How Separate Do You Keep Writing From The Rest Of Your Life?

I'm thinking about this in the wake of the Amazon contest (and forgive me if I'm starting to get tiresome in my mentions of this - my next post will mention it too - it's just neat having my first chapter online). So, first of all, I can't siphon you - my many, many readers - to my excerpt, because that would blow my pseudonymity. The only way I could have done it would have been to submit under a pen name. Then I'd have three identities going, plus a lot of explaining to do if I actually got to the end of the contest. That is a minor frustration.

But the bigger piece is how writing gets divvied up in my day-to-day life. A co-worker recommended me for a writer/editor job recently and it was a revelation. "My God," I thought, "why have I never considered applying for writer/editor jobs myself? Just because I'm trained as a scientist, just because I've been doing policy stuff? For goodness sakes, writing and editing are the parts of my job I really love - they've always been - and of course I love them. Is that a surprise?" I just had totally separated the writing part from everything else, and it took someone else - someone who really doesn't know me particularly well at all - to make the explicit connection that it's something I might want to do as my day job as well.

I started writing pretty hard-core when I was in ninth grade. As longtime readers will know (and shorter time readers may surmise) my parents were extremely controlling and didn't much believe in privacy for their children. I reacted to this atmosphere by becoming extremely secretive about a variety of things, but especially about writing, which was MINE by God and no one could touch it or threaten to take it away.

Needless to say, this didn't go over well. My parents had no way to figure out what was on my computer (this was the very early 90s, before the internet, and when computers couldn't even handle graphics, so trust me, all we're talking about here is writing) but I did catch them opening rejection letters I'd received from publishers (and then resealing the envelopes and denying they'd opened them). I wonder what they thought was in the envelopes? My dad once gloated that he knew I had written things I hadn't told them about (again, unable to help himself in flaunting the control). I wonder to this day what reaction he hoped to provoke. Of course, what he did provoke was simply more secretiveness.

I went to college thinking I'd pursue writing but it didn't work out that way. I wrote some joke stories for my friends (and I'd show them). In grad school I wrote the occasional silly little essay or short story I'd post online. But for the most part I erected a big wall between writing and everything else.

"Hello me, meet the real me..."

At this point, who knows I write? My blog buddies, my wife, one of my wife's friends who served as a beta reader (but she lives across the country and was sworn to secrecy), and that's it. I decided a few days ago to ask my wife to post on her Facebook page (I don't have one) that my Amazon excerpt was up. The nominal idea was to hopefully entice some of her more literary friends (a couple of whom have agents and are in the process of publishing books - yes, in my world, this constitutes a worthy connection) to take a look. I asked her to block the family members of mine she's friends with and a few others, but I didn't ask her to block everyone we know in common (including some former co-workers of mine who are friends with both of us). There was a little bit of interest, but not much. I don't know what I was expecting, though.

I just know it seems odd to have this separation. With the blog, there's a lot of things I wouldn't say if the domain name was myrealname.blogspot.com. But in regular life, it's odd. I don't want to become that person - and we all know that person - who regularly blitzes his friends and co-workers with invitations to exhibitions and sales of the pottery designs or stained glass he does evenings and weekends. It's cool the first few times, but then it gets old.

I also don't particularly care to hear other people's opinions that writing fiction isn't important or worthwhile, or that it takes time away from other activities I should be doing instead. I don't want to have to answer: "Found an agent yet?" "Getting your book published yet?" "Finished it yet?" I most definitely don't want to have to answer money questions. I don't need people accusing me of writing about them (yes, this has happened in the past). I always figured people would learn I wrote when I sent them a link to my first published novel and asked them to buy it. But it would be much more parsimonious to have one coherent identity.

I don't know. For readers of this blog, do you feel your writing is in harmony with the rest of who you are? Is it just a hobby like photography or cooking you might or might not mention, or is it more? Am I being self-indulgent even musing about this since the reality is no one gives a shit - it's not a big deal to anyone but me? Or is there something to be said for continued secretiveness/separation?

Feeling Soooooo Lazy...

Maybe it's the weather. Maybe it's because I was a little sick last week - for the first time in at least several years I was even a little feverish for a few nights. Maybe it's because, thanks to the illness and a few other factors, I skipped the gym for the better part of two weeks. Maybe it's because I'm kind of burned out generally (my job, having to do chores around the apartment like clean out the entire kitchen so they can spray for roaches, just the thought of usajobs.gov, etc.). But I've been feeling so lazy lately.

I barely got out of bed Saturday (though on the plus side I did a lot of reading). Sunday was better: went back to the gym, sent out five queries (one rejected within three hours - yes, on a Sunday - guess that Amazon quarter-finalist credential failed to wow him), wrote about 1,000 words on my WIP, cooked dinner, and put in a job application.

As lazy as the Lt., but just a touch cuter.

I went to the periodontist last week and he adjusted my bite and took impressions for a mouth guard. I go back in two weeks to have the mouth guard fitted. Evidently he's also going to prescribe me some ibuprofen to bring down the swelling in my gums. I also made an appointment for next week for a dental exam/cleaning - it's been about 7.5 months since my last one, though with all these dental-related trips it sure doesn't seem like it. Anyway, my bite does feel better since the adjustment, though my gums are still sensitive. I've been trying to minimize my clenching during the day and being mindful of how I sleep.

My wife and I also went for a "fitness assessment" two weekends ago. We went last year so it was interesting to compare. I was not feeling my best (still not over the cold I mentioned), but still improved from the year before on strength and cardio, not to mention lost 26 lbs. and 3.5" off my waist (though the weight loss, we know, is less about what I've been up to at the gym and more about the gum issue). They were very focused on BMI, which really is a bunch of nonsense if you've ever even thought about strength training. I think a lot of the stuff they did/measured was very lowest common denominator, but we'd have to pay more and take more time for something more individualized and sophisticated.

At this point I am in the high 170s - my lowest weight in probably six or seven years - and have been as low as 174 in the morning. I could never have imagined I'd be at the point of trying to eat more caloric foods and finding myself disinclined to eat them, and yet here I am. I'm trying to look at this as an opportunity - I've lost little if any strength (am benching 1.25% of my body weight 6-7 times, for example) and when I'm ready to gain weight again it'll be protein time. But I am not interested in losing any more weight - it's getting on 30 lbs. now and that's quite enough.

Meanwhile, just trying to recover some momentum....

On The Age Of Absurdity by Michael Foley

So eager was I to read this book when I first learned of it from this review in the Guardian that I purchased it immediately on Amazon (rather than just sticking it on my wishlist for future consideration) and opened it up as soon as it arrived. The first couple of chapters were entertaining yet filled with truth, accessible yet erudite, drawing on sources from Jesus and Buddha to Flaubert and Kafka to Freud and modern happiness studies.

But alas, this momentum could not be sustained.

Part of why I was so attracted to the book is that it jibes well with my own worldview: life in general is absurd, our modern Western existence even more so. Our priorities are totally skewed, we seek fulfillment where none will be found and - even more - our modern culture seems as though it has deliberately evolved to make it difficult to seek real fulfillment in a sophisticated way. I thought surely Foley was a kindred spirit and wanted to hear his prescription.

But what is strong and focused in the first few chapters becomes more diffuse as the pages add up. Foley is marshalling evidence (though too much of it is anecdotal or simply his opinion) for how difficult our society makes it for people to seek true fulfillment, that the things great spiritual, philosophical, and literary thinkers of the past, East and West, have said are essential for meaningful human existence are the very same things our culture devalues and discards (simplistic fundamentalist religious flavors and their increasing popularity notwithstanding).

How absurd that this book didn't delve deeper!

But the people he really needs to convince are not reading this book - they are at the mall, behaving like the consumerist automatons they are. So after a while it all gets...well, a bit tedious. Foley goes from insightful to complaining to - at times by the end - downright curmudgeonly. Sometimes this veers dangerously close to being just another book complaining about modern society.

I think there is a little bit of a generational dynamic on display. Some of his thoughts, especially about love and sexuality, seem downright quaint. Some of it simply doesn't match my experience (such as his observation that people no longer hold wakes and funerals and death is absent from modern urban life). Much of the book is framed as "we have become" as though some transformation occurred between some healthier time and now. I am leery of going too far down this road of (even implicitly) idolizing the past without at least some empirical evidence. Of course there were less buzzing gadgets and distractions, a less frenetic pace of life, and less STUFF back then (whenever you want to think of it), but was it really easier to find fulfillment?

Foley has a long chapter devoted to the absurdity of the modern workplace, and quotes from sources including Joshua Ferris's fine novel And Then We Came To The End (which I reviewed a couple of years ago here on this blog). But who really needs convincing that the modern office environment is absurd (certainly not anyone who has ever worked for the federal government!)? The problem is that people are all too willing to accept the absurdity.

There's also quite a bit of discussion about ego and how setting it aside can make one happier. Ego and entitlement are a big part of why modern society sucks; as an extreme example, consider gangland culture, where kids get killed because they looked at someone wrong. I don't necessarily disagree that we all just need to cool down a bit and realize the world doesn't revolve around us, but - especially in the workplace - too much of this can also lead quickly to you getting the reputation for being a great person for others to shit on. Completely letting go and detaching can't really work for those of us invested in what we do every day. Foley never discusses this tension.

The most disappointing part of the book was the conclusion. Now of course I didn't seriously think that Foley would "solve" the problem of the absurdity of modern life. But perhaps he would recommend things we could do to change our culture? Or perhaps he would recommend withdrawing, at least a bit? Reshuffling our own priorities as individuals? Or at least carving out a bit of ourselves and keeping it free?

Nope. After pages and pages of kvetching, exploring the minutiae of age, the workplace, sexuality, and our celebrity and consumer obsessed culture, including the moon landing (an incident he evidently liked so much that it is repeated almost verbatim in two different sections of the book), his solution is simply to embrace the absurdity. Um, hello Albert Camus ca. 1942!?! And Foley doesn't pretend to ignore Camus. He says we need to be like Sisyphus and find our joy in the struggle to push the stone up the hill, to seize it as our own. It's a fairly terse end, and fairly obtuse. I'm not at all clear how to operationalize his suggestion, and that's especially maddening given the specifics of his complaints.

So in sum I'd say that if you want to read an entertaining and learned, if perhaps a bit too detailed, account of how incompatible our society has become with those things that bring true happiness, go ahead and pick this up. But if you want something that goes much beyond a mere characterization of the problem, you'll have to look elsewhere.

More Good News

They kept us waiting for the news all day, but it was worth the wait for me. I learned fairly late last night that my novel has made it to the quarter-finalist stage of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest! We're down to 250 of the 5,000 initial submissions (5%) in the General (adult) Fiction part of the contest.

Two posts ago, I strategized a bit about what to do whether I made it or not. I think sending another dozen or so queries for the thing between now and the middle of next month would be a good idea. It may not get me much, but every little bit helps.

Looking forward in the contest, at this stage, the whole manuscript gets read and reviewed by someone at Publishers Weekly, and the "excerpt" (= first chapter in most cases, including mine) is posted and can be reviewed by anyone (this round was based on the evaluation of the excerpt, where they cut the 1,000 who made it past the "pitch" stage down to 250). More feedback is always good. If this contest gets me nothing but more feedback it will still have been well worth it.

The next (semi-finalist) stage cuts the 250 down to 50 based on the strength of the manuscript (from the PW review). I'll worry about that one late next month when the announcement is made.

For now, I'm just enjoying what I've got!

A Day In The Life

I'm a bit delayed on this, but better late than never, and all the kool kidz are doing it....

0645-Alarm goes off. Mrs. Lt. Cccyxx (henceforth Belimperia) gets up to shower, have breakfast, and do all kinds of other responsible morning things. The Lt. remains in bed in a state of semi-conscious existential angst.

0705-Lt. arises, pees, checks Blackberry, sometimes checks weather.com, opens Google Reader. Sometimes comments on other blogs.

0720-Lt. gets in shower.

0735-Lt. dresses, dependent upon his schedule for the day, but always without a tie if he doesn't have meetings with "important people." In fact, let's be honest, Lt. never puts on the tie until he gets to work no matter what.

0745-Lt. packs all kinds of goodies into his bag to sustain him throughout the day.

0750-Lt. leaves for work. It is one mile to train station. Lt. virtually always walks unless it is: a) ridiculously humid (quite common in the summer), b) pouring rain, c) icy, or d) the Lt. is hung over or just generally feels crappy. If conditions a-d prevail, Lt. takes bus, though due to the entirely random bus schedule, this rarely saves any time.

0810-Lt. arrives at train station. Technically the ride downtown should take 20 minutes, but this is Metro we're talking about, so it's entirely a wildcard. The Lt. cannot read on the train or he will blow chunks. So he listens to music and sometimes thinks about blog or writing ideas, though more frequently he continues his existential angsty musings and, with disarming frequency, conjures up scenarios in which his physically assaulting his fellow passengers becomes socially acceptable.

0845-Lt. is in office. He makes some mint tea or, if feeling weak-willed, grabs a Diet coke. He fires up his computer and opens up his work and personal e-mails and his Google reader. They will stay open all day. He often glances at linkedin, too. It is always nice to keep track of who knows who in the Lt.'s career world.

0915-There is no standard day for the Lt., but he has a to-do list for each day that pops up as an appointment at 9:15. The Lt. is fanatical about these lists because he knows he will forget stuff and not plan his time appropriately without them. If there's a lot to do, and there usually is, the Lt. tries to knock a bunch of it off first thing because he knows he will run out of steam as the day wears on. The Lt. usually has 1-2 hours of meetings/phone calls, 2-3 hours of e-mail related fun, 0.5 hours of bureaucratic paperwork, and the rest of the day is misc. If he's lucky, the Lt. gets to work on putting together documents. If he's not, he has to interact with people or do scheduling, logistics, or some other BS. The Lt. also spends a small amount of time most days working on professional stuff that isn't directly related to his job but is still appropriate to do at work. And he'd be lying if he didn't admit to occasionally goofing off a bit. Sometimes he writes blog posts. Rarely does he write-write.

Sometime between 1130 and 1330-Lt. has lunch. Being a frugal guy, he almost always packs it in. He likes to sit at his computer and read blogs or news websites while he eats. Lt. admits that he's more likely to read something from the "Books" section than from the hard news sections. Eating also gives him an excuse to close his door for a while.

1400-Nothing in particular happens at 2pm. But the Lt. drinks an insane amount of liquid during the workday. His typical workday includes around 24 oz. of iced coffee, 1 liter carbonated water, 1 liter iced tea, 1-3 cans Diet Coke (trying to cut and doing pretty well lately), and often another liter plain water or iced tea. This means he takes bathroom breaks nearly hourly.

1530-The Lt. is usually running out of steam. More goofing off becomes likely.

1645-The Lt. and Belimperia get in touch to discuss whether to meet at the train station after work and go home together. Unless one of them has to stay late, this is what they typically do.

1730-Lt. leaves work and meets Belimperia. Once again they are at the mercy of the Metro. On Thursdays, the Lt. often stays late at work to exercise in the building gym and play catch-up either with writing or work-work or those professional-but-not-directly-related activities.

1820-If all goes well, the Lt. and Belimperia arrive home.

1820-1915-The Lt. chillaxes, maybe watches "The Daily Show" online, often takes a second shower to wash off the day.

1915-One to two weeknights each week, Lt. and Belimperia head to the gym. If not, they usually start dinner around this time. (Weekends are a totally different beast.) Honestly the commute home sometimes really saps the Lt. of motivation to work out, and occasionally even makes him feel sick. This is part of the rationale for those Thursday nights.

2015-If they went to the gym, they usually return home about this time and have dinner. If not, dinner's often done around 2000. Often, they hang around the table shooting the shit for a little while. The Lt. may have a drink or two, though he tries to be good because hangovers are a luxury he can rarely afford.

2030-2230-Wild-card time. But let's be honest, the Lt. is often completely drained and is a lot more likely to be reading or listening to music than he is to be writing on a weeknight like this.

2230-2330-Sometime in this window, it's usually lights-out.

When does the writing, querying, etc. get done? Mostly Thursday nights, weekends, and holidays.

Writing Strategery Update

I just received a rejection for a query I sent on December 12. Nice. You know, I've always said I was a fan of the response (as opposed to non-response) from agents. Any response at all. But when 3+ months have elapsed on a simple query? Dudes, I've written you off. (Unless you want to say yes. Then I'm all about you.) So my query stats - around five months after I started - now stand at 47 queries sent, 1 partial request (rejected), 18 rejections, and 28 non-responses. IMO that is pretty fucking pathetic, but I don't know what to do about it.

I haven't sent any queries since January 21 and I was thinking about it. The next stage of the Amazon contest is coming up: the 250 quarter-finalists will be announced next week. So here's what I think: if I make it, I'll "reward" myself by sending out a blitz of new queries that mention my quarter-finalist status. Now, agents may be underwhelmed by that but it's still something.

Nowhere's about where I am after five months of queries.

Maybe I will seek out one or two more beta readers just for the query and the first chapter. I have the suspicion - and it's been slowly growing - that it's not the writing, it's that agents see my concept as...how can I put this without sounding like an arrogant fuck? I don't want to say too intellectual. Too geeky? Maybe they are confused and think I have written a science fiction novel? Maybe anything that smacks of science is intimidating or they think there's no way a scientist could write a decent novel (well, plenty of support for that last, as I've pointed out here before - ha-ha). Or maybe too esoteric? Too far removed from everyone's Facebook and American Idol-centric lives? Something people just wouldn't care about (even though in reality it is absolutely fundamental)? This is my worry.

If I get cut from the Amazon contest, it means my first chapter needs work and maybe I will take a little hiatus from querying (or extend my current hiatus, more precisely), rework the beginning, and then go back through the rest with a battle-axe and a chainsaw. It's been awhile since I've looked at it so I could probably bring some relatively fresh eyes.

But anyway, why not take advantage of the information the Amazon contest will provide?

Much more excitingly, I've been cranking along on my new project, with nearly 7,500 words complete. And it's been fun, which of course is important. I took a couple of personal days earlier this week to recover from the last few weeks at work and made some really good progress. I've been showing parts of it to my wife and she's been laughing out loud...and not pity laughs, either.

Also keeping my eyes open for D.C. writing conferences and other novel or short story contests I might enter relatively painlessly. In the back of my mind, I am thinking some personal connections/contacts may be necessary to have any chance of getting this work the attention it needs.

So I just need to hunker down and keep working - not get too frustrated with lack of progress on that first novel and the whole query thing. Working on the second novel is such a savior - keeps me from fixating on it too much.

Goddamn, though, this is a slow and thankless process.

Class-A

Imagine the scene in the Miller (well, MillerCoors) boardroom:

"Dudes, we have got to do something to set our beer apart for the white trash demographic."

[A variety of ideas are put forth and promptly discarded.]

"Oooh, oooh. I've got it! Let's make the cans camouflage!"

"Oh, come on, that's ridiculous."

"No, we can call it the `Limited Edition: Fall Series'. It'll be for hunters and whatnot."

"That'll never work. No one's going to buy camouflage beer. We'll lose all kinds of business."

"Hmmm, you're right. There's no way our mainstream consumers, even the ones who drink Miller, will go for that kind of thing."

"OK, how about we...um...well, if you really want to hit the white trash demographic, how about we only do it to the 16 oz cans?"

[Pause as everyone absorbs the suggestion.]

"Dude, that's amazing!"

"Totally f'ing brilliant!"

"Score!"

"Enjoy After The Adventure"...yeah, right

Do you like to shoot animals? Do you like to drink beer? Are you afraid your beer can will distract or scare the animals? Then get some Miller High Life Limited Edition Fall Series 16 oz cans. You can sit in your stand with your rifle, secure in the knowledge that the deer (or pheasants, or bears, or whatever) will not be frightened away by your choice of beverage.


Yes, this is the kind of stuff the Lt. drinks. And yes, it's been expired for a month, even though the Lt. bought it today. (And yes, it still tastes totally fucking fine.)

Lt. Cccyxx: just as smooth and classy as the beer he drinks.

Hey agents, looking for a high-class new author? Here I am!

What Does "Rewrite" Mean To You?

No, I haven't gotten a request to rewrite my novel (though some agents would be happy enough if I unwrote it, I think). I am just wondering, appropos of nothing, what the word "rewrite" means to you. It's used an awful lot in discussions of writing, and yet I cannot think of a single time in my entire life that I "rewrote" anything, if by "rewrite" you mean literally sitting down with a blank piece of paper (or new Word document) and just starting all over again on something I've already completed a draft of...at least not without anticipating a lot of cut and paste (I have "rewritten" both short stories and work products this way - basically deciding a wholesale reorganization was necessary; nonetheless, much of the content was recycled).

For my first novel experiments when I was in high school, I took an entire novel written out in long-hand, edited it, then typed it into the computer editing it as I went again, then edited again, and again.

For the novel I am currently querying, I revised sections a million times before I even finished a first draft. (And a year of research and plotting preceded my writing even a word.) Then I cut more than 13,000 words off the first draft; deleted, reorganized, moved, and added scenes; read through and edited sections many many times; chapterized it; and generally got to a point where the current draft probably doesn't have a single paragraph where some changes weren't made.

maybe you won't fuck it up so badly the second time

So does "rewrite" mean heavy edit? Or do we really mean "rewrite"?

Because, honestly, if you told me I had to start all over again with it, I'd probably pass. I love the story, love the characters...but after three years, I am ready to move on creatively. Certainly I wouldn't have any confidence that the final product would be any better. In fact, I'd bet it would be worse.

Now, if an agent or editor said: you have problems a, b, and c with this manuscript, I would most certainly go through to resolve a, b, and c. And this, again, could involve some very heavy editing. But I sure as hell wouldn't start from scratch.

Are there circumstances under which I would "rewrite"? Well, like most aspiring novelists, I have some completed manuscripts and some partially completed manuscripts that were relegated to the dusty recesses of my hard drive years ago. Were I to suddenly catch fire on one of those projects again, I'd probably start over. I would still expect a bit of cutting and pasting, though.

So a question for you writers: what does "rewrite" mean to you? Would you ever start over again from scratch? How much editing do you find yourself doing (if you can generalize)?

Health Insurance As A Tether To Servitude

Maybe this is a "no shit Sherlock" moment, but bear with me. You have to understand two fundamental things about me: 1) I'm generally in good health and haven't been to the doctor in years - also, before these past few months, I hadn't been to the dentist in forever either; and 2) I am a total cheap bastard and the greatest pleasure money can give me is sitting in a savings account (or mutual fund, or whatever) providing me security. I'm a firm believer in living not just at but below my means so that I don't owe anyone anything and could walk away (from credit cards, employers, landlords, whatever) if I had to.

Anyway, as some of you know, I've had a weird tooth/gum/TMJ issue going on, and in fact I'm set to go to a third doctor later this week. But about a month ago I was referred to an endodontist, who examined my teeth and wrote a couple of lines of diagnosis. My health insurance at work is amazing - yet another thing to keep in mind as I look for another job, especially now that my wife is on it too - and there was no charge for the visit.

what else could they possibly do with all of it?

Nonetheless, my insurance company sent me a statement (not a bill) that was hugely eye-opening. If I'd gone in there without health insurance, I would have been charged $540.00! The insurance company was charged $114.00. (Had this been an out-of-network doctor, I could have been charged for 540.00 - 114.00 = $426.00 - leading me to realize the lack of value in the "flexibility" my insurance plan touts.) So a few points:

1) First of all, only about $150 was actual things he did (x-rays, a swab). The rest of it - nearly $400 - was simply for the pleasure of his company for 20 minutes, so far as I can tell. That's $1,200 an hour, a rate that would make even the senior law partners I've worked with blush (for example, one partner and former political appointee I've worked with bills out at just under $500 an hour, and he at least tells you precisely what he did for you to the nearest 0.1 hours). Even $40 for an x-ray seems pretty shamelessly inflated.

2) Second, how can the charge to the insurance company be so radically different than the charge to an individual? Yes, I understand the concept of a bulk purchase, but these services should have a specific value associated with them.

3) And third, how can they not be legally obligated to tell you about these charges the instant you walk in the door? I don't even like to buy liquor drinks at restaurants because they never tell you how much they cost. I hate walking into the doctor's office and not knowing in some cases whether I will have to pay, and if so, how much.

For a while I was in the nebulous land of being not-really-an-employee: you know, quarterly taxes and the like. My health insurance (which I never used) was weird. I paid the full cost out-of-pocket (more than $400 a month) and was then reimbursed the full cost. At the time, it seemed ludicrous to have this in-and-out $5,000 a year for essentially nothing, but now I better understand.

I have to admit to not following the health care debate as closely as I should, but now having gotten just the merest taste of how out-of-control the system's costs are, having health care through my employer seems to make even less sense. I'd happily pay slightly higher taxes to have some protection regardless of my employment situation. It's true that in a system like that some people would put in more than they get out (and vice versa), but thinking of it only this way neglects the very important facets of security and freedom that come with the knowledge of a safety net. As with so many other policy choices, it is all about managing risk.

Personally, I'd be happy to be a net loser monetarily on the whole thing if you could assure me that health care is no longer tethering me to one job or another and I wouldn't possibly be faced with catastrophic costs if I was somehow between jobs (or outside normal employment for a while) and something came up or an accident happened.

That's not to say I'm not grateful for my employer's generous plan...but, in looking to move on, isn't it bizarre that a healthy guy with a healthy wife should have to worry about medical costs and risks when deciding on my next career step? Isn't that stifling the creativity and innovation that everyone says is so wonderful about our system?

A Second Opinion on Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

An anonymous commenter disagreed with my review of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower. I challenged them to explain themselves...and they did in a subsequent comment.

Most of the reason I post book reviews is to facilitate discussion and to force myself to grow as a reader. (I also post them to help others decide whether they'd like a book or not - I get most of my own reading ideas from looking at blogs and reviews.) Writing the reviews is one way to clarify in my own mind just why something does or doesn't work for me. Learning from others is another way. I don't get my jollies by always being right or disparaging people who disagree. So, with that spirit in mind, I wanted to post the second anonymous comment, which makes a good case for the strengths of Tower's book, and has persuaded me to go spend a little more time with it:

"Sure, sorry . . . it's normally a copout to say, just read the reviews, but this is a case where a bunch of top-notch critics not only all agree strongly that the book is great, but agree about WHAT makes the book great, namely Tower's mind-blowingly (for me) original language, in combination with great subtlety, restraint, mastery of the more traditional mechanics of storytelling (the intermingling of backstory, interior, and scene), etc. Kakutani in the NYT, E. White in the NYTBR, Eisenberg in the NYROB, and Ruland in the LA Times all get it right and in more detail than I can get to here. And then there's the Amazon reviewer who wrote that Tower's sentences "approximate the uniqueness and varieties of personal experience." That's it, to me, right there --- if you're really interested in getting into the book (and it's so worth the effort), I'd suggest actually setting aside half-an-hour and reading the carnival story out loud to yourself. I think maybe the remote, placid omniscient 3rd person may have put you off. But out loud, you'll hear the beauty and specificity of the sentences, and you'll also become aware of how much you learn about the characters, how they think and deal with the world, without being told directly. Happy reading!"

On The Best American Short Stories 2009 Edited By Alice Sebold

Short stories can be fun to read and write, and most aspiring novelists probably have at least a few of them around. Personally, when I get an idea, it's almost always immediately clear whether it's a novel idea or a short story idea. Still, for writers who try to get their work published, it seems like the world of the short story is a very different place than the world of the novel. And as inaccessible as the world of publishing is for novelists, short story publishing (at least of the non-genre variety) seems like an even more forbidding place. Looking at upscale literary magazines and their descriptions of what they're looking for, I as a writer often feel like they're speaking in a code - an academic jargon - that I don't understand.

I still like to read the occasional short story, though, so for most of the past ten years I've bought the Best American Short Stories volume. It seems like a good way to keep up, so to speak, without having to understand the world of the literary journals. (In his introduction to the volume he edited a few years ago, Stephen King talked about his experiences going to a mainstream bookstore - not in a major city - and trying to find and buy some literary journals. Everything from where they were located to how much they cost spoke volumes more about the problem than any of this abstract "is the short story dead?" hand-wringing that seems par for the course with these things. Of course, SK got his start writing short stories, but for pulp magazines, not Zoetrope.)

These volumes are always edited by some fairly well-known author, and - even though a lot of early vetting is no doubt done by the series editor - it changes its character a bit each year.


This most recent edition is edited by Alice Sebold, whose work I haven't read (my wife read The Lovely Bones and didn't think much of it). I thought Sebold did a pretty decent job choosing stories - it wasn't a whole volume of these "monogamy is hard and so our marriage is falling apart but we won't talk about it" stories (soooooo boring!), though of course there were one or two. Indeed, most of the stories were pretty good, and a few were actually exciting.

My biggest criticism of her choices is that they were predictable. The New Yorker publishes most of its fiction online, and you can read the stories for free, which means the 4/20 (20%) of the book's stories that were from The New Yorker I'd already read. (And yes, as a writer, it was good for me to read them again, but that's not really the point.)

Looking at the authors she chose, there were no newbies or even real surprises (well, there weren't any stories by Alice Munroe - maybe that's surprise enough?). Everyone was already published many times over in top journals and/or had published novels, most were M.F.A.'ed up and taught writing for a living, etc. Now, if those were the stories she thought were best then so be it. I'm not calling for a quota system here. But it was a bit odd to me that that no one's background deviated much from what you would expect (or if it did, they'd already established themselves as writers in some other way).

Still, as these volumes go, this was one of the better ones lately, and I'd recommend it to readers who want to read some good, recent short stories. Especially if you don't already read the fiction in The New Yorker.

On American Rust by Philipp Meyer

This is one of the better works of fiction I've read in a while. It kept me engaged and read quickly. The premise was efficiently set up and well-executed. The characters were well-drawn and memorable. The sense of place was hugely important to the novel and also effectively conveyed. The technique of moving from one character to another in successive chapters worked well to maintain suspense while giving a variety of perspectives and providing the reader with the information they needed.

However, there were also some problems: mostly some implausibilities and the failure of the author to wrap up all the novel's threads at the end.

Decent

Let's talk about setting: the novel takes place (mostly) in a small Pennsylvania town outside of Pittsburgh, in a region that used to be the center of the American steel industry and is now part of the decaying rust belt (thus, the title). The setting - both the natural beauty of the area and the economic collapse of the region - is perhaps the most important "character" in the book...or, at least, it gives the book its fundamental character and sets an important backdrop for just about every character's life. That being said, I thought there was even a bit much musing on it by all the characters and the narrator, almost to the point where it became repetitious. A little less would have been just as effective.

The (human) characters are well-drawn and distinctive, though at least one of them (Lee, Isaac's older sister) seems almost entirely devoid of scruples. And indeed, the author introduces lots of complications into the relationships between Lee and Isaac, Lee and Poe (Isaac's friend, Lee's former fuckbuddy, and the story's other main character), and Isaac and Poe without resolving them. But the lack of resolution in the relationship of Isaac and Lee is the most troublesome - was it all just a big misunderstanding? or is Lee really a selfish bitch and Isaac a needy misanthrope? The secondary, though still important, story, involves Poe's mother Grace and the chief of police, Harris.

The plot is interesting but there are some calls to "suspend disbelief" that strain credulity. The main one is that, even pending a trial, Poe is put into general population in what appears to be a maximum security prison, complete with warring racial gangs (D.C. Blacks and Aryan Brotherhood). We are given to believe that the district attorney has rigged this to put pressure on Poe. But this is just not what happens. Meanwhile, Meyer's research for this part of the story (which, I have to admit, I still found quite exciting) seems to have consisted almost entirely of reading Jimmy Lerner's You Got Nothing Coming. (This, btw, is one of my favorite books ever - but mostly because of the humor and the juxtaposition of cultures. American Rust doesn't really focus on these, and the whole prison angle seems a bit unnecessary for the story at hand. Also: hello to the guy who obsessively searches for Jimmy Lerner and hits my blog over and over. You found me once again. Say hello in the comments, OK bud?)

Also, the Grace/Harris relationship is at times only borderline believable, and I'm still not quite sure what Lee's relationship is with her husband or just how bad their father really is or why their mother killed herself or why, if Lee and Isaac are so smart, they do such dumbass stuff all the time. It's almost like the characters, or the book itself, suffers from a kind of schizophrenia. No one can think straight, everyone is mercurial in their moods and actions.

I tend to be very sensitive to plot implausibilities - so much so that they can ruin an otherwise pleasant reading experience - but here I did not find the implausibilities to be fatal. Still, the author might have done well to keep things a bit simpler, or at least taken more responsibility for wrapping up all the threads.

That being said, I would still recommend this book - it paints a portrait of people and a place that is both interesting and reflective of parts of society as a whole.

On Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower

This is a short story collection I'd read a lot about; it had been sitting as a placeholder on my Amazon wishlist for a year or so now. I have to admit to some initial confusion: First, is Wells Tower a man or a woman? (Answer: he's a man, not that it really matters) Second, are these stories about September 11? (Answer: no, though I thought so because I was confused with The Looming Tower plus the violent title - I guess I had an Orson Welles/George Orwell moment with this book, where similar-sounding things get confused)

Meh.

OK, that's neither here nor there.

I thought I read somewhere that a couple of the stories in this book were interconnected; if so, the connections seem fairly tenuous. But there are some themes that run throughout the stories.

I have to be honest - the book read quickly and easily and was touching in places and amusing in others. But I forgot most of the content as soon as I finished it. There were no unforgettable characters or situations or deep truths revealed. I liked the one with the fish tank, the one with the two brothers, I didn't really like the carnival one much...I mean, that's how I'd describe it if you asked. Not much else sticks with me. Even the Viking one was sort of blah.

I guess what I'd say is: Tower draws true-to-life characters. But he didn't draw even one I'd particularly root for. And in the context of these short stories, there wasn't enough for me to get to know them to care. Maybe if his next work was a novel he'd do better in this regard. (Though honestly, I wouldn't go out and buy it unless the premise somehow sounded very intriguing.)

So, I'd recommend a pass on this one.

Getting More Followers - Some Ideas

I want to thank Travener and Sierra for their comments on my last post, and highlight their suggestions in a new post...even though many of their ideas are pretty common sense, I haven't done them myself yet (or done a very good at them), and they might also be useful for others.

Travener recommends:
1) Leave your blog URL in comments. (I do an OK job of this on blogspot but am pretty lazy about it in any other domain. I first found Trav's blog through Absolutewrite - of course I haven't gone there much lately and haven't posted in months.)

2) Ask your readers questions (borrowed from Sierra). (Actually, Sierra is the master of this, but I could do much better at it than I currently do.)

3) Follow a lot of other blogs. (See, this is so common sense, yet I don't do it. Of course, as with so much in life, I have a wonderfully rational reason: I follow many, many blogs on my Google reader feed - I currently subscribe to 169 feeds, including 65 I label "writing" - without the public follow. In fact, the public follow - in my experience - works quite awkwardly with the reader feed. That being said, it's no excuse and if I want public followers...well, redundancy here I come.)

4) Have a contest. (I've seen this on other blogs and even "entered" one or two, usually if the person's giving away a query critique or something. The irony is most of these blogs are already on my reader feed. And even if I "lose" or the person isn't that well-qualified to critique or I don't use their suggestions or whatever, I'm still ahead of the game. I'd have to think about what I could offer in a contest, besides of course my body. But who wants to get with a cockroach anyway, and a married one at that?)

ok, it's not really that bad!

Sierra recommends:
1) Post often, by writing posts ahead of time and scheduling them for publication. (See, this is why I think her blog is a really good example. She posts M-F, she has regular features, she asks her readers questions in almost every post...good God, you can even look up in the top corner and see what the next posts are going to be and when they will be posted! I'm such a fucking dumbass I only recently figured out how useless it is to post on weekends - and yet I still do it sometimes since that's when I have the most time to write. I am trying to post more often, though, and be more strategic about scheduling the posts, and making posts shorter...well, at least for me. Compare now with 2008 or 2007.)

2) Comment often on other blogs, and comment repeatedly on some of the same blogs. (I think I'm doing OK with this one, actually.)

3) Use sitemeter or another webtracker to get a picture of what are looking for when they come to your blog. (I've just recently started with Google Analytics - got the suggestion off Sierra's blog, actually. It's cool.)

4) Use twitter. (This is a very sensible idea, as would be the suggestion I use Facebook in some capacity. I'm not sure I'm ready for this one, though, for the same reason I stay off IM during the workday.)

5) Post about your experiences in the politico world. (This is an interesting suggestion and requires a little more thought. Obviously I need to maintain my pseudonymity, but I could blog about some of what's going on. I could also blog about cool science, again trying not to focus too much in my specific area so people decide they want to start guessing who I am. I do detect that most of my regular readers don't want to hear much more bitching and moaning about the academic pipeline, though a post with the terms "adjunct" or "postdoc" is likely to be a long-term search winner, not to mention my "postdoctoral student" post got linked from dcblogs, which - at least temporarily - drove a lot of traffic here.)

Well, thanks guys for your suggestions: this is a lot of food for thought, but I appreciate it. And hope others find these suggestions useful, too.

This Week...

...is going to be hell on wheels at work, but afterward, things should quiet down a bit for a little while at least. I've set some posts to go up during the coming week with reviews of some of things I've read recently. Hopefully this will ensure my traffic doesn't go down to zero.

Meanwhile, I have a question for people who read this blog: most of you have "followers," many of you have quite a few. How in the heck do you get them? I've been posting up a storm over the past two months (and commenting up a storm on other blogs) and yet I can't break out of the single digits in terms of followers. I simply don't have the time to put the care and effort into this blog that, for example, Sierra Godfrey puts into hers. But maybe there's something I could do - post about a greater or lesser diversity of topics, be more predictable in terms of timing, make all my posts really short, participate more on absolutewrite or other forums, repost pictures of other people's cute babies here, etc etc.?

How did you guys get so many friends?

Validation re: Adjuncts And Postdocs

I was reading Anthony Grafton's Review of The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University by Louis Menand in the latest issue of The New Republic. (No link to the article itself because I get The New Republic in hard copy and can never find anything on their website.)

I haven't read the book but the review is interesting, focusing on how the humanities as disciplines have changed over time, how society as a whole has changed in different ways, and why there appears to be such a mismatch now, leading to some of the humanities being in big trouble of becoming "dying fields".

But I wanted to highlight one short passage from the review that really struck me:

"The humanities need reform because their traditions are confining and their job market is a catastrophe, but reform cannot mean surrender, or dilution. It means finding out how to do what the scientists ave already done: how to combine the rigor of tradition with experiment and innovation - but without replacing hordes of underpaid adjuncts with hordes of underpaid postdocs, as the scientists have."

This is fair - I think there's too much ultraspecialization in the sciences too, but there is also some wiggle room. On the other hand, here is a great validation that postdocs are just the science equivalent of humanities adjuncts, filling the same niche (cheap, disposable labor).

the funniest part of this is that most adjuncts, and postdocs, don't get any orientation at all

"You must run as fast as you can to stay in the same place."

How Can You Not Smile At This?

The gym schedules of my wife and I have been somewhat offset this week, so the other night she was at the gym and I was at home. I made dinner and ate it while watching an episode of "The Daily Show" online. I chuckled a few times. Then I looked at this post and when I got to the picture at the bottom I laughed out loud. A couple of days later, it still makes me smile. This woman has the cutest kids ever, but the baby is just over the top. I especially liked the comment from "Susie Q," who admitted she wanted to eat her cheeks. I've added this blog to my feed and just love the pictures of the kids - they always look like they're having so much fun, and they're so frigging cute.

(You would never know it by looking at the Lt., trust me, but I'm actually a total softie for little poofy-cheeked goodness.)

Some Good News

I'm pleased to report that not only did I survive a horrible week at work, but I learned on Thursday that I made it to the second round of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest. I blogged about the contest before here.

Essentially, for adult fiction, the contest was limited to 5,000 entries, and I read that it maxed out. Each submission had a 300 word "pitch" associated with it (basically a query), and the first round involved choosing 1,000 entries to move on and discarding the rest on the basis of the pitch.

I was prepared for failure and actually quite nervous on Thursday, when the results were announced. But I thought to myself: if you don't make it, don't be embarrassed. Just accept it as data. If your pitch/query isn't in the top 20% of entries, that just means your query needs more work. Now, my query may need more work anyway, but this is a bit of a confidence booster that I can't be too far off. I do still wonder why my track record with agents is so terrible (46 queries, only 1 partial request, 16 form rejections, and 29 total non-responses) but this at least indicates the query is not fatally flawed.

In about a month, I'll find out if I am a quarterfinalist. For this stage, the judges read an "excerpt" (basically the first chapter) and choose 250 of the 1,000. So basically 1:4, and if I get cut at this stage it means my first chapter needs more work. I happen to think my first chapter is pretty strong, but we'll see. If it needs more work, it needs more work. I'm just grateful for the information.