Tag: writing

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The Death of Paper Notes

One of the changes in OSX Mountain Lion is that it has a dedicated Notes application.  It’s just a basic text editor, except it syncs with other Apple devices.  This isn’t entirely new; iOS devices have had a notes app for a while, and it would sync with an IMAP server and show the notes in the Mail application.  This meant I could create a set of notes that lived in my gmail account, and then edit them on my phone, my computer, or my iPad.  That was pretty much the end of trying to remember to carry around a little notepad or Moleskin or whatever, and now I just jot down any stray thoughts or ideas there, and they get synced in all three places.  And I guess in some extreme emergency where I didn’t have any Apple devices with me, I could always point a web browser at gmail and get at the notes there.

This new workflow saves me a ton of time, and avoids the issue that my handwriting is all but unreadable, even to me.  But one problem with it is that I don’t have a hardcopy of any of my notes about a book.  I was digging around for something else in my storage recently, and found a vinyl three-ring binder containing all (or most all) of the notes from Summer Rain and Rumored to Exist.  One of the first things I realized about this binder is that it’s actually from when I was a computer consultant for the school.  UCS had these beginning-of-year training sessions where they gave you a binder full of stuff you’d never read, and this happens to be one of those binders.  It was probably given to me in 1991 when I started working there, and after I chucked all of the lists of phone numbers and rules, I used it as a school folder.  It’s still got a couple of papers I wrote in it, including the two papers I wrote in the summer of 1992 that I mention in Summer Rain.  I can’t even try to read them though; I’m sure they’re horrible.  I distinctly remember losing the 3.5″ floppy disk I used that summer for my WordPerfect files – I left it in a Mac in one of the labs.  Part of me wishes I still had those files for some sick reason, but I guess if I have the hardcopies, that’s just as bad.

A big chunk of the material in this binder is research material and notes on Summer Rain.  That book is fiction, but it’s based on fact, and I burned a lot of cycles trying to keep track of dates and times.  I’ve got an insane amount of post-it notes and scraps of paper reminding me of stuff like that Ray visited Bloomington on July 11, 1992 and I broke my arm on September 30th and I ate lunch at Burger King on August 7th.  There’s a bunch of report cards, a complete recapitulation of every bursar charge I had during my time at IU, and a small stack of snapshots of the campus in the early 90s.  And there are pages and pages of outlines.  I tend not to outline before I write; I usually write until I get stuck, and then I used to go back and write outlines of what existed, so I could navigate through all of the files without getting lost.  I have dozens of pages of these outlines, inventory sheets of what happens in what file.  There are punchlists from 1998 of what parts are missing from what chapter, and long essays to myself on 1996 on what direction characters are heading.  The 1998 notes even contain a combination of all of these, a list of chapters and what date they would have happened in real life.

The notes from Rumored to Exist are also pretty interesting.  When I worked in Seattle, I would sit with a PC in front of me, a Mac Centris 660AV on my right, and a legal pad on my left.  I would write this online help on the PC, and then compile it on the Mac.  The Apple machine also served as my CD player.  But while I worked, I would write down any random nonsensical thought on the legal pad.  And by the end of the day, I’d have a page or two of these scribblings, random quotes and names of designer drugs and medieval weaponry and genetic disorders and long-forgotten TV shows, and all of these became raw material for what eventually became that book.  And I’ve still got a bunch of these, along with a post card from Larry from the Astrodome, which is something that appeared in the book, but that he later really sent me.  There’s a shot of all of this on the back of the now-out-of-print annotated version of the book, but I’ve also got all of it here.

There’s also a printout of a 1998 draft of Rumored here, one that I must have given Marie, that she marked up and sent back to me.  It’s so different than the finished book that it amazes me.  I still have a lot of these drafts in electronic form, because I’ll usually zip up a copy at a big logical stopping point, but it’s amazing to me to see it captured forever on paper.  When I moved to New York, I was almost to the point of quitting this book, and decided to start a new draft, a completely blank document.  I sifted through the old version, and only carried over the things I absolutely loved.  Everything else stayed behind, and I think I probably rescued maybe 80 pages.  But those old bits — I started writing this thing in 1995, so there were pieces that stayed in the draft for three years before being clipped.  It’s fun to see those bits again.

Now, I do all of this stuff online, and it’s much more efficient.  I can tear around in Scrivener and keep a digital outline and easily checkpoint documents to save old drafts.  I have no idea why I kept any of this old paper stuff — I think there was some assumption that I’d sell millions of copies of the book and some university library would want to purchase all of my letters and notes.  I mean, not really, but that’s a hoarder’s rationale.  Now, I wonder if any of the bits I threw out are worth publishing, but I’ve already done so many editions of Rumored, I’m in no hurry to rush out another one.

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Mandelbrot and Genre Writing

I’ve been in the post-book-release period of my writing cycle where I don’t know what I’m doing next, and I don’t know what I should be reading, so I start poring over non-fiction, usually some junk science book.  Specifically, it’s that James Gleick book Chaos, which is about chaos theory and the butterfly effect.  I mostly read stuff like this to pour random facts into my head with hopes that I’ll go off on a tangent in some wikipedia-reading frenzy and end up finding the pieces of my next short story.

Part of the book talks about Benoit Mandelbrot, who once said this:

Science would be ruined if (like sports) it were to put competition above everything else, and if it were to clarify the rules of competition by withdrawing entirely into narrowly defined specialties. The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.

That got me thinking about genres, and writing.  I’ve been knocking against this invisible wall with regard to genres, because I don’t really fit into any one category.  And every self-publishing make-money-fast scheme online talks about how you need to market yourself by finding your niche and building your platform to sell to that slice of the reading public.  Every person out their schlepping their own advice on publishing will tell you about the importance of hitting up the forums relevant to your category.

When I’m depressed about not having stellar book numbers, this feeds into a horrible cycle of negativity.  I don’t sell books because I don’t market.  I don’t market because I can’t find the people to market to.  I can’t find the people to market to, because I don’t know how to categorize my work.  And I don’t know how to categorize my work because I don’t really like any of the categories.

That’s a big part of the problem.  I don’t read a lot of straight genre fiction, because it bores me.  While I like picking at the edges of the science fiction genre, I find the die-hard stuff to be so goddamn serious.  I can’t stand fantasy.  And romance and thriller aren’t even on my radar.  The books I like are combinations of different things, or aren’t representations of the category as a whole.  Vonnegut wasn’t a science fiction writer per se; he sometimes fell into that category, but his stories had a humor you aren’t going to find in the typical outer space robot book.  Burroughs had the same distinction.  Was Hunter S. Thompson a journalist or a humorist or an essayist or what?  And Mark Leyner wasn’t literary fiction, but he wasn’t general fiction, either.

The big issue is that when you define success as straight-up numbers, nothing but copies sold and dollars taken in, you’re competing more than you’re creating.  You’re not going to push boundaries or do what you truly want; you’re going to stick to that same narrowly-defined plot structure that everyone uses to maximize the number of readers you can satisfy.  You’re going to think of how to market a book and then write it, instead of creating what you truly need to create as an artist.  It’s like the difference between a painter like Jackson Pollock laying his soul and his inner demons onto the canvas, versus someone being handed an RFP by a hotel chain for a thousand identical paintings that meet certain requirements.  When you write for the market, you may sell, but you probably won’t innovate.

I don’t want to dole out yet another hero’s journey monomyth novel because I can plug it by saying “it’s like <current hit> but with <other thing people like>”.  I feel like I need to continue down the path I’ve followed with the last few books, but I also feel like it’s okay if I suddenly want to write some non-fiction, or a book of essays, or whatever else.  I’d hate to wake up someday and be told I can only write dystopian literary occult police procedural fantasy fiction, or that I couldn’t do what I want because it won’t sell.  Life’s too short to back yourself in a corner like that.

 

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The Feel of a Book

I really do wish I could switch to an all-digital book library, buy every print book in this house in some e-book format, and haul all of this shit to the goodwill, or sell it in the Amazon used section.  Someday, books will kill me, and I’m not talking about being buried alive via hoarding.  I mean, these books are all collecting dust mites, and I’m horribly allergic to dust mites, and I’m sure ten out of ten allergists would tell me, “well, just get rid of all of your books and watch more TV.”  And of course, 87% of the books I have here aren’t available on the Kindle, and even if they were, the second I’d buy all of them, they’d change the Kindle format to some incompatible thing and force me to re-buy everything, just like the whole vinyl > 8-Track > Cassette > CD > MiniDisc > DVD > BluRay > whatever trail of tears.

I tried remembering when my whole relationship with books started, and of course, I can’t.  My parents started buying me books before I can remember, those “I Can Read” books like Danny and the Dinosaur that you got from the grocery store or some mail-order club.  I remember being in the Weekly Reader book club, getting these corrugated cardboard mailers every week or two, containing another few hardcover books, each one getting progressively more advanced.  I thankfully learned to read before I started school.  I lived in a tiny village in Michigan with no kids as neighbors, in an age before cable, when an endless amount of adjustment to a set of rabbit ears got you four or maybe five channels of TV, so those books were my lifeline.

In thinking about this, I think one of the reasons I like to collect books is their physicality.  I’ve still got a couple of these Weekly Reader books, from almost forty years ago, and I loved the oil paintings in color on the cloth-bound hardcovers, a square spine and a design that is obviously very pre-Photoshop. Some books had spine lettering faintly embossed in a metallic gold color, and looked distinguished and official.  Some were paperbacks, the Choose Your Own Adventures and Encyclopedia Browns and pocket editions that felt the perfect size in your hand.  I devoured all of these books, and no matter how many of them showed up in our rural route mailbox, I always wanted more.

I always got locked into these series books, things like junior encyclopedia, where they’d sell the first volume at Kroger and then swindle you into mailing away for the next twenty.  I remember this junior history series I had, an endless collection of books on American events like the construction of the White House or the battle of Iwo Jima.  My parents would sometimes go to a friend’s house to play euchre, plop us in front of a TV in their living room, and hope we’d fall asleep eventually.  I would always drag along a huge collection of these books, so that instead of watching a Love Boat re-run, I could read the illustrated history of the Washington Monument or the D-Day invasion.  And I would always have to bring an entire armload of them, partly because I felt a need to always have access to every volume (this predates Wikipedia by a few decades) but also because I enjoyed the physical feeling of having all of these books, the weight and feel of these perfectly square books filled with illustrations and maps and pages that smelled like fresh paper and ink.

I always wonder about this with kids that are being born right now and handed an iPad thirty seconds after they leave the womb.  There’s something magical about being able to zap an animated book filled with background music and hyperlinks to your kid, but are they missing something by not having an actual, physical book in their hands?  A device that plays Angry Birds and shows videos is pretty cool, but do you miss out on something that you get by hoarding these little bits of dead tree?

I do like loading up my Kindle with books before I get on a plane.  And most of the books I sell are on the Kindle.  But it doesn’t feel like I’ve “bought” a book unless I have it sitting on a shelf, and I like the physical rituals of either going to stores or having a delivery person hand me a cardboard mailer filled with books.  I also don’t like that I always hold the same device when I’m reading different books, the same size and weight and thickness, and I’m even deduced to the same exact font and margins. I’m not pro- or anti- on the e-book, but it makes me hesitate before I buy anything, and I end up purchasing the best stuff twice.  I can’t seem to fully jump on either bandwagon, which means I probably will either be buying a spacesuit to keep out the dust mites, or googling away to find clinical trials of some new steroid treatment to keep my eyes from swelling shut.

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Fieldstones and Moleskines

I know I said I don’t do new year resolutions, and I don’t.  But one of the things I’ve been trying to do – it’s more of a course-correction for my post-40 memory loss – is writing down every damn thing that pops in my head, with hopes of later mining this stuff for story ideas.  I know it’s something I should have started doing decades ago, but it’s something I’ve been trying to be militant about.

I just read this book,Weinberg on Writing, which talks about his “fieldstone” method.  The analogy has to do with those fieldstone walls you see on old farms.  (Watch the last five minutes of Shawshank next time it’s on TBS; they run it pretty much daily.  There’s a nice fieldstone wall in that.)  When a farmer builds one of those walls, they don’t go to Wally World and say “gimme a thousand yards of stones.”  They plow the fields, and when they hit a big stone, they pull it aside and save it.  After years of doing this, you have enough stones to build some fencing, or a nice fireplace hearth or wellhouse.  It takes time to find the right stones to fit the odd cracks and holes, but if you’re always looking, you never know when you’ll find it.

Most of the art of writing has to do with dragging your subconscious mind into your conscious mind and then dumping it onto pages in a way that can transfer into someone else’s conscious mind and creep into their subconsciousness.  Anyone that tells you it’s about marketing or the three-act structure or hitting plot points or what your cover looks like is full of bullshit.  That’s about selling books.  Salvador Dali wasn’t a genius because he painted the crying clowns and prairie field landscapes that he knew would sell; he was a genius because he would have fucked up dreams and then immediately paint them with no censorship or conscious thought, and those paintings haunt you and are hard to shake because they drill into the bottom of your mind.

The problem is, you can’t sit at a blank page and consciously think, “okay, let’s dump my unconscious mind into this buffer.”  You just see fits and spurts of what you need: while you’re in the shower, when you’re cleaning up cat shit, when you’re stuck in an endless meeting.  Something pops into your head, and it would be awesome in a story.  And then, if you’re above 40 and have spent your lifetime drinking from aluminum cans, it’s gone in ten seconds.

This requires some way to always capture this shit.  The current strategy is a three-pronged approach:

1) The iPhone notes program.  It’s pretty easy to use; it syncs up with IMAP in my gmail account, so I can also get at it from my Mac or my iPad, making cut/paste pretty easy.  The downside is typing with my thumbs, and it’s not always easy to whip out a phone and tap away.

2) A google docs document that does the same as above.  I use this less and less, but there are times where I’m not at any of the above three iOS machines, or where I need to cut/paste in something sizable, like a big chunk of an article.

3) A moleskine notebook.  The classic, hardcover, lined.  I’ve got a little folding pen that bungees right into the elastic cord, and it stays in my jacket pocket or bag at all times.

There’s a certain tactile satisfaction to keeping notes in a moleskine; that’s a huge plus.  And there’s an overwhelming joy in filling up one of these leather-bound pocketbooks, like you’ve accomplished something more than just dumping ASCII into a buffer.  I just finished one of the books, and it took me almost two years, just because I write in fits and spurts, and this “capture everything” movement just got into gear.

Now here’s the real problem with the moleskine: how to move these fieldstones into the production line.  The iPhone notes thing is easy: Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V.  The notebooks – well, first my handwriting is horrible.  And I barely hit the lines to get all of this stuff parallel to each other so OCR can handle it.  And I can’t ship it off to someone and have them transcribe it, since I can barely read it.

The current workflow is to scan the entire thing in as a single PDF using Preview and my printer/scanner.  This take some work, only because you end up with a 50-meg file, and there’s no way you’ll do a hundred scans without Preview crashing at least five or six times.  (I know, Windoze people are like “ha, it doesn’t just work”.  But I was able to use a piece of software that came on my system for free, without spending 19 days researching what third-party program works with my brand of scanner, brand of USB chipset, version of Windows, brand of USB cord, IRQ settings, motherboard configuration, and then find out the software I paid fifty bucks for is a “lite” version and the “pro” version costs $999.)

Then, I split the PDF into a hundred or so PNG images.  I have a Scrivener project that’s just a dumping ground for all of my fieldstones, failed stories and books that still have some reusable bits, and whatever else.  So I create a folder for the book, and dump the PNGs onto a file in the binder, then split that up into a bunch of files, and either type in the bits of each page, or ignore them.  (Sometimes a page will just be a partial grocery or todo list, or something I’ve already used, so not everything is gold.)

The process of turning these fieldstones into working stories and books – that’s another project, and a workflow I haven’t mastered yet.  But a lot of The Earworm Inception  came from fieldstones that were grouped and fleshed out, and this next book is using a lot of stuff collected like this.  Some of them will be duds; some just become a single line in someone’s dialogue, or a little aside.  And some will be the nucleus of an entire work.

So I’m having fun, transcribing this stuff, finding little gems.  And I’ve got the next Moleskine up and running, ready to capture whatever happens in the back of my head during my TPS report filing during the day.

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A Hundred Years From That One Rush Album

I guess I haven’t written in here yet in 2012.  Oops.  I’ve been busy working on getting a new book released, another collection of short stories and flash, and that’s about done.  But it’s been hard to get started on something new, and I really need to.

Part of this is that I’m trying to quit caffeine, and that shit’s a wonder drug for my creative productivity.  I am tapering down, and I’m down to two cokes a day, but I used to drink about two cokes per thousand words, so that’s been a struggle.  I’m probably sleeping more and better, but sleep doesn’t write books.

One thing I forgot about – I used to use my own crappy  set of scripts to run this site, a bunch of cobbled-together duct tape and cardboard that generated the index sidebar out of a bunch of PHP and shell script.  And every year, the whole thing would break, and required me to move all of the files to a new directory and edit a script by hand and regenerate the index and whatever.  And one of two things would happen: either I’d stay up late on the morning of the first and fix everything and post an “okay, this works” message, or I’d procrastinate horribly, and not post anything for days.  Maybe it wasn’t days, but I remember the dread of not having anything to write about, not knowing what to write.  Every New Year’s, I’d have grandiose ideas of how I’d write a story a day or a thousand words per 24 hours, and how that year would be the year I’d write a dozen books and submit a million stories and blah blah blah blah, and sitting staring at that blank page always felt like if I resolved to lose a hundred pounds, and then found myself in line at McDonald’s.

The other big part of 2012 is that it marks the 20-year mark from when the events of Summer Rain happened in real life.  I have very conflicted thoughts about this, and there are two different things going on in my head.

First, it’s been 11 years since that book came out.  I’m slowly moving to using nothing but CreateSpace and Kindle for publishing, and I feel like I should gather up all of my old stuff and push it to there, then unpublish it from iUniverse or lulu.  And I feel like I should get all of this old stuff on the Kindle.  So I loaded SR into Scrivener and started fixing all of the line breaks and indents and whatnot, thinking I’d eventually on some rainy day (no pun intended), I’d get the thing exported into .mobi format.  And of course, this degraded into this pulling-a-loose-thread-on-a-sweater thing of “maybe I need a new cover” and “maybe I need an new intro” and whatnot.  But it also made me stop and read the old writing, and I really don’t like it anymore.  I mean, there are the minor typos and things that could be reworked.  But I am no longer in love with those characters or what I did with the book.  Maybe this will change if I give it another serious read.  But I also did this same process with Rumored to Exist recently, and I really liked it.  It made me wish I could keep writing more stuff like that.  But the idea of revisiting Bloomington in 1992, or the thought of finishing this incomplete book of IU stories from 1989-1995 is somewhat boring to me.

And I just went to Bloomington, a couple of weeks ago.  It was the first time I’d touched foot in 47404 in ten years.  I only had a couple of hours, long enough to eat dinner with Simms and grab a quick drink with Bill, but I cruised around town for a few loops, taking it in.  And I was strangely unenthused.  Maybe I’d shut off that part of my brain, the part that usually swims in nostalgia trips like this, because the whole Indiana experience was so surreal to me.  But I didn’t experience the huge charge I used to get when I returned to town.  I swung past Mitchell Street, and around the fountain, and up and down Jordan, and to the library, but none of it caught me.  It seemed so long ago, so distant – and it was.

No real moral of the story here – I know what I’ve been writing best for the last couple of years is not the rehashing of this old college stuff, and that’s fine.  I’m still struggling with what exactly I call the stuff I do now, and how to sell it or tell people about it is the big question, but it’s slowly happening.

In other news, I bought a rowing machine the other day.  Not sure why.

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Force

I’m trying to force myself to write daily, not just the fiction writing, but some kind of post here, to keep the momentum going, but also to get out of my system this sketching, the rote description of the past and the present, which isn’t the kind of writing I do for stories and books, or at least it won’t be anymore.

That thing to the right, by the way, is the Claremont resort, where we went for Thanksgiving.  The inside reminds me of the hotel in The Shining, although it’s been so long since I’ve seen that flick, it might look completely different in comparison.  Other things I am reminded of include the extended family of Carter on ER, and all of the various athletic clubs I’ve visited in the past. I also feel slightly insulted that they haven’t nagged me about a membership yet.  I figured I would have been spammed to hell and back to pay a monthly fee roughly the same as my mortgage payment to use the tennis courts and rub elbows with the 1%.

So, force.  I never get stuff done.  I have a huge collection of books with the first 15% written.  Lots of books on the shelves with a bookmark at the page 43 mark.  I have this bad habit of skipping around, too.  Like if I have 20 chapters to edit, I will edit the first, second, get bored, skip to the last one, and then start playing video games.  A couple of years ago, at work, I started forcing myself to do stuff from start to finish.  It has convinced me that I never could have written a book in the analog days of the typewriter.  But I sometimes get results when I power through stuff like that.  It’s harder to apply to creative work; sometimes I can create, and sometimes I can’t.

I’ve also found that if I time myself, start a timer with 60 minutes on it, disconnect the internet, and force myself to either type in a buffer and get word after word on the page, or stare at the screen and do nothing, I’ll eventually start moving forward.  I guess if I burn through an hour on the timer and do not get word one on the page, that’s at least more of a victory than if I sat in front of the tube and watched an episode and a half of Chopped.

I have this book essentially done, but all of the stories need to be renamed.  I thought about going on fiverr and paying somebody five dollars a story and doing it that way.  I hate coming up with titles.  Was it Emily Dickinson or e.e. cummings who never titled anything?  I also thought about pulling a Peter Gabriel and naming my next six books Jon Konrath, except I’m sure that would somehow fuck up Amazon and all of the books would overwrite each other in some last-one-wins scenario.

I also wish Amazon listed stuff alphabetically, because then I would name it like locksmiths and bail bondsmen come up with names, something like AAAAAAA.

What else?  Closed on the house.  Bought two pair of glasses for an insane amount of money.  I am now farsighted enough that I need a second set of glasses just for reading.  This is the beginning of the end.

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Why I am not an indie writer

I hate the term “Indie Writer”.  Hate it.  Hate all of the variations: indie writer, indie writing, indie books.  It’s one of those terms, like “sammies.”  Any time I am in a restaurant that has the term “sammies” on the menu, I want to burn the fucking place to the ground.

Over on Self Publishing Review, there was an interesting article about this (here.)  In recent years, I’ve had a certain unease with the sudden popularity of self-publishing, and I could never really explain this effectively. But then I read this article, and it was like I’d spent the last X months staring at the splotchy acid-trip picture at the mall and something shifted and I could magically see the 3-D unicorn.

Back in the day, I was tangentially involved in the underground death metal scene; I published a zine, wrote for another, and spent a lot of time trading tapes and writing obscure bands around the world.  This was independent music at its most fundamental: people recorded albums in their own garage, dubbed them onto Maxell C-90s with a jambox or tape deck, then photocopied j-cards and mailed them off to zines for review, or sold copies through the mail.  (“Enclose carefully hidden cash!”)  Some bands “sold out” and signed to major labels, and you could have arguments forever with people over whether or not Nuclear Blast America was a “major” label, but I’m sure their most popular band sold about as many albums total as Sony gave away during promotion of a new Mariah Carey album.

Then Nirvana showed up, and the metal scene completely died.  And all of a sudden, all of these “indie” bands appeared.  And we were constantly told that a band like Smashing Pumpkins was “indie rock,” even though they shared a label with the Spice Girls and Janet Jackson.  And this must have been a major pain in the ass for alternative or punk bands who were still pressing their CDs in batches of 1000 and dragging their own orders to the post office.  But it was even worse for the metal bands who saw a recently functional ecosystem completely dry up, replaced with a bunch of guys in flannel.  The only valid solutions for metal bands were to a) cut out all of the satan references and play mopy college rock; b) get a job at a gas station; and/or c) wait it out until all of the alternative bands had kids and got old and metal once again ruled. Meanwhile, MTV and the mainstream press beat this “indie” label to death until it had no meaning.

There are two different axes to graph this stuff on.  One is “indie” as meaning independent of a massive corporation for your publisher.  The other is “indie” as a term describing rebellion against common conventions in literature.  And I think many of the people who write genre fiction and self-publish it take up the “indie” moniker to show that they are somehow bad-asses raging against the machine, although they’re still writing vampire romances and murder mysteries.  And most self-publishing forums and groups I encounter have little to nothing to do with pushing boundaries, and are mostly about how to make a product that looks like and competes with the same exact things released by the Big Six.  And anyone calling themselves an “indie” would be the last to admit any of this, and respond with “but MY book isn’t just like Tom Clancy – it’s like Tom Clancy with zombies!”

Self-publishing suddenly became “indie publishing” because people wanted self publishing to sound legit, and shed the baggage of being associated with people who paid vanity presses a few thousand bucks for a box of a thousand books, 974 of which would sit in a box in their attic forever.  And some people may be staging a revolution against the Big Six by doing it themselves, while others may have tried to get an agent and get a deal and failed.  And maybe they failed because the industry is failing (nobody reads, economic downturn, the damn 1%, choose one or more), or maybe they just didn’t make the cut, because their stuff was no good.

And I know you’re probably just thinking, “He’s just jealous his piece of shit books didn’t sell as much as Twilight.”  That’s not the point.  That isn’t my world.  I’m not Pavement complaining about Smashing Pumpkins.  I’m Captain Beefheart for the sake of that comparison; I’m doing something that’s not meant to be appreciated by anyone but a small number of people.  I’m fine with that.

The problem is, I self-publish.  I’m an “indie” in the sense that Random House is not handling my output.  And for whatever stupid reason, that automatically lumps me in with every Stephenie fucking Meyer wannabe that’s self-publishing for profit.  I don’t self-publish to make money.  I self-publish because I don’t happen to have an offset press in my living room.  And I write because it’s a way of channeling my subconscious and my thoughts on finding a meaning to life into a format that can then be consumed and possibly felt as emotion by other people.  And the way that happens isn’t about a perfectly carved out plot arc or a nicely packaged consumer product or a compliant genre-specific thriller novel.  Jackson Pollock did not paint crying clowns and landscapes.  Albert Camus did not pen murder mysteries for the YA market.  I don’t have to adhere to the bullshit rules people keep spouting off, any more than G.G. Allin had to dress like the members of Pearl Jam, even though they both released albums in the same era.

It’s irrelevant.  And it should be for you, too.  Write what you want.  If someone tells you to develop a marketing plan, tell them to go fuck themselves.  This is Art, not Amway.  I am not an “indie” writer.  Underground?  Maybe.  Cult?  I probably need more cult members first.  But “indie”?  Ugh.  Someone’s mom is an indie writer.  I’m anything but.

Categories
general news

My new book, Fistful of Pizza, is available now

I am happy to announce that my new book, Fistful of Pizza, is now available at the following places:

  • On the Kindle for only 99 cents here.
  • In print at Lulu.com for $8.74 here.
  • In print at Amazon.com for $12.99 here.

Here’s the answers to some questions about this:

What is it?

Fistful of Pizza is a collection of short stories and flash fiction including ten pieces that have appeared in other publications and were otherwise unavailable until now.  I wanted to make the book as cheap as possible; actually, I wanted to make it free on the Kindle, but I can’t do that because I’m not a big publisher, so instead it’s the cheapest price they will let me.

What if I think the Kindle is stupid?

I also did a print version, which is a 150-page pocket-sized book.  Feel free to read it on the beach or lend it to your friends or drop it in the tub or burn it or do any of the other things that people who complain about the Kindle say you can’t do with the Kindle.

Why is the print version so expensive?

Because of the whole tree thing.  I could do what big publishers do and make the eBook version cost $8.74, or do what the biggest publishers do and make the print book $8.74 and the eBook $21.99.  $8.74 was about the cheapest I could go on lulu.

Can I get a preview?

If you have a Kindle, or have a PC/Mac/tablet/phone with the Kindle software, you can get a preview of the book for free.  Go to the Amazon page here and click on the Send Sample Now button.  This will send the cover and the first two and a half stories to you.

Does this include that one story where the guy flies a jet into a Wal-Mart in order to obtain an erection?

Yes, it does.

Why does the print version cost more on Amazon?

Because Amazon hates you.

Is this book suitable for my kid?

Any book is a children’s book if you teach your kid to read early enough.  Whether or not your child should read a book in which Richard Nixon pisses into someone’s gunshot wound is really your call, though.

What is a pocket book?

It’s a 4.3 x 6.9″ book.  It’s roughly the size of one of those drug store paperback books.  I think it’s a neat size and have wanted to do one of these for a bit.  I have no idea why it’s that exact size; it probably has something to do with a fraction of a standard size of sheep used for its skin in England or something stupid like that.

What 19th-century French civil engineer who specialized in hydraulics is one of the 72 names inscribed on the Eiffel Tower?

Jacques Antoine Charles Bresse.  It’s the fifth from the left on the northwest side.

Why is there a picture of you sodomizing a wax figure of Tiger Woods on the last page of the book?

The Sean Connery figure was out for maintenance at the time.

I’ve been your pal forever and would really like a copy of this book for free.  Can you give it to me?

If you drop me a line and tell me how you’ll help me sell copies to all your friends, sure.

Thanks for the support, and I hope you get a chance to read the book!

Categories
general

The Agony of Defeat

I’m so depressed about the baseball season right now.  The Rockies have catastrophically failed in almost every aspect, and I don’t foresee it getting much better any time soon.  And if they had a bad start, and continued a slump through May, that would be one thing.  But they were leading the division — they were leading all of baseball for a while.  And now I think they’d have serious problems taking on most AAA baseball teams.

Some facts and numbers:

  • The “ace” pitcher, Ubaldo Jimenez, does not have a single win.  Since he started the all-star game last year, he is 4-12.
  • Jorge De La Rosa, arguably the team’s best pitcher, tore his UCL completely and will be out for the rest of the season.
  • The ace of 2008 and 2009, Aaron Cook, hasn’t thrown a single pitch this year in the major leagues.  He fell apart last year (6-8) and then broke a toe, then messed up his shoulder, then slammed his hand in a door and broke his finger during spring training.
  • Closer Huston Street has given up 5 home runs in his last 8 outings.
  • There’s essentially nobody at 3rd base, and they just fired 2nd baseman Jose Lopez.
  • There are no longer any left-handed pitchers starting.  They have only one lefty in the bullpen.
  • They’ve gone from first to third in the division.  Depending on how the Dodgers do this weekend and how they do against the Dodgers in their upcoming series, they could very easily drop to 4th.
  • Tonight they are starting a pitcher who has never pitched about the AA level in the minors against the team that has the most run production in all of baseball, in a hitter’s park.
  • The team is 7-18 in May, and will most likely finish the month with 20 losses.
  • There are a million other statistics you can look at to make this even more depressing.  (Stolen bases?  0 for 3 in 11 games?)
  • Oh yeah, and the other day, a fan trying to slide down the railing in a stairway out by center field fell 20 feet and smashed his head in, and died the next day in the hospital.  Not only is this horrible for the fan and his family, but I’m sure it’s not helping a) the sagging attendance figures; b) the funk over the team; and c) the team’s finances, because I’m sure the guy’s family will sue the hell out of them because the safety rail didn’t have a safety rail.

It’s gotten so bad that I finally, after last night’s total clusterfuck of a 10-3 loss, deleted the MLB At Bat app from my phone.  Half of me thinks that they will eventually have to come back and start winning games again.  Half of me thinks it will only get worse, and it’s only a matter of time before Todd Helton gets his annual back injury and Tulo gets his yearly leg pull and Aaron Cook comes back from the DL and starts pitching like a batter’s high school coach at the home run derby.  I haven’t gone to any games this year, and I have no desire to drop a thousand dollars on a long weekend to Denver to watch them lose two or three games to the Nationals, or pay $100 for tickets to watch them get demolished in a sea of orange over at AT&T Park.

And it’s still May.  There’s still four months of this.

It’s so hard for me to give up on this, it has become so intertwined with my life.  I mean, I think about the time I spent in Denver and how much I liked it there, and how I loved going to games there.  Granted, I was not 100% happy there; I didn’t have a job for a good chunk of that summer, and I didn’t get much writing done during that era.  But I only remember the good stuff, and it’s odd how memory works that way, how I can smell a certain kind of suntan lotion and immediately think of the times I would slather on that SPF-80 and roast out in the 331 section during a day game.  I sit in my car that I bought back in Colorado and think of all of the times I listened to 850 KOA while driving up and down I-25, trying to keep up with the end of that 2007 season.  Even my iPhone – I think about all of the games I’ve watched on that stupid little app in the last couple of seasons, all of the time I’ve spent trying to follow this team while I was thousands of miles away.

We go to the movies almost every weekend, and it’s become this ritual, how I would get out of a show and flip on the phone and check the score.  And that’s the gotcha to all of this, the way those different disparate sensory inputs all twist themselves together: the wood trim on the mall we go to, the theater’s bright red carpets, the smell of the popcorn, the taste of the same Reese’s Pieces I always get, the design of the little icons on the screen, the feel of the phone in my hand, the look of the uniforms on the pictures in the news recap of the game.  It all fits together in such a perfect storm of pieces, that just taking out my phone now and looking at the hole in the icon screen where the app used to be makes me depressed.

I should channel all of this energy into writing.  And I’m trying to write, but I’m thinking about it too much right now.  And that’s the problem with both writing and baseball: thinking about it is your worst enemy.  If you’re standing 60 feet and six inches from a batter up on a pitcher’s mound, and all you can think about is the number of losses behind you and the ability of that batter and his stats versus your kind of pitching, you have lost.  If you stare at a blank page and think about how much you need to write and what you need to get done and how you need to get that next winning book out there, you will lock up completely.

Could be worse.  I could also be a football fan, and staring down that huge disaster of a lawsuit that’s probably going to derail their next season.  The more I think about sports, the more I miss the days when I hated all of them.

Categories
general

So two comedians walk into a bar

I wish I was a stand-up comedian.

I have trouble saying that, because I feel like the many or most people would reply with “you’re not funny.” And I’ve probably spent a lifetime trying to make other people laugh, and maybe I have, but the only thing that sticks in my mind are the too-serious people who reply with “you’re not funny.” And that’s probably why I couldn’t become a comic – it takes a certain amount of confidence to get up on the stage and talk to people like that. But lately, there has been something compelling to me about the whole comedy world.

Last night, I saw this documentary I am Comic on netflix.  It’s sort of about comedian Ritch Shydner, who had a ton of old Carson appearances, and then graduated into bit acting roles and staff writing jobs.  In the movie, he decides to make a comeback to stand-up after 14 years, and it documents his appearances at open mics and small gigs, both the horror of bombing in these small places where people are more interested in the pool tables and TV sets than the comedians, offset by the total high you get from running a show like that.

But the movie is more of a primer on stand-up, the process, the lifestyle, and the good and the bad, told through interview clips with at least 40 top-rate comics.  The wide swath of appearances is awe-inspiring, from household names that we forget got their start in stand-up (Roseanne Barr, Tim Allen, Jeff Foxworthy, Tom Arnold) to the current a-list (Sarah Silverman, Dave Attell, Lewis Black, Margaret Cho), and lots of other great cameos.  It talks about middling, and comedy club condos, and life on the road, and jokes versus bits versus chunks versus sets, and worst shows ever.  It’s a great movie if you’re a huge comedy nerd, and I am.

There’s a huge comedy boom going on right now.  I can’t quantify it and show you a Gartner report with pie charts or anything, but all the indicators are there:  there’s a whole world of podcasts and twitter feeds and web sites dedicated to stand-up; there are all of these shows like Last Comic Standing; there are tons of venues and shows; there are a bunch of stand-ups crossing over into movies and TV shows; there are something like 79 late-night talk shows now, every one employing a dozen staff writers and spotlighting a hundred comics a year.  It’s huge right now, which in my pessimistic mind means that there are orders of magnitude more people trying to break into the business, and I’m sure there are thousands and thousands of unemployed actors and directors and agents who are thinking “I need to start doing sets at open mics so I can segue that into a line producer job at Two and a Half Men.”  It also makes me think that if I decided today to become a stand-up and started writing jokes full-time, I’d just start to get momentum around the time 90% of the comedy clubs in the US shuttered and all of the trend-hop fans who are into Patton Oswalt today will move on to becoming professional salsa dancing fans, or whatever the hell the next trend will be.

I look at the huge growth of the comedy world as I look at the ever-dying world of publishing and wonder why the hell I got into a craft that’s so hugely unrewarding and impossible to crack.  As I try to study how to make it as a literary fiction writer, all I hear are horror stories about how there are now more MFA candidates trying to sell stories than there are readers of literary fiction, and there’s no money in publishing.  And yes, I could write genre fiction and make money writing hack murder mystery crap and publishing it myself, but you can’t choose your voice, it chooses you, and I can’t even read stuff like that, let along write it.  I write what I write, and I try to convince myself that someday the trend will change and people will trade in their vampire and zombie books for Kerouac and Wolfe.

But comedy has such an appealing ecosystem.  For one, you get up on stage at an open mic and go – there’s no trying to finagle blog followers and spamming your stuff to these lit e-journals in hopes that someone will pick it up.  You get on the mic and go, and there is immediate feedback.  I write a book, and maybe a year later, someone will read it and maybe I will hear back from them.  But comedy is immediately absorbed; you tell a joke, a person hears it, they laugh or they don’t.  And people seem to seek out comedy, go to clubs and pay money and see comics, and seek out these podcasts and XM Radio shows and live CDs.  I think in any art, there are two different cycles: either you follow the potential fans, or the fans follow you, and I feel like writing is very much the former right now, and comedy is the latter.  And maybe that’s not entirely true, and I’m sure a lot of comedians bust their asses trying to find Facebook friends and grow their mailing lists and post one-liners to twitter constantly.  But there’s not a huge audience of literary fiction fans out there eager to snap up anything you produce.

I recently took a comedy writing class, to see if I could do it.  And I found that I could and I couldn’t.  I mean, one of the assignments was to write something like 30 monologue-type jokes, which was hard only because I had to actually read the news, and I hate reading the news.  And after carving away at 30 jokes over the course of a week, I found that writers at Kimmel or Letterman have to write at least 40 or 50 jokes a day.  And their pay ranges somewhere between dick and shit.  I think I could hack away at being a comedy writer, or punching up scripts, but it’s probably as unrewarding as hacking away at user manuals all day.  And I don’t mean to knock the tech writing career, which pays more than all but the top tier of fiction writers on amazon, and gives me health insurance and paid vacation and pays me every day, whether or not I scare up sales.  But I remember that feeling when I hit ‘send’ and launched the final, final manuscript of Summer Rain to the publisher, after five years and a quarter-million words of pain and torture, knowing that it would be a 650-page chunk of my life and other peoples’ hands, and it was not the same feeling I get when checking in the final PDF of a developer’s guide for a software product that will literally sell a million times what my book does.

I wish there was a writing community more like the comedy community.  I mean, I look at stuff like the people taking UCB classes who are working with each other and building their careers and doing awesome things, and then I look at any number of literary sites where people are talking about their head shots or whether or not they should change their names to market to the Young Adult romance genre.  I’m slowly finding more authors that subvert this paradigm, but I need an order of magnitude of readers that do the same.  And lately, it’s hard to get people to pay attention to 140-character updates, let alone 140-page novellas.  But I think that will eventually change.

Oh yeah, I did standup once.  It was 1988 and I was in the Catskills and I did a talent show/open mic in some bar in East Windham, in front of maybe 20 people.  I don’t remember a single joke I did, but I vividly remember between the time I put down my name and the time I took the “stage” (really just the same floor as the bar), I went on this long walk in the upstate New York summer night, and listened to the bugs and talked to myself and tried to write a set on the spot.  I remember the smell of the August night, and the cool feeling when it was like a hundred all day and all you could really do is sit in the pool or hide in the AC of the motel, and the temp would drop to like 75 at night, and it would feel almost cold.  And I’m walking by myself, muttering “okay, no, start with that, then go into this, and then, no, then say this, and then mention I’m not from here, and go into that, and, and, and….”  And the set completely bombed; I think one joke got laughs.  But I did it.