix of anxiety, insecurity and pride in her book. At the same time, I knew almost objectively that she has no real chance of selling this book. It's a virtual knock-off of another best-selling book, with major problems of its own, and she'll face all the obstacles any POD author faces.

Part of me felt sleazy for doing this kind of work at all. But then ... part of me felt like, at least in this case, I had the ability to give her part of the experience she was looking for. So after I sent the book back, I contacted the publisher and asked them if I'd be allowed to generate an editorial letter. They said yes (even though it's not required), so I whipped up a 2-page critique of her book on a meta-level. I wasn't overly harsh, but I gave her my straight opinion on the fairly major things that need to be fixed. I signed it Your Editor.

I've been waiting these past few days to see what would happen next and how she would react to my letter and the job I did. Today, she updated her blog with a happy post about how she's "loving" the POD experience and I did a "quality" edit. She also said she was so happy to be self-publishing because it meant she didn't "have to change anything I don't want to change." Which I took to mean that she's disregarding most of my letter.

The whole experience really got me thinking. I was talking to someone recently who compared my job to Simon Cowell, who famously tells people they should stop singing because they'll never be any good. Truthfully, that's 100% of the writers I've edited through this POD company. Even the best of them aren't very good. I wouldn't buy a single of their books. So I get it: they are fools, chasing a pipe dream, and I am not only enabling their impossible dream, i'm profiting from it. I'm the editorial equivalent of the girlfriend experience. And yet ... part of me can't help but to wonder: is it so wrong to help these writers live a dream, no matter how foolish it is? Isn't that what we all want, at least a little?

Give Me Your Eyeballs

2010-05-13T09:41:00.002-04:00

Mostly because I love the taste of a fresh eyeball.

Just kidding.

As you might know, I'm a site guide for About.com. I run a website on houseplants for About.com, which means I'm the resident houseplant expert and I have near total control over this website. My website is one of 750 discrete sites on the About.com network, each run by a different site guide. In total, About.com attracts about 60 million visitors per month, which makes it one of the 50 largest websites in the world.

I've been at this for almost two and half years now. It started off pretty small, because I was basically starting from scratch. But then I added content and articles, and over time, it built. I just got my site metrics for last month, and let me tell you, it gave me serious pause. I'm contractually prohibited from giving out my numbers, but let's just say this: my little houseplants site put up traffic numbers last month that would make many bestselling authors blush.

It really got me thinking about the changing nature of what it means to be a writer. I think the "writer" of yesteryear is a dead animal. Instead, the writers I've observed who are successful use the same techniques they teach us at About.com to grow a site. It's all about eyeballs. You want to control the most eyeballs as possible. You want to create an immersive "universe" centered on your subject. Your subject can be houseplants, or it can be your novel, your imaginary world, or if you're very good, the reflected light of your sheer awesomeness. Whatever it is, it should be narrow enough that you can wrap your arms around it, but interesting enough to attract your particular audience.

And it should be interactive. There should be interaction between you and the people who visit your universe—in the form of blog comments, emails, and forum posts—and interaction between the visitors themselves, usually in a forum. The point is that you want to give people as many chances as possible to join, talk, contribute and react. In a way, you're less a writer than you are a host at a big themed party.

I've been following a few writers for a a number of years (I'm thinking of two in particular). Both of them have done an amazing job of creating a true community built around their books, the worlds they've created, and their aesthetic. In both cases, these authors are infinitely accessible—they hang out on their own forums, they answer every Facebook message, every email, and respond to every comment. In both cases, they run forums and/or blogs that attracts tens of thousands of people every month, usually repeat visitors.

I think in the future—especially as e-books destroy the print business model—distribution will fade in relevance. Instead, we'll see the rise of the Metric Writer, someone who knows how to build, measure and maintain an audience in a vertical silo built around a complete entertainment community: books, video, a steady stream of blog content, short stories and novellas, active forums, linked social media, and author availability.

Personally, I think it's a very exciting time to be a writer.

Genetic Potential

2010-05-10T11:43:00.003-04:00

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about genetic potential. As a gardener, I'm always hoping to bring my plants to their maximum genetic potential. Basically, this means growing the plant to its perfect form. And it can definitely be done—ask any hyrdoponic gardener about their nutrient schedule and you'll quickly see there's a world of difference between a plant that's carelessly stuck in the ground in bad soil and bad light and one that is pampered on every level.

Plants, I think, are pretty cooperative when it comes to their genetic potential. They WANT to achieve their full potential, and they respond beautifully to the right conditions. People ... not so much. People are frequently self-destructive—they smoke, they eat too much, don't exercise, jump out of perfectly good airplanes, whatever. For people, it seems that the experience of living itself means trading away your genetic potential.

But as far as books go ...

I've been editing and critiquing a lot of novels lately for some reason, and it struck me along the way that my job isn't to make a book better. Not really. My job as an editor is to help the author bring her book to its natural genetic potential, or at least as close as possible. Because better is my opinion. It's subjective. But it's a safe bet that every writer starts off with a vision of their perfect book. They know how it sounds, how it feels, the emotions and themes it conveys. But like a war plan, this book rarely survives contact with reality. So an editor's job is to suss out the spots where the perfect book in your head didn't translate to the page and suggest ways to get it there. The editor's job is NOT to fix plot points, add or delete characters, etc.

I guess the hard part for lots of us is that the genetic potential of any particular book might not be all that great. That's a tough thing to recognize—when even the best version of a story is still missing something. And I think that's when people start getting desperate and adding character quirks or weird plot twists or, in the words of another blogger, throwing a dragon into the story randomly to spice things up.

Anyway, as a side note, I didn't post a Storytellers prompt this month ... I'm taking a little break from the prompts for a while. I know there are a few people who have asked when/if I was going to do another prompt, and I think that's awesome. We had some really good stories here, and I loved the give-and-take between the writers and commenters. So it's not over forever, just for a while ... and thanks if you had ever written anything for a prompt.

Now For a Break In Our Regular Programming

2010-04-30T09:55:00.004-04:00

I almost titled this post "A Shameless Plug for my Kid." But I decided to be more subtle, because subtle is better when I'm trying to convince you to do something (and it wont' cost a thing, I swear).

Before I start my pitch, though, I want to tell you a story about my oldest son, Max. He's always been a funny kid with a really novel take on life. A few years ago, when he was about 9 or so, Max and I came home to an empty house to find that the washing machine had flooded. This meant we had to pull everything out of the laundry room, move the washing machine and dryer, figure out what was going wrong, and then fix it. Max was at that awesome age when he was eager to help Dad with any project, so we started pushing and pulling and moving stuff around.

Then the Domino Effect kicked in. The outflow pipe came off the wall, the dryer vent was pulled free, and things went from bad to worse. At one point, like an idiot, I wanted to see if the pump was still working in the washing machine, so I turned it on without hooking up the outflow pipe and sprayed water all over the laundry room.

My wife picked that exact second to arrive home. She walked in, saw us with the laundry room taken apart, water all over the floor, dryer lint floating through the air, and asked, "What's going on?"

Max looked up and said in his completely earnest way: "Hi, Mom. We're formerly known as the disaster waiting to happen."

I had to stop and think about that for a second.

Anyway, Max is 15 years old now and he entered a writing competition at SparksNotes (the organization that helps students figure out what the heck books are supposed to mean). He was selected as a finalist in the category of "Most Unique." If he wins the voting round, he gets $500. Which is a fortune to a 15-year-old who keeps a list of toys he wants (drums, new iPod, car, music).

So here's my pitch: go check out Max's entry in the competition. Read the other two entries. Carefully consider who DESERVES to win.

And then vote for Max.

:)

Like a House of Cards

2010-04-27T10:10:00.005-04:00

In the last two weeks or so, I've started and deleted more blog entries than ever before. Truth is, I'm in a rough patch, and I keep deleting blog entries because I like to keep my angst private.

In a nutshell, I finished the book I was working on. Throughout the book, the response was very good—and there are lots of things to like about it. But I realized when I finished that I didn't actually have a book. I had a set-up to a longer series. There was no plot. And most people like a plot in their book.

This, naturally, has provoked an intense round of soul-searching. What the hell? How could I make such a rookie, dumb error? How could I not see such a thing until readers pointed it out? This isn't my first book, or my second, or even my fifth. Anyway, in between moping and feeling like a moron and all that discouragement, I just couldn't find the heart to blog about writing. So I've been taking a break.

In my original plan, I would finish this draft and begin querying this summer. But that plan is shot now, and I had to spend a few days with the idea that this book was essentially worthless and could never be queried in its current form before I decided what to do.

Logic tells me I could easily move onto another project. But ultimately, when you get down to it, I'm just not that guy. I wish I could move on. I wish I could just shelve it and sit on it, let it go, and go onto another book. But I can't, even though I know I'm dangerously close to the line where determined becomes foolhardy and stubborn becomes self-destructive. I just hate giving up, and I WANT to get this story right. I've written two books about this same story now, not including all the world-building. It's like the story deserves a better writer than it got, but we're stuck together for now.

So I started over from a blank page. I started at chapter one and started rewriting another version of the same story, but I moved whole chunks of the story from future planned books into this one. I covered in the first five pages what took me 75 to cover before. I'm not even bothering to outline anymore. What's the point? I know the story and the world so well, it's like second nature at this point.

Anyway, I started out this blog entry to say that I was taking a vacation from blogging for a while. But ... I think I'll keep this version. Maybe one day, it'll make better sense.

Open Windows, by Erica Orloff

2010-04-21T08:05:00.001-04:00

In my bottom right-hand desk drawer, I keep a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black. I keep it for celebratory cases, hard-won. I keep it for the God-awful cases that trail me home like shadows at the end of the day. The Marsh case was both.

I set the glass on my desk and poured it more than half full. My hand shook and the first sip raced through me. I imagined it purging my brain of the shadows. I took the second slip slower and shut my eyes. Another one for you.

Someone tapped on my glass. My assistant opened my door and stuck his head in. “There’s a woman here to see you, Joe.”

I glanced at my watch. “It’s been a long day. Can you take a message?”

He shook his head. “She says she has to see you. Today. Said her name is Grace Ann.”

I set the Scotch down unsure I could trust my voice. “How old is she?”

“About your age. Beautiful. Blonde.”

I exhaled. “You can send her in.”

When he shut the door, I downed the rest of the Johnnie Walker.

She walked in not three minutes later, tall, willowy, expensive bracelets on her wrists, and the scar. The little star-shaped scar on her forehead that she got the time she fell from my treehouse.

“Hello, Joe,” she whispered.

“Hello, Grace Ann. Sit down,” I gestured toward the chair. I wasn’t sure if I was even breathing.

“I followed the case, and . . . I saw your picture. I thought of coming here a dozen times and always chickened out. But . . . I wanted you to nail the bastard.”

Nail the bastard.

I’d spent fifteen years of my life atoning for not rescuing Grace Ann from the shadows on her wall.

“How are you?” I managed to speak. “Do you live in the city? What do you do? Are you married?”

“Do you cross-examine everyone this way? Good, yes, actress, no.” She smiled. Her eyes didn’t though. Sad eyes behind the flirtatious voice.

“Occupational hazard. I ask a lot of questions.” I blinked and I remembered a day in fifth grade when she smiled at me. Maybe the only time I ever saw her smile that way. A pure laugh. “So . . . It’s been what? Fifteen years?”

“Yeah. I . . . God, where to even start. I ended up, believe it or not, in L.A. You can fill in the blanks. I did some things I’m not proud of. A lot of things, actually. And I woke up one day and looked in the mirror and wasn’t sure who I even was anymore. So I took all my money, came east. Took real acting classes. Ever see that commercial for—”

“Oh my God,” recognition flooded through me. “You’re the toothpaste girl.”

She laughed. I saw a hint of the girl gazing at the stars. “Yeah. That’s me.”

I leaned back. “I didn’t recognize you.”

“And how about you, Mr. Prosecutor?”

I didn’t answer for a minute. Finally, I whispered. “I’ve spent my life going after bastards like your stepfather. It’s my penance.”

She bent her head. “Joe . . . you were a boy.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Yes, it does. You were so kind to me. I’ve held onto that night in the field my whole life. Kind of measured people up against you, Joe.”

How could I tell her I did the same?

She looked up from her lap. “So I just had to come say thank you, Joe. And shake your hand.” She stood up and put her hand out in the space over my desk.

I stood. “Do you want to have dinner, Grace Ann?” I took her hand and didn’t so much shake it as hold it.

“Considering how I left town and what you do for a living, Joe . . . I don’t know if that’s such a good idea. It’s sort of why I haven’t come before now. But this case, the Marsh girl. She might have been me.”

I’d actually thought about what would happen if I ever found Grace Ann. “How you left town doesn’t matter to me.”

“Maybe not now. But someday it might.” She withdrew her hand and started toward the door.

“Grace Ann . . .” I just couldn’t let her walk out.

Her back was to me, but she didn’t say anything.

“You were right, that night. I was spying on you. I could hear what he did to you. See what he did, through the open window. In shadows on the wall. My entire career has been about saving every Grace Ann there is. Every last one. I have something to show you.”

I opened my bottom desk draw where I keep the Johnnie Walker and took out the envelope.

“Here.” I walked to her and put it in her hand. She still didn’t move.

Then slowly, she opened it. A single Polaroid our fifth-grade teacher had taken of her and pinned on the bulletin board along with all our pictures. I had stolen hers and kept it until the colors faded to sepia tinges.

She turned around. “They say you are the prosecutor who never sleeps. That your assistants quit from exhaustion. That you’re driven like no one the city has seen before. You’re forgiven, Joe. Now you can sleep.”

“Don’t go,” I heard a panic in my voice I didn’t recognize.

She held my gaze, then looked down at the picture. We stood there like statues. Finally, she said, “All right.” She smiled at me. “Dinner, then, Joe.”

I nodded and opened the door for her. And for the first time for as long as I remembered, a shadow didn’t follow me home or come in echoes through an open window.

[AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is a companion story to the earlier Open Windows.]

The 11th Ring, by E. Flanigan

2010-04-20T09:33:00.001-04:00

Raisa says people are like trees: you have to cut them down to see what they're made of.

Raisa's really smart, and she's also the funniest person I've ever met. She's always cracking jokes and playing tricks and stuff. And she comes up with things really fast. When Margot didn't save her a seat at breakfast, Raisa said, "Hey, Large Marge, I know you got your red hair from your mom, but did you get your chest hair from your dad?" It was so funny.

She has nicknames for everybody. Smelly Shelly. Sticky Nicki. She calls me Scabby Gabbi, but nobody has a nickname for her because nothing rhymes with Raisa.

We're best friends. They call us the Rainbow Twins because we always wear two different colored socks. If she wears red and blue, I wear pink and purple. We also wear yellow and green sometimes, but not black or white, and not orange. Raisa hates orange.

Raisa wears two different socks even when she’s not at camp because rainbow is her favorite color. I do it because we’re the Rainbow Twins.

She can tap dance and French-braid and count to 10 in Japanese. She went to Hawaii last year and rode in a helicopter. Her dog's picture was on the Today show. She likes being interesting.

If you can't take a joke, you're boring, and nothing is worse than being boring. "What good are you?" That's what Raisa says.

Last summer Sarah and Raisa were best friends, but not now. Raisa says Sarah is boring. She calls her Snoozy Sarah.

Last night we played a trick on her. Right after lights out, Raisa called for our counselor Michelle. “Sea-shell, I need to use the bathroom!”

“What are you up to?” Michelle shined her flashlight toward Raisa’s bunk, and Raisa was hopping up and down with her hand between her legs.

“I really have to go, Sea-shell. This is très serious.”

Michelle said, “You have to take a buddy.”

Raisa grabbed my hand and pulled me out the door. We started toward the bathrooms, but then Raisa turned off her flashlight and stopped.

“What are we ….?”

“SHUSH!” she said. She looked around, then pulled a piece of paper out from under her shirt. "Wait 'til you see this letter the Snooze wrote her mom today: Boo-hoo, I miss home, I miss Daddy. Wahh!"

She yanked a roll of masking tape from her shorts pocket and started walking toward mess hall. "This will be hilarious. Just wait 'til tomorrow."

Raisa taped the letter to the door and we went back to the cabin and went to bed.

This morning, when Raisa and I walked up for breakfast, the other girls were gathered around reading the letter.

"What a big fat baby!" Raisa started laughing.

Nobody had a chance to say anything because just then Sarah walked up and saw. She ripped the letter down and looked at Raisa like she was about to cry. "You know, Raisa, you're a jerk!"

Raisa laughed. "Why don't you go get your diaper changed, Snoozy? Or is it time for your bottle?"

I laughed, and Sarah turned to face me. "Gabbi, grow a brain of your own!"

A few girls giggled and Sarah walked away, back toward the cabin.

"She's such a joke." Raisa snorted and went in for breakfast.

This afternoon when I walked up to the cabin to change into my swimsuit, Sarah was sitting on the stump next to the cabin.

"Where's Raisa?"

"Still down at the lake."

Sarah sat there for a minute, then wiped a tear off her cheek. "Gabbi, did you know me and Raisa used to be best friends? But she's not a good friend."

I thought about what Raisa would say if she were here. "You're just mad because she thinks you're boring."

Sarah shook her head. "No, Gabbi. You know that thing she always says about how you have to cut something down to see what's inside? Well, it's not true. You can see what's inside her if you just look."

“As if you would know!" I said. I thought about walking away from this très boring conversation, but I didn't.

Sarah stood up and pointed to the middle of the round stump.

“The rings are small in the middle, see? This tree didn’t start off good. Michelle told me if the amount of rain and sun is just right, the tree makes a big fat wide ring. But if it’s too dry or too cold or too cloudy, then the ring is real thin.”

"Thanks for the science lesson."

"Gabbi, you don't have to cut Raisa open to know she's real small inside. And she's making us small, too. And you're helping her."

Sarah sat back down. “Michelle said people like Raisa make everybody’s 11^th ring small. Forever.”

"You wouldn't say that if she was here."

Sarah shrugged. "OK, Scabby. Just think about it."

I went in the cabin, but I don't have to think about it. Sarah is boring, and Raisa is interesting, and which would you rather be?

She Hung It on the Blackboard, by Allen

2010-04-19T10:04:00.002-04:00

I sat at my desk, convinced my drawing was the best ever made. Ms. Cummings often found most my stuff to be too messy or that I had committed the ultimate sin of crossing the lines with my paint. Funny, how the world wants order.

In the fancy drawings of my peers, you can tell what the art represents. Not in this creation I have. My drawing was of the things floating around in the fog of my mind. So depicted and so drawn as to offer the class a real look at the genius of this nine year old.

I drew this because I wanted Ms Cummings to see the real me, to know what lurked under those line faults. The broad brush strokes and the lavish use of blue and red indigo ink. I succeeded. Her look after viewing my drawing let me know she knew the real me.. She didn’t scream. She didn’t cringe. She smiled.

"What a wonderful picture!" she said. "How on earth did you do this?"

I smiled and grabbed up the blue and red tipped pigtails from the girl in front of me.

Where Are April's Prompt Stories?

2010-04-16T14:47:00.001-04:00

Just in case you were wondering ... I'm going to start posting Monday. We ended up with fewer than usual (just a handful so far), so I'm going to post next week.

Have a good weekend everybody!

Mark Terry, Guest Blogger

2010-04-15T09:10:00.002-04:00

Today I'm handing over the reins to guest blogger Mark Terry. And all I can say about Mark's post is, "I agree," and, "I wish I had the presence of mind not to freak out ..." Mark's newest book, The Fallen, was just released—it's an old-school thriller that literally opens with a bang. Check it out, or take a peek at the first six chapters on his website (then buy it).

Without further ado, take it away, Mark:

UNTIL

I wrote a fairly long blog post yesterday about Writing For A Living, and someone asked me what my best writing advice would be that wasn’t related to money. I gave her the usual answer, which is “think more, write less,” which is advice given to me by an agent I once had. I still think that’s pretty damned good advice.

But afterward, thinking about it, it occurred to me that there might be a piece of advice I can give to writers that is significantly more important and probably more useful.

Since Jon is a freelancer I’m pretty sure he will agree with me. I have found this to be something I picked up from being a freelancer more than a novelist, but it applies to novels and publishing.

When do you quit sending out queries? When do you stop marketing a story? When do you stop looking for an agent? When do you stop marketing a novel, looking for a publisher?

Ultimately, only you can answer that question.

But here’s the thing about being a freelance writer and doing it for a living: When do you stop querying story ideas?

You don’t. Not UNTIL you get an assignment.

Otherwise you’re going to have to go back to whatever lousy job you had before. If you open a restaurant, you don’t close the doors because it’s not busy unless the bank or your accountant tells you to. You keep marketing and working it until your business takes off. And that’s just like any other business.

I went through a slow period last year and my response to it wasn’t to freak out (if I freaked out every time something strange happened in my writing career I’d be totally insane by now). It was to start sending out more and more queries, trying new markets, hitting old markets, scanning job postings on Craig’s List and others looking for writing gigs. Until I was busy again.

So that’s my best advice for writers. When should you stop? When should you quit? Well, only you know for sure, but I would say, “don’t stop UNTIL you’ve accomplished what you wanted to accomplish.”

I'm Such a Sucker

2010-04-14T11:01:00.002-04:00

I'm just finishing an AWFUL book right now. I mean it. This thing is awful, and if I wasn't getting paid to read it, I would have quit a hundred times over. But that's not the bad part. Here is the bad part: I got goosebumps at the ending. It was cheesy, corny, improbably ridiculous, obvious, manipulative ... and it still got me.

Grrr.

I remember years ago my older sister called me (we share a love of books) and said, "I just read a book you MUST read. It's amazing! It's called Bridges of Madison County. Really. I mean it. Read it."

Today, my sister denies making that phone call. But I remember. (And for the record, I did read it.)

I guess we're all suckers sometimes ... right? Does everybody have Shame Books, or is it just me?

Kindling

2010-04-10T15:04:00.004-04:00

Like everyone else I know, I've been following the developing e-book story fairly closely. For the record, I think that e-books will someday soon take over the publishing world, and when that happens, I think publishing as we know it will be forever, irrevocably altered. The whole system will change, and the old ways of business will become obsolete. I don't know what the future will look like—no one does, of course—and I'll save you the pain of another prognostication. It seems the Internet is full of people who are absolutely sure they know exactly what will happen.

But ... I don't know if you can relate, but sometimes I get this nagging feeling that I'm leaving opportunity on the table. I'm pretty high up the entrepreneurial scale by nature. In middle school, I started my own business selling wholesale lollipops to drug stores in my area (never amounted to much). In high school, I was in a different kind of business for myself. And of course now I'm a full-time freelance writer. So let's just say I understand the drive to be independent, and I'm not at all intimidated by the idea of selling things.

Yet I've also been just about 100% committed to pursuing a traditional publishing contract, with a traditional agent. To make it even harder on myself, I have a pretty solid idea what kind of publishing contract I want and which of the companies I'd like to publish with. I have little interest in dropping a book into the world just for the sake of it.

(By the way, I'm not saying this to snub anybody else's choices in their publishing journey. First off, I think the writer's journey is totally unique to each of us and what is true for me is not really true for anybody else. Second of all, it's ludicrous to think that everyone has the same goals, ambitions and definitions of success. I would never be so presumptuous as to judge someone else—I much prefer to support people as they make these decisions for themselves.)

Anyway, so I have a hypothetical question, and I'm really interested in gathering some opinions. Here's the situation.

I have a finished middle-grade manuscript sitting in my drawer. The book is about a boy who inherits a billion dollars and uses it to build a time machine, based on plans left behind by his brilliant and reclusive grandfather. Then he and his friends launch through American history, solving a series of riddles to unravel the mystery behind what actually happened to his grandfather when he vanished while escaping from Alcatraz.

This book was represented by a boutique literary agent, who shopped it around NY in '08. The first company that saw it, Dutton, was enthusiastic and immediately requested a period of exclusivity. The next, Knopf, liked it a lot but didn't publish time travel books. The third, Scholastic, really liked it, and I worked with a senior editor for 18 months, on two major revisions. The book made it all the way to acquisitions and there were meetings at the publisher level about it. Scholastic passed in early 2009 and I shelved the book.

I'm bothering to tell all this (if you don't already know it) to establish the book's bona fides. I can say with confidence this is a good book. It's been professionally vetted, and intensely edited by top editors—people who have bought and edited books that are still sitting at the top of the NYT best-seller list. Obviously, they opted not to buy it in the end, and they gave me reasons, but it's still a quality, fun book.

So the question arises in these mixed-up days in publishing about the wisdom of turning this into an e-book and selling it as a Kindle, iBook, Nook or whatever.

I can see two sides. On the "yes" side, it's a good book. I would retain the rights, so I could sell them later if I wanted to, and it would be a way to release a book I have a great fondness for (and one that actually made my wife cry at the end ...). From a financial point of view, it's all upside. If I make $2 on it, that's $2 more than it would make in my drawer.

On the "no" side, the Kindle market for middle-grade books is a fraction of the adult market, which is a fraction of the actual book market, so if it sold more than a handful of copies, that would be tremendous. And if I publish on Kindle, I would likely lose the ability to sell it later, to a print publisher. Finally, I'm a literary nobody. I know how to promote, but I have no built-in fan base. I'd be starting from zero, pursuing a market that is maybe .05% of the actual book market.

So ... would you put this book on Kindle?

Criticism: The Less Is More Theory

2010-04-08T09:48:00.003-04:00

I remember my first meeting with my writer's group like it was yesterday. We met at her house and sat in a loose circle in the living room. The idea was to do a round-robin critique, and I squirmed. For someone who had been writing my whole life and who made a living ghostwriting books at the time, I'd never really been subjected to this kind of criticism. I'd never belonged to a writer's group.

First off, I'll admit it: I was surprised how GOOD everybody else was. It was nice, though, because it gave me confidence that I was in the right place. After all, you want critique partners who are at least as good as you are. Hopefully better.

Second, I was surprised how much their criticism stung. I thought it wouldn't be a big deal. Ha ha. Yeah. Right. Stung like hell, and they weren't even all that harsh on me. It was more like, "This is pretty good, definitely has potential, but you need to work on a few things."

Fast forward six or seven years and I'd like to think I've learned a few things about criticism. Lord knows I've gotten enough of it. I might not know squat about getting a book deal, but I sure know a lot about giving and receiving criticism. And now that I'm deep in the critique phase of yet another book, I've been thinking about the process a lot. So without further ado, and in no particular order, my Great Critique Manifesto:

1. Get it early. Here's the thing: if you work without a critique group or partner, you're not avoiding criticism. You're only pushing it back later in the process. Instead of identifying issues at the drafting stage, you'll have potential agents and editors offering criticism, often packaged in the form of nice rejections. So I say get out ahead of those rejections. And speaking personally, I've been through the revision process with professional editors at big publishing houses and it was about 100 times more intense than I expected. You have to earn every word.

2. But don't get it too often. Personally, unless the circumstances are extreme, I think it's a good idea to finish your book, then start revising. A lot of people start, get 1/3 of the way through, then start revising because they're not comfortable. I say go ahead and power through the rough spots. Finish it, then come back. You'll have better perspective on the beginning when you know how it ends.

3. Limit your critique partners. I once sent a book to everyone and their grandmother and their dog for critiques. I figured it would be helpful to get input from "regular readers" and kids and basically anyone who was nice enough to give me their time. While I appreciate this effort, I was wrong. Readers aren't writers and writers often aren't editors. I have since limited my critique partners to a handful of people whose opinions I trust and who are skilled editors. Anyway, too many opinions can only be confusing.

4. Sit on criticism. In fact, sit on the manuscript itself for a while. Wait until the emotion drains away. Wait until you stop focusing on the critique itself and start thinking about the book again. Then start revising.

5. If it doesn't feel right, don't do it. This can be tough, especially when you're dealing with critiques from agents and/or editors who have the power to represent or buy your book. And in fact, this happened to me in one of my books. I got a rewrite letter that, after I read it, I just flat-out didn't agree with one of the points. It might have made a good book for someone else, but not for me. I didn't take the advice during the rewrite, and ultimately, the editor never mentioned it again. (The book went down for different reasons.)

6. Believe. A good critique partner will challenge your book on every level. It's like when they pressure-test submarine hulls. They're looking for cracks. But challenging doesn't always mean changing. Sometimes a challenge is merely a pressure test to make sure it holds water. And sometimes your book will hold water and you just have to believe in it.

7. Give back. I believe that critiquing is a group activity. There's a trust issue there, a balance in the relationship. You're putting yourself out there and exposing yourself to the slings and arrows of outrageous readers. But the balance can be easily screwed up if your partner isn't also risking something. A little reciprocal fear is a good thing. I've found that critique partners are much less likely to go off on my writing, expounding on this and tearing apart that, if they know their turn is next. Let's just say it encourages civility.

8. Don't deal with people—even people who are way more experienced than you and might be much better writers—if they are douchebags. I don't know why, but the writing community seems to be full of them. There's nothing more destructive to the confidence than a condescending, dismissive and micromanaging critique partner.

Personally, I feel lucky—my critique partners rule, and I bounce EVERYTHING off them before it goes anywhere. Because that's the other great thing about critique partners. This is a solitary business most of the time, and every writer's journey is completely different. But just because it's solitary and unique doesn't mean it has to be lonely.

Poopin' Stories

2010-04-07T08:36:00.003-04:00

Parenthood is filled with moments when you think, "Has it really come to this?" More often than not, these moments are filled with the excretions of a tiny body—excretions of all kinds. After a while, you just become immune to it. Spit-up stains on the shoulder? Whatever. At least it's only spit-up.

Anyway, we have a four-year-old who completed his potty training relatively recently. I mean completed in the sense that he's on his own now. He has his degree. Closed bathroom door. No checking up on his thoroughness afterward. Our job as parents has basically been reduced to asking, "Did you wash your hands?" after he's done. From what I can tell, this stage will probably last well into teenage-hood.

Except for one thing ... Every night before bed, he poops. And every night, he asks me to tell him a "poopin' story." This started a long time ago, when I was looking for a way to keep him occupied while he waited for the magic to happen. But by the time he no longer needed my help, it had become a ritual: me, perched on the edge of the tub, him on his throne, and a little story.

The funny thing is, I think I've gotten more out of poopin' stories than he has. Try this: four to six nights a week, come up with a funny, 5-minute story that has identifiable characters, action, and most importantly, a Major Theme. We tell stories about slugs who learn that even they have special skills, sunflowers who hoard their seeds because they're jealous of their own beauty, wasps who protect children from tarantulas, little boys who wish away night so they can play all the time and never sleep, and on and on and on. I get instant feedback on these stories—I can tell when he's engaged and paying attention. I can tell when a message hits home because his little face lights up. And I can tell when he's bored or otherwise distracted.

Lately, as I'm plotting another book (another book? Indeed), I realized how much I've come to rely on these simple little stories and how much I've learned about basic storytelling by having to come up with a new one every night and, probably more importantly, edit on the fly when I can tell I'm losing the little monkey.

So you tell me ... what surprising lessons has normal life taught you about storytelling?

April Prompt

2010-04-06T09:56:00.004-04:00

For this month's Storytellers ...

Where'd I Go?

2010-04-05T09:45:00.002-04:00

I did something recently I haven't done in literally years—I totally disconnected for almost a whole week. No computer. No email. No phone really. It was weird. When you work for yourself, from your house, you're pretty much always at work. I check my email from the time I wake up until I go to bed. Same with the phone. Anyone wants to reach me, they call my business line, and unless I'm doing something like eating, I'll probably answer it. So I'm kind of always at work. (Which, incidentally, doesn't mean I'm always working. Just at work.)

But we went on vacation last week, and since I don't own a cell phone or an iPhone or any sort of mobile device that has Internet access (that's another story), I was completely out of the loop. The first day was pretty hard. I kept having bursts of panic that something was going dreadfully wrong and I wasn't there to fix it. I imagined my largest clients writing me with an emergency, and me not there. Even though they knew I was out of town. Didn't matter. I imagined new clients calling, needing something done, and no me. Gradually, though, the worry went away and I got more used to it. Then it was almost nostalgic. So this is what life was like before I became plugged in, before I opted to work at home ... You're much more present in the moment, much less distracted by the potential of incoming communication.

When I finally did check my email, I sat there waiting for the folder to open, wondering if any of the things I worried about had actually happened. And naturally, I had a zillion emails. But it was 99% spam and 1% no big deal.

Ah. So I actually can take a vacation and my world doesn't fall apart. What a nice thing to know.

Hey, Lookee Here ...

2010-03-22T08:48:00.002-04:00

My post on rules of magic in fiction is up today at STET!, complements of Melanie Avila. If you haven't seen it already, go check it out and leave a comment. Make me look good ... :)

You Versus Your Book

2010-03-19T09:31:00.002-04:00

I'll warn you in advance, this post won't make any sense at all. I was awakened last night first by a 4-year-old, upon whose floor I slept for an hour and a half, and then by the Zodiac killer, who had mysteriously come back from whatever hell he's in to stand in my living room for TWO HOURS. He didn't do anything. He just stood there. And when I finally got up to go confront him, he had mysteriously vanished. Why the Zodiac killer? Who knows.

So I finished my first draft last week. When I first finished it, I thought, "Yay! Awesome." Then a few days went by, and I swung around to, "Awful. Sucks." Funny how that works.

In the meantime, I've been circulating it around to readers to collect some opinions, including one shiny new reader who will most likely be getting a fruit basket from me this Christmas (if you're reading this, you know who you are ... and thanks). Anyway, she pointed out something that got me thinking: all of my chapters feel like "short stories" because each chapter is approximately 1,000 words, with a discrete beginning, middle and end. The result is somewhat choppy, with a rise and fall to each chapter that doesn't always suit the emotional content of the story.

It really got me thinking.

When I'm drafting, I write every day pretty much. And I write fast. I do about 1,000 words a day. That seems to be the amount that comes naturally, partly as a result of being a journalist and having to write newspaper and magazine stories to fit. At the end of 1,000 words, I start to feel my concentration slip, or I get hungry or itchy or whatever, so I end the chapter. Thus, each chapter roughly equals one day's output.

As soon as she pointed this out, it was like a lightbulb went off. Duh. The basic structure of the book reflects my writing schedule, not the pace of the story. As a result, the flow is uneven, and the emotional timbre swings around with the rise and fall of each chapter. It's like sampling a song 65 times and saying the song is whole.

There was a valuable lesson in here for me, actually: as ridiculously obvious as it probably sounds, you have to be careful not to stand in the way of your own story. Like, for example, it's highly unlikely that chapters naturally conform to one day's output ... To go one step further, if you're angry, watch out that it doesn't bleed into the story. Or don't write half a book drunk and the other half sober (either go all in, or lay off the bottle until you finish). The actual writer is supposed to be INVISIBLE in the story.

I was going to say I don't know how on Earth this is really possible. I mean, we're not robots. But then I realized: that's what rewrites are for. Ugh.

Monsters, By Jon VanZile

2010-03-17T09:23:00.001-04:00

I remember everything about that night.

After my parents put me to bed, they stood outside my door and had a whispered argument.

"We should leave the light on," Mom said.

"No way," Dad answered. I pictured his face just from the tone of his voice. There would be lines between his eyebrows, and his mouth would be tight.

"But he's just a little boy!" Mom said. "And seriously, this lightning is even freaking me out. I wouldn't want to sleep alone in a dark room on a night like tonight."

Just to make her point, there was a huge FLASH! from outside that lit up my room with an electric glow. I pulled the covers up to my eyes and counted ... one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand ... until a BOOM! rolled down from the mountainside, over our house, and shook the old windows in their frames.

"That was a big one," Mom said in a far-away voice. "Honey, just for tonight. Let him have his light on just for tonight."

"No way," Dad answered. "We start letting him sleep with the lights on, next thing you know, he'll be in our bed. He'll be running the whole house. He's the original give-an-inch, take-a-mile kid."

"But-"

"Seriously, if you turn that light on, I'm gonna break out the bulb," Dad said. "I thought we were on the same page about this kind of stuff."

"We are, it's just that ... I don't want him to be scared."

"What's so wrong with being scared?" Dad said. "This is our house. If you can't learn to handle fear in the safety of your own house, where will you?" Mom was silent, and I could tell the argument was over. He'd won.

There were a lot of good reasons to be scared in your own house. I knew that, even if they didn't. They still pretended they liked this old house, even though I could already tell that, underneath, Mom hated it just as much as I did. I wasn't even sure Dad liked it. He cursed when he talked about it, and he said it was "probably going to kill him," but when he talked on the phone, he laughed and said he was going to "put lipstick on this old pig and make a fortune."

I didn't sleep. I lay in my bed with my felt blanket pulled up to my nose and my eyes plastered to the window. My room was on the second floor, and my window looked across the overgrown field to the dark line of trees. It was very windy, and the branches tossed and flailed beneath the racing clouds and full moon.

Another FLASH! lit up the sky and I counted to two-one thousand before the BOOM! came and shook my bed. My window was old so cold air rushed around the frame. I felt like I was almost outside, like the skin of the house was thin and brittle like skin on top of pudding.

After the traces of thunder rolled away, I listened for Mom and Dad. I didn't hear their voices. Nothing. So I waited with my eyes plastered to the glass. I knew he would come again tonight. He had come every night for the last three nights, each time inching closer and closer to the house, until once I thought I almost saw his face. Even thinking about it made my throat close around my breath.

I watched the same spot in the woods until my eyes were drawn away, closer to the house. I saw a blacker shadow among the other shadows move slightly, the hulking shape of a man shifting under the cover a dark bush right beneath my window.

I began to scream. I kept screaming as their footsteps drummed up the stairs and Mom flung my door open and turned on the light. I was sitting up in bed. She raced to my bed and wrapped me in her arms while Dad stood in the doorway, shaking his head and frowning.

"See?" she said to Dad. "You're being a major asshole about this. Just so you know." Then she turned to me and nuzzled me. "It's just a storm, honey. Don't worry."

My breathing slowed down, and my crying dissolved into hiccups.

"Did the storm scare you?" Mom said. "It's just thunder. It's just God bowling."

"No," I said, finally working up the courage to tell them the truth. "There's a monster outside. I saw him. He comes closer every night."

"No honey," Mom said. "It's just a storm."

Dad came in a few steps and looked down at me. He didn't look so angry anymore. "She's right," he said. "Listen, I'll tell you what. We'll both be brave tonight. You sleep with your light off like a big boy. And I'll take care of that monster. OK? Any monster comes in here, I'll kick its ass. I’ve got a air-powered nail gun with that monster’s name all over it."

"Trevor!" Mom said. "What kind of message is that?"

"Just the truth, baby," Dad said. "OK?" he said to me. "We got a deal?"

I nodded, but only because I knew they both wanted me to. What good was a nail gun against a monster? Then Mom kissed me and they left. Dad turned out the light, and before he shut the door, he said, "You remember. I'm right outside this door, and I'm tougher than any monster."

But he wasn't.

Open Windows, By Erica Orloff

2010-03-16T09:35:00.000-04:00

Sometimes, on hot summer nights, when my mom kept the windows open, hoping for a breeze to float through after dark, I heard it. Hidden in the symphony of crickets and tree frogs echoing across the fields, I could hear Grace’s stepfather raping her. At least that was what I thought I heard.

I’d climb out my bedroom window onto the trellis and scramble down, running across summer grass, cool and wet on my bare feet. When I got close to her house, I’d crouch down and listen. And I swear that’s what it sounded like. Whimpers, grunts, a mattress squeaking, the occasional slap of hand against cheek. Then I’d see his six-foot hulking frame rise up, a monstrous shadow on the wall, and leave her pink bedroom.

And right then and there, I decided one day I’d marry Grace. And one day I’d kill the bastard. I never said anything to her. But in my mind, I’d told her and I convinced myself she heard me.

In August, I heard her cries traveling in Morse code on the backs of a flock of cawing crows. I did the same thing, climbing down, sneaking to her house, sitting on the grass and trying to conjure the nerve to get my granddad’s rifle. Then, like a wild angel in a white nightgown, she came tearing from back door, running straight for me and crashing into me.

“Shit,” I said. Blood spurted from my nose where her kneed landed square on the bridge.

“Shh!” she whispered. Then she squinted her pale gray eyes. “What the hell are you doing here? You spying on me, Joe? Is that what you’re doing?”

I scooted away, wiping my bloody palm on the grass. “No!”

“Come on,” she urged. She grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the grassy fields where the old horse owned by Mr. Morris—a sway-backed mare a step from glue—grazed.

Behind us, I heard a screen door crash open, and a man’s voice calling out, “Grace Ann! Grace Ann, you get home now before I bust your face wide open.”

I stared at her in the moonlight. “You going back?”

She shook her head, her face streaked with tears and dirt from our tumble. “I’m not ever going back.”

“What if he was dead? Would you go back then?”
She shook her head. “Nope. I’m leaving here, Joe.”

“In a nightgown?” Her blonde hair reflected moonbeams. “Where are you going? You got any money?”

“I have a hundred and ten dollars in a savings account.”

“Hmm.” Even I knew that was only going to get her just so far. “What about going to the sheriff?”

She looked at me like I was the stupidest boy in the whole town. Maybe even the whole world.

“Oh. Yeah,” I breathed. Her stepfather was a deputy. “All right then, I’ve got a savings bond for $500. You can have it.”

I heard the old mare whinny. I sat down, out of breath from fear and from being so close to her. She sat down next to me.

“I hate him.”

“I do, too,” I whispered. “You think he’ll come chasing you?”

“Nah. Too drunk.”

“What about your mother?”

“She’s just plain crazy.”

I ran my fingers along the grass. “What if they were both dead? Would you get the house? Would you get their money?”

“I suppose. But I don’t want nothin’ from them. I just want to get away.”

She flopped back on the ground and stared up at the night sky. “I wish I was a shooting star.”

I leaned back. I didn’t know what I wished.

The two of us whispered all night. I don’t even remember what we talked about. Everything and nothing, until a pink-gray wash chased the moon away.

“You better go home,” she said. She grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “Thanks, Joe.”

“Why don’t you come home with me? My mom will help you. I swear she will.”

Grace jutted her chin out. “I’m going home. I’ve got things to do.”

She rose slowly, and gave me a half wave, then walked toward the house.

The next night, there was a fire.

Supposedly, her stepfather fell asleep, drunk in bed, and his cigarette lit the mattress on fire.

He and his wife died, their bodies charred to blackness.

And Grace Ann was nowhere to be found.

Now, on hot summer nights, through the open window, I just hear the sounds of crickets and tree frogs. I shimmy down the trellis and run, barefoot, to the house. I sit on the grass and smile, and I like to think Grace Ann is somewhere else. A shooting star. An angel in a nightgown in a grassy field.

Ass, by E. Flanigan

2010-03-12T09:33:00.001-05:00

Belief in the Law of Small Numbers: 1. A systematic error in human judgment in which people assume that the pattern of a large population will be replicated in all its subsets. 2. The deep-seated need to see meaning in the ordinary variations that appear in small samples.

We walked up to the house and looked at each other. Actually, I walked and Ray waddled.

“There’s no way it has a bathroom,” I said. “I mean, look at it.”

It looked a million years old.

“This is serious, though,” Ray said, clutching his gut. “I need a shitter pronto.”

“Go for it,” I told him. “I’ll stay out here.”

Ray waddled up the steps with his ass clenched super tight. It was hilarious, but I didn’t say anything. I mean, we’ve all been there.

When he came back out, I was just sitting there chilling. “Did you find one?”

Ray shook his head. “I had to wing it.”

“Man, I don’t wanna know.”

He laughed out loud and sat down in the grass next to me. It was a pretty cold day, but when the sun was out it wasn’t so bad. Things were quiet for a while.

“This is cool.”

“Yeah.” I stretched out and laced my fingers behind my head in the grass. I was seriously considering a nap. But no.

“I can’t believe Doug has a girlfriend,” Ray said.

Great. I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed he’d think I was sleeping.

“Seriously, the guy never washes his hair and he’s like fat and demented. And he’s getting laid. What’s up with that?”

I didn’t answer for a minute. Technically he was correct, Doug was a tool. But then again Ray was kind of a lame-ass.

“And granted she’s kind of nasty, but she’s female,” Ray went on. “I mean, how did that guy get a girlfriend? I can’t get action from anybody. Does it make sense?”

I didn’t want to have this conversation. The day had been moving along nicely before the shitting and things getting all mopey-dopey. But Ray’s a nice kid, he’s got a decent car, and there’s no reason he shouldn’t have a girlfriend. At the very least an ugly one. “Yeah, you’re right, dude,” I said. “Doug is a douche bag.”

Ray got excited and sat up. “I know, he’s a douche bag, right? He’s not even nice to girls, that’s probably why they like him. They’re attracted to assholes.”

He got quiet again for a while. Then, “I just can’t help thinking I’m, like, cursed or something.”

More silence. “I’ve never even gotten a blow job. Just a hand job.”

Damn, I’m not having this conversation. That’s all I could think. I felt bad for the guy, but this whole talk was taking a 90-degree turn toward homo-town, and I don’t live there. Screw that. If he asks for a hand job, I’m gonna kick his ass. So I just kept my eyes shut to look like I was sleeping.

Lying in that position, I actually fell asleep for a minute. When I opened my eyes Ray was still sitting there, hands between his knees and eyes on the ground. Then he looked at me. “This blows.”

“Dude, it will happen for you. Just relax,” I told him. But I knew what he meant. Before I dated Kristin last year, I felt that way—and I don’t even have a car.

Ray didn’t answer me, just kept sitting there all sad.

“You know what, man?” I told him. “There’s no such thing as a losing streak. It’s all just chance. Your time will come.”

He perked up a little. “What? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s like when you flip a quarter. You could land tails, like, 10 times in a row, but the very next flip could be heads.” I could tell I really had his attention, so I said the next part super slow like I was predicting the future. “The next chick you meet ... could be the one you nail.”

Ray sat for a while, thinking. “If you flipped a quarter 10 times and they all landed on heads, the next one would be tails?”

“No, man. It’s random each time. So like, every time is another chance to land on tails.”

Ray was quiet again for a minute. “But if it’s all random, doesn’t that mean the next time could be heads again? It could be tails, but it could be heads?”

I thought about it for a bit and realized Ray was right. He might never get laid. Some people die virgins, and he might be one of them.

We both sat there for a while.

I decided to throw him a bone. “Long story short, you’re going to get laid. I mean, you’re not an asshole. So it’s a foregone conclusion.”

Ray looked at his hands for a while. I hoped I’d said enough to change the subject.

“Thanks, man, you’re alright,” he said finally. “I don’t know what I’d do without a guy like you to talk to.”

He stood up and wiped his hands on his shit-smelling pants.

“Let’s roll.”

What A Picture’s Worth, by Melody Maysonet

2010-03-11T09:26:00.001-05:00

That Gothic-style mansion with its ivy-covered pillars looks like something out of Amityville Horror, only creepier, if you can believe that, and in a lot worse shape. No one believed I’d seen a girl’s face peeking out of the little round window of the attic, and that’s why I’m standing not twenty feet from the house, pointing a camera at the upper stories, hoping the girl will make a reappearance while at the same time wondering what the hell I’m doing.

I mean the place has a reputation, for god’s sake, and it isn’t a good one. Just a year ago there was this neighborhood dog that went missing. It was a husky, a real pretty dog, and the owner went all out to find it. I mean everywhere you went you saw this dog’s picture on a telephone pole. A week goes by and no sign of the dog, and then out of the blue all those faded color printouts of the dog have been replaced by pictures of the dog hanging by its neck on the porch of that house, its head twisted sideways like a hook and its tongue all black and spilling out between its teeth. I still clench my stomach when I think about that picture. I mean it was disturbing.

And then there’s that newspaper story from fifty-some years ago that everybody around here knows about, the one where the owner of the house thought an atomic bomb had fallen and it wasn’t safe to come outside. He was starving so he started chopping off bits of his own body to eat. They say he started with his ear lobes and then moved on to some of his toes and then graduated to bigger body parts, so when they found him dead he only had one foot, no nose, and there were strips carved out of his side like he was some kind of rib roast for god’s sake. Anyway, they found him in the kitchen of that house in the act of sawing off his other foot with a bread knife. That was the picture they printed in the paper if you can believe that. Ever since then the house has been empty and no surprise.

But it’s not empty now. I swear I saw a girl’s face in that window, and she didn’t look like she was a prisoner. She looked like she lived there and was just taking a peek out the window to see about the weather. That was about an hour ago when I saw her, so I ran home to get my camera and here I am standing in front of the house looking up at that window and thinking I must be insane.

I mean that too because there’s no way I’m seeing what I’m seeing. That dead husky is on the porch barking at me and the girl is looking out at me from the other side of the screen door. I find myself moving closer and then I remember about the camera and I stop to take a picture of her and the dog both.

The girl waves to me, and I’m curious as hell so I jog up to her and step onto the porch. The dog comes up and licks my hand and I pat its head and look at the girl.

“Nice dog,” I say.

“He likes you.”

I study her and notice that her dress is real old-fashioned, like something out of Little House on the Prairie. “You live here?” I ask.

“I used to.”

“But not now?”

“I died here.” She looks fondly at the dog. “Me and Canook both.”

Jeez Louise, I think.

“I see you brought your camera,” she says.

I lift it and look at it like I don’t know what it is, and for a second, I don’t because I’m so scared that I’m only thinking Ohmygod.

“Let me take a picture of you,” she says and reaches for the camera.

Screw that, I think, and that’s when I run. I don’t even realize the camera’s in her hands until I trip over the dog and hear the camera’s shutter go off just as I smack my face into one of those ivy-covered pillars. My nose explodes like a squished bug and my tongue feels like someone cut it off with shears, and as the pain blooms to maximum intensity I realize I’ve bitten off my tongue. The girl picks up the piece of tongue and says, “Fred will like this,” and I have enough sense to wonder, “Who’s Fred?” before the dog starts licking the blood off my face while the girl takes another picture of me.

The screen door opens and out comes a man who must be Fred and though he still has a nose and a foot I know this is the guy from the newspaper. I’m laying on the porch trying to crawl down the steps but the dog’s all over me and then Fred grabs me by one leg and starts dragging me into the house. I kick and grab onto one of the pillars, but my fingers are slick with blood and I feel myself being dragged through the entryway. The girl’s holding the door open and looking down at me with a smile and I try to scream but it comes out more like a gurgle.

Inside the house, the flash goes off, and I see myself the way the camera sees me, my body sprawled on the dusty floor like one of those homicide chalk drawings. There’s a mess of bloody meat where my throat should be and the dog’s hunkered over me chewing something and gulping. My face is covered with blood, which is just as well because I don’t want to see what I look like. And then the dog licks the blood clean and I see my face and I realize it doesn’t look that bad even though I know I’m dead.

In My Father’s House, There Are Many Mansions, by Allen

2010-03-08T08:33:00.000-05:00

The grass huts ringed the center of the village. The church bell tower stood above the grass roofs, majestically. They were hiding from us, waiting for us to appear in their sights. The only ones left were the young, the rest had been carried off by the insurgents months before.

Mud squished around my boots as I tried to get steady. The clicking of my sixteen-millimeter movie camera set the cadence of my steps. Along the tree line, mix in among the leaves, were the faces of the young boys and girls waiting to attack us. With no experience, they were soon to be massacred.

The lofty sounds of muttered prayer rolled out of some of our men. Others cursed the job and continued with their usual battle rituals. The officers, huddled in the recesses of the rear, pointed to their maps and ate their boxed lunches. This scene had become far too normal.

The first shot echoed across the open field. Then another. Screams and hollers catapulted the kids, fourteen at most, from behind the barn, their eyes fixed on the enemy ahead. The distinct rattle of an AK-47 preceded the bolt slapping sounds of a Ma Deuce stippling a line of bullets through the boys along the tree line. The thunder from a grenade covered the shrillness of a lone soldier screaming in pain, all captured in brilliant color.

I lost my place in this mess, unable to tell where my camera pointed. The richness of the brown and camouflage scenery melted into the iris, swallowing the background of blue so that I didn’t know how close to the fighting I had wandered. Even in the fog of my thoughts, I found a place to hide, a small recess in the ground where I would be safe. Trembling as the film rolled, I continued, steadfast in my duty.

An explosion rumbled across the open field. The staccato sounds of shots bouncing around me were like musical triplets. The bass line rang from the thumps of the tubes on the hill, scattering shrapnel in the midst of the boys held behind the barn in reserve. I stood to capture the moment on film when, in an instant a single shot rang out from the bell tower. After the echo left, I found myself engulfed in utter silence, devoid of my senses except for my sight.

The sun’s rays shone on the field as I viewed the whole process from above. I drifted past the bell tower window and saw the girl, no more than sixteen years old, ratchet another round in her rifle. She pulled the trigger without emotion, killing my sound man. I watched his soul rise above his body until he crashed through the clouds and out of sight, followed closely by the dead boys of the field.

The ragged clothes and unkept hair of these kids somehow made the whole situation more palatable to us. The girl was too young to know about killing someone, to not feel anything as she watched someone die. She was a throw away child in a useless country, the victim of some far off dictator whose quest was for power was at the expense of those young children. For the child’s lost soul, I was sad.

I felt strangely safe as I rose through the clouds, hovered over the earth still draped in a blue hue. Crashing into space left me speechless. I was floating, but not at my will or my direction. I was drawn to that place, dark and murky, as if pulled along the way. The darker it got, the less I felt until I know I slept.

Waking on a lawn, I looked across the green, lush field of freshly cut weeds. In the foreground stood a stately old mansion, one like my father restored for our family to live in. The wrought iron rails were entangled in vines and weeds, and the English boxwoods had grown high enough to cover the first floor windows. The whitewash on the bricks was faded and failed to cover the bricks behind it. The woodwork had lost its charm as the bare wood rotted in place. All manners of critters roamed the rooms as the missing windows allowed them access. I thought I was in heaven, but I must have found hell.

My camera was still around my neck so I filmed the building. It may be disheveled, but no one could deny its majesty and beauty. Perhaps, for my sins, I was sent to hell to reclaim this house. Perhaps if I did, God would reclaim me. I didn’t know, but it felt good to film something so beautiful. Not the least of my joy was filming something devoid of blood and guts.

As I stood in the rough grass, my camera to my eye, a man placed his hand on my shoulder. "This is your mansion, Son, but it is not ready, yet. You must return home so that I can prepare this place for you."

I lowered my camera so that I could meet this man, but all I saw was a Navy Corpsman frantically working on my chest wound. Flat on my back in the blood-soaked mud, I felt the cold prick of fear climbing up my spine. I held my camera tight to my side as they rolled me onto a litter. The bouncing trip to the Huey sent bolts of pain across my chest with each step until they racked me in a bunk.

They returned my camera to me several weeks later, untouched by others. I often watch the footage of the house when I am down or blue. Just knowing there is a restored mansion waiting for me is comfort enough. But I often wonder what happened to that girl.

Magical Me (Sorry Mr. Lockhart)

2010-03-04T09:17:00.006-05:00

As you might have heard, I've been closing in on the end of my book for about two weeks now. So far, this has been the Book that Won't End. I'm 10,000 words over my expected length so far, and I still have several chapters to go. I'm actually having a hard time letting it go ... I don't want to say goodbye to this story yet, and since it's part of an intended series (fingers crossed), the story won't be completed even after I write The End.

Before I started writing this book, I spent a lot of time thinking about magic. The book is paranormal, so there is magic ... and as I thought about it, I realized that I have strong feelings about magic in books. So keeping in mind this is just my opinion, here are the "rules" I unofficially developed for using magic in a fantasy:

1. It must have a cost. This is a BIG ONE. Strong magic shouldn't be effortless, without any strain or cost. If I wanted to get all literary, I'd say that magic is actually a metaphor in literature for strength, and strength of any kind often requires development. Monks aren't born meditating; body builders aren't born bench-pressing twice their weight; and Olympic sprinters aren't running a 100 yard dash in a blink when they're ten. In each case, the potential is there, but it requires work and sweat. So it goes with magic. I think it should require something of the users.

2. It must have limits. I read that JK Rowling's greatest challenge with magic was deciding what WASN'T possible. Three cheers for that. Impossibly powerful magic is either boring to read about because it's impossibly powerful, or the author is cheating by not using the magic to its full potential. If the hero can lift 100 million tons in one hand, why pretend he struggles with 10 tons at a crucial scene?

3. It must have a system. This is harder to explain, but I'll try. I generally dislike magic that simply IS. I like magic that has a system of rules. Again, this mirrors real life. Ultimately, the magic has to come from somewhere and there should be discrete steps that are used to make it happen. If these steps aren't followed precisely, the magic fails. In a way, this relates to #2, because the system imposes limitations. If a spell takes 10 minutes to cast, that 10 minutes is a limitation (and huge potential plot point).

4. It should escalate. Again, just my opinion, but in a paranormal book, it's important to first establish the world and set up the story. Magic should make a slow entrance, because you first need to convince the reader of the authenticity of your world. If you drop magic into a normal setting, all at once, then obvious questions abound: "Why isn't someone calling the news?" "Why is this the first time that's ever happened?" etc., etc., etc.

5. The reader learns about magic at the same pace as the characters. Many books with magic are actually, subtly about a magical EDUCATION, in which the character slowly learns the cost, the system and the limitations of magic, gradually moving from simple spells to more complex spells. Again, like real life. Mastery is only possible once the reader and the character have learned all their lessons the hard way and earned the right to use magic.

6. Finally, magic is only a tool, not a value. Magic isn't necessarily inherently good or evil. It's like electricity. The same power that we use to fire up our computers and brew our coffee is also used to electrocute prisoners to death and deliver shocks to the genitals in Third World dungeons. So the point of the story isn't the magic itself, but how it is USED, which is actually a reflection of character.

The thing I ultimately realized was that magic is cool, but it's also a literary tool that reflects the acquisition of any knowledge (and growing up). Arthur C. Clarke said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. So when I'm writing about magic, in a way it's the same as writing about the construction of a nuclear reactor or space ship—it's about discipline, ambition, study, sacrifice, and finally mastery. But more important than all this, in the end it's about the choices the character makes with his or her power, which is really the same dilemma we all face every day.

A Writer's Revenge (or Roasted Pigeon)

2010-03-03T09:09:00.005-05:00

We live in a fairly urban area, where no one has much land. My yard is bordered on three sides by a 6-foot privacy wood fence, over which we can sometimes hear the goings-on of our neighbors. We also live in a very ethnic area, so our neighbors are an interesting lot.

One of them is an avid home plumber. I noticed the other day that he had attached a small plastic pipe to the outflow from his washing machine, then run that pipe around the side of his house so his soapy water emptied into the little area between our houses. Very classy. I have no idea why this is a better idea than the normal way of connecting it.

Another house appears to be occupied by about 10 Brazilian 20-year-olds. These boys are mostly quiet, but sometimes, they'll have their friends over and spend the day listening to George Michael at 120 decibels and jumping off the roof into their pool. I didn't know George Michael was still cool among Brazilian kids, but I bet he'd be thrilled.

But today's blog entry is really about the three power lines that run between our houses and connect us all. It starts last spring, on a mild night when we were sitting in our backyard and heard a few flat splats!

"What was that?" asked my mother-in-law.

"I don't know," I said. "Could be anything around here."

Then a pigeon fell into our yard from where he had been perching on the power line. The pigeon had been shot in the neck. A few minutes later, a Brazilian kid pops up on his roof, looking down into our yard. I waved at him. He smiled (as a rule, Brazilians are very, very smiley people). Then I said, "Did you just shoot that pigeon?" He smiled again and looked like he didn't understand English. I have my doubts ...

Now, I'm not exactly loaded with sympathy for these pigeons. See, a third neighbor has gotten in the habit of feeding pigeons in her yard. This is a very nice family of Ecuadorians who grow mangoes and avocado. Although they don't speak English, I trade produce across the fence with them sometimes. Apparently, "mango" is the international word for "mango." We make it work.

But I could do without the pigeon feeding. My neighbor has trained a whole flock of pigeons to sit on this wire. It's a little cruel, I think, because it provides easy target practice for the Brazilians—who have since shot a handful of more birds and missed many others—but more importantly, it creates a mess for me. Ever scraped pigeon poop off a wooden fence after it's been cooked by a subtropical sun? I have. A lot.

So last night, I'm sitting outside, enjoying a beer after work and watching the pigeons sitting on the wire. There must have been 60 of them up there. All looking at me. Mocking me.

Then one of them pooped right on my fence. He didn't even have the decency to look away while he did it.

I got mad and a sudden vision went through my head. What if, I thought, what if I flung some kind of wire up there that connected the power wires? They're only a foot apart. It wouldn't be hard. All at once, the whole thing was as clear as a dream in my imagination. I saw the arc of electricity, the surge of power as the two electricity cables connected and shorted out my whole neighborhood, and the satisfying popping sound of 60 pigeons being flash roasted at once.

I would never actually do such a thing—even if I'm convinced the birds wouldn't be wasted. They would probably be eaten. (I suspect another of my neighbors is raising chickens in his yard.) But I'm just saying ... if you're neighbor's a writer, don't poop on his fence unless you want to die a gruesome, imaginary death.

Why I Love Cilantro

2010-03-02T15:45:00.004-05:00

It has recently come to my attention that a thriving web community exists of people who hate cilantro. They have (or had) websites (www.ihatecilantro), Facebook pages, letters to editor in major cooking magazines, and even a blog devoted to hating cilantro.

It might be tempting to write a blog entry about how cool it is that the Internet can bring together the most unlikely people ... that MIGHT be tempting if they weren't picking on cilantro. Instead, I think this is a prime example of why the Internet is evil.

First off, and most importantly, cilantro is delicious. I LOVE cilantro. It improves virtually everything to which it is added. I throw handfuls of it in Mexican and Indian food, I find ways to slip it into salads, I sometimes munch on handfuls of it like a cilantro-scented cow.

Second of all, cilantro is delicate. Ever noticed when you buy it that the fresh herb only lasts a few days? You can't keep cilantro around for long. And if you want to grow it ... ha ha! It took me two years and many tries to grow cilantro successfully. It hates heat, needs just the right amount of water, and even then, only lasts for about two months. Like all excellent things, cilantro needs to be babied. It takes a careful, skilled hand to nurture its pungent delights.

There are a lot of features of modern life that I think are very cool. I can video chat with complete strangers wearing only a shirt and tie and boxer shorts, and somehow this is "professional." I can join any number of tribes from a thousand miles away; I can reach across time and space with nothing but a keyboard and three cents of silicon. I can access any piece of information, any piece of media, at almost brain-speed.

But I have a message for you cilantro haters: step off the herb. Go pick on something else that truly deserves to be described as "the pubes of a demon."

Like parsley.

March Prompt

2010-03-01T08:45:00.001-05:00

Here it is ... the prompt for the March Storytellers:

The Folly of After

2010-02-25T09:11:00.006-05:00

When I first started gardening seriously, I got myself a bunch of books and read like a maniac. I hadn't grown up in a gardening family, and I didn't even meet my first real "plant people" until I was in college. So I had no background in it, no natural feel for growing things. I just knew that I felt a strong desire to grow things, and I had a clear vision of my own garden.

The vision was especially important. In those first few years, I spent a lot of time looking at pictures, thinking, "THIS is what I want my yard to look like." I like a heavy tropical look, so I salivated over rare aroids, tropical epiphytes, and exotic ferns. I got in the habit of driving very long distances to track down unique and unusual plants, and when that didn't work, I found people who would mail me cuttings or root sections.

I didn't really know it then, but I was making a critical mistake that I'm still working to undo. My idea of the perfect garden was a snapshot. It was literally a photograph. I knew what I wanted, and it looked exactly like the pictures in the books. I figured once I collected enough rare plants, once I figured out how to grow them, I could have that garden. It would be mine forever.

I viewed this garden as a static place, a place of frozen beauty. Of course, anyone who has spent years gardening knows that's ridiculous. But I was new. I didn't get it.

Since then, now going on 15 years later, I've had too many moments in my yard to count when I marveled at the beauty of it all. But never the same vision twice. At one time, I had a huge stand of ice cream bananas. They were gorgeous, but they're gone now. I've had 20 orchids blooming at once in my yard; I've had rows of papaya all heavy with fruit; I've had beds of color; vines loaded with fruit. All gone now.

This is what gardening has taught me: there is no goal, and in a way, the only ending is heartbreak. If I stopped taking care of my yard today, by the end of the summer, it would have reverted to sand and weeds. It only exists through the sheer force of my will, and even then, I'm only barely in control. It's forever changing, a kaleidoscope of color and texture, life and death. There are days it looks beautiful, and days it looks awful.

So it goes with writing. I think sometimes writers get attached to an idea of after. "After I sell this book ..." and "After I get a big advance ..." and "After I can quit my job ..." But I'm beginning to understand that the writing life isn't meant to yield those kinds of rewards. If it does, it's purely accidental, fleeting. The more I write, the deeper I travel into my own writer's journey, the more I see that writing is very much like my garden—the process IS the point, and at the end, the only reward I can reasonably expect is the satisfaction of the journey itself.

Respecting Red Lights

2010-02-24T09:16:00.004-05:00

I dated this girl for a while who had a thing about red lights. She HATED red lights. She would sit at red lights and rant and rave about the damn red light. To her, every red light was basically a personal insult leveled by the state's transportation gods against her. She often tried to calculate how much of her life she would spend sitting at red lights, assuming 1 minute per red light, and X number of red lights a day, multiplied by weeks and years, and holy cow, before I knew it, she had thrown away whole YEARS of her life because of red lights.

In novels, we don't really bother with red lights. Or cat naps. Or TV time, reading time, eating, sleeping, and the 90% of every waking hour that's just a yawn of time. This is why novels will never be like real life—real life doesn't have the advantage of an editor. I might be bored out of my gourd for the next four hours, but no editor is going to highlight this morning and delete it, saying, "C'mon, Jon, are you really moving the story forward here? I mean, what are you doing exactly?"

(But oh, how I wish for such an editor sometimes.)

A novel is a collection of moments, and if it's handled well, you hardly realize that the writer has strung together six or ten or twenty minutes from a single day and turned it into a cohesive narrative. You know what I really admire? Writers who can blink by a whole day or whole month with hardly a bump in the narrative.

I got dinged last night in my writer's group because I botched an important minute. It was a meeting between two characters, and although the actual time sequence is less than a minute, it's a very important minute. These characters will spend the rest of the story getting to know each other and developing a relationship. You can't really afford to blow these scenes.

But, see, I'm always concerned with pacing. I don't like red lights in my manuscript, sitting there sucking up time and insulting my readers. The problem is the natural tension between characterization and pacing. A very fast-paced novel tends to have less character, and writers who spend pages developing characters are less concerned with writing a bullet.

When I was thinking about fixing this particular scene, I went back to that minute and realized my problem: I hadn't fully inhabited the moment. Not in my head. Not really. I basically wanted to move past it, to go down the stairs, into the basement, not to linger there at the doorway while they make that first contact.

I have to remind myself that sometimes it's OK to slow down, to linger. If a moment is important enough to include in the story—more important than all the other moments that surround it—I should respect it enough to give it life. I never really said this to my girlfriend (she was kind of volatile), but if there's a good song on the radio, and it's a nice day with the windows down, I sometimes like red lights. They give me time to think.

On Failure

2010-02-17T09:40:00.002-05:00

I was watching last night when Lindsey Jacobellis failed out. For anybody who isn't following the winter Olympics, Jacobellis is a snowboarder. At the last winter games, she had a solid lead for a gold medal in the snowcross racing event. But she stumbled just short of the finish line and had to settle for silver. This year, much was made of her comeback moment. She did interviews, NBC ran features on her, she got endorsement deals. It was a Big Deal. An athlete seeking redemption, or in the words of Bob Costas, a chance to "silence her critics once and for all."

But Jacobellis didn't even make the finals. In the semi-final, she kind of bobbled coming off a jump, then clipped a gate, and her race was over. It didn't look like much, honestly, and it was probably the kind of thing that's happened to her a million times before in practice and during lesser races. But this time it cost her.

I watched the replay a few times. Right after she went out of bounds, she raised her hands as if to say, "How can this be happening?" Then she stopped and just looked down the hill, where her Olympic dreams were racing away from her.

At the same time I was watching this, my wife was watching a girl get cut from the final 24 in American Idol. I didn't see it, but she said this girl broke down and begged the judges for a chance. My wife said it passed the point of spunk and just got embarrassing. This singer, who came so close, just couldn't understand that the decision was made, it was irrevocable, and her own want—no matter how large it was—meant nothing.

I kind of understood how this feels. I've never failed on such a big stage, or so publicly, but I've definitely notched up an impressive list of failures. The worst, of course, came just last year, with a massive book rejection.

Contrary to what they say, I don't really believe failure builds character. Failure is just failure. What builds character is what comes AFTER the failure. Sometimes I think we place too much emphasis on emotion, too much care and thought are given to processing and recovering from and understanding a failure. Is it really that hard to understand? Jacobellis bombed her race. My book wasn't good enough. Or as Simon told the American Idol contestant when she asked what she did wrong, "You just didn't sing as well as they did."

If I could give my kids any wisdom I've learned from getting kicked in the teeth over the years, it would be this: "Feel whatever you have to feel, but DO what you have to DO." After you flame out, go ahead and throw a pity party, doubt your talent, get angry, get sad, cry your eyes out, get drunk, sober up and get drunk again, annoy your friends with forlorn emails, curse the powers that be ... do all these things. But whatever you do, don't QUIT. Stay in motion. Keep writing. Keep singing. Prepare for your next event the way you've prepared for every other event. Let the emotion run its course, move through the stages and let it drain away. But the one thing you can never, ever do is give up, because once you've done that, then all you'll ever know is failure.

Bad Lurker!

2010-02-16T13:49:00.002-05:00

Well, I did it again. I was supposed to post my story this morning, with Janet and her accelerator. But the truth is, I didn't finish it by this morning. Er, or start it. But before you curse me, I have a good excuse! At least a good excuse among writers ... in the past two weeks, I've done about 20,000 words on my book. I'm really blazing through it right now, and every time I sit down to do anything—if I have even a few spare minutes—I think, "But wouldn't I rather be working on the book?" So I open the file and away I go. Then every time I close the file, I miss it, and I spend all my time thinking about where I left Flynn until the next time I can steal some time to write.

On the bright side, I think I'm about 10 days away from finishing this draft ... and then you just wait! Janet will be stamping on her accelerator until her pointy little foot falls right off.

Sonnet, by Erica Orloff

2010-02-15T09:32:00.003-05:00

Janet stamped on the accelerator. A bottle of Jim Beam slid toward the gas pedal, and she kicked it sideways as she drove, wiping angry tears.

When she reached the cemetery, darkness had settled like a heavy blanket of silence. She climbed out of the car, her cowboy boots crunching in the gravel. She grabbed the bottle of bourbon, slammed the heavy Cadillac door shut with a thud and surveyed the locked gate.

“Never stopped me before,” she muttered, and climbed an oak tree, slid out on thick branch and dropped on the other side of the stone wall.

The moon filtered through a cloud and she saw the freshly dug grave at the top of the sloping hill, a mound of dirt that infuriated her. He wanted to be cremated. He told her so. Told her that. Told her a million things she bet no one knew. Secret things.

Janet hiked up the hill and sank to her knees in the fresh earth, the scent of mowed grass and damp soil making her heart ache as surely as if someone had squeezed it. She unscrewed the bottle and took and healthy swig. She splashed a little on the grave. Then a sob sprang up, and she tried to choke it down, choke it with another swallow of bourbon, but it refused to be choked.

She slid down, almost in slow motion, pressing her face to the earth and whispered. “I know you loved me, but I couldn’t go to the funeral. I just couldn’t. Couldn’t watch them put you in this box, Professor.”

She stretched her arms, hugging the dirt, then rolled over on her back and stared up at the stars.

He had been 72. She was 23. He taught her things. Like Shakespeare. He listened to her. She made him laugh.

The stars made the squeezing in her heart hurt more. They used to sit on his back deck and drink red wine—from Napa, really good red wine. He taught her about finish and the scent of laurel. And he gave her his old Cadillac, and a bunch of books, and a telescope. A really good one that let them see the rings of Saturn. And they looked at stars. He showed her Orion and Canis Minor. Then they would make love. He took his time. She loved his eyes.

“But no one would understand,” she said to the stars and the dirt.

When he got sick, near the end, he made her promise. You will find someone young. Someone to grow old with in your own time. Someone to have babies with. Promise me.

She had nodded. But she never spoke the words. Never said “I promise” out loud, so it didn’t really count.

The pain was worse thinking of him sick. She sat up and sipped the bourbon. Her face was wet and mixed with the dirt, she was muddy and tired. She whispered Shakespeare,

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose Worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved

She let the words linger with him in the soil. Then she brushed her hair back, dirt on her palms, and stood up. “I won’t come back,” she said to him, firmly. “Not here. This isn’t where you really are.”

She made her way down the hill. She would go use the telescope he gave her. The one that showed her Saturn. The one that let her dream of things beyond her world.

He wasn’t in the dirt but in the stars.

Doppelgangers and Other Monsters, by Merry Monteleone

2010-02-12T09:08:00.001-05:00

Janet stamped on the accelerator. Still nothing. She pulled the keys out of the ignition and held them between her palms. If anyone happened to notice her, they’d think she was praying – ironic really, since god was obviously done taking her calls.

Okay, one, two, three.

Shoving the key back in the ignition, she turned it with a flick of her wrist and stomped on the pedal at the same time.

“You rotten motherfucker.”

For about two seconds, the weight pressing against her neck and shoulders relinquished its grip and floated above her. Swearing might be cathartic, but it didn’t get her to work any faster. Grabbing her purse from the passenger seat, she jumped out of the car and slammed the door. She jogged up the block, until she saw the bus chugging past the next intersection. Bursting into an all out run, she cursed her cute shoes and skidded around the corner just in time to stumble into the last guy waiting to board.

Whoa. Hello.

From the back she only saw wide shoulders, mostly because she came damn close to bashing into them face-first. But when he turned and squinted down at her, all broad cheekbones and chiseled jaw, she forgot to breathe. Something about him was familiar.

“You okay?” He cupped her elbow with his hand, steadying her the way on old friend might, without thinking.

Janet regained her footing enough to pull her arm away and he bit down on his bottom lip, one dimple just peeking out. He was trying not to laugh in her face, which should have annoyed the hell out of her, but for some reason it made her smile.

“I’m okay.” Stop panting, you moron. “It’s the shoes, can’t run in the shoes.”

“That’s why I had to give up the heels,” he said, “ruined me for marathons, it did.”

She followed him onto the bus and paid her fare, and then she grabbed the closest unoccupied seat. She kept her eyes focused on the grungy floorboards and wished she’d brought a book or something. She would have if she’d known she had to take the bus.

“Janet? It’s Janet, right?”

It was him again, sitting in the seat across from her. Her chest contracted and her eyes shot up to meet his before she could stop herself.

Damn, damn, damn.

“No, sorry,” she adopted that blank stare she’d spent the last two years perfecting, “my name’s Marina.”

“Really?” He scowled, and looked above her as if trying to picture something and said, “I’d swear you were a girl I knew back in Milwaukee. You didn’t used to live in Wisconsin, did you? Maybe I’m just messing up the name.”

“No.” She answered too quick but caught herself enough to give him a full smile, “Never been there. Sorry.”

“Huh, well, you’ve got a doppelganger out there.”

He laughed and it was so warm and fun and full of promise that her heart sank. The bus slowed down and she jumped to her feet.

“Whoa, where you going? We just got on.”

“I... yeah...” she fished around for some excuse and came up lame, “stupid shoes. I didn’t think I could make the five-block walk.”

“Oh, well, nice talking to you.”

She didn’t turn around, just waved behind her as she got off and stood at the sidewalk. Through the window she could see him looking down at her, squinting again, as if he was trying to figure her out. She hoped he didn’t try too hard.

She pulled out her cell phone, and dug through her purse to grab her wallet. She opened it up and rifled past the driver’s license that said she was Marina Sandoval, and pulled out the other one – Janet Sierra, issued by the State of Wisconsin. She was supposed to get rid of it, it was dangerous and she knew it. She just couldn’t give that one little piece up. She’d already given up everything else. Behind that last reminder of her former self was the scrap of ragged paper she was after.

She punched in the numbers and waited two rings, putting the scrap of paper back into its hiding place.

“Bitsy? It’s Janet. Someone saw me.”

“You need to come back in. Now. Just grab what you need.”

“Yeah, same place?” It was mechanical. She knew she’d have to move on again, as soon as he called her by her real name, she knew.

“Same place. I’ll make the arrangements to send you on to the next stop today.”

“Oscar doesn’t know I’m here yet. Maybe I can stay.” She knew she couldn’t, knew Bitsy would talk her out of it if she tried, but God, she loathed giving everything up. Again.

“Same place, Jan. I’m sorry, you can’t take the chance. You just can’t. Meet me there.”

“Yeah, okay. My car’s not working, though, I got spotted on the bus.”

“On the bus? There’s a whole new reason public transportation sucks.” Bitsy laughed, trying to lighten the mood, “I can pick you up in two hours. Is that enough time?”

“Yeah. See you then. Thanks.”

She closed the phone and dumped it back in her purse. Walking up the street she kept her eyes open, drinking in every sound, every movement. Amazing how he could still ruin her life without even trying. She stopped at the garbage can on the corner and looked down at the old license, still palmed in her hand. She dropped her old smiling face on top of the used wrappers and garbage and walked on.

Janet Has a Gun, by Allen

2010-02-11T09:16:00.001-05:00

Janet stamped on the accelerator. With the wind tossing her hair, she sped past the marketplace still thinking of that evil woman lying in her bed. Her husband surely knew better than to carry his secret rendezvous into their house. Each puff of wind fluttered another lock of hair across her face and added an additional layer of contempt for that tramp.

The gun sat beside her as a traveling companion. Each cylinder carried the revenge she so desperately deserved. Nothing was too morbid for this man, a cheater and a liar.

Janet stomped the brakes as the car slid into her driveway. The loud, crashing sounds traveled far past the crumpled trash cans bouncing against the garage. She wondered if the copulating cheaters upstairs had even heard it, or were they so engrossed in their own dalliance that mere thunder, lightning, nor careening trash cans could penetrate their frolicking minds.

The gun nestled nicely in her hand. It felt comfortable, like an old, worn out tennis shoe. Her palm surrounded the pearl grips as she slid her thumb across the hammer. Three solid clicks and the revolver stood cocked, ready for whatever Janet needed.

Janet stamped the cigarette out with her open-toed shoe. The last puff of smoke held in the air as she worked the key. The single ping from the alarm echoed through the hall. The clip clop of her heels on the hardwood floors traced her path through the den to the stairs in the back. Climbing the stairs, she waded through a maze of strewn clothes; a silk blouse in dark green, a black skirt too short to hide anything while climbing stairs, a black bra, and a pair of red panties inscribed with Tramp on the back.

She rolled her eyes. Fitting.

Janet stepped into her bedroom amid the smell of a lavender candle burning on the table, a gift from her mother just before she died. The sounds of sex reverberated in the corners of the vaulted ceiling. Framed by the poster bed’s posts and canopy that he bought to celebrate their twenty-fifth anniversary, Janet stared at the whore astride her husband, still riding him as if he was the only steed left on earth. Their rhythm, accentuated by the squeaking bed, droned on as moans of pleasure escaped the petite young thing’s lips. Janet, fixated on the rocking motion and the visual of this woman’s hips gliding back and forth, playing peek-a-boo with the bunched covers of the bed, couldn’t divest her eyes from the sight.

Tramp stamp. Figures.

Janet firmed her grip on the revolver, rolling her head in their direction, craning her neck just enough to view the wall mirror’s image of the two humping away. She held the gun rigid, assured of her aim and determined to fire. She watched the couple begin to build the intensity of their endeavor. Still, the gun never wavered. When her husband began his final climb, one she had experienced through all the years and both of the children, she knew the time was right.

Janet slammed to the floor as bits of her brain and blood hung in the air. The spatter, clinging to the mirror, obscured the view of the couple, still entangled in their deceit. The crimson stains slid down the glass until the brain speckled goo plopped to the dresser. The burst of blood which covered the tramps back mingled with the green of her tattoo, a grotesque display of dancing Cherubs. Her screams ended their play.

The gun, oozing smoke from its barrel, lay beside its traveling partner as another jilted wife became silent. No gurgling sounds or twitching motions. The two lay in abject stillness.

Thumbing It, by Jude Hardin

2010-02-10T07:57:00.000-05:00

~~Janet stamped on the accelerator~~.

~~Janice stomps on the accelerator~~.

Jan floors the gas pedal. The Mustang lurches forward, pinning me back in my seat. Thirty seconds later, we’re cruising down the two-lane at a buck ten.

“Why are you writing in that notebook?” Jan asks.

“Because I’m a writer.”

“Really? A writer? Have you published anything?”

“Yes. I’m very famous.”

“Are you writing a story now?”

“Yes.”

“And I’m in it?”

“That’s right.”

“What’s my name in this story of yours?”

“I couldn’t decide between Janet and Janice. So it’s just Jan.”

“That’s boring. Would you like to know my real name?”

“There’s a pretty sharp curve up here,” I say. “Might want to slow it down a little.”

Jan glances over and smiles. She doesn’t say anything, and she doesn’t slow down.

“Seriously. Really sharp curve. Up ahead. Really sharp.” I fasten my seat belt. “Actually, if you could just drop me off here…”

“You’re funny. Are all writers such cowards?”

“I’m not a coward. I just believe in exercising a certain degree of caution.”

“Where’s your sense of adventure? Isn’t it important for a writer to have a sense of adventure? If I slow down, the story isn’t going to be as exciting, now is it?”

The needle on the speedometer jitters around the 120 mark. It’s dark outside, but a Texaco sign blurs by and I know there’s an extremely sharp curve less than a mile from here. Beyond the guardrail there’s a sixty-foot drop to a dry creek bed.

“The story’s not even going to get written if the main character dies,” I say.

“Who’s the main character? Me or you?”

“That would be me.”

“Rather selfish, don’t you think? You should make me the main character. Make me the main character, and I’ll slow down.”

“Okay, you’re the main character.”

“Awesome!”

Jan presses down harder, as though she’s trying to put her foot through the floorboard.

“What are you doing? I thought we had a deal.”

“A main character should have some sort of flaw, right? I’m a pathological liar. That’s my flaw.”

Jan flings her long blond hair back and cackles insanely. We pass a blinking yellow light atop a sign that says Curve.

“This is, like, super-suspenseful, isn’t it?” Jan says.

“I’ve decided to make it a horror story.”

“Beg your pardon?”

In one swift motion I grab Jan by the hair, pull my hunting knife from its sheath, and slit her throat from ear to ear. Her muscles go slack. I straddle the console and stomp the brake pedal with my left foot. The Mustang goes into a spin, whipping round and round like a Tilt-A-Whirl from hell. With every revolution I see the reflectors on the guardrail. Closer and closer and closer until…

Bang!

The Mustang breaks through the rail and bottoms out on the asphalt. Sparks fly from the undercarriage as it grinds to a stop on the edge of the cliff.

I gently open the door and step out.

The car teeters, and then, as if in slow motion, careens down the hill and explodes in a massive fireball on the rocky bottom. Realizing this is a cliché, I vow to think of something better on revision.

I stand on the precipice, like some sort of crazy god, and shout toward the plumes of greasy black smoke filling the canyon. “A first-person narrator rarely dies, silly girl. It’s a point-of-view issue.”

Your Lucky Day, by E. Flanigan

2010-02-08T22:40:00.002-05:00

Janet stamped on the accelerator. She meant to hit the brake, but her foot hit the gas instead.

In that brief second, as the minivan lurched forward instead of stopping, she felt strangely calm. She didn’t think of Christian sleeping in his booster seat in back, didn’t think of anything — just watched the dark world careen by. Then the crunch of metal on metal and Christian’s startled cry.

Even by the glow of the orange street lamps, she could see the side of the other car was crumpled. Luckily, her van was moving so slow the air bag hadn’t even deployed. If you can call that lucky.

Christian was crying in earnest now. She opened her door a crack so the interior light would turn on, and in the dim glow he seemed fully intact. Thank God for small miracles.

She got out and walked back to open the side door of the van. Christian was coughing. She leaned in and put her face close to his. “You OK, buddy?”

Christian turned his head away, eyes wide, mouth agape. His arms were bent awkwardly at the elbows, hands up, fingers splayed. Janet watched the little fingers spread and close, spread and close.

“You’re OK, little man,” she said, and unbuckled him from his seat.

The other car was parked directly in front of the convenience store, but no one emerged from the store to claim it. As she approached, she could see its rear quarter panel was smushed. It was a new Mustang. Shit.

Janet guided Christian back to the van by his shoulder and opened the passenger door to look for her phone, but her purse wasn’t there. Double shit. She wasn’t surprised to find the purse missing. Maybe it was on the kitchen counter. Maybe it was in a store somewhere. It had been that kind of day.

Christian was working himself up—flapping his arms and moaning. The point of this drive had been to keep him sleeping, get a break. Ha. She wished she could put him back in his seat and get out of here, but fleeing the scene wasn’t really an option.

The Mustang’s dark tinted windows had made it appear empty at first. But from this angle, she could make out two figures framed by the lights from the store.

She again took Christian by the shoulder. He was flapping his arms wildly and starting to spin. Janet stepped up to the car and tapped on the window. “Hello?”

The window rolled down an inch, maybe two, and a young man’s eyes peered back at her.

“Hi, I hit your car."

She didn’t know what she expected. Maybe for him to start yelling. Maybe for him to get out of the car. But he just looked at her.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”

Janet was processing slowly. It was late, she was tired. But she definitely saw a young guy in the passenger seat. And she thought she saw a gun in his lap.

She stood there silently. Her brain was moving at half-speed. The only sound was Christian: “Digga-digga-digga-digga. Digga-digga-digga.”

The guy behind the wheel stared at Christian. Then he looked at her. Nothing.

“I’ll go call the police,” Janet said.

She grabbed Christian's shoulder and started to maneuver him towards the store's automatic doors, but Christian threw himself into a seated position on the ground and began rocking back and forth. He closed his eyes.

Janet tried to lift him by the armpits, but he was in a panic and started thrashing. "Digga-digga-digga. Digga-digga-digga," more loudly now.

"I wouldn't do that," the man said. He opened his car door. He had a gun in his hand. "I wouldn't move."

Janet looked down at Christian on the ground. Shit. Shit. Shit. She didn't know exactly what crime she had interrupted, but she was certainly in the middle of something bigger than herself.

"You need to shut him up," the guy said. "Make him stop doing that."

Christian was rocking and digga-ing and working himself into a lather. "Shh, Christian. Shh." But it was pointless. "He's just scared," she explained. "He gets upset kind of easily."

"I'm gonna need money," the guy said. "To pay for my car."

Janet closed her eyes. "I don't have my purse, though. I mean, it's missing."

Down the street a horn honked, and Christian clamped his hands over his ears and moaned.

The guy watched with wide eyes. "What's wrong with him?"

Janet considered how many times she'd been asked this very question. She thought of the business cards in her purse—her missing purse—that her husband had printed up, ostensibly so she could hand them out at the park and the mall when Christian made a scene.

"He needs his special clothes hanger. He likes to carry it around. He's autistic," she said. "Do you know what that is? Like Rain Man?"

The guy looked blank for a moment, then smiled. "Oh, yeah. I saw that. Can he count stuff?"

"No," Janet said. "No."

They stood in silence for another minute, both watching Christian do his thing. Then the guy looked up at her.

"That's pretty messed up," he said.

"Not really," she said. "He just needs his hanger to calm him down. It's back at home."

The passenger got out of the Mustang, looking annoyed. "Yo, Smitty, the store's at zero. Are we gonna do this shit or what?"

Janet looked at Smitty, who was watching Christian. Everyone waited, but Smitty lingered, spellbound.

Then suddenly he shoved the gun into the waistband of his jeans. "Well, it's your lucky day. 'Cuz we were just leaving."

He and his partner got back in the Mustang, revved the engine, and with that, they were gone.

Janet looked down at Christian, barefoot and rocking, hands over his ears. She crouched down and touched his shoulder.

"Did you hear that Christian? It's your lucky day."

And even though she knew he wouldn't like it, she kissed his cheek.

Road Rage, by Melanie Avila

2010-02-08T08:37:00.001-05:00

Janet stomped on the accelerator. The guardrail curved with the road, the scratched metal glinting in the bright sun and reminding her to take it easy. She eased off the pedal. Slightly.

Bruce didn't know what he was talking about. He’d walked in there with his shoulders back and that damned cocky expression plastered across his face, raising his eyebrows ever so slightly when she announced her decision.

Her decision. Not his. Since when did he care anyway? He always did what he wanted, when he wanted, and if it somehow worked its way into agreeing with her plans, great. If not, screw her.

Her fingers twitched at her jeans pocket. Maybe she should call—

A sleek blue car slung out from behind her and tried to pass on her left. “Screw you,” she muttered, and drifted over the center line. She tried to check over her shoulder but the seatbelt dug into her ribcage and kept her flattened against the vinyl seat.

The car fell back and her gaze settled on the rickety bridge that spanned the road. Two children leaned over the railing and waved as she passed, but her attention was locked on the smooth blacktop.

Bruce thought he was so smart. What? He's a guy so he automatically knows everything? Heaven forbid she ever know what she was talking about, and forget her ever being right. If it was up to him she’d hand all decisions over to him and become the fifties housewife he dreamed about.

As if.

The sun slid behind a clump of trees, then blinded her as she rounded the next curve. She nearly slammed into the backend of rusty green car that clung to the center line.

"Move it!" she hollered, blurring past the car and flipping the bird over her shoulder.

She couldn’t let him be right. Not that it would make any difference after that day, but just once… She flexed her fingers against the steering wheel, the grooved metal cool against her skin.

Not today. Today he was wrong.

Her foot pounded the slim pedal to the floor and she hurtled past the black and white checkered flag.

She screeched on the brakes, climbed out of the car, and tossed the pink helmet to the smiling attendant. A smirk danced on her lips as Bruce pulled to a stop alongside her. "I told you the red one was faster."

My Desk ... In Defense of Organization

2010-02-05T10:43:00.003-05:00

The paper-clipped stacks are current projects that will get attention today. The open space ... is open space.

In Which I Exhort

2010-02-05T08:41:00.004-05:00

I was a nerdy little kid. Well, correctly put, I was an extremely bookish little kid. I read constantly, almost compulsively. I regularly got into trouble for reading during class or taking books to places where books didn't belong.

As a result, I had developed a fairly chunky vocabulary by about third grade. I knew most of the little words, and lots of the big ones, too. The problem is, when you're a third grade boy, and you're already known for sitting in a corner with a novel, having a big vocabulary is NOT a good thing. You get questions like, "Why do you use so many big words?" And, "You just use a lot of big words to show off." Or, "What are you talking about?"

No kid likes to attract that kind of attention, or at least I didn't, so I can actually remember making a conscious decision to use fewer big words. And to swear more. Lots more (that part I liked). Pretty soon I could swear like a marine, and by sixth grade, I like to think that you could have talked to me and never known I'd read a book in my entire life.

Now that I'm an adult, I still have echoes of this. I still cringe sometimes when I hear a three-dollar word creep out. I know this doesn't make sense completely—people tend to appreciate well-spoken adults, and they sort of expect writers to be word-nerds—but it's a lingering effect from being the bookish kid.

But on paper ... now that's a whole different ballgame. I'm a total word hound, and when I say I'm editing, what that means is I'm usually combing the book looking to replace and upgrade single words. See, I believe in precision, especially in verbs. I believe very strongly that there is a world of difference between "crying out" and "yelling" and "screaming." And sometimes people lope, while other times they jog, and yet still other times they might run or sidle. And I believe IT MATTERS which one they actually do—these aren't synonyms. (Don't even get me started on the whole idea of thesauri ...)

I respect writers who choose their words carefully, and I'm almost instantly bored by prose that lacks any specificity of description. As a reader, I can almost feel the writer casting around, spilling whole paragraphs while they look for the right few words. Sometimes it's sloppy editing, sometimes lazy writing, and other times it's just a lack of vocabulary. Even in simple books, aimed at children, I think word choice matters a great deal.

I'm afraid this might sound elitist, but I really don't mean it like that. After all, I'm the kid who taught myself to avoid big words.... To me, this a craft question, and this has everything to do with how good you are and how good you can be. If I was a brick layer, I'd want to know all the kinds of brick available. If I was a painter, I'd want to know every shade of white I could memorize. So as a writer, there should be a hunger to know every word (impossible, of course) and a willingness to spend time looking for just that perfect one.

So you see, I'm not really ranting. I'm exhorting.

It's Not the Length that Matters ...

2010-02-04T09:07:00.002-05:00

When I first got serious about writing MG fiction, I went through this whole Word Count Phase. I'm the kind of writer who believes in making life easier on myself, which means writing to my market. It's hard enough to get published, so why bother approaching a publisher with a 200,000-word epic aimed at 12-year-olds? No, no, no. I'll leave the windmills for Quixote.

So "they" say an MG novel should be somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000 words. Definitely not more than 70,000 words, or less than 40,000 words. Using these as my guidelines, I did some research into the word counts of best-selling books in my genre:

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone: 76, 944

Series of Unfortunate Events, The Bad Beginning: 24,744

Inkheart: 145,000

A Wrinkle In Time: 52,587

Holes: 46,587

The Hobbit: 95,022

Artemis Fowl: 56,924

Percy Jackson, Book 1: 86,826

Interesting, huh? I just picked these titles randomly, whatever popped into my head. Obviously, all of them are best-sellers or classics. And only TWO of them are within the suggested word range. Most are significantly longer, but the first Lemony Snicket book barely rises above the level of an extended essay.

Here's the kicker. Although my list suggests that word count isn't all that important, I'm not arguing that we should disregard suggested word lengths. In fact, just the opposite. The truth is, most of those books were written by established authors or they were written overseas. In this country, in this moment in publishing, I think you're shooting yourself in the foot if you turn up with a super-long or super-short opus, especially if you're unknown. They're always looking for reasons to burn through submissions.

But it is food for thought, no? I know personally, I pay attention to word count. I've always envisioned my current book as one of a series of relatively short books (between 40k and 50k words each). My other two novels fell right between 55k and 60k words. What about you? How much does word count matter when you sit down to plan a project?

War & Peace? Surprising ...

2010-02-03T08:42:00.008-05:00

Growing up as a writer and reader, Tolstoy's War and Peace occupied a special place in the pantheon of books. It was the doorstop all other literature was measured against, often squatting atop "Best Books Ever Written" lists like some kind of fat, Russian toad. It was the yardstick against which all literary endeavors were really measured. "Well," someone would say, "it's not like you're writing War and Peace." Or you'd hear people say, "Someday, one of my life goals is to read War and Peace," and they'd say it in the same way that people talk about getting a colonoscopy.

So I'd always avoided War and Peace. I worked my way through Dostoevsky and The Man of La Mancha, then all those 18th century French translations, and of course many years spent with Dickens. I did 100 Years of Solitude and Faulkner. Heck, I even did Gravity's Rainbow. But never War and Peace. Even as a dedicated reader, I always figured life was too short for books like that.

Recently, my father-in-law bought the new Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace. I'd read about this translation in a few places, and most people who would know were saying it was the best translation of Tolstoy ever done. That it rendered War and Peace as close to the Russian original as any translation had ever come. Then not too long ago, we joined my in-laws on vacation, and my father-in-law happened to bring his book along, which is a pretty sure invitation for me to pick it up and thumb through it. I read the first page. Then the first 20 pages. And that was it ...

I borrowed the book.

I'm about 200-odd pages into the book now, and I don't know why I should be surprised by this, but I'm kind of blown away by how good it is. Tolstoy's sense of character is incredible, and the scope of each scene is so impressive. I've never seen a larger cast of characters handled so adroitly. It's not hard to keep track of the scores of people because each is rendered so individually. And even more surprising: Tolstoy is funny. Hard to believe, but he is. He has this really fine sense of humor; he frequently tells jokes at his characters' expense, and he sets up situations that are utterly believable but droll (there really is no other word to describe it). Finally, his description of impending combat, of armies lining up preparing to shoot and the feelings and thoughts that go through a person's head in the moments before the bullets fly, is just so authentic feeling.

You know Beauty and the Beast? If War and Peace is the beast, then I feel a bit like Belle (which is still infinitely better than a singing teapot). I expected this book to have fangs, to beat me over the head until I was senseless, but instead I found something else entirely. I guess generations of critics know a little something about books after all.

Anyway, you tell me ... have you ever been surprised by a book? Which one? Why?

The Tipping Point

2010-02-02T09:52:00.003-05:00

I think there's a tipping point in certain manuscripts, when you know you're actually going to finish the thing. Other ideas start to drop away and this one idea consumes more and more brain space ...

In my current book, I stalled at 12,000 words for months because other things intervened. Then I picked it back up a few weeks ago, and yesterday I hit the halfway point, maybe a little more. It was kind of a victory, because over the last few days, I've slowly become aware that I hit that tipping point: I'm going to finish this book. I can see the end. It won't be long now.

It's funny, because my crit partner Erica posted on this subject today, but her experience of this same place, for this particular project of hers, is so different. She's got this huge, many-tentacled story that sprawls across centuries and multiple POVs with a dash of global epidemic thrown in. She's literally dreaming about throwing herself off a bridge. (And believe me, I get it. Personally, I'd be freaking out too, but let's just keep that between us ...)

So far, no one has seen most of this book I'm working on--even my crit partners have only seen about a third of it. For now, it's MINE. I'm feeling very protective of it, like it's this crystal I'm growing in a dark room. All day yesterday, I walked around talking to this story, because yesterday I think I wrote the best single page I've ever written. And as long as no one else has read it, then I'm free to keep thinking that.

And that's what it's like for me at the halfway point. I'm secretive, committed, protective and mad proud of this little organism I'm nurturing on my hard drive. Soon, I'll kick it out the front door, where it will have to fend for itself, but for now, this book is my secret and my pleasure.

February Prompt

2010-02-01T13:38:00.002-05:00

Ah, another month, another Monday. I would have posted earlier today, but instead I spent this morning trying to get my head around the Amazon/Macmillan kerfuffle. What does this mean? Am I pro-Macmillan because they're a publisher and publishers are going broke? Does this mean Macmillan will be able to pay for more new voices, or is that a wad of horse-pucky pushed by a company that likes to threaten its own customers? Or am I pro-Amazon because I'm rooting for consumers and agree that $15 e-books are ridiculously overpriced? Will this be good for writers? Or are we doomed to even worse health insurance? Which corporate behemoth do I root for? And what role did Apple's iPad really play in forcing Amazon to eat crow?

I'm worried that the thudding sound I just heard was the echo of the sky falling down on my roof, but I'm afraid to look.

Anyway, this month's prompt is a single first sentence:

Janet stamped on the accelerator.

To the keyboards! And if anybody wants to mull over who will rule over us in the future, we can play "Choose Your Overlord" in the comments.

I Knew Today Stunk

2010-01-28T13:53:00.003-05:00

This morning, I got into a knock-down-drag-out fight with my four-year-old. It started small—"NO!"— and ended up with me dragging a garbage can into the kitchen and throwing away toys, one after another, until he saw that he was, indeed, not the one in charge.

Then I had an editor go ballistic on me because they basically hired me to report a story in the middle of a natural disaster. I don't want to get into too much detail, but it was like the lesser equivalent of going to Haiti right now to report on the brick-making business. Just a bad, impossible, stupid, rudderless idea. So he's pissed, and I'm pissed because I've poured enough time into this story that I'll earn about $3 an hour and it still stinks.

And then I just read that J.D. Salinger died. Now, I'm no Catcher in the Rye fanatic, but I suspect like a lot of boys, I read it at the perfect moment, when I was most open to its nihilism. I read it on the train to Chicago, traveling alone and still a teenager myself. I completely related to Holden Caulfield.

So there it is. One. Crap. Day.

When does Happy Hour start again?

The Overlords of Japanese Porn

2010-01-28T09:28:00.002-05:00

Seem to have discovered my blog. I looked at some old posts and saw that I had up to 50 comments that appeared to be randomly generated links to Japanese porn. So does anyone know how I can ban certain IPs or commenters on Blogspot? Does anyone else have this problem? Or do some of you not consider it a problem at all?

I Type Fast

2010-01-27T09:23:00.003-05:00

It's true. I type really fast. At the height of my typing prowess, I once clocked about 90 words per minute. I think I might have been past 100 wpm, but my memory is kind of foggy on the details, so who knows. But anyway, the point is that I type really fast, and it's not at all unusual for people to say, "Boy, you type fast" when they first hear or see me type.

Typing fast makes my job as a freelancer possible. There are lots of times when, as a freelancer, you're not really "writing" so much as copying quotes, reinterpreting data or paraphrasing. In these situations, typing fast is a Godsend. I'm not quite sure how much this little skill is worth to me in terms of hard dollars, but it's definitely worth something.

Here's the problem: I used to think that because I typed fast, I also wrote fast.

Wrong.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

In fact, I don't write fast at all. I can generate a lot of words quickly, but in terms of finished product? Not fast. I might have to revise 45 times, and lately, I've gotten in the habit of STOPPING WRITING when I hit a scene I'm unsure of and just sitting on it and thinking. Then thinking some more. So before I start typing at all, there might be 3 or 4 days worth of thought in that scene. Not quick when you're talking about 500 words.

This idea that I write fast—persistent as it was—has been a pretty major stumbling block for me because it was all wrapped up in pride and didn't allow much room for revisions. My second novel was 120,000 words. I wrote (typed) it in 7 weeks. Some days I cranked out 5,000 or 7,000 words. Problem was, the novel was dreck. I often say that part of my evolution as a writer has been developing my process, but I think what I really mean is that I've been discovering what kind of writer I ACTUALLY am, as opposed to what kind of writer I THINK I am.

So ... what do you think? Are you holding onto any beliefs about yourself as a writer that might 1) be untrue and 2) actually holding you back? Tough question, right? Because answering that question is half the battle when it comes to becoming a better writer.

Strong Women

2010-01-26T12:14:00.002-05:00

They say that every person, no matter the gender, has both male and female energy. I know this is true in my case ... I don't care about organized sports, I don't give a rat's ass about cars or motorcycles, and I do a whole lotta cooking and gardening. On the other hand, I do have a pretty serious crush on power tools and few things give me as much satisfaction as rough carpentry, especially if ladders and eye protection are involved. So you know, I go both ways.

It's a challenge, I think, to write an accurate character of the opposite gender, at least for me. I've said it before—ladies, i love you and all, but you confuse me. I don't understand how anyone can take Oprah seriously. I honestly don't. And the dense, predatory, tearful, supportive, heartfelt, shallow politics of your average cheerleading team or sewing circle would likely reduce me to a quivering mess. You operate on levels of which I'm only dimly aware.

So I'm writing a female now. She's about 15 and she's a thief. She's an orphan who claims she has no parents because all of her early memories are too horrible to confront. As I'm writing her, I'm thinking about what makes a strong female character. She could be a bad-ass—beating up guys, smart and sassy, brash. But I think that's a bit of a cop-out. That kind of ass-kicking Bruce Lee stuff is more a sign of typical male strength than female. The strong women I know are defined instead by consistency in the face of pressure and emotional and moral courage. And I know this is a stereotype in some quarters, but they are not self-centered. They have figured out a way to lift everyone around them, even as they lift themselves.

Maybe that's one of the features of female strength: it's extroverted, as opposed to introverted. By this I mean that male strength tends to be inwardly focused. Guys are strong when they crush the competition, gather tremendous resources to themselves, carve out their niche in the world and defend it against all comers. Women are strong when they are embedded in a complex web of relationships, feeding and being fed by this web and improving the lives of everyone in it (including their own—this cannot be underestimated because it seems that lots of women fall prey to the idea of doing for everyone else what they refuse to do for themselves).

But I'm just guessing ... I want to get this girl right. So I'm curious, what do you think makes a strong woman?

Harvest Begins ...

2010-01-23T10:05:00.006-05:00

Some guys post pictures of chicks in the underwear (that's right, Mark, I'm looking at you). I post pictures of firm, rounded ... vegetables.

I call this one "A mixture of beefsteak, heirloom and hybrids in pink, red, and yellow":

And this one is "Still Life With Cabbage":

Thinking Commercial

2010-01-22T09:33:00.004-05:00

If you haven't read it yet, there's a very interesting and long profile of James Patterson in the New York Times Magazine. Among other tidbits, the article says that 1 out of every 17 novels bought in the United States since 2006 was written by James Patterson; he writes up to nine books a year with a stable of coauthors who do the actual writing from his detailed outlines; he's had 35 NYT #1 best-sellers and 51 books that made the list; and he's ferociously in charge of his own career—he has been constantly pushing his publisher from day one to approach publishing like moviemaking, as a collaborative, branded business. If you believe the article, he single-handedly invented the blockbuster model that has come to dominate publishing.

James Patterson thinks commercially. His books "are not high art," he says, and he edits them between hardcover and softcover versions to respond to reader feedback and his own ideas. He cares less about sentences and more about stories, and although he himself reads "high brow" literature (he cited James Joyce as a favorite), he aims to write simple, fast stories with short chapter, short sentences, and short paragraphs. His characters are deliberately simple, and the books are heavy on violence, sexual themes, and action in a very conscious attempt to pull people through.

It took Patterson a while to develop this model. His first novel, published in 1976, was a more "literary" noir novel, with more complexity and less accessibility. It had moderate sales and didn't rise above the normal literary chatter. It took him a few books to get the hang of what he calls "popular fiction," by which he means books that are fun, fast, light, titillating, and written purely for sheer entertainment.

I once saw Patterson speaking, purely by accident, at a local bookstore. It was my lunch break, so I was hanging around the bookstore to get out of the office, and he happened to be there for a talk. So I hung around in the back and listened. There were perhaps 200 people there, and I clearly remember one thing he said: "If you want to write what's in your heart, go ahead. But you'll never get published."

Ouch.

So let's say there's a spectrum in the literary world. At one end, there's authors like Patterson, who write purely for audience enjoyment. They write commercial fiction, and they do it well. Millions of people love it. At the other end, there is Thomas Pynchon -- a book every fifteen years, a book so dense and loaded with meaning that it is sure to be studied for generations hence, but it will likely sell mediocre.

As writers, we have to locate ourselves along this spectrum somewhere. Is the goal to write fun books? Commercial books? To illuminate the human condition? To say something? To gain literary respect?

I've struggled myself on this one. I don't like the idea of writing books solely for sales, but I love the idea of writing for my audience. I admire literary books—I'm wild about Moby Dick—but I work very hard to make sure my own writing is simple, clean and quick. I think books have something to say, but I also love to get my hands on a story that rocks along and takes me for the ride. I thought The DaVinci Code was silly and poorly written with outrageous characters; I thought The DaVinci Code was a nearly perfectly executed thriller. I have no problem linking writing to money—I think anyone who does will have a hard time feeding themselves by writing—but I often write for free because I love it.

So ... where are you?

Suspense ...

2010-01-18T09:32:00.002-05:00

In the comments to the last post, Jude got me thinking when he quoted Vonnegut's Rule #8 on writing:

Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

I poked around the internets a bit to see what other writers have to say about suspense, and I found this quote from John Gardner, a famous writing teacher:

All true suspense, we have said, is a dramatic representation of the anguish of moral choice.

I've always tended to think of suspense in the bomb-under-the-table sense. In other words, a function of action. There is a bomb; there is a timer. It will explode unless it is defused. But according to Gardner, suspense isn't action based at all--it is moral. Our suspense comes from watching a character make a hard choice, believing in that choice, and living with the consequences.

I see Gardner's point, because let's be honest, in the bomb-under-the-table scenario, is there really any suspense? I mean, we KNOW it's not going to go off or it would kill the main character. Is there really any question in a serial killer book that the former alcoholic cop with a heart of gold is going to catch the bad guy? Isn't it really just about process?

In the books I'm working on now, the real suspense (the moral suspense) doesn't truly come into play until later in the three-book series. My main character has to make a decision that will change the rest of his life one way or the other. Early in the first novel—in fact, in the scene I wrote about yesterday—another main character suspects this will happen, and she says, "You might have a terrible choice to make. You need to be prepared."

From this point, the books are chiefly concerned with outlining and exploring that "terrible choice." It's the point of the whole series.

Will this work as suspense? I don't know. I do know that I'm not completely settled with the choice the character eventually makes because it will close other doors; he will gain a great deal, but he will also lose a great deal. But this is also a book about growing up, and that's what growing up involves: making choices that simultaneously expand and limit our options. It's often painful. I will never be a tropical ecologist, and that still breaks my heart just a little bit.

So, I'm curious, how do you define suspense? Do your characters defuse bombs or make terrible choices? What's the difference?

Show Me Some Leg

2010-01-16T20:02:00.003-05:00

All day long, I've been wrestling with this question ... how much leg should I show?

I'm almost halfway into my WIP now, and I'm at a crucial scene. Two main characters are sitting before a fire, talking. One of them knows everything; the other one knows nothing. So I've been wondering, wrestling really, with how much backstory I should let slip here. How much should I give away? How much leg should I show?

It's an important question, not least because, before I wrote this book, I almost wrote a book about this book. That's how intricate and involved the backstory and world is. It's a tightly bound world, with rules and precedent, and a whole history. And I'm more than a little enamored of this world. It's just so ... exciting and big.

My impulse is to spill the beans. I can't help it. Ask my crit partners. Throughout this book, every time they get to the end of a scene, I get all excited and say, "So do you wanna know what that all means? Because it's pretty cool. That's not some accidental slip of the tongue there. There's a whole story there! See, because what's about to happen is—"

And they say, "No! No! Don't tell us!"

Then I tell them anyway.

So all day, I sat around, thinking about how much I should let go right now. And finally I decided: absolutely no more than is minimally necessary, and finally, only the stuff that makes sense to my character. She has an agenda, and even if she knows everything, she's only going to say what's important to her right at that moment.

This question—what to tell, when—has everything to do with pacing. For every question I answer, I want to raise two others. For every mystery I solve, a new one needs to replace it. The books I can't set down—even if they're poorly written—are the ones where I must know the answers to all my questions, when the author pulls me by the nose all the way through. So even though it goes against every strain of my big-mouthed writerly self, I'm hoping to keep this scene short, sweet and simple.

Perhaps at the end of the day, the same thing that makes a striptease effective also works in writing novels: only hint at the good stuff. Leave 'em wanting more.

Cleaning Up, by Jude Hardin

2010-01-15T08:47:00.000-05:00

By 2:00 A.M. everyone except the enormously-fat Claude Barlow had left the party. Everyone except Claude and me, that is.

Or is it Claude and I? I can never remember. Miss Apel, my seventh-grade English teacher, tried and tried to drill all that crap into my head, but it never seemed to stick. Poor Miss Apel. She would get so frustrated sometimes. Her eyes would bulge and her face would turn the shade of a ripe tomato, and she would say, “Gordon Malicat, if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a million times…” And she had. She had told me a million times. But it still never seemed to stick. It’s not that I’m stupid or anything; I just get preoccupied sometimes. I’m not stupid. She thought I was stupid, but I’m not.

I stabbed Miss Apel to death and threw her body in a dumpster.

I used a wooden ruler, one end wrapped with electrical tape and the other sharpened to a point on the sidewalk. It took some persistence to penetrate the flesh deeply enough, but I was strong for my age. I went at it like a roofer hammering shingles, really putting my shoulder into it. A knife or an ice pick or something would have been easier, but she was one of them, and it had to be wood.

It had to be wood.

Anyway, all that’s ancient history. That was back in seventh grade, when I was still just a kid. I’m eighteen now, and I have my own place and everything.

Claude Barlow owns the Mexican restaurant where I bus tables. Prick. Last night, before the restaurant closed and the private party started, he called me into the bar while I was trying to finish a four-top practically painted with salsa. He motioned for me to have a seat on the stool next to him.

“Can I buy you a drink?” he said.

That was the kiss of death. Whenever Mr. Barlow called you into the bar, motioned for you to have a seat on the stool next to him, and then offered to buy you a drink, it meant he was going to fire your ass. New Year’s Eve or not. I tried to play it cool, even though I knew what was coming.

“I’m only eighteen,” I said.

“Oh. Well, listen. Remember when I talked to you a while back about speeding up your actions? About getting out of here on time?”

“Can I help it if a bunch of filthy slobs eat here?”

“Yeah. Well, Gordon, I’m afraid we’ve decided to let you go.”

“Let me go where?” I was in smartass mode by this point.

“You can get your final paycheck next Friday.”

I untied my apron, wadded it up, threw it on the floor on my way out.

I had my own little party in my apartment, just me and a pint of Jack. I watched the ball drop on TV. I still had that good old ruler from seventh grade, hidden in the bottom of my underwear drawer. I got it out. He was one of them, all right. No doubt about it.

At 1:30 I drove back to the restaurant. The lot was empty except for Claude Barlow’s Cadillac. I parked by the service entrance. The metal door back there hadn’t been secured for the night, and the alarms hadn’t been set. I walked right in.

Claude was on the black leather settee in his office, passed out drunk. It looked like someone had propped him up in a sitting position, maybe to keep him from drowning in his own puke. He wore a silver party hat and there was a helium-filled balloon tied to his left pinky.

I picked up a half-empty flute of champagne and splashed it on his face. His eyes startled open, as if a switch had been flipped.

“Can I buy you a drink?” I said.

He never got the chance to answer.

When I got home I washed the ruler and put it back in my underwear drawer. You never know when you might need something like that. You never know when you might run into another one of them.