Skullcrusher Mountain

Justice for Caitlyn

2011-07-15T10:00:00.005+01:00

Last night, I fired six queries for my new project off into the ether. I started with ten agents, but a full 40% of them were: a) not accepting queries, b) not accepting queries from unpublished authors, c) not accepting unsolicited queries, or d) not agents anymore. No rejections yet!!! (OK, no responses at all yet.) Thanks to those of you who responded to my last post - it really helped light a fire under me. More queries may follow through the end of the month. Then we'll see.

So if you're sitting around this weekend with nothing to do and would like to write the next best-seller, I've got an idea for you.

The book will be called Justice for Caitlyn. In it, the self-righteous ire of an entire nation reanimates the bones of a murdered toddler, which rises from its grave and - after obtaining an iPhone - breaks into jail and exacts bloody and brutal revenge on its attractive but disturbed mother, whose name is, um, Cathryn, while live-tweeting the whole thing. The entire nation watches as Cathryn is dragged away by demons to suffer eternal torment. Even after Cathryn's demise, the toddler continues to attract the attention of everyone it meets, so much so that they stop caring about their own kids and only worry about the dead toddler.

The book ends with the reanimated toddler testifying before the state legislature (also live tweeting the hearing, and posting Facebook status updates involving lots of indignation and crude ASCII art) about the utility of a new law against letting your kids out of your sight ever until they're 21...before reascending to heaven amidst hymns, angels, and a shadowy vision of a professional wrestler body-slamming Jesus.

Hinted but not fully revealed is that after Caitlyn reascends to heaven everyone will realize they have to start paying attention to their own kids again - indeed, they are now legally mandated to do so. And boy, will that piss them off.

I offered to set my wife up with unlimited Diet Mountain Dew, Cheetos, and red velvet cake from a nearby bakery over the next three days with the expectation that she'd show me a draft Monday or Tuesday, but she wasn't interested.

For any of you who would like to execute this brilliant idea, however...a small cut of the proceeds, or at least dedicating the book to the good old Lt. is all I ask in return. Just remember, you have about a week to write it, query it, and sell it before the real Cathy scoops you.

Straw Poll: Would You Query For A New Project Now...

2011-07-07T10:00:00.001+01:00

...or would you wait until September?

It's exciting. My draft was finished in February. I revised and had the manuscript beta-read. I've been researching agents and just this past weekend spent a couple of hours at the big Barnes & Noble up the road looking for books "like" mine and making lists of agents and authors. I wrote a query that I tinkered with for a bit, and my wife has looked it over and given me some feedback to make it better. So, I need to finalize my list of agents to hit up initially, and then I am good to go.

But now the question has arisen in my mind: it's already July. It'll probably still take me another week or two to get my list finalized. Then it will be more than halfway to August, one of publishing's "dead times." Advice to the effect of "use July and August to write, and query in September" is starting to pop up on the blogosphere.

Of course I am excited for my new project and eager to get it out there. But I also want to be strategic and maximize my chances, especially since we know how the deck is stacked against cold queriers. I also have plenty of other writing and publishing related tasks I could do if I put this project on ice for a bit. So let me ask you, my fine readers, for your opinions.

What would you do if you had a project just about ready to query right now? Would you forge ahead, or would you wait a couple of months?

Your feedback would be appreciated, and might very well prove determinative.

"People Buy It So It Must Be Good"...Or Fox News Syndrome In Literature

2011-06-29T10:00:00.001+01:00

I promised (threatened) a few posts ago to tackle this issue one encounters in the contemporary world of writing and publishing, wherein one person says: "X Book [or Y Author] is utter crap!" and another person rejoins: "Well, people are buying it [his/her books], so it [he/she] must be good!" One hears this, usually defensively, from fans of certain genres (and from agents, of course).

At a macro-level, this reasoning fails because it assumes that "good" is the equivalent of sales, and we know that literature is judged on more than just that one dimension. We also know that who gets published and who gets marketed is not a meritocracy according to any single dimension or dimensions, and that those things obviously correlate highly with sales for most authors.

This reasoning also fails because it's kind of like using a word in its own definition. This is the literary equivalent of the anthropic principle, and it makes the error of judging the cause by the effect. (It's like saying "The Mona Lisa" is a good painting because it is so popular. Or, God help us all, "The Jersey Shore" is a good show because lots of people watch it.)

The truth, though, is that in almost every instance - whether we're talking a book, an author, a band, a TV show, or whatever in our consumerist, generally democratic culture - there are two valid sides to the exchange, neither of which is being clearly expressed.

So let's parse a bit the well-known example of Stephen King's critique of Stephenie Meyer. King said Meyer couldn't write "worth a darn" but then went on to say:

"People are attracted by the stories, by the pace and in the case of Stephenie Meyer, it's very clear that she's writing to a whole generation of girls and opening up kind of a safe joining of love and sex in those books. It's very exciting and it's thrilling and it's not particularly threatening because they're not overtly sexual.

"A lot of the physical side of it is conveyed in things like the vampire will touch her forearm or run a hand over skin, and she just flushes all hot and cold. And for girls, that's a shorthand for all the feelings that they're not ready to deal with yet."

Now, King's dissection of the appeal of the books may not be perceived as terribly flattering of Twilight fans (especially those older than the target demographic!), but - even if true - it is a valid reason to enjoy the books (no matter who or how old you are). And regardless of whether you agree with the exact stated reason, Meyer clearly found some way to tap into what certain people want in a story (this is the "people buy it" part, and it is undeniable). But let's separate that from the writing itself. One can enjoy books that are not especially well-written, but it's counterproductive to argue those books are well-written when they're not.

Another great example is The Bridges of Madison County. It tapped into a vein with a certain demographic (one with very little overlap with Twilight fans, beyond also being largely female) but - despite its pomposity and faux-literariness - you'd really be hard-pressed to make the case that it is a well-written, or good (in any sense but tapping into that vein successfully), book.

Thinking for just a sec about TV, people watch reality TV because it taps into their curiosity or appeals in some way. But, even if you're a fan, you'll probably fess up to morbid or prurient interest as your motivator for watching, rather than make the case that it's the complex plotlines or amazing camera work that you really love.

(The Lt. will here admit a weakness for terrible action movies on hulu.com. There's a reason they put those things up for free. I watch these horrid movies and feel the adrenaline rush, root for the hero - especially when there's a vengeance element. I enjoy them. I'll keep watching them. But they ain't good movies.)

What annoys readers (and writers) like me is not when people buy Twilight or Bridges in sufficient quantities to make them bestsellers.

And it's not when they read them as guilty pleasures.

It becomes a bit annoying when that's the only kind of stuff people read: books that tap into them at a visceral level and reinforce what they already believe or want to believe (about themselves, about the opposite sex, about love, about politics, about society, about whatever). (This is one of my problems with certain - not all, but certain - examples of so-called "women's fiction" where all the the male characters are mere window-dressing or straight out of a Bud Light commercial.)

This is the fucking Fox News of literature. But isn't art supposed to challenge us? Maybe not every time, maybe not constantly, but at least occasionally? If you're scared to read anything that isn't self-reinforcing, why bother reading? Do you really grow by reading - over and over - protagonists that are just like you, facing situations you can well relate to (even if you are unlikely to encounter them yourself) and making choices that you approve of all the time?

And this moves from a bit annoying to supremely annoying when readers then go on to claim that such books are "good," by which they mean well-written and at least kind of deep. (Nor, by the way, am I arguing that well-written and deep books necessarily resonate with many people. Whether a book is "good" is not only highly subjective, it is also highly multidimensional.)

So I think what this post boils down to is an appeal (or several) to avoid the false dichotomy people draw from instances like King-Meyer:

First, let's stop equating best-selling with good.

Second, and more importantly, let's can the use of "good" if we're talking literature, and instead say what we mean.

And finally, let's us writers seek to challenge our readers, and let's us readers seek out a challenge (or at least seek to understand about ourselves why certain books do or do not resonate with us), at least once in a while.

I Have Read Some Great Books This Year

2011-06-27T10:00:00.001+01:00

We writers, and readers, often bemoan the state of publishing today. I know I am guilty of this with some frequency. Stephenie Meyer, Snooki, Sarah Palin's kid, celebrity memoirs...it's so frustrating for those of us who put our all into what we write (under the constraints of our daily lives, of course) and yet hit a brick wall of rejection from agents who seem uninterested in anything that isn't by a celebrity, YA or focused explicitly on "women's issues." (I'm being slightly hyperbolic, as I every-so-often am wont to do, but surely you see my point: a focus on this ultra-specialized niche market stuff instead of literature that appeals to all of us as human beings.)

Sometimes, though, I like to reflect on the other side of things. There are many, many great books out there. Some of them are even being published now. It's about halfway through the year and I've put away around 20 books so far. I was thinking that I've read a lot of excellent stuff this year. So let me highlight a few:

--I just finished the legendary Kolyma Tales by Shalimov. What Primo Levi did for the Nazi camps, Shalimov has done for the GULAG, but via a series of vignettes that distill the essence of the hopelessness and the utter brokenness of a system that grew out of the dream of communism. Each tale left me breathless, or shaking my head, or simply grateful for the existence I have.

--Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad got so much hype, but the description never seemed interesting: who cares about the music industry? Not me. But I read it, and it was spectacular. A loose configuration of stories that form a moving whole, Egan uses deceptively simple language to draw complex characters interacting over time. Better than Freedom - it really is an amazing book.

--Paul Auster's incredibly insightful ruminations on fathers and sons (from both perspectives) The Invention of Solitude: made me eager to read more from an author who is so introspective, who can see so much in others and in himself.

--I am halfway through David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. My first foray into DFW (beyond reading a few of his magazine articles), I wasn't at all sure if it would agree with me. But it is quite brilliant in its own way. I'm a fan so far.

--Richard Russo's amazing Empire Falls, with its unforgettable characters and its portrayal of small-town life and struggles.

--The clever and illuminating novel The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin. We knew Stalin hated Trotsky, but who ever would have thought his paranoia ran so deep?

--The smart and insightful Proofiness, with its clever labels for the quantitative tricks politicians, the media, and advertisers use to trick or mislead naive people, would make a better high school math textbook than most any out there, while at the same time being orders of magnitude more readable and entertaining than any textbook could be.

--I cannot leave out the riveting Vietnam war novel Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes. Now, finally, I feel like I understand the Vietnam War. And while I don't understand what it's like to be in combat, this surely is the closest I've come.

Six months of reading, and I've been blown away, awed by the language and the characters and the plot turns and the authors' investigations of humanity at all difference places, times, and scales. There is a whole lot of crap out there, but there is also plenty that makes reading, and trying to contribute as a writer, very much worth it.

A Note On The Lt.'s Discursive Style

2011-06-23T10:00:00.005+01:00

My last post made me think (and I know what you're thinking - well, that makes one of us, Lt. - and to you I say shut the fuck up): imagine if I took all the shit in my posts that goes into parentheses and instead put it all in footnotes (even my footnotes would have footnotes).

(Leaving aside the fact that I have no idea how to make footnotes work on blogger) I'd be David Motherfucking Foster Wallace!!

Go, Lt.

Yes, go, you're thinking. Go already.

And this business of me telling you what you think/say is what my wife does to me. She has whole conversations with me where I don't have to say a word because she does my talking for me.

It's wonderful (as long as she doesn't veer off course from what I'd actually say, which she rarely does (which is kind of scary) <-- see - that's a place right there where there'd be a footnote within a footnote) because I don't have to pause in drinking my beer to respond.

One day soon she'll say to me, "That was a great conversation we had last night, hon."

And I'll say (because this time she'll wait for my response), "I wasn't home last night, darling."

And she'll say, "Yeah, so?"

I'm not sure where I'm going with this.

Oh yeah:

David Motherfucking C*cks&cking Foster Wallace!

(do i have any readers left at all?)

The Amanda Hocking Phenomenon

2011-06-20T10:00:00.002+01:00

I demand that you read this New York Times Magazine profile of self-publishing (and now mainstream publishing) phenomenon Amanda Hocking. Now, I know what you are thinking: who in the fuck are you, Lt., to disappear from our lives so rudely, and then show up again one day making demands? But trust me, it's for your own good.

It's for your own good because the article goes on and on (just like my blog posts, though you have to admit you missed me and my discursive style) and yet winds up making Ms. Hocking sound kind of dumb (I'm not saying she is, but the portrayal was not flattering) and - much more importantly - explains absolutely nothing about her that would be of interest to anyone (and thank you, Sierra, for letting me know that bold, and not italics, underline, asterisks, or - god forbid - ALL CAPS - is what I should use for emphasis in cases like this).

For example, is her writing any good? Based on the article, my guess is that it is not. It's "candy," something people can turn to to escape from thinking. (And look, I know a lot of us don't have the perfect lives, but is being forced to think too much really the problem in contemporary America?) But maybe it is. After all, people are buying her books. (One day I want to address head-on this "people buy it so it must be good" thing. It's half-right but - like so much else - not very informative. And we can throw up our hands and say "good" is subjective but that's not helpful.)

Here's another: does she know what she's doing? Whether her writing is "good" or not, she's doing something that appeals. Does she know what it is and why it works? We learn a bit about the development of her style from the piece, but not enough.

Here's another: why did her books take off? The way the article describes it, she uploaded her first book and one day five people bought it, and then she uploaded more and soon thousands of people were buying them. So...um, did she do any marketing? I know, I know, you can't always explain these things fully. But with anyone being able to publish online, how did she get noticed? She doesn't come across as especially business savvy or some kind of social media guru. So what was the secret?

And another: why did she decide to move to a mainstream publisher? She is asked, and answers, this question in the article without really providing an answer. There's been a lot of handwringing about this in the blogosphere, but I don't want some guy's speculation about why she did it, I want to know from her why she did it.

And a final one: why did New York publishers reject her so much? (I put this one last because this is the one you and I, my friends, have already agonized over so much ad nauseum.) That being said, why did the reporter not ask Ms. Hocking to pull out some of her rejection letters, and call up some of those agents and ask them. Heck, maybe Amanda Hocking's big problem is that she just can't write a query letter.

So, was this article just extremely poorly-written (or written by a reporter with no analytical capabilities whatsoever), or are these questions somehow obscure or uninteresting to people? I've read it and understand Ms. Hocking's appeal and success no better than I did beforehand. Do you think Ms. Hocking is being deliberately obfuscatory about her strategies and techniques? Is the reporter just thick? Or - I know it's incredibly unlikely but I'll throw it on the table - is your intrepid blogger, the Lt., missing something here?

So Who Reads This Shit?

2011-06-02T21:35:00.001+01:00

No, not my blog, wisenheimers. Those stupid "novels" celebrities are supposedly writing.

That's my question.

What If It Happened Here?

2011-05-27T14:18:00.006+01:00

The ads on the Metro can be as wonky as the people who ride it. Stuff about federal retirement benefits. Advertisements for military and defense aircraft. Ads that essentially lobby for the wind energy industry or for net neutrality. Geez, even the literary ads can be a little weird.

But this ad, from stopthedrill.org, really caught my attention. They have them for San Francisco and D.C. too, but the New York one made my jaw drop.

Does this remind you of anything? Anything, um, not an oil spill in New York Harbor? You know, the sunny day. New York. Black smoke billowing high up into the sky. Anyone?

My first reaction to this ad, and to the "What If It Happened Here?" on top was: what the fuck are you talking about? It did happen here! Only then did I notice "stopthedrill.org" at the bottom and that the smoke was rising from the water, not lower Manhattan.

do you see my point yet or should i upload more pictures??

I understand what they're trying to do. I agree we need to be much more responsible with offshore drilling. I'd even say the oil spill in the Gulf was probably more devastating than a comparable spill in New York or San Francisco would be - I'm guessing here a bit, but at least in terms of the marine ecosystem and its effects on the economy (not to mention the ease of containment).

But these are wonky details. My point is: who approved this particular ad and how tone-deaf can they possibly be? I note the D.C. ad has them cleaning up birds in the Tidal Basin (during Cherry Blossom Festival, no less) and quite notably does not show a pillar of black smoke rising from what just might be the Pentagon.

Give me a break.

Reviewing Books

2011-05-26T10:00:00.004+01:00

I am intrigued with the discussion going on over at the Fiction Groupie blog about writers reviewing books. It's of relevance to me because: 1) I frequently, and often quite critically, review books on this blog; and 2) I am finding myself with more "real world" (that means "real name") opportunities to review, often quite critically, mostly nonfiction so far, but that may change. It's a multi-dimensional discussion that got me thinking a little bit about how I do things.

First, there's the distinction between nitpicking and reviewing. I'd like to think that I review, not nitpick. (Anyone care to disagree?)

Second, there is the fact that I use a pseudonym here and this blog is not a marketing platform (God help me if it was). Chances are I would be a bit less critical were I using my real name, or at least go a bit less on my overall impressions and a bit more on easily-substantiated particulars.

That being said, as someone trained as a scientist, I am used to anonymous peer-review, which can be incredibly harsh. Anonymous peer review tends not to get posted on the internet (though some argue it should be), but it is simply par for the course. If your work sucks, people aren't shy about telling you. If that makes you cry or makes you not do science anymore, que lastima. I believe in being constructive to a fault, but I do not believe in coddling mediocrity. If giving criticism properly has become a lost art form, so has accepting it. And I stand by that.

At the same time, even here - safely hidden behind my pseudonym and an unknown and unpublished quantity, anyway - I have made the decision not to review several books on this blog whose authors were nice to me in person when I met them or with whom there is some other connection or some other reason I didn't want to or felt it would be unprofessional to.

On the other hand, do Emma Donoghue or David Eagleman or - for fuck's sake - Snooki really care what I think? Please - they are laughing all the way to the bank, and in a previous post I highlighted research showing that even bad reviews in prestigious venues (this blog clearly is not one) can boost sales for new authors. When you enter the public sphere by publishing a book, you expose your work to criticism. That is one of the things that makes publishing difficult. People who don't like that can: a) not publish, b) use a pen name, and/or c) not ever read reviews.

One of the most interesting aspects of the conversation in the comments is this distinction between readers and writers. Some were arguing that writers shouldn't be trashing other writers online because we're all writers. One commenter even likened it to bashing a co-worker publicly, which is a baffling analogy. Anyway, I've got two problems with this assertion:

1) If you look at (fiction) book reviews in major newspapers and periodicals, you will find many reviews written by people who are not professional critics, but whose qualifications are that they are authors. If you're telling me those reviews are buttered up with false praise (though I accept they probably sometimes are), then I'm no longer interested in reading them. Certainly in scholarly circles and even in much mainstream nonfiction, you want a reviewer who knows the subject, and their own publications are often their credentials.

2) This implies that readers and writers are somehow different people. But many readers write and many (should be all) writers read. We are consumers and producers at the same time. And I as a consumer am unhappy when I read a book that's a total piece of crap. (On the other hand, I'm less likely to review that book here because it's not worth it - I'd rather review books that are at least mixed.) What if I write YA but review adult, write mystery but review romance, write fiction but review non-fiction, write technical papers but review Jonathan Franzen? I mean, this is a fairly ridiculous argument.

I review books on this blog for two interdependent reasons: 1) I like to analyze literature and writing the analysis down forces me to solidify my thoughts, the exercise of which I think helps improve my writing, and 2) reviews can foster discussion...not just about reading, but about writing. I have, in the past, elevated comments that disagree with my assessment of books to make my readers aware of them (Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned comes to mind) because the thing I most want to do with my reviews is learn (not preach, instruct, bash or anything else).

If I review in other venues (where my name is attached), there is a third and selfish reason, which is to get my name out there. This requires that I think not only about my opinions about the work but about how they, and I, will be perceived. So those reviews are certainly prepared more carefully than my reviews here, though they may not be any less critical.

Now, all this being said, I think if I were Roni from Fiction Groupie - with a fiction publishing deal in hand, lots of followers (approximately 50x the Lt.), a blog focused on writers - I would do just what she does because, as she says, the cost-benefit is pretty clear. (I might make an exception if the New York Times asked me to review, vs. on my own blog.) Her advice seems designed simply to help novice writers avoid coming across as unprofessional by reminding them that publishing is a small world and the internet is indeed public. I thought it was funny to watch the discussion because she was arguing a pretty sensible middle ground, but the commenters kept expanding her meaning to extremes, and she kept reminding them what she'd actually said.

Anyway, a pretty thought-provoking discussion....

The Question On My Mind And The Rapture

2011-05-23T10:00:00.001+01:00

The question on my mind this past week was whether it didn't seem like such a bad week to me because: a) I had just returned from vacation and actually felt like a human being, or b) it really wasn't such a bad week. I think a little of both. Cautiously, I predict the end of the ridiculous times at work for a while, which means a little more of the Lt. in your lives as we move towards the summer. Assuming, of course, that I can think of what to post about.

I can tell you that last year, when I returned from vacation, the peace lasted until around noon at my first day back at work, because by that point in my time at that place there was a person the mere sight of whom made my blood boil and made me want to grab the nearest hard object and start swinging it him. So as soon as I saw him, upon my return, all bets were off. There are aggravations in my current job, too, but nothing even within an order of magnitude of that in its acuteness. My peace lasted the first three days or so.

And this time, we won't wait a whole other year before taking another vacation.

On another note, it goes without saying, but the Lt. was not raptured on Saturday. I'm an atheist, but I didn't entirely dismiss the possibility, because truly: who can know the mind of God? I thought of a short story idea, though: God announces the rapture to a select few individuals and of course nobody believes them. The day comes and goes and nobody is raptured. It turns out this is because nobody can meet God's high standards - basically, we're all fucked. Even the "select few individuals," are just vessels for spreading God's word and not themselves raptured.

Alternatively, God announces on the airwaves, on Twitter, on everywhere that the Rapture is coming Saturday. He orders everyone to strip naked and prostrate themselves in the middle of a big field. The time comes and Independent Day-esque spaceships descend from the sky on a helpless, naked, prostrated humanity. Ha, ha! say our new alien overlords. Fooled you superstitious humans!

(There is, indeed, a good reason why I do not write short stories.)

WTF?

Jeez, Lt., what is the connection between these two threads in your post? you ask, assuming you are one of the stalwart few still reading. Oh, it's tenuous. Only that I feel like if God were to redesign Heaven, he might want to look at the resort my wife and I stayed at last week for some ideas. Because that's what Heaven is, right? Like a big vacation that doesn't end.

Have you ever seen those illustrations of Heaven from Jehovah's Witness literature? It's like everyone got dressed up and headed to a zoo without cages for a big picnic. Go ahead and tell me those are just symbolic representations, but I'm sorry, I don't believe it. I mean, there's no swim-up bar!

Humans: we really are such silly creatures.

Running Tally Of E-Readers?...And A Note On Philip Roth

2011-05-19T14:21:00.005+01:00

Having said in my guest post on Sierra's blog that I don't read much about e-books because they just ain't my problem yet (which is true), I have to admit to the one exception to my lack of interest: my real life experiences.

To the point: as many of you know from my frequent bitching and moaning, Lt. commutes by Metro each day, and for months I've had the wacky idea of keeping a totally non-scientific tally of how many paper books vs. e-books I see people reading on the train.

What would this tell me? Probably nothing. Why don't I do it? Well, see answer to first question...plus, it'd be a lot of work because I'd need to think about it and write down what I saw each day, rather than just totally zoning out or fantasizing about pounding the shit out of my fellow passengers or whatever it is I might otherwise do. (Which does not include reading because, as I've mentioned before, the Lt. gets incredibly motion-sick if he tries to read, especially on a transportation system as herky-jerky as the Metro.) But the idea doesn't go away.

Of course I would have to exclude Bibles or overtly religious stuff, and I see people reading that stuff with surprising regularity. Perhaps people hope that such material will give them the spiritual and moral strength necessary to survive their crappy commute - I don't blame them. Might also have to exclude the folks who read management textbooks and other school type stuff on the train, though I admire their work ethic.

I also thought about this while we were on vacation last week. As you might expect, most people out by the pool or on the beach read paper books (and man, what a bountiful cornucopia of shitty authors were represented!), but I did see a couple of e-readers. (However, I probably saw more laptops than e-readers, and not more than three of each. And yes, my wife and I rolled our eyes at the people with laptops, until I considered perhaps they were using the time to write a novel. Then I made a nasty face at them. And no, I didn't see anyone stupid enough to have their laptop with them on the beach. But I saw one at the pool and a few inside the hotel.)

On another note, the only things I'll say about Philip Roth and the Man Booker: I like Roth but I'm by no means a huge fan. Three judges was a bad idea - there should have been a panel. The judge who resigned had what I consider a clear conflict of interest and never should have been asked to judge a field that included Roth. I know publishing is a relatively small world, but the people who set this thing up should have taken more care. Here's a piece on the situation I more or less agree with, though again - I think the real problem here is that the people who chose the judges did a poor job in only selecting three people, and not vetting for conflicts of interest.

The Lt.'s First Guest Post Ev-AH!

2011-05-16T10:00:00.003+01:00

I am (very reluctantly) back from vay-cay after much sun and much cerveza and many hours spent floating in the tropical sea. But luckily I do not have to write a post because Sierra Godrey was nice enough to ask me to write a guest post, which appears today on her blog. It's about how I've tried to make writing a bigger part of my life than just trying to get an agent for my novel, and how that's helped me be persistent.

Go check it out (and on the off chance you don't already follow Sierra - she's a must if you're a writer)!

Throwback Week #4: Random

2011-05-13T10:00:00.001+01:00

Some of you may remember this one, but it still makes me chuckle, especially the part about Jonathan Coulton and Haman.

Throwback Week #3: Must See TV

2011-05-12T10:00:00.004+01:00

I hate the asininity of most TV, and I hate the way some people need background noise all the frigging time. Read about the fun I had one morning at my car dealership as a result.

Throwback Week #2: Breaking Down My iTunes Music

2011-05-11T10:00:00.003+01:00

If you are me, you feel helplessly drawn to trying to do a quantitative analysis of just about everything in your life. Check out my attempt to extract meaningful information of some kind from my iTunes music.

Throwback Week #1: The World Without Us

2011-05-10T10:00:00.001+01:00

From my very early days as a blogger in 2007, check out my review of Alan Weisman's intriguing The World Without Us.

Throwback Week

2011-05-09T10:00:00.001+01:00

I'm on vacation this week, which I desperately need, but I thought I would use the opportunity of my absence to highlight some older posts. My posting lately hasn't been very good, but I've still got around 350 posts in my blog history - if 80s sitcoms can do it, the occasional rerun won't kill me, either.

So look for a "new" old post here each day this week, and then next Monday look for the Lt.'s first guest blog post ever!

Have a great week.

Thoughts On Osama

2011-05-05T10:00:00.002+01:00

They got the motherfucking bastard, and that makes me happy for reasons including: 1) as many of you know, I'm from New York, and events ten years ago struck quite close to home; 2) it shows the world that we don't give up and we don't forget.

I count myself among those who would have liked to have seen pictures of the body, not just to dispel the inevitable conspiracy theories, but also just for personal edification.

When I posted a couple of months ago about media coverage as a reward, some of you seemed puzzled. But now here is a great example. The American media establishment is salivating to get at those Navy SEALs. Imagine those guys on the "Today Show" answering questions like, "How did it feel to know you had a chance to kill Osama bin Laden?" Imagine them "writing" a book like A Promise To Keep or Faith Of My Fathers or (God help us all) Highest Duty dressing up their entire lives to make them a prelude to those 40 minutes. Next thing you know they're on Dancing With the Stars or locked in a cave with one of the Palin kids for our entertainment or remaking a Lady Gaga song. Seriously, this is what we've come to.

But that will never happen. We will never know who they are. We will be deprived of our hero cycle. And, if you think about it, isn't that more inspiring? Hear me out. Not only do many of us do heroic, and unacknowledged, work at our jobs (every time you watch the news about DC you are seeing the fruits of the labor of thousands of staffers whose names you will never know, heroic or not), but just raising our families and being good spouses, children, siblings, friends is the most important stuff most of us will ever do, and it goes all but unacknowledged by society. We have to seek out our satisfaction elsewhere, not from the fame machine.

Those of us who write, at some level, all want some recognition for our work - be it huge commercial success or just a small but devoted following. Our art is one thing. The rest of life is another.

I'm proud of those SEALs. I'm proud of our military in general. I'm proud we never gave up.

But to make them household names, parade them on talk shows, let them sit where the cameras can see them at the Superbowl and the State of the Union: do they need that? Do we?

They did their jobs, and the satisfaction for them is surely in that. Let's all of us seek more of our satisfaction in the same place.

As for Osama bin Laden, I can't help but think his quick death was a mercy for him. Many innocent, hardworking folks who never hurt a fly will suffer a lot more - in hospital beds, on the battlefield - before their own ends. But I'm glad we got him. And glad we never gave up. And I'm glad we'll never know who the heros are. Because they are those men, all the SEALS, all our military, and - to the extent we live up to it - all of us.

Reading Like A Writer

2011-04-27T10:00:00.001+01:00

Yes, it's the title of a Francine Prose book I read a while back (and made a note to read the books in her list at the back and never quite followed through), but the question is...

...Is it just me, or do others also find that "reading like a writer" is a lot easier when the writing is lousy? By "reading like a writer," I mean paying attention to what the author is doing in the broadest possible terms - language, characterization, pacing, setting theme, and so on - instead of being a passive reader. (I think calling readers "passive" is an unfair characterization most of the time, but I use the word to equate it to watching TV or a movie rather than being actively analytical.)

See, when the writing is good - very good - I find myself (despite my best efforts) reading too much like a reader: getting sucked into and carried away by the story, not paying as much attention as I should to all the things the author is doing right. This is somewhat of a guilty admission, but Stephen King does this to me almost every time. His dialogue is amazing (usually), his characterization masterly (most of the time), his story premises simple (often unoriginal, even) but effective, and his ability to ratchet up the tension and raise the stakes (and keep them raised) unparalleled.

I also failed to very effectively read like a writer when I read Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes (one of the best two novels I've read this year, along with Empire Falls). I noticed, fleetingly, how quickly he ratcheted up the tension, how true his dialogue was, his descriptions of battle, his ability to tell us just enough about the large cast of characters so that we didn't get any more confused than he intended. But I kept getting too sucked into the story to worry about it all that much.

I've gotten better at this over time, with more experience writing and more self-consciousness (I mean this in a good way) about what makes my own writing stronger or weaker. But I still find it hard to enjoy a story and read like a writer simultaneously, especially when I'm actually inclined to enjoy the story. (Give me some shitty piece of trash to read and I can see all the problems. It's even easier for me to see the good things an author does in a book I don't really like or am not all that into.) Now, you might say that is what rereading is for, and to that I answer: re-what? I'm lucky I have time to read it once!

One last thought: if you've ever tried mindfulness meditation, you know you are supposed to observe yourself meditating, notice when you have thoughts, acknowledge them, and bring yourself back to mindfulness (concentrating on the breath or whatever). In a way, you're supposed to step outside yourself and watch yourself just be. (Which, to me, has always begged the question of whether you're supposed to watch yourself watching yourself just be, and so on. The zen masters would not be pleased that the Lt. is such a fucking wiseass.) But reading like a writer is kind of like mindfulness meditation in that you need to observe not only what the author is doing, but also yourself as a reader. It also requires you to step outside yourself, outside your interaction with the story...and that's a toughie when the story is good!

And that's about as close to a deep thought as I'm going to get today.

Radio Silence

2011-04-25T10:00:00.001+01:00

It's now been just about three months since my experience at the Writer's Digest Conference in New York. After the conference, I had some back-and-forth with agents but then abruptly all that activity stopped. I still have two partials and two fulls pending, but I've not heard a peep from anyone since the end of February. I guess at this point I can nudge, at least on the partials, but I'm not feeling especially inclined to do so, figuring the only responses would be more silence or rejections. I like being able to hold out some hope.

I'm in an interesting place with respect to writing right now. I've got this first novel out there, but I'm starting to think more and more that it's nearly played out in its current form, that more cold querying is a waste of time. The novel is good, and publishable: it's not that I'm slowly getting the sense that it's just not up to snuff, or have lost confidence in it as a work of literature. But I am getting the sense that I gave it a good run and people are not going to bite right now. More work on it might help, but simply working on it for the sake of working on it and then wondering if everyone will feel differently is probably not the way to go.

I have a second novel that I have just come back to after putting it aside after I finished the first draft a few months ago. I am revising it but finding, for a couple of reasons that mostly have to do with the story and the genre, that not much needs to change, that it will be ready for prime time in the not-too-distant future. Once I'm ready, it will be interesting to contrast my experiences with this novel and the first one.

And I have a third project on which I am slowly - too slowly, but what can I do? - beginning to set down ideas. I feel like the lessons learned, especially from the first one, will pay dividends here.

And yet with all these projects - a place I've worked for nearly four years to get to, as opposed to having just one project and just one focus - there's been so little activity lately that I feel like things are stagnating and it would be so easy to just...well, do nothing and give up. Let me immediately say I have no intention of doing that, despite how difficult it has been for me to get things of my own done lately (including blogging). But it's so odd that here I finally am with multiple projects and instead of making me more gung-ho, it's just been tricky to figure out how to allocate my already too sparse time.

I know there is nothing to do about it but continue plugging away. I tell myself that I'm doing this for me and if I don't want to write anymore that is my choice. Put it aside and life simplifies, at least a bit. But I rebel at the thought. Sometimes, when you do something for yourself, the rest of life intervenes. That's no excuse to give up. Like I said, there's no other choice but to keep moving it all forward - one hour or 30 minutes or whatever I can scavenge - at a time.

On Room by Emma Donoghue

2011-04-18T10:00:00.001+01:00

I try not to reveal too much in my book reviews, but interestingly it is impossible to review this book without giving away some of the essential elements of the plot. So, be warned, spoilers follow.

This book got an awful lot of hype last year. My wife read it and seemed strangely unaffected (not negative on it, just unaffected) but - in my quest to understand what makes good, or at least bestselling, contemporary fiction - I thought I would give it a shot. The book does two things very well: 1) it sets up a compelling situation - a woman and her young son held captive in an 11 by 11 space - the son never having even seen the outside world; and 2) it provides a unique narrator in the five year old son. These two elements together, and both are done quite well, make the story irresistible.

And yet I find myself, like my wife, unaffected...which I attribute to several elements of the way the story is executed.

First and foremost is the pacing, and this is why I say I cannot review the book without spoilers. I expected the very end of the book to be their big break for freedom. Instead, it comes less than halfway into the book. "Man, this just can't work," Lt. Reader thought to himself, "Not only is the plan wholly implausible, but it's way too early in the book, and [in the style of Stephen King] boy is the shit going to hit the fan when this fails."

Unfortunately, the plan succeeds. And I say "unfortunately" because not only is the plan implausible to unbelievability, but it makes the rest of the book about what happens after they escape. Sure, there are interesting parts of becoming reacclimated (or, for the narrator, acclimated) to the world. But it's not that interesting, and it also suffers from some implausibilities.

"english basement" for rent...real cheap...utilities included...LOL

Such as: nobody thinks socializing the narrator with kids his own age is of any importance, but his grandma somehow thinks he should effortlessly make fast friends with some random kids at a playground. Such as: when his uncle comes to bring him to the natural history museum, no one foresees "just stopping by the mall on the way to pick up a gift" will be problematic. Such as: the mother's suicide attempt in the wake of a disastrous talk show interview, which ruins - for little purpose - her otherwise admirable character.

The man who abducted them - Old Nick to our narrator (the allusion to Satan being a bit too obvious here for my taste) - is but an afterthought. Something compelled this sicko to build a special facility in his backyard and abduct a woman for his personal perversion. Yet when Old Nick and Ma interact, it's more like "The Lockhorns" than Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling (or even the two characters from Misery). Who'd have thunk our antagonist would so quickly go from living out his sick fantasy to squabbling with his abductee about the cost of groceries and the condition of the floor tiles? Who'd have thunk his raping her would occur missionary style, with the lights off, after she bleakly asks him whether he's coming to bed? Who'd have thunk he'd allow her to have his kid? I feel like the author took no care to build this character, and the story suffered as the result.

It's hard not to think that this story was inspired at least in part by this sick case...but Room fails to be as disturbing as reality. Our narrator is compelling but ultimately we know he's going to be fine: he's going through the same acclimation to the world that all of us do - just a little later and more suddenly. And we lose interest in Ma who, after all her endurance and her strength and her developing a a vivid world for her son, gives up as soon as some stupid TV lady questions her motives.

One last world: I did not understand why in a book that is otherwise fairly plainly written the language around breast-feeding was so veiled. I picked up on what they were talking about right away, but "some from the left" seems unnecessarily obscure. My wife thought maybe because there is some kind of shame associated with it. But really? These two lived in a small room and had to take a crap in front of each other. If they can talk about poo, they can talk about milk.

Nice To Meet You

2011-04-04T10:00:00.001+01:00

Hi. My name's Lt. Cccyxx, and once upon a time, I was a blogger. Then life intervened. The irony is that things being so busy means there's a lot I could write about if I had the time. It's also true that playing in my mind is the fact that half my readership is about to give birth and will probably not be reading blogs as regularly for a while. But that's a silly reason not to blog since I write this blog for me. Indeed, this blog would look quite different were it set up to market something (me? my book? methamphetamine?). I was going to write a post about that, in fact, but...um, yeah.

So, you may be wondering, what in the f is going on with you, Lt.? First and foremost, work has become - there's no other word - overwhelming. Out of balance. Unsustainable. I'm guessing this is just an especially busy time. Some of the folks on our staff seem to really thrive on this - they wouldn't have it any other way. But for me, and for at least one or two others, it's not a good thing. Seriously, if I gave up my weekends and evenings and just worked seven 10 or 11 hour days, I still wouldn't get everything done. The unclimbable mountain of work is enough to make me want to throw my arms up in despair. But I think what really needs to happen is simply a reequilibration of expectations...and, I'll admit it, I'm mostly talking about my own. But work and other things have been impinging, fairly significantly, on my evenings and weekends. And since that is obviously my prime time for writing and blogging...well, as the characters in Matterhorn (a fine book I am about 2/3 of the way through) might say: "There it is."

It has also become abundantly clear to me what the downside of being salaried and exempt is. If you lose a Sunday to work and meetings, you are simply not compensated for it (with either time or money) and there's no way to get it back. Now, I suppose the proper attitude towards this is to say that this extra time is already built into my compensation. I just have trouble wrapping my mind around that, especially in an environment where we make a good deal of our own work.

I'm not complaining about my job, and busy times come up everywhere, but I wasn't a happy camper for good chunks of the past couple of weeks (less about the hours, honestly, though I was working long days, and more about the intensity and the impossible deadlines batted around with no one actually believing they could be met, but me taking them seriously and getting upset), and that's been unusual for me in this position. I just know that sometimes I need a break, and the break can't be a day and a half - sometimes it just needs to be a longer break. And when I can't get it, I get cranky.

So, all this is to say, blogging will now resume, but I can't promise three times a week in the near future (and who are the ad wizards who came up with that three times a week thing anyway? I don't know what I was thinking).

I'll just do what I can.

Apologies

2011-03-31T13:53:00.003+01:00

I am unbelievably slammed. You'll hear from me again when I can come up for air. Hopefully this will be soon.

Taking Pride In My Whiteness

2011-03-21T10:00:00.002Z

I bet that title caught your attention, didn't it? It's not what you think.

This weekend was spring-like and sunny, and we had some company come into town. So, as we often do when people visit, we spent time walking on the National Mall. It was just a few hours in the sun, but at the end of the day, looking at the mirror, I found a reddish Lt. staring back at me.

I've not always been so sensitive to the sun, but combine living in D.C. (not exactly a tropical paradise) with an intense day job in an office (long hours) with it being winter (short days) with us not having taken a vacation to somewhere warm and sunny since...yeah, and the result is a skin tone two shades south of corpse.

I used to hate and even ridicule those poor pale office drones I'd see around town, but a strange transformation has been occurring. I went to a conference downtown about a month ago and as I approached the hotel some extremely pale guy in a suit was walking in the opposite direction.

I started in my usual internal monologue, "Geez, check out that guy! He probably hasn't seen the sun since 1986! What a los..."

Dude needs to get out. (Dude also needs a shave and a haircut...and less lipstick)

Then I looked down at my hands and realized they were about the same shade. I reconsidered. That guy: I bet he works hard, works long, does important stuff, is dedicated to his job. Yeah. I bet he's a go-getter, a do-gooder, a serious workhorse powerhouse. Totes.

And I found myself wanting to raise a fist. "Hail, brother! We, of the poorly-lit offices where we toil 50+ hours a week. Our complexions are a badge of honor. I salute you!"

Is Media Coverage A Reward?

2011-03-18T10:00:00.003Z

My post on Monday showed data supporting the hypothesis that any media coverage is good coverage if you are a relative unknown and looking to make a name. I've been thinking about this a bit more, and once again Amy Chua comes to mind. I've given my own perspective on her book before, but the media storm around it is a great example of misleading (whether intentional or not) marketing and (mostly) negative attention doing wonders for a book's saleability.

Let's move beyond books to consider this in a wider context. I'm thinking specifically of the Facebook status meme going around comparing the ridiculous coverage of Charlie Sheen's meltdown (I have to admit I have not been following this and am not all that interested - I couldn't name a single movie or TV show with Sheen, though if you reminded me of some I might know them) to lack of coverage of some of the soldiers who recently lost their lives in Afghanistan. The tone was outrage that the media should focus on a celebrity's debauchery while ignoring the brave young men and women who are fighting and dying for us. It is a noble sentiment, and one I partially - but only partially - agree with.

This gets to the title of my post. Is attention from the media (and, by proxy, from society as a whole) a reward? And is the injustice here that people who don't "deserve" the attention (Sheen) are getting it (because it sells) while those who do (our soldiers) are not (because who wants to read about regular folks getting killed?).

In my considering this, btw, I'm leaving aside cases where the media hound the hell out of people, or their families, who are accused of wrong-doing, since there's attention people would certainly rather not have.

The degree to which I share the outrage is the degree to which the focus on Sheen (and Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, etc, ad nauseum) allows the public to stick their heads in the sand, ignore or remain ignorant of real problems, or allows the media to compress coverage of those other issues into so narrow a space/timeslot that they cannot possibly be seriously considered.

I used to subscribe to a magazine called World Press Review, which would compile stories from newspapers all over the world into a monthly digest, and the difference between what was being covered in the U.S. press versus most of the rest of the world was remarkable.

Of course there is a whole lot more than Charlie Sheen standing between the media and serious, sober examination of the issues. One can spend the whole day watching cable news discussions of politics and current events without seeing anything that doesn't make the coverage of celebrity gossip seem harmless (or at least intelligent) by comparison.

But beyond this basic function of bringing awareness to issues, I have to admit the argument loses me. Why should we know biographical details of the soldiers who die in Afghanistan (beyond what it takes to hammer home that this is a real war, with real Americans being killed)? More to the point, why do soldiers "deserve" stories about them when they're dead, but not while they're alive and serving? Are news stories a "reward" for sacrificing their lives? (If so, what a pathetic recompense.)

If you read periodicals like The New Republic, you'll find a lot of stories about political figures that also give you details of their pasts, their personalities, their hobbies and interests, even their families. I can guarantee you that those political figures treat the press with wariness. It's a mixed bag, capable of either good or harm, and must be steered toward the advantage of the figure in question. This is much more like Charlie Sheen than like a private who died thanks to a roadside bomb.

The answer to the question seems to be that media coverage can be a reward, but only for those who can use it to their advantage. For our troops, the media should have an obligation to keep the American public informed about the war (even if much of the public has no appetite for it), but to compare Sheen to our soldiers? It's just not fair to the soldiers, and sets up the false premise that media attention is always good, and a reward.

The Karma Of Lost And Found

2011-03-16T10:00:00.002Z

I pride myself on being a modern, rational person. I'm not religious or spiritual (I don't look down on and actually envy a bit people who are, but I am not and it's just not something I can will myself to be) and definitely not superstitious. I don't throw salt over my shoulder, knock on wood, or freak out if a cat crosses my path or I walk under a ladder. I have few rituals in my life that explicitly deal with luck (though I have noted a tendency toward OCD on occasions, especially when I'm stressed, it's really not the same thing).

There is an older woman who lives down the block from us, and many mornings on my way to work I will see her walking to church. Sometimes she walks past me and says hello, but most of the time she will randomly veer off the sidewalk, walk around cars, and essentially pick a strange and circuitous route like a child might do. My wife and I sometimes joke that she is compelled to do these weird things to ward off the return of Cthulhu, but the truth is that she's probably just a little nutty, in addition to very superstitious.

Despite liking to think of myself as completely materialist and rational, I find that I possess a very strong internal sense of karma when it comes to finding and losing things.

It's not just a sense of trying to be an honest person, though there's an element of that as well. It really seems more about justice, about golden-ruleness, about wanting to do everything I can to increase the likelihood that if I lose something important - say, my SmartTrip card (I found one in my building last week, and if you're not familiar with D.C. you may not know that those things can have hundreds of dollars on them, plus be monthly rechargeable) or my glasses (my wife found a pair last week) or my driver's license (I've both lost mine and found others' on more than one occasion) - that people will take the same pains to get it back to me, or at least not steal it for themselves.

If I found $50,000 in cash in a paper bag, would I turn it in? I really don't know but I'd be strongly tempted to keep it, and if I did, karma would not be among my concerns. If I found a wad of bills totaling $1,000 on the street, I'd probably keep it and chalk it up to plain old (absolutely fucking awesome) luck. But if I found a wallet with some kind of ID that had $1,000 in it, I would absolutely return it - probably by trying to get in touch directly with the person who lost it - and I wouldn't be one of those people to first take the money out and then say I'd found it empty. Nor would I expect a reward.

What it really comes down to - for me, at least - is a social compact, but one that - I notice - has me as a big part of it. I don't actually believe that were I to keep the SmartTrip card, throw out the glasses, or even strip the money out of that wallet - that it would bring bad things on me or even increase the likelihood of my losing something in the future.

That would imply some supernatural external power directing things and keeping score. And yet I can't deny that "doing the right thing" in those instances makes me feel better, even if I never know whether the person who lost the card or the glasses comes to claim them. Intuitively, even if not rationally, I embrace the concept of karma.

Bad Reviews And Book Sales

2011-03-14T10:00:00.001Z

Most of you - like me - probably don't have to worry about this just yet, but have you ever wondered how good and bad reviews affect book sales? Certainly, recent flare-ups over issues like gender equity on the pages of the New York Times book section contain an implicit assumption that more attention to books by reviewers is a good thing, regardless of whether the reviews are good or bad.

(As a brief digression, it is not difficult to imagine that if complete gender parity, or at least proportionate representation, were achieved on the review pages, the next step would be to check how good vs. bad reviews varied by gender. I find one has to be very careful going down this path. There's a line to be walked between pointing out important discriminatory trends and simply harping on things that may be random, variable, or simply not significant - statistically or otherwise.)

I found a mention of this study, which looks at the effects of good and bad reviews in the New York Times on book sales. The authors did not look at gender, but perhaps unsurprisingly they found that the most important factor was not whether the review was good or bad, but instead how well-known the author was (using previous books published as a proxy).

If you're wondering, as I did, whether you can really attribute sales fluctuations to reviews, check out the study because they've got a good discussion of this issue and others involved in trying to be careful about understanding the relationship between reviews and sales.

The study authors found that positive reviews always increased sales, quite a bit (around 30% to 50%). But there was a distinction in negative reviews: these decreased the sales of well-known authors' books (by around 15%) but actually increased sales of lesser-known authors' books (by 45%)!

The take-home message for new writers: pull out all the stops to get your book reviewed by the New York Times. Even if they trash you, it gets your name out there and more people will buy your book! Much rather they trash you than ignore you. (At later stages of your writing career, it may be better to be ignored.)

How Can We Develop Good Characters If We Don't Understand Ourselves?

2011-03-07T10:00:00.001Z

I'm traveling for work today and don't have much time to post, but I wanted to bring to your attention this incredible article I saw in Slate about brain injuries and behavior.

It makes for some disturbing reading, and by the end you'll see it raises questions about assumptions in the way we apply the law, as well as about more abstract philosophical topics (such as free will) that nonetheless can affect the way we see ourselves, others, and the world. We could talk about the many subjects it raises for days, from many different angles. But because it really gets to the core of what makes us who we are, I thought it also raised some interesting - if less societally pressing - questions about literature and characters.

What if you had a character like one of the injured people in the article? Someone whose behavior changed in undesirable ways as the result of a trauma? Someone for whom the changed behaviors were not a choice, not a failure of willpower, not even tied to emotional turmoil that others couldn't clearly see...but linked up with a physical injury to the brain?

How would you convey what was going on in that person's head? Do you think readers could develop sympathy for such characters even if they engaged in totally antisocial behaviors? If so, would the characters deserve it? (I have vague memories of reading about murderers in thrillers and horror stories who are being tormented by a brain tumor...but you're still not supposed to feel bad for them. And the mentally-ill serial killer is a cliche.)

We all know what works in creating good characters - not that it's easy to do (not at all) - but at least as readers we know it when we see it. But what if our impressions are based on flaws, founded on larger flaws in the way we see ourselves? Then would a true character perhaps be more fickle, more robotic, more the slave of physiological urges (and physical traumas) than a good character?

So much to say, so little time right now. I leave it to you. Of course it's easier simply to ignore all this. But play with it in your mind for a second, and let me know what you think.

Gratuitious Alliteration Pisses Me Off

2011-03-04T10:00:00.006Z

Let's wrap up "whine about words" week with why alliteration can be so wretched.

Oh, shit.

It's not literary alliteration that irks me so much as the way alliteration passes for cleverness in real life, even when it requires sacrificing an enormous amount of precision. Yes, I know, no one ever got hurt because of Taco Tuesday, and I like Happy Hour as much as the next guy (well, more), but much alliteration is simply egregious. (And I know the title of my last post was alliterative. But it was also precise, and "unmatched synonyms" or "improper synonyms" wouldn't have been any better.)

Have any of you ever been invited to a "chat and chew"? Beyond being two things that really shouldn't go together, and beyond my personal loathing for the word "chat," I can think of very little that sounds as unappetizing (it conjures an image of cows in a pasture for some reason)...except perhaps for a "brown bag," which I guess is supposed to conjure images of school lunches, but of course school lunches are not what pops into my mind when I'm hungry. If I ever swallow poison and need to promptly vomit it up, however, that'd be a fairly good thing to think about. (And while "potluck" is not alliterative, it's perhaps one of the only work/social get-together ideas worse than the "chat and chew" and the "brown bag," and I don't especially understand what the "luck" part is supposed to be, either.)

Some people seem to think that any seminar, lecture, or discussion held between the hours of 11 and 2 is automatically a "brown bag." I cannot think of the last time I saw a brown bag in a room where a "brown bag" was going on, even if the whole crowd brought their lunch. And I tend to not like to bring mine to things like that. My attitude is: listen, don't imply I should be bringing my lunch to shit, man. I'll eat when I want, and most likely alone in my office afterward at my own leisure, thank you very much.

Journalistic alliteration is genuinely clever perhaps 2% of the time, and the rest of the time it drives me crazy, both because it sacrifices precision and because it is intended to be so damn cutesy. (You notice serious stories are hardly ever treated to alliteration: ever hear anyone call September 11 "terrorist Tuesday," or refer to "hijackers' hijinks"?)

What irks me is when you know there are better words, but the journalist chose the one he or she did solely because of the first letter. So the pop star Rihanna is a "Bahamian beauty," Bernie Madoff is a "fraudulent financier," what's going on in Wisconsin is "Madison mayhem," our Hill correspondent brings you "Senate shenanigans" and "House happenings." (I won't even bother with traffic and weather.) Yes, I think it's safe to say that alliteration is often present when newspapers engage in "purple prose" and some of those words hardly ever get used unless paired in some kind of ridiculous alliteration. (I personally find it impossible to take the word "shenanigans" seriously, regardless of how it is used.)

Oh, fuck.

Even when not alliterative, this obligation to be cutesy can backfire, leading to nonsense. My favorite example that makes me want to throw things comes from the Express, the Monday through Friday D.C. newspaper whose prime purpose seems to be serving as floor covering on most Metro cars. Each day they feature the so-called "Blog Log" with short quotes from various blogs. But since "blog" is short for "weblog," "blog log" is on par with "ATM machine" in terms of needless redundancy.

There are lots of reasons I'm glad I never pursued journalism as a career, but this cutesy alliteration shit would make me hang my head and shrug in shame over such lousy language.

Crap.

Sloppy Synonyms

2011-03-02T10:00:00.005Z

Last time I questioned whether "scrumptious" and "delectable" were really synonyms. I think the jury is still out. Regardless, there are other examples of words that are used as synonyms when they most definitely are not. And the worst culprit with these, I have found, are journalists, though misuse is quite common.

Here's an example: is the nation currently facing a "fiscal" crisis or a "financial" crisis? Or both? They are not the same, but you'd never know it from reading the newspaper, where the words are used synonymously. (The way policymakers talk about it doesn't help.)

There are many money words that are frequently used as sloppy synonyms, and with no background in economics I've been guilty of this myself on occasion (though at least I try). For example, what's the difference between "equity" and "capital"? (Not so straightforward, it seems, though they are not the same.)

Here's another: "science" and "engineering." Not the same, news reporters of the world. Scientists are not engineers and engineers are not scientists. I won't even get into "accuracy" vs. "precision."

And also, if I'm a scientist and I go through peer-review to publish the results of my research, I have not published an "article" in a "magazine." I have published a "paper" in a "journal." The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is not a magazine like Vogue or Maxim. And there's a big difference between "A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again" or - God forbid - "Ten ways to drive your guy wild in bed" and "Metabolic cross-talk allows labeling of O-linked β-N-acetylglucosamine-modified proteins via the N-acetylgalactosamine salvage pathway."

But here are the two that I hate hate hate cannot abide!

1) Prison and jail. No, no, no, people are not sentenced to 30 years in jail. Nor, for that matter, three months in prison. If you know the difference between a misdemeanor and a felony (and no one uses those synonymously), then you know the difference between a prison and a jail.

2) Monkey and ape. This one drives me, pardon the phrase, apeshit. Humans are apes, as are chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas, and gibbons. But apes are not monkeys and monkeys are not apes. Among a host of other differences, monkeys have tails.

Look, I don't walk around expecting people to know their prosimians (even though they are primates too), or to be able to elucidate the differences between perissodactyls and artiodactyls (or even sarcopterygians and actinopterygians), but considering how close to us on the evolutionary tree monkeys and other apes are, I think it is reasonable to feel the strong urge to go bananas (yes, that is deliberate) when people say that chimps are monkeys. You know a whale isn't a fish, you ought to know a baboon isn't an ape.

And when creationists say "I didn't descend from any monkey" I want to laugh and say "you are absolutely right!"

Then again, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

More Fun With Misused Words

2011-02-28T10:00:00.004Z

Belimperia commented on my post last week about words that annoyed me that she hates when people use "enjoy" in advertising, as in "enjoy 20 percent off." That reminded me of another pet peeve of mine, which is "treat yourself."

Two things about it bother me: 1) you are yourself, so how can you treat yourself? and 2) what exactly constitutes "treat"? Have I "treated myself" to not starving or not walking in front of a Mack truck? If I'm hungry and I eat a can of beans, am I treating myself? What if I eat lobster tails? Yeah, I know I'm kind of overthinking it, but it bugs me.

Thinking about "enjoy" and "treat" got me thinking about the oddity of using food words to describe things not food. The worst culprit of my entire life in this regard was my elementary school principal.

I talked about her in my recent post about the Challenger explosion, so you may remember: jet black hair despite being about 90 years old, radio antenna tower firmly ensconced in rectal cavity. One of my high school teachers once confided in me that he thought it quite likely that - despite her advanced age - she was "untouched by human hands." (So was I, at the time, but I was 16.)

She liked the word "glorious." She liked "disgraceful" even more, as it was the word that she reserved for the worst of behaviors, and the worst of behaviors seemed to crop up quite frequently at my school. But she also liked using food words for not food.

A couple of times a year, the whole elementary school would pile into the auditorium for some kind of show by people from outside the school - troops of grownups who performed one thing or another. Who were these people, and where did they come from, and why were they performing for our school? I cannot remember the subject matter of any of these shows or anything about them, though I suspect they were propaganda rather than entertainment. Of course, anything that broke up the otherwise stultifying routine of elementary school was welcome, and propaganda was par for the course, so I wasn't going to complain.

(At least in middle and high school they had us running around between classrooms all day at the mercy of bells, preparing us well for lives on the factory floor or in prison...or perhaps on Capitol Hill.)

What I do remember about the shows is that the principal would always get up on stage before they started and tell us the show was "a special treat" and we should "enjoy" it. My mouth always started to water when she talked that way, and I felt like she ought to hand out chocolates.

Which reminds me of more food words that I hate, like "decadent," "scrumptious," and "delectable." These words seem designed solely to appeal to the same demographic that keeps specialty cupcake shops in business. (No offense intended towards those of you in that demographic, by the way, but I'm not one of you.)

One could write a long post dissecting "decadent" as used to describe food, along with its less sophisticated cousin "sinful." Does it hearken back to times of shortage and the sin of gluttony? Why isn't a fatty steak ever described as "decadent"?

As for "scrumptious" and "delectable," I don't hate them so much for themselves as for their use in dressing up plainer words. They are also used together way too much, which raises the question of whether they are synonymous. A little searching reveals ambiguity about this. But if so, they should not be used together, because that's simply redundant. If not, why are they always used as synonyms?

Next time: several examples of words used as synonyms that definitely aren't synonyms and that drive me up the fucking wall.

Amazon Contest Fail And Other News...McLaughlin Group Style

2011-02-25T10:00:00.001Z

Issue #1: I am a bit embarrassed and somewhat flummoxed to have to report that I did not make it past the pitch stage in this year's Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest. I was surprised enough by this outcome that I looked over the list several times before coming to terms with my name not being on it.

The same pitch/query that was earning me partial and full requests from agents in New York was not enough to get me into the top 20% of contest entries. Meanwhile, last year, when my pitch/query was rougher and form rejections seemed to be my only lot in life, I breezed through the contest's pitch stage. (Same book both years, by the way.) So if you ever start to question the huge subjective component of this whole publishing thing, just think about that!

I am mildly disappointed at being cut, of course, but I have too many irons in the fire right now to worry excessively about it. I was mostly hoping to use the contest to garner additional feedback, anyway. Actually winning the contest would be wonderful, of course, but also a hugely idiosyncratic way to enter the publishing world.

Issue #2: Like everyone else in D.C., I am holding my breath over the possibility of a government shutdown starting in about a week, watching as the likelihood continues to grow even as the political maneuvering is nonstop, the concern not over the actual effects of any shutdown but over who will be blamed and face the political consequences.

It has been interesting to hear the perspectives of people who remember the last shutdown in 1995. One thing is for certain: beyond a few well-established parameters, there are a lot of questions and unknowns about the mechanics of shutting down the government.

I wish more citizens could come to D.C. and see things firsthand, especially at a time like this. It's not like high school civics. You wouldn't believe how much of this is make-it-up-as-you-go-along. But as shitty as it is much of the time, that's democracy, warts and all. Elections have consequences: voting is one of the least glamorous and most important rights to exercise. And, in case you're wondering, a shutdown will not affect my job directly or even make things any less busy.

WRONG!!!

Issue #3: My wife and I are trying to organize a much-needed vacation for April, and airline fares are not cooperating! We have some but not a ton of flexibility in our dates, and I think somehow the timing of Easter is making things worse (who travels on Easter? I thought no one since there's no time off for it). It is becoming quite frustrating - I would just like to get this on the calendar already, but I'm not going to pay an arm and a leg and then watch the prices come down.

Issue #4: I would like to strongly recommend to all of you Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude. It is composed of two lengthy essays: one ruminating on his father shortly after his death, the other more focused on the author's own history and his son. I haven't read any of Auster's fiction, but this work is full of deep insights and reflection. Auster's father was clearly a different man than my own, but I could relate so well to aspects of their relationship as he portrayed it, and to his deep desire to understand the man better. He goes digging into family history and finds a gigantic skeleton in the closet that is perhaps explanatory of how his father came to be who he was (no such thing in my family that I could ever find, and I've dug).

Certainly I have to marvel at Auster's observational skill, his gift for creating and teasing apart symbolism, and the way he is able to connect myriad threads into a whole. It's a short book but very much worth reading.

Issue #5: I've got a Donald Maass book on its way to me from Amazon, and will be reading it as I continue mulling over the outlines of my next novel. As useful as these craft exercises can be with a finished manuscript, I would like to have this information fresh in my mind as I flesh out my characters and think about how to write a story that is exciting and fulfilling. Who wants to make their characters more exciting after writing about them for 400 pages (I mean, if you have to you have to, but why not just make them more exciting from the get-go)?

I spent a little time thinking things over this past weekend, which involves me sitting on the couch with a notebook, mostly staring off into space, occasionally jotting something down. It takes every bit as much focus as writing. And I find it's like a choose-your-own-adventure, or some kind of a multidimensional dendrogram. I do not try to micromanage every last aspect of things, but - as I've written before - for me, it's worth it to more thinking time in before the writing starts.

That's all for now. Bye-bye.

Many Words Are Overused, Many Words Are Misused

2011-02-23T10:00:00.004Z

Today I would like to concentrate on two words that are definitely overused, and arguably misused. I will make the case that they are indeed misused, or at least frequently used in a way that pisses me off. (And, I mean really, what's the difference?)

The two words are "explore" and "celebrate." They are used in ways that irritate me not so much in fiction (hardly at all, actually) as in the professional world. I'm not talking about management-speak either: "think outside the box" or "dialogue" as a verb or that sort of thing. These two are examples of words that are far too evocative for the way they are often used, and they are used deliberately to make things sound more dynamic than they are. And that annoys me.

Let me show you what I mean.

First, "explore." This word has an aura of adventure, of the unknown. We all learned "the explorers" in school. (If you're me, you learned them five or six times.) It also has an aura of the physical and the spatial, either literally or metaphorically. One can "explore" the Amazon or Manhattan (though I think the second is stretching it). A surgeon can "explore" your chest cavity (a physical space) or two teenagers in heat can "explore" each other's bodies.

Exploration also sometimes connotes certain kinds of science and discovery (space travel, expeditions to faraway places) but it is very easy to overextend this analogy. In my view at least, one does not open up Excel (or SPSS, for that matter) and "explore" data (one analyzes it). This blog is not an "exploration" of my life or my quest to get published (heck, I don't know what it is). I do not "explore" my Outlook calendar to see what I have to do today (I look at it). The expert panel did not "explore" the future of health care (they talked about, discussed, argued, speculated, and/or pontificated on it). The word is simply too much for those cases.

"Celebrate" is even more annoying, because it conjures festive images: party hats and noisemakers, or at least cake and some booze. A group of people sitting silently in an auditorium in suits at 8:30 in the morning listening to someone talk are not "celebrating" anything.

Indeed, if I have to write a paper for or give a Powerpoint on the occasion, then the occasion is not a "celebration." (If we all go out to the bar afterwards and someone else is paying for drinks, then ask me again.) People seem to want to use "celebrate" to mean "commemorate" or "acknowledge."

Or people will urge us to "celebrate" a concept. "Celebrate diversity" is the most often-used example I can think of. They mean "accept" or, more enthusiastically, "embrace" or "appreciate." They do not mean go buy an ice cream cake and think about the ethnic foods aisle in your supermarket while gobbling away (though I would be happy to do that).

A third but less frequently used example is "weave." And there are probably more. But I won't belabor the point.

Anyone else down with me on this kind of over/"mis"use? What other examples do you hate?

Where I Left Off Last Time

2011-02-21T10:00:00.001Z

Let me clarify and amplify my last post. Travener's comment made me think a little harder. I wasn't so much emphasizing the "why are we here" or the "gosh we're so small and the universe is so big" stuff - because that's fairly trite subject matter for literature at this point unless the author has something new to say - as I was the inward focus vs. outward focus.

As I thought about this (on the arc-trainer on Friday, and this was unusual as I tend never to think while I'm exercising, which is one of the things I love about exercise) I realized I've already tried to do this in my work and evidently I have failed...or at least, encountered the problem of a hard sell.

The protagonist from the novel I've been trying to interest agents in is one of these outward-thinking folks. Indeed, his lack of inward focus eventually comes back to bite him in the ass when events eventually begin hitting close to home and what he'd been thinking about becomes a bit too personal. But he walks around, somewhat detached from the average person's fixations, thinking these big thoughts about life, the universe, and everything...and the whole crux of the conflict is that he is confronted with a nearly insurmountable piece of evidence showing his big thoughts are wrong. And he is absolutely shattered by it.

And then I send this manuscript to agents and they tell me they don't know what's at stake. Like, maybe he oughta fall in love (which he actually does, but not in a cutesy way) or meet a vampire wearing steampunk glasses or something and everything would be better. I mean, if no other person is at stake then how can it be important?

But people live and die for ideas, philosophies, abstractions, religions, beliefs, all the time in the real world. My protagonist has basically the reverse of a crisis in faith. So if nothing's at stake for my protagonist, then when religious folks have crises of faith it is equally meaningless and nothing is at stake.

Or people don't understand why the characters around my protagonist aren't freaking out the way he does. But that's because they are more typical, inward-focused people. Again, it's the whole: who cares if the last elephant in Africa dies when I have TV to watch and a buddy to text? Well, some people truly don't care. But some people take that kind of stuff very seriously. (And most people fall in the middle...I'm not going for a diatribe or morality tale here.) Certainly, as bad as the extinction of African elephants would be, the "stakes" in my book are much, much higher.

See, this is part of the frustration. But as I go longer and longer trying to sell this book I realize what a monumental task it is...not just because it's tough to publish any book these days, but because the subject matter is difficult. And I don't say that to butter myself up, because one of my primary worries from before I wrote a word to today is that the end product would be/is banal.

Now, if I think of tackling these issues again in the new book I'm contemplating (and my wife asked me last night if I was and I said no but - again, now that I think about it some more - maybe at least peripherally and from a very different perspective it is part of the plan, though as ever I need to narrow it down and focus a bit rather than try to fit in everything and the kitchen sink) I realize there probably need to be two sets of stakes. Those philosophical/worldview stakes need to mesh somehow with more concrete stakes that even the TV/texting crowd can at least kind of relate to.

This is not inconsistent, I realize by the way, with advice that one of you provided me on my manuscript. And the situation I am contemplating makes the new novel's protagonist more of an active decision-maker and less of a conduit for shit that happens.

And here my thoughts end abruptly...but I am supposed to be using these weeks to begin thinking about what comes next for me, so if some of it comes out in a couple of posts then so be it.

Is Hell Other People Or Not?

2011-02-18T10:00:00.003Z

There's a spot on my train ride into work where the ground drops out from below the tracks, and for a few hundred feet before the tracks slant back down to meet it, it feels like we are floating through the air with the city sprawled out in front of us.

On the train, dressed for work, surrounded by other commuters, with all that steel and concrete stretching for miles, and the Capitol and the heart of our government plainly visible...when I'm in the right mood, there's no time when I feel more like just a cog in a gigantic machine. I feel like society is emergent, which means simply that the sum is somehow greater than its parts. And I wonder why, why we are doing this, and whether any of us really notice what we're doing or whether we're just too wrapped up in pretending we're never going to die. I don't believe there's any teleology to "civilization", but how can you not wonder how we got here and where we are going?

Then I look back into the train, at my fellow passengers. Their ties, tattoos, books, rap music, assortment of sizes and shapes and races and ages. We might be anywhere on the globe, doing anything, but we're here. And we are each wrapped up in our little worlds, our individual problems. And while my problems seem important to me, I know 90% of their problems would make me laugh (the other 10% would no doubt humble me and make me feel terrible for laughing). But they'd laugh at most of my problems, too.

I wonder why we are so self-absorbed as individuals, as a species. Of course a complete lack of self-absorption means pretty quick death, but ours seems excessive. The environment to us is just a passive substrate on which we build our buildings and enact our dramas. It's like that wacky drug-addled space where my video counterpart lives: is there wildlife in there? what kind of trees are those? are those hills in the distance, and how did they form?

Does anyone care about any of that? What does the rainforest mean to me when there are widgets to be bought and sold and my favorite TV show is on tonight?

And I want to write something that shows this, that shows just how small we are, just how much we miss being so wrapped up in ourselves, focused on money and how we're going to get that assignment done and what Betty posted on Facebook yesterday.

And then, speaking of money, I know there's a reason Snooki draws viewers and the kind of thing I'm talking about might make bad science fiction or possibly even good nonfiction but it will never reach huge numbers of people. And then I think that my desire to do this seems somehow antithetical to the point of literature itself. Except maybe it's not. But I think it might be antithetical to literature because literature is about humanity (says I with absolutely no background), and humans are about other people (this I can say with confidence). If we have no value to others then we have no value to ourselves.

Belimperia found this for me - comes from here.

You can torture a person just by putting them alone in a room and locking the door for a while. I mean, think about it, at face value isn't that totally fucking crazy? You haven't physically hurt them, you haven't even emotionally hurt them. You just...left them alone too long.

And I wonder whether any book labeled The Bible would resonate as much with so many people, would allow them evidently to find such endless wisdom...or whether it resonates because it is - at a certain level - simply brilliant literature that taps directly into the human experience.

Then I can't help but think of my own life and wish I controlled more of my own time. Which then makes me feel ungrateful since things are going so well. But this wasn't what I envisioned for myself when I was young and the world made absolutely no sense. How much sense does it really make now? It struck me as ultimately absurd back then, and it still does. What if I had taken a different path?

I start to think about my constraints and my choices and my relationships with other people, then wonder fundamentally why I have to be dragged kicking and screaming into acknowledging I'm as human as everyone else. Everyone else seems to embrace it but at some point I picked up the idea that needing other people is weak, even as everything in my experience serves to belie that attitude.

And so, ironically, my thoughts of big things lead me squarely back to thoughts of myself. I've proven myself wrong. And usually by this time the train has gone underground and I so resign myself to being just a cog for another day.

Proxy Dad

2011-02-16T10:00:00.002Z

There's a not-especially-good movie from the 1990s starring Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt called The Devil's Own, about a young IRA operative (Pitt) who comes to New York and stays at the home of an unknowing NYC cop (Ford). You can read the wikipedia page if you want to learn more about the movie's main plot. What stayed with me about the movie was the subplot wherein the two characters begin to develop a father-son kind of relationship.

The Pitt character saw his father gunned down in Ireland years before, while the Ford character has three or four daughters but no sons. There is a scene where the two of them hang out at a bar, and it's like you might imagine a father and adult son might do if they liked each other and got along and had some stuff in common.

I have a kinda sorta proxy dad of my own: my boss from a few positions ago. I learned a lot from him, and he was a mentor like I've never had before. My success and growth in that position was due in large part of the environment that he fostered, to the connections he helped forge within the organization. I had to leave the organization (on the best possible terms) for a variety of reasons, but part of me didn't want to leave at all because I wanted to keep working with him. But he, I think, had the idea that I was destined for bigger and better, and kind of pushed me out of the house (or nest?), so to speak.

It's a few years later now, but we still see each other every few months, though usually as part of a bigger group get-together. Part of me always feels like I should be doing something more to facilitate this relationship. But the truth of the matter is that my proxy dad, by his own design, has many other professional "kids" (not to mention a few actual biological children) to keep tabs on.

Proxy Dad can still be a very good sounding board for issues within the professional realm. Proxy Dad might also be a good person to talk with about certain personal issues - like his thoughts on fatherhood - but I haven't hit him up that way.

He does, however, also say some stuff that strikes me as off. And when he does this, I find myself simultaneously wanting to correct what I view as his misperceptions and questioning whether it is worth it to try to do so. I want Proxy Dad to know and like the real me, and I don't want him to think I'm "set for life" or "can write my own ticket" or other such phrases and don't need his further concern. Short of winning the lottery, no professional situation (even my current situation, which I'm enjoying) makes me "set for life." But he's got a story about the way things are that doesn't always match the truth.

somebody's dad is waving right there

For instance, there is his long-standing insistence that he would try to hire me back, but that he "can't afford" me. I just don't know what to make of that. I certainly want to be paid what I am worth, and one of the reasons I had to leave the organization where we worked together was that I was being chronically underpaid (and he couldn't do anything about it at the time). But he seems to think everyone makes more money than he does. He thinks I do, and I definitely do not (though I make a lot more than I did when we worked together). We were out with a department chair from a state university once, and Proxy Dad also seemed to think that this guy made more money than he does, which is nuts. Lately I'm starting to think that, when he says he "can't afford" me, maybe he's referring to more than just money. He must be.

Then there was the incident a little while back when I was profiled in a local magazine. It was just a short piece in the back of the magazine, in their "people" section (a section that runs in every issue), about my move to my current organization. It was organized by the media person at my organization, and - while it was certainly nice - it was at least as much about the organization as it was about me.

However, the issue I was featured in was devoted to "D.C. political movers-and-shakers." Proxy Dad, who is a savvy, smart, and generally very shrewd man and has been immersed in D.C. culture for decades (so, in other words, should know better!), saw the magazine and then either willfully or carelessly decided that the magazine had pronounced me one of D.C.'s top movers-and-shakers. He then forwarded the piece on to a fair number of people, proclaiming it so. Some of those people then sent me their (baffled? I hope) congratulations.

Now, the idea that I am one of D.C.'s top movers-and-shakers is of course patently ridiculous. The magazine's actual list included members of Congress, powerful lobbyists, heads of think tanks, etc. Not only am I not a political mover-and-shaker, but my desire to ever become one is quite low. Indeed, even in my day-to-day staff work, I pass on the political stuff as much as possible. I want to be a substance provider, not a mover-and-shaker. And substance providers don't get special sections of magazines devoted to them. He knows this.

I tried clarifying the situation to some of the people who wrote to me individually. I saw others at a happy hour and told them the deal. But it is a lot of work to have to go around and fix this kind of thing with everyone, and in many cases - unless the person said something to me about it - I simply didn't bother.

I know that - to this day - Proxy Dad seems to honestly and genuinely believe I am one of that magazine's movers-and-shakers. It fits with his internal narrative about me, one that reality doesn't seem to more than nudge a few inches. I've never been able to raise it with him directly.

My wife says, "He's a dad and he likes to brag." And I like that he's proud of my accomplishments. I just wish he was proud of my actual accomplishments and not some weird misunderstanding.

Oh, Proxy Dad. I love you, man. I wish we could spend more time together. But you can be just as exasperating as a real dad sometimes.

Life Lessons From Stalin

2011-02-14T10:00:00.002Z

For some reason, I am having a heck of a time thinking of what to blog about. I've had plenty of ideas but either don't feel inclined to pursue them or - by the time I do - they have become a lot less immediately relevant.

Everything - ha! well, besides the blog - is churning along at a chaotic and uneven rate, but still moving forward. I've been volunteering with a local group related to writers and books lately, and the project we've been working on has nearly come to fruition, but it has been taking a lot of time over the past couple of weeks. I think it is worthwhile, though: I'm proud of what we're doing and I have definitely been able to make a lot of connections with local writer, editor, and publicity types (I had virtually none before). Now, whether this will help me as I work towards getting published I don't know, but at least I am becoming part of the community, and that can't be a bad thing.

I just finished up The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin by Richard Lourie, which was pretty interesting: it's a novel but - as the title suggests - written as though by Stalin, with the central concern his long-standing feud with Leon Trotsky. Anyway, one part struck me: as a younger man, before the Revolution, Stalin was exiled numerous times to Siberia by the Tsarist police. Exiles in Siberia back then weren't actually imprisoned; they lived in tiny villages with the locals and had to hunt and fish to feed themselves. Escape was generally easy. Boredom was the big thing everyone had to deal with.

"Stalin" (the narrator of this book) writes that while he was there, rather than do everything in his power to stave off the boredom - as most prisoners did - he embraced it, sought the greatest boredom and solitude possible, and came to develop a tremendous tolerance for it.

young stalin? more like young hottie!

As "he" tells it, he did this because he knew it would serve him well in at least two ways when he returned to his Bolshevik colleagues. First, it would give him the patience for long committee meetings, arguments, and negotiations. Second, it allowed him to volunteer for and perform all the tedious jobs for the party - personnel issues and record-keeping, for instance - that were unglamorous and things nobody really wanted to do, but which were necessary and allowed him to build his network and consolidate power.

For obvious reasons, I do not want to overextend this analogy, but I quickly realized that there were some skills I had that this group I am volunteering for desperately needed, and we are not talking about the more glamorous or interesting stuff. So I made myself indispensable simply by taking on the shit jobs. We shall see, like I said, whether it pays off.

I know myself well enough to know that I am not much of a schmoozer, or a guy who makes an especially warm or memorable impression in social situations (though this depends on the situation I guess). But in my experience working with people is the way to get to know them, and most (not all, but most) people who work with me wind up liking me because if nothing else I am conscientious.

(A small subset of people do not work well with me, and these tend to be the types who see themselves as "visionaries" rather than doers. They seem to think they are the "idea people" - even though their ideas are rarely that great - that their pontificating is actually a valuable service, and that once they have provided that service it is the workhorse types like me who should then make their ideas reality. No, I do not work well with that type. But this is definitely the subject of a different post.)

Anyway, this is all pretty vague, and I apologize for that, but were this blog under my real name I probably wouldn't be able to write any of this at all, so there you go. This volunteer activity has been consuming a lot of time and energy lately, and is perhaps the primary cause of my crappy blog week last week, so it's been on my mind.

And now I shall bring this stream-of-consciousness to a close and hope some new idea for a post hits me by Tuesday night, or else you will all be punished once again with another post like this one.

Getting Drafty In Here

2011-02-07T14:28:00.003Z

Just a quick one today, as I was super-busy over the weekend working on a variety of different things. But one of those things was my WIP, and I finally finished a first draft!!

Man, WIP (and I'm still calling it that because it still needs lots of editing) is such a different beast than Novel #1. At 54,000 words, it is around half the length...indeed, I know this is too short for a lot of genres, but for what this is, I think it is right. And in terms of tone and style (and subject matter) WIP was like me going on a big bender after six months of teetotalling.

In total, it took me around 10 months to write the draft, but the truth is, I wrote nearly half of it during the month of August and over Christmas break.

And it was fun. I mean, Novel #1 was fun too, but writing WIP was fun in a more in-your-face way: like attending a wonderful musical production vs. going out and getting totally trashed at some dive bar. And WIP is supposed to be funny, and I find that I like writing funny, and I feel like I'm not bad at writing funny. There was a little funny in Novel #1, but it certainly was not the main thrust.

What's next? Well, WIP goes into hibernation for six weeks, then I come back to it with fresh eyes.

In the meanwhile, Novel #3. Much more like Novel #1 than WIP, as I conceive it now. God, can I tell you people, I've been feeling like I'm bursting to start developing new characters and plotting out a new story? I feel like I've learned a lot from writing Novel #1 (and trying to get it published) and I want to bring that to bear on a new story and new characters. I've also gotten really interested in some of the craft stuff - less on the language side and more on the plot development/structure/characters side. So, as time permits, I am headed down this road next: mostly reading and thinking and jotting down notes, at least at first.

Oh, and no, I don't have time to proofread this post before it goes up, either. So I hope it is coherent.

If Both Content And Company Affect Enjoyment Of Movies, Then What About Books?

2011-02-04T10:00:00.003Z

Add this to the long list of "research that tells us something we pretty much knew already, but is still kind of cool."

Researchers found that how much people enjoyed movies depended not just on the content of the movie, but also on who they were watching it with.

Particularly, the combination of watching a steamy love scene with your parents proved to be most unpleasant. Hmmm, ya think?

Most of us have faced this kind of situation at some time or another, and it's actually an incredibly intuitive result for anything social. The same might be said for many experiences, not just movies. How much you enjoy a meal depends not only on the food, but also where you're eating and who with. How much you enjoy (or tolerate) an airplane flight depends on how long it is, where you're going, and who you're sitting next to. The same activity done by yourself or with others may also lead to different feelings. (For me, drinking comes to mind.)

But as I was reading about this, I couldn't help but wonder about books: would these findings translate at all into the literary world? Part of what made me think about this was remembering one of the speakers at the Writer's Digest Conference, who talked about how the social aspects of reading had always been important, but were becoming more and more so. They're a big part of why some people read, and - as with movies - can be an integral part of the marketing. Think about the "guides for book clubs" that appear in the back of some books or the fact that "Oprah's book club" is not just a monthly book recommendation but an attempt to socialize (in a way) over the books.

The difference is that, with books, the consumption of the medium has to be an alone activity. (That's one of the things that sets reading apart from so many other things, and - in my view - makes it so great!) The closest book equivalent to watching a movie with your buds (or, God forbid, your parents) that I can conjure is the ludicrous image of you and several of your friends sitting next to each other on the couch and trying to read Freedom in as much synchronization as possible (with a bunch of popcorn out, just for kicks).

But just as you can talk about a movie with friends whether you watched it together or not (and I hardly ever go to the movies because I don't like the way movies blur the alone and the together - I want one or the other but not kinda sorta both at the same time), you can talk about a book with friends after reading it. The potential awkwardness of watching something sexual or violent or otherwise disturbing together is avoided, but the awkwardness of talking about it isn't necessarily - I'd guess it would depend on the centrality of that element to the plot. It might sometimes be easier with a movie to avoid talking it (say: a movie with one or two gory or sex scenes versus a book built around a character's sexual identity).

As a writer, I'd love to give my readers something substantive to talk about and think about, while at the same time not being so inaccessible that my work can't appeal to a wide range of people. In short, I'd love to write a nice book club book and capitalize on the social aspects of reading. But what are the elements of such a book?

People's enjoyment of your book will certainly be affected by the content (let's say plot and characters not worry too much about the writing itself for purposes here), but is there an equivalent to the enjoyment being affected by who else is reading it, or who they discuss it with? Short of being predisposed to not like a book because you're forced to read it (for a class or whatever) it is hard for me to think of when this would come into play.

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Way To Inspire A Generation

2011-02-02T10:00:00.001Z

Call it a good idea gone bad. Say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, or that no good deed goes unpunished.

Tellingly, it was my Facebook feed that reminded me last week of the 25th anniversary of the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion. Why my Facebook feed? Because people were remembering (reminiscing probably isn't the right word here) where they were when the shuttle blew up.

It's a bit amazing, if not surprising, that we all remember this moment due not to the magnitude of the tragedy (yes, it was a tragedy, but remember that only seven people died: more people died in 2009's Metro accident), nor to its consequences, but simply to the presence of television cameras. (Don't believe me? Where were you when the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City blew up? You probably don't remember, do you?)

I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, because of course this was indeed a tragedy for the astronauts and their families (not to mention NASA), but in the public consciousness this moment has more in common with the O.J. Simpson verdict than it does with the likes of the Kennedy assassination and September 11.

I told my wife that, 25 years later, I much better appreciate the irony. Seriously, readers, how many other NASA launches have you watched live? Yeah, me neither.

Sending a teacher into space was an absolutely brilliant idea, and I say that with 100% sincerity. Because whatever effect it was going to have on the public in general, whatever effect it was going to have on kids, TEACHERS across the land were totally fucking geeked. That means they were first going to try to be Christa McAuliffe (at least one teacher of mine was among the many who applied), and when that didn't work then they would be inspired by Christa McAuliffe, and then inevitably they would decide that the kids they taught would be inspired, too.

We weren't much for current events in my elementary school, as I recall. I used to think of our principal - imagine white hair religiously colored black, and flagpole inserted firmly up ass - as a female Ronald Reagan of sorts (don't ask, I was young: they were both old, both in charge of stuff, both liked to talk, both dressed up all the time, and both seemed strict), but that's as close as it came.

In my school, we were much more into the explorers (covered every frigging year between second and sixth grade), being forced to square-dance in gym, librarians who yelled at you if you were in fourth grade and took out a fifth grade book (not that I'm still bitter, especially since I'll bet you dollars to donuts she's long dead), some of the most incredibly boring textbooks ever written, and being kept inside on the day there was a solar eclipse.

the wrong stuff

So imagine what it took to disrupt my sixth grade math class with an honest-to-God television (fuck! did they even know about those newfangled contraptions in school?) wheeled into the room on one of those utility carts so we could - no, not do more pre-algebra problems - but watch the Challenger launch live, and my math teacher could wish it was him on-board (he had been one of those who'd applied, though I doubt he'd gotten real far in the process).

We all remember the Challenger accident not just because we watched people die on live TV (though of course we saw nothing graphic) but, even more, because we got to watch our teachers' horrified reactions. My memory's a little spotty, but I seem to recall that what ensued was our school's equivalent of pandemonium, with the class running down the hall to the other sixth grade classrooms shouting that the Challenger had exploded. And why were we allowed to do this? Best I can guess: our teacher wanted the other teachers to know.

Honest but embarrassing admission: I was mostly excited that this experience was so far outside of our stultifyingly tedious normal everyday routine.

You know, whenever I hear people talk about space exploration as inspiring, it always seems like a dated reference. In other words, even when I was a kid, I never really got it and figured I was just too young, kind of like when people would talk about Nixon or Vietnam or the Beatles, people and things I only vaguely understood but knew that: a) they inspired strong feelings, and b) they were before my time. I never quite got why launching rockets (or dogs, or monkeys, or people, or even teachers) into space was supposed to be inspirational, why it was more awesome than other science or many non-science things.

That NASA set up this potentially huge moment to inspire a new generation of kids (or at least their teachers, for what it's worth) and then totally blew it in the worst way possible is kind of sad but also kind of funny.

And I can't help but consider the counterfactual: who would remember where they were when the Challenger launched if it hadn't blown up? Not me, but quite possibly my teacher.

Halting Progress, Kinda

2011-01-31T10:00:00.004Z

Our power was restored Friday night. However, by then we'd already shelled out for a hotel room, having no desire to spend a third night without heat, hot water, or electricity. We checked in, took nice hot showers, went out for dinner and some beers, then curled up in bed.

As it turns out, though the power was back, the condo's boiler took until Saturday afternoon to really get going, which means we would have faced a very cold night had we come home (though we could have taken hot showers to warm up, at least). So we made the right decision.

Everything's back to normal for now...at least until the next time it snows or rains or the wind blows or thunder flashes or a tiny infant baby blows on the wires near our home. Yes, things are back to normal, but my grudge against Pepco remains.

After we got home Saturday, we cleaned the place up (including purging our refrigerator) and then I sent out all the stuff I promised agents at the conference last weekend. So, if you can believe it, I now have four partials and three fulls (plus the one 5-page request) pending.

Next on my list is wrapping up a first draft of Book 2 (my WIP). As I've probably mentioned a dozen times, I seriously think it'll just be a couple of sittings, and it's on my list for this week to finally actually do it.

Oh, and in the comments last week, Sierra asked for more information on Donald Maass's session at the conference. As it turns out, the conference organizers put up a pretty thorough outline of the session here. They did at least as good of a job as I could have done, and it's worth checking out.

Did I mention I went to an orthopedic specialist to have a look at my shoulder last week? The regular doctor I went to recommended him.

It's rotator cuff strain indeed, but he says it will heal on its own. Now, it still bugs me nearly five weeks after the fact (and actually I feel it more now than I did when I visited the doctor, which is a little disturbing), but it's less that it's soooo painful and more that I'm worried it's warning me to be careful.

He told me some exercises to avoid (like shoulder and military press) but the vast majority are OK for me to do. He didn't even order x-rays.
And I asked him about the supplements I've been taking. He said he takes fish oil for his eyes and his heart, not for his joints. But he still endorsed that one. As for glucosamine and chondroitin, he advised me to save my money. He also pointed out my problem is actually with the tendons, not the joints. However, for what it's worth: 1) I've actually been clicking and snapping less lately, and 2) I was concerned about my joints because of those noises. I've already bought a three month supply of glucosamine and chondroitin, and I'll probably stick with them for that duration.

He said to call him if the problem worsens but he definitely did not seem concerned, and didn't say anything about physical therapy.

At this point, I'm going to be more aggressive about icing it and taking ibuprofen (oddly, like I said, it worsened over the course of the week, and I have no idea why, but since two doctors have looked at it and said it's no biggie I really just need to give it more time I guess). Personally, I've never known ibuprofen to do much of anything for me, but the idea here is to bring down the irritation and then keep it down.

I've come up with a new set of workouts that avoid the problematic exercises he mentioned and add in a few things I should probably be doing anyway (like lunges). I was due for revamping my workout a bit anyway. But I'm going to wait at least another week before I start lifting, and even then maybe I'll just start with core to ensure nothing further agitates my shoulder.

Meanwhile, I've been doing cardio and have actually lost a couple of pounds since this whole thing started (I was 187 this morning and have been below 190 for weeks). That's OK, and better than gain under the circumstances, but I don't want to lose too much. I am really eager to get back to lifting, but I guess I just have to be patient with this injury. In 15 years of lifting I've never had anything like this, and I don't want it to end my run.

Pepco SUCKS!!

2011-01-28T13:04:00.005Z

We've had no power, heat, or hot water at home for 36 hours now, with projected restoration of power not until 11 pm tonight or even later. This is thanks to around six inches of snow that didn't even close the federal government or the Metro.

And it's not like this is the first time. A single flash of lightning over the summer seemed enough to take out our power for an entire day or sometimes more.

What makes worse is that the boiler is in our building. No power is OK if you're warm and cozy. We are not warm and cozy. The only place in our apartment that seems warm and cozy right now is our fridge, which of course is the last place you want to be warm and cozy.

We have a small shopping center near us that loses power whenever we do. So all the little creature comforts we might be inclined to seek out when we're without power are inaccessible. For instance, a hot shower at the gym: nope, too bad, the gym's closed because it also lost power. A hot bowl of soup at a restaurant: nope, too bad, same deal. A cold drink during the summer: same deal. (Our stove is gas so we can cook at home, thank goodness, and I'm already getting quite proficient at cooking in the dark.)

What is really baffling to me is how, after last February's Snowmageddon and this summer's many storms, with all the branches that came down and the trimming that Pepco was supposedly going to do, we can still be so vulnerable. And why does it take so freaking long to get our power back on? If we lost it with the same frequency but for a few hours each time, it'd be something to shake our heads and grin about. But this is serious. I would say that over the past year we spent a better part of a full week without power.

can you make heads or tails of this mess??

What makes it worse is it's impossible to get answers. We're not individual customers - it's our condo that's the customer - so we have even less power. Pepco puts a so-called "outage map" on its website, but it's just a street map with lots of triangles on it. They aren't tied to a specific address, so far as I can tell, and all of them have the same projected power return time, which can't possibly be right. Since our condo is the customer, we ought to be several hundred people without power (never mind the nearby businesses), but all those blue triangles mean 50 or less, and usually they say "less than 5" which makes absolutely no sense. There's no way to figure out where Pepco's trucks are or when they might get to you.

I understand the power can go out during extreme conditions. But we've lost power so many times, and for so long, just this past year it would be comical if it weren't so frustrating. I don't need to be plugged in every second of the day, but when you take away heat and hot water for prolonged periods of time during the winter, it's a problem just as bad as not having any AC or way to move air through the place for a long time over the summer.

I just hope the power comes back on today, or we're going to be spending the night in a hotel.

Get Published Or Die Tryin'

2011-01-26T10:00:00.007Z

It was quite a weekend in New York. The Writer's Digest Conference started Friday night and ran through Sunday, but - given the logistics of getting up to NYC and back - I registered for Saturday only. That was the day with the pitch slam, which was - truthfully - what I was most interested in, though in an ideal world I would have liked to have attended the whole thing.

The conference was at a gigantic Sheraton Hotel in the theatre district, which meant it was pretty easy to get to, and with lots around it. Saturday was structured with two sessions in the morning, then a networking lunch and keynote speaker, then one more session, and finally the two-hour pitch slam. For most of the sessions, conference participants had a choice of one focused on marketing and the publishing industry, one focused on getting published or pitching/querying, and one focused on craft.

I started out the day attending Donald Maass's session on "Putting Fire In Your Fiction." He provided some great tips on quickly developing a connection between your readers and your protagonist, on making your antagonist more compelling, and on strengthening weak scenes. I was impressed with how systematically he's thought all this through, and I took away some good suggestions for past, current, and future work. I also think I will check out his new book coming out in March. He really lives up to all the hype, and I would love to spend time taking a workshop with him.

For the second session, I was torn between the "ask the agent" panel and another session focused on plot, but decided that under the circumstances I ought to go to "ask the agent". After all, I'd come to NYC to pitch my book, even if part of me was really more interested in improving craft than in listening to a Q&A about query letters (when and if I ever get an agent I can start going to the craft sessions, and do you appreciate the irony there?). Everyone else evidently decided the same thing - the room was packed (there were around 500-600 participants in the conference).

The panel was moderated by Chuck Sambuchino, who spoke so impressively at the AIW Conference in D.C. last June. The agents were Donald Maass, Janet Reid, Jud Laghi, and Mary Kole, and they pretty gracefully handled a wide range of questions that ranged from specific to general, sophisticated to incredibly naive (such as the questioner who'd never heard of the Query Shark blog, and I'm not trying to be snooty but the conference costs hundreds of dollars while searching google for agent blogs is essentially free, if you know what I mean).

A word on Janet Reid, because she is so prominent in the agent blogosphere and because her post several days before the conference (on how pitches should be 25 words long) freaked me the fuck out.

Quite honestly, I was afraid she would suck all the oxygen out of the room, but while her online persona can sometimes be a bit self-absorbed and overbearing, she was really funny and down-to-earth in person. I went up to NY figuring I'd either be charmed by her or hate her, and it wound up definitely being the former (and, here in anonymous internet land, I've no incentive to lie).

I had lunch with a nice but subdued group of folks at my table, then we all heard a somewhat baffling keynote presentation by Richard Nash. Certainly I never before had recognized the magnitude of the significance of the development of PageMaker in 1985.

Then it was time for one more session - of course I chose the querying/pitching session with Janet Reid, where she gave some great advice and critiqued audience members' pitches - quite kindly but humorously - before the pitch slam itself. (She can be blunt, but people were literally running up to pitch to her, and as someone who has gone before really tough and critical audiences before - giving a seminar in front of the faculty in my grad program comes to mind, as does briefing a U.S. Senator - I can say she was unfailingly constructive, even as people's pitches ranged widely in quality.) Here is a nice summary of what she said, written by another conference attendee. (Kind of cool that after the conference I was able to google around and find blogs by lots of other attendees, including one or two I met, plus a couple of the agents I pitched to.) Oh, ha-ha, and here's Janet Reid's own summary.

The pitch slam was obviously the main event for me. About 55 agents were present, seated (mostly alphabetically, thank goodness) at tables lining the walls of a giant ballroom. (It looked like this before the writers came in, with two agents per table, which wasn't nearly as distracting as you might think it'd be.) Of course, after they let the writers into the room, it looked like this and this. Yeah, so, lesson #1 is it's a little easier for me to sympathize with what agents' inboxes must look like after this experience.

Every three minutes, the conference staff rang a bell (which, of course, made me think of this, except change "post" to "pitch!"). This was supposed to cause everyone pitching to get up and move on so the next person could pitch (it didn't always work: some of the writers were not being terribly considerate of others, but most were). The idea was for the writers to pitch for 90 seconds or less, and then the agents to respond for 90 seconds. Most of my pitches actually took less than 3 minutes for both the pitch and the response, because I didn't waste any fucking time. (Of course, part of being a professional is smiling and introducing yourself, speaking slowly and enunciating in such a loud room, etc. I just mean I got right to it.)

So I had done the math in advance. Two hours means 40 three-minute blocks. But there is absolutely no way a person could pitch more than every other time block, which meant 20 pitches maximum. However, did you notice those lines in the photos? Yeah. It wasn't going to be 20.

So what I did was as follows: Before the pitch, I had made an alphabetical list of the agents who either: 1) were looking for my genre and I'd never queried, or 2) were looking for my genre and had rejected or ignored my query. I didn't really differentiate the two, but I did know who was in each category.

When I got into the room, I waded through the crowd to the very far end where the lines were somewhat shorter, and just got on the shortest line I could find for a 1 or 2 agent. While on line, I looked around to consider what line I might jump to next. So I wound up pitching to a preponderance of agents with last names in the middle of the alphabet, but so what? I wasn't going to spend 45 minutes on line just to pitch to Janet Reid. I didn't have a dream agent there and figured more pitches = better.

As soon as I finished each pitch I jumped as quickly as I could to another short line. Despite my best efforts, I was still waiting to deliver Pitch #4 at the end of the first hour. It was really, really crowded, and I even started to get a bit irked that the conference organizers hadn't managed the ratio of writers to agents more effectively.

Luckily, however, the crowd slowly but surely thinned out. I knew it was important to hang out until the end and cram in as many pitches as I could. I managed to do three pitches in the last 20 minutes - two of them after they started handing out "end of line" cards to try to bring things to a close - and for the two hours my total was 9 pitches. I got 7 positive responses, including:

one "send me 5 pages" (said agent later blogged she only asked for one full during the entire session, so I don't feel too bad)
three "send me a partial" (50-100 pages or so).
two "send me a full" and
one "I'm intrigued; send me whatever you want" (=third full: I mean, why not?)

Even my nos weren't bad. One agent said she really liked the concept but had never had much luck selling anything - fiction or nonfiction - sciency. She said she was sorry she couldn't give me better news. I told her I appreciated her honesty, which is 100% true. I don't want pity requests, and I don't want to waste either her time or mine, sitting around wondering whether she likes my pages when she knows it's not for her.

The other no was an agent who said my manuscript was too long for my genre but she would consider it if I cut out about 15,000 words. No one else thought the manuscript was too long (and I mentioned word count in every pitch), but that's her prerogative of course. It is possible one day I will take her up on it, which I told/warned her.

So, overall, I was quite pleased. I feel like I managed to be strategic and effective, and nearly half the agents I pitched to complimented me on the quality of what I'd said. I anticipated most of the questions I was asked and was ready with responses.

Most importantly, no matter what happens, I feel like I took a real step forward. If something positive comes out of one of these connections, that is terrific. But if not, I've still made progress. I have one partial out now, so if three more partials and three fulls gets me no additional interest, I know without a doubt the problem is the manuscript (not the query) and chopping it down by 15,000 words or more might be part of another extensive revision.

Now, the conference was a pricy experience: just registering for the one day cost more than $300, plus getting up to NY and all associated expenses. And it was time-consuming (I took Friday as a vacation day). And definitely nerve-wracking at times (though the worst was all the conflicting advice everyone was giving, right up until minutes before the pitch slam, as to what should be in the pitch).

But - on the $$$ side - I tend to be such a cheap bastard most of the time, and this is something I really care about. On the stressful side, I have done much, much more difficult things in my life than this, and it was well worth it. I'd definitely recommend it to any of you getting frustrated with cold querying, and would be happy to talk some more about what precisely I said in my pitches if people think it would be helpful, because I kinda followed Janet Reid's advice but not really. (Is that vague enough?)

My wife came with me, and she provided amazing moral support through the weekend. She also took advantage of being in NYC to see a Broadway show while I was at the conference. We got to eat a lot of amazing NY pizza (man, do I miss that in D.C.!) and went out for beers after the slam Saturday night (and, you know, low-key bars where you can sit at the bar for an hour or two at 7 or 8 pm on a Saturday night also seem to be in really short supply around here...not that I would ever live in NY again).

On Monday, I also reentered my manuscript into the Amazon contest. I'm a lot less emotionally invested this time, but I just don't see any downside in putting one more iron in the fire.

And so now, I have to actually send these agents what they asked for, and decide whether to query any of the others who were there. There were about half a dozen more at the pitch slam who are looking for my genre and whom I've never queried. My attendance at the conference might be a way to get my query a little more attention than it otherwise would, even if I didn't pitch to them.

And then it will finally be time to move back to my WIP (henceforth "Book Two" because otherwise it just gets confusing) and onward to Book Three - my new project - for a while.

People, this has been good, but I'm ready to get back to writing!

Pitch Slam Punt

2011-01-24T10:00:00.002Z

I've just arrived home from New York and don't have time to write a full report of the Writer's Digest Conference and the pitch slam before tomorrow morning (Monday).

Suffice it to say, for now, that I'm really pleased with the way it went for me. More details to come - about the conference and the slam - on Wednesday.

For now, please enjoy this work of comedic genius by GoRemy (it's very funny stuff, but you might need to check out the lyrics below the video on the youtube page to understand all of it).

Everything In Moderation

2011-01-21T10:00:00.006Z

Surely you've seen the fracas over Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by now. Misleading as the disturbing Wall Street Journal piece may have been about the true nature of the book, you have to admit that it is absolutely brilliant marketing. Yet, leaving aside the false "strict Chinese" versus "permissive Western" parenting frame, most of the discussions - and especially the comments - online are focused on oversimplifications and extremes.

For instance, sure: the crazy controlling mother is better for most innocent bystanders than the mother who lets her kids run amok. So what?

I'm not a parent, but I find the powerless attitude implied by a lot of the comments strange. Why should it be in question whether or not parents can control their kids (at least until they really start to grow up)? If your eight year old weighs 60 pounds and you weigh three times that, you can control your eight year old. End of story.

The better questions are: to what extent should you, and to what ends?

Unpleasant experiences can sometimes teach people valuable and useful lessons. If a person never is forced to apply themselves beyond what is comfortable, then one never learns the self-discipline to utilize one's capabilities under appropriate circumstances. It's pretty clear that this lesson applies, to some degree, to everything from schoolwork to writing a good novel.

But it is a very very fine line between this lesson and the alternative lessons: that one hates the specific activity in question, that one cannot take up anything in life without devoting oneself body and soul until you succeed or break, and that one has no idea when a problem or situation is best approached with brute force or some other tactic.

For example, I had to play a musical instrument I hated when I was a child. I didn't have to practice for hours and hours, but I did have to practice everyday. Nominally the lessons began because my handwriting and coordination were so poor. But improvement was never assessed. When I wanted to try another instrument instead, my parents said I could only do it in addition to the one they wanted me to do. Needless to say, after a year or two that second instrument was dropped. When, after ten years (by which time I was typing most of my schoolwork - I'd taught myself to type and was pretty fucking good at it - talk about lack of coordination - and my handwriting was never that bad, anyway), my parents finally let me stop taking lessons for the instrument I hated, I stopped and I haven't touched it since, nor taken up any other instrument.

My dad made me drink a glass of milk every day. I hated milk - it made me gag. The nominal reason for making me drink the milk was because my bones would evidently splinter from lack of calcium if I did not, though no discussion of whether this premise was true or not was allowed. As soon as he stopped making me do it, I stopped doing it. (When I read Karen Armstrong's story of forcing down macaroni and cheese - which made her gag - in Through the Narrow Gate, it reminded me of this.) I still hate milk - it still makes me gag (you should watch me try to drink a whey protein shake if you don't believe me). My bones haven't splintered. And I think there was probably some other way to get me the calcium I needed...if that was really the point, which it clearly wasn't.

I had to do many tedious household chores, some of which took hours each week. They had to be done right, too, or I'd never hear the end of it. So tedium doesn't scare me now, but for every time my high threshold for tedium might aid me, it hurts me ten. I too readily take on tedious work and establish a precedent for being the go-to person for it, which leads people to take advantage of me and diminishes me professionally.

A tolerance for tedium and unpleasant tasks never compensates for social awkwardness. I was the fool who - in fifth grade - was actually surprised when the girl I liked was not impressed with all the work I put into my big school project. It made me wonder, seriously, why I'd invested so much effort.

Some teaching styles actually reduce the likelihood of learning. Anything my dad tried to teach me in his usual coercive style - diving is a great example - is something I still can't do. Anything others in the family tried to teach in gentler ways - swimming and riding a bike are two - are things I learned and even excelled at. Bizarrely, my dad told just the same story about his own father.

The sad truth is that my dad had no larger goal in mind than control for its own sake. As bad as that would be if your kid was going to do rote shift factory work for his whole life, it's pathetic when translated into the modern, creative working world. Hard work is important but it simply isn't going to replace good thinking, and while good thinking can come of life-or-death necessity, it usually comes when people are enjoying what they do because they're confident and interested.

Enjoying what you do doesn't mean enjoying every minute of it the way you might enjoy every minute of lounging out by the pool. But knowing what real enjoyment is, and how to find it - rather than simply being reconciled to being miserable - now there is a valuable life lesson.

This issue of control touches a real nerve. Look, here is a piece by Amy Chua's daughter telling "her side of the story." But don't you understand that in a truly controlling family there is no "her side of the story"...and such a piece, if it existed, would simply be propaganda?

I don't know whether my wife and I will have kids, but this stuff really eats at me. What is the point of an existence devoted entirely to pleasing a parent? How are you ever supposed to really know who you are? If I can't do better than my parents did, surely the biggest favor I could do my kids is not have them.

And I haven't read Amy Chua's book, but if her daughter was able to effectively rebel at the age of 13 (and the rebellion didn't involve a rope or pills), then maybe she's not as bad - and certainly not as controlling - a mom as people seem to think.

Slowly Coming Back To Life....

2011-01-19T10:00:00.003Z

I've slowly reemerged into the land of living, after feeling pretty awful for a couple of days and spending my evenings doing shots of Robitussin Night Time (pretty good stuff, actually: helps you sleep without transporting you into another dimension the way Nyquil often does).

My wife and I traveled this past weekend to an interesting but very cold (I mean: holy cow! have I become a southerner yet or what?) city to visit her brother. He, being a college student, did not exactly run us ragged, so I was able to catch up even more on sleep during our trip.

I went to the doctor for my shoulder late last week. She diagnosed me with a rotator cuff strain, which sounds like bullshit but it's actually a real thing. Major league ball players lose weeks or months to it. At this point there's little pain in my everyday activities (and I can't associate the pain with any particular movements, and don't have a restricted range of motion) but lots of cracking and it's fairly obvious that lifting weights would still be a very bad idea. She referred me to a sports medicine doctor, and I'm going next week.

Meanwhile, I'm getting back into cardio and am going to put together a core workout that doesn't involve my shoulders at all. At this point in my life I'm clearly not training for the Mr. Universe contest, but going too long without working out (at all) just contributes to my general sense of malaise. As I write this, it's been about ten days since I've been to the gym, and - all else aside - that doesn't exactly help my psychological state. Finally, I suspect that my office ergonomics was a contributing factor to my shoulder issue, so I am working on improving that as well.

I shall be creative, and I shall overcome.

The writers conference, and the pitch slam, is this weekend in New York. I've been working on my pitch, though the 90 second maximum certainly makes it challenging. I think it is going to be chaotic, but I am looking forward to it. A couple of bites (=partial or full requests) would be success enough.

I am thinking of reentering the Amazon Breakout Novel Contest this year. Seems like there's nothing to lose, though I may not be quite as emotionally invested this time. The contest starts next week, if any of you are interested.

Then, after I get back from New York, I need to finish up that first draft of my WIP already.

So things are rolling again. I'm not exactly a well-oiled machine all the time over here, but I do my best. And, with all the fish oil I've been taking, I'd hope my joints at least are well-oiled.

2011 So Far...Hasn't Been Very Good

2011-01-14T10:00:00.002Z

This is not, I'm afraid, a cheery Friday post. It's not that I've faced any major setbacks or a real tragedy (so let me keep things in perspective), just that barely two weeks into the year, I feel like I am running to stay in place.

Two and a half weeks after I hurt my shoulder at the gym, I can still feel it and have no idea how long it will take to heal. It's improved but it's definitely not gone. I am going to the doctor and we will see what she says. But this may very well be the worst thing I've done to myself in 15 years of lifting weights.

I put in a heroic (if I do say so myself) effort over winter break on my WIP: about 9,000 words in eight days. When I came back to work I figured I had maybe two or three more sittings to finish up a first draft. Indeed, I was looking forward to telling you all in a post that I'd finished the draft. But I haven't written a single word since.

I have done absolutely nothing to get ready for the pitch slam in New York next weekend (except gather up my old pitches and the list of agents). I will be traveling this weekend too, and while the travel is for pleasure (and I'm looking forward to it) it takes away time I need for preparation and also rest.

I've been volunteering with a local organization, and that seems to be taking more time than I'd planned, and some prime writing/resting time, too. This volunteer work is not about helping people or any societal good - it's about writing and me meeting people. I can say at least that people are certainly getting to know me. Whether it pays any dividends remains to be seen. But I told my wife if I spent this much time at a soup kitchen for the homeless or putting together packages to mail to the troops I'd probably feel more satisfied.

Then of course there is my own stupidity. I had too much to drink last Saturday night, so I was hung over Sunday. If I'm really hung over, I can't do anything that requires actual concentration, like writing or preparing my pitch or...basically anything worthwhile. So there was one prime day for getting things done and it was completely wasted. Go, me!

The hangover then turned into a cold. Nice, huh? So I had a fever, a cough, a headache, sinus pressure, chills. Second time sick for me in two months...shit, that never happens! Maybe I get sick twice a year. (Usually less often.)

So Monday comes and I feel like crap, but guess what? There's a very important paper we're putting together at work, involving negotiation with other organizations (including some grumpy folks), and guess who is leading up that effort, which has a deadline of ASAP?

So here I am, not going to the gym - even just to do cardio, not writing, not working on my pitch, feeling like shit, trying to get bed early every night but still feeling terrible even if I'm spending 10 or 12 hours in bed.

I hate the 6:30 alarm. I hate getting up in the cold and the dark and knowing it'll take me a better part of an hour to get to work.

See, the problem is that I need to be going great guns on everything right now, and instead I just want to get into bed and pull the covers over my head. But even if I do that, I feel like it's never enough time.

Well OK, I've gone on enough. Thank you for reading my vent. I know this isn't the permanent state of things, but I feel like I've built so little slip-room into my life - and set expectations so high - that when all rocket boosters aren't operating at full blast, it becomes a problem...even though a reasonable person would know this is going to happen from time to time.

I just need to take care of myself and slowly ease back in, meantime set my priorities and get through the next few weeks.

Snooki Succeeds Where The Lt. Fails

2011-01-12T10:55:00.000Z

Before July ends, the bonds of family and friendship will be stretched to the breaking point. Will the haters prevail, or will Gia and Bella find love at the Shore? (from the “product description” on Amazon.com)

Oh, I can’t wait to find out what happens!

Maybe she was just angry that I wrote that the human race would die out were we the last two people on earth. But in a strange tangent to one of my posts from a few weeks ago, Snooki from Jersey Shore has published a novel, A Shore Thing. The level of cleverness of the title is likely an indicator of the level of cleverness of the book overall, which is already available in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle. I must confess that I am immune enough to pop culture to have never watched even a single minute of Jersey Shore. Indeed, I do not even know what Snooki’s voice sounds like (though, having grown up in that general neck of the woods, I can certainly imagine it and cringe). And my interest in her novel is on the low side (being kind, being very kind) as well.

One need not dig very deep that find out that the novel wasn’t really written by Snooki herself (no! she is way too busy…not to mention incapable), but by a professional writer. (Even if the book winds up really sucking, which my guess is it will – not that I plan to find out – this makes me feel just a tad better.) Snooki was more the “inspiration” for the novel, the description of which makes it sound like fan fiction of a sort (except that with reality TV, the distinction between the stars/characters and the fans can sometimes be blurred).

Even with my limited knowledge about her, Snooki carefully crafting a query letter to send to Janet Reid is a somewhat difficult image to conjure. And I think it is safe to assume that this novel didn’t travel the traditional path to publication. And why should it? After all, doesn’t Snooki have “platform”? She’s not yet waded into the realm of nonfiction (though this book might arguably be as much memoir as fiction) but “platform” doesn’t seem to hurt in the world of fiction, either. Not only is she a reality TV star, but look, she tweets! She’s on Facebook! My God, people, if that won’t sell books then what will? I’m not going to rail about the injustice of it all, but I do hope the folks who decided that publishing this book was a good idea occasionally feel a pang or two of conscience…even if, somehow (and I doubt it), it becomes a commercial success.

I hear that Snooki is next planning to publish some of her shorter work in “Ploughshares” and “Granta”. She was the first choice to review Saul Bellow’s letters for the New York Review of Books, but she was too busy. My hope is that she will come to D.C. for next year’s book festival; I would especially like to see her on a panel with Junot Diaz, Harold Bloom, and the ghost of David Foster Wallace. Likely a Pulitzer will follow thereafter.

when the lt. publishes his novel, there will be a big picture of that piggie-doggie on the cover, making a rude gesture as best it can without fingers

The big problem, of course, is that fame and wealth do not necessarily go together. This proliferation of reality TV stars has spawned a cadre of people who have been given a huge measure of one, and it’s only natural they then seek out the other. These horrible opportunities for commercializing and commodifying oneself are the curse of all these people who find themselves in the public eye all of a sudden…for reasons good, bad, or nonexistent. And it’s a difficult temptation to resist, be you Snooki, O.J. Simpson, that homeless guy with the voice, or Captain Sullenberger. Neither Snooki nor Sully hurt anyone with their books, though besides that there isn’t much difference between them (the books, that is) from what I can see.

I read somewhere recently, and I can’t remember where or I’d credit it, that we’ve been seeing way too much of this lately: we take these people and catapult them to fame and their problems get solved with jobs and money and stuff. And we feel good about ourselves. (Now I’m talking less about the Snookis of the world and more about the homeless guy with the voice and his ilk, all those injustices you read about on CNN with the guy whose daughter needs a kidney transplant and etc. etc.). But where is our attention to the larger problems and shortcomings that underlie these examples? I know, to paraphrase, that one death is a tragedy and a million a statistic. Nicholas Kristof had a column a while back about how much more individual narratives appeal to us than facts and figures. But really.

Snooki probably needs the money. I mean, think about it. And she’s got “platform.” So, you go girl! But you failed in your quest to make the Lt. jealous. You see, the day I think Snooki’s novel has anything to do with me is the day I need to seriously consider a breather from trying to get published.

On The Neighbors Are Watching by Debra Ginsberg

2011-01-10T06:00:00.004Z

I have enjoyed and recommended several of Ginsberg’s novels in the past, but unfortunately this one is not up to par. Let me focus on a couple of issues that especially drew my attention as a writer.

First, the book is oddly-paced, and this is true at two levels. At the macro-level, the book is set against the backdrop of a hot, fire-plagued San Diego fall, but while the climactic scenes take place in October as the fires approach and the neighborhood must evacuate, in actuality most of the action occurs either earlier (as early as July) or later (as late as the next February). There is no special tension leading up to those October scenes, and much of the action comes afterward.

The whole book is framed around Diana, a very pregnant and very unlikeable teenager who shows up one day on her father Joe’s doorstep, even though Joe has never met nor been involved with Diana at all. Joe’s wife Allison is about as pleased with this development as you might expect, and immediately descends into a sullen alcoholic incapacitation that she remains in for most of the story. Given this framework, one then might imagine that the birth of Diana’s baby would serve as a catalyzing scene, but it doesn’t.

At a micro-scale, there are too many breaks in the action for character-development digressions…you know, where a character thinks back to an important previous scene that occurred off the page, or remembers the first time they met another character, or whatever. Now I use this technique too in my writing and I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with it, but in this case it is used so much that the book becomes choppy.

One chapter, centered around a “neighborhood meeting” and occurring late in the book, clearly serves only to allow certain characters to remember this or that, and to physically bring other characters together to remind the reader of something or let one character realize something about another. The “meeting” itself is virtually glossed over. I told my wife this reminded me of “The Muppet Show” where the whole half-hour is about getting ready for the show, and then the show is over. The show itself never happens.

go for the grift or blind submission instead

A second problem involves the characters themselves. In previous work, Ginsberg has shown a lot of skill in drawing characters of the appropriate depth (but no greater). Here, there are two problems. First, no character is likeable enough and when (and here I’m not revealing anything you couldn’t learn from reading the jacket flap) Diana disappears, leaving her baby behind, it’s difficult to really care very much.

Second, the internal psychodramas of the characters are quite easy to tease out, but the other characters take forever to elucidate them. So there are endless pages of the kinds of domestic argument scenes that involve characters saying other characters names and walking out the door and hiding in their bedrooms and really just not communicating, where one fifteen minute conversation probably would have sufficed to get to the root of say, Allison’s real problem with Diana, or the tension that builds up between Sam and Gloria.

The final problem I’ll touch on, related to the second, is a general sloppiness: some of this may be intentional, but it doesn’t leave a reader particularly satisfied. Some of the sloppiness is in the plot. The reader sees conflicting information about who the father of Diana’s baby might be, but it’s never resolved. Again, perhaps this ambiguity was intentional, but one possibility would give readers much more sympathy for Diana than another. We also never learn for sure whose brilliant idea it was for Diana to land on Joe and Allison’s doorstep in the first place. Diana’s disappearance fosters a Clue-like environment where the reader can’t help but guess that one character or another might be responsible, but the final reveal is a bit out of left field and quite disappointing.

Other sloppiness is in the characters, and – I’ll say it – especially (though not exclusively) the male characters.

Consider Kevin, the confused, drug-addled (I pictured the pimply adolescent from The Simpsons throughout) neighbors’ son, who winds up as Diana’s drug supplier/friend/lover/confidant/possibly all or none of these. His parents are both atrocious people (and his mother Dorothy’s selfless act at the end is really quite selfish, if you think about it). He’s a boy trying to be a man, and he is treated with scorn by basically everyone. But his intentions are noble at times (just as they are self-serving at others) and I don’t think he got a fair shake.

Joe, arguably the book’s protagonist, is perhaps the best example of a sloppy character. Though his great flaw in the past, evidently, has been strong-arming people into doing things, in the book he seems completely passive and doesn’t even bother to try to help resolve Diana’s situation. Because he is not nearly as bad as his wife seems to think he is, the character of Jessalyn is introduced to give him a temptation he can yield to and provide some moral equivalence. It seems a bit contrived, really, and a reader winds up pretty darned confused about Joe and Allison’s marriage even at the end of the book.

In its favor, the book is a quick read and Ginsberg manages to recreate the stifling San Diego environment and insular atmosphere of the neighborhood. But her other work, including The Grift and Blind Submission, is better and while I would recommend those books, I don’t recommend this one.

Book Roundup And Awards For 2010

2011-01-07T06:00:00.010Z

This is my third annual book awards post (see my award posts from 2008 and 2009). 2010 was a good but somewhat peculiar year for reading for me. What do I mean?

In 2007, before I started the blog, much of my reading was done for research for my novel, and a lot of what I read was weird shit. This year also I read some (for me) strange and unusual stuff. Before I start, then, just let me say that I’ve excluded a couple of books from my list from consideration for any awards. So if you think X or Y was an obvious candidate for A or B award, but it didn’t happen, that might be the reason why. I also did a much better job reviewing books this year, and below I link to my 2010 reviews where available.

Overall, I read 39 books this year (plus a few assorted other book-length things I'm not including), including 12 works of nonfiction and about half a dozen collections of short stories or novellas. That's about the same as last year. 11 of my 39 books were written by women (last year it was 10 of 39: I choose my books based on what I want to read rather than who wrote them, but I think this is a decent ratio, especially when you consider my own demographics - mid 30s male - as a reader).

So let’s get to it.

Best Fiction
In 2008, my winner was Serena by Ron Rash. Last year, it was Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler. This year it goes to Beneath The Lion’s Gaze by Maaza Mengiste. Despite the flaws I point out in my review, it was a great effort. I had two close runner-ups this year: Solar by Ian McEwan and Burning Bright, a short story collection by Ron Rash. All three are well worth reading.

Best Nonfiction
This was a toughie because most of the nonfiction I read this year was excellent, and I recommend a lot of it. Two years ago my winner was Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. Last year it was a tie between two very different books: The Unforgiving Minute by Craig Mullaney and Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer. This year I am giving it to The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright, about the history of al-Qaeda and the run-up to the September 11 attacks, which every American should read and which should be required reading for policymakers.

Worst Fiction
I really would like to give this award to a certain book on my list that I bought solely because I was told I would get a query critique from the author’s agent if I did so, but no critique or any communication whatsoever from said agent has been forthcoming more than five months later. (Also, it was a very poorly-written book – a great example of a time I’m not exempt from the writer’s cliché of wondering why so many crappy books are published and mine hasn’t gone anywhere – so I’m not mixing applies and oranges here.) But I will refrain.

Two years ago my winner was the awful, awful People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks. Last year it was Fool by Christopher Moore. (One day I will try again to read another Moore. One day.) This year, I’m going to give it to The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff. Sloppy, cumbersome plotting including a huge cop-out at the end, cookie-cutter male characters, and an utterly loathsome protagonist (in a strongly protagonist-driven novel) made this the book I wanted to throw against the wall (and hoped the main character would die painfully) the most this year.

Worst Nonfiction
Poor Tara Brach. She won two years ago for her incomprehensible Radical Acceptance and I still feel bad about it since I love her audiotapes. Last year I had the cojones (not cajones) to give it to Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama because I found his discussion of race frustrating and infuriating (and I love Barack Obama, by the way). This year the award goes to the very disappointing The Age of Absurdity by Michael Foley. I don’t know if Sum by David Eagleman is supposed to fiction or non-fiction (fiction, I think, though that’s somewhat perplexing), but either way, I’m putting it as a close runner-up. Carrie Fisher’s memoir Wishful Drinking was no great shakes either.

Best New Discovery
After discovering the arrogant but brilliant Nassim Nicholas Taleb in 2008, and the amazing Hans Fallada in 2009, I had high hopes for 2010, but failed to discover anyone new. Indeed, to be honest, my big discovery of the year was a re-discovery: H.P. Lovecraft. A bit different to read Lovecraft in your 30s than in your teens. A bit different to read him in 2010 than in the late 1980s. And yes, there are undertones of racism in his work that are rightly unacceptable today (nearly 90 years later). But oh, the joys of cosmic horror. My WIP owes a lot to HPL, and he’s been a presence in my life again these days.

Most Memorable Book
In 2008 it was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s memoir Oak and Calf. In 2009 it was the incredible Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi. This year it’s a tie between the absurd but highly memorable The Lecturer’s Tale by James Hynes, and the more subdued but unforgettable memoir In Search of My Homeland by Er Tai Gao. Yes, two quite different books. But I won’t forget the faculty party in the Hynes book anytime soon. And the forced emoting during the Cultural Revolution as described by Gao will be with me for quite some time as well.

Least Memorable Book
Two years ago it was the atonal The Know-It-All by A.J. Jacobs, the human guinea pig. Last year it was tie between the overwritten The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu (take some risks, man!) and the pointless Nothing to be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes. This year the award goes to Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier, about which the only thing I remember is one of the main characters’ incredibly annoying habit of saying “verteberries” when she meant “vertebrae.”

One last observation about a book on my list: I was excited to pick up The Frozen Rabbi by Steve Stern. It was a brilliant concept and drew me in. But it got less funny and more disturbing and confusing as it wore on, and the end absolutely lost me. One of the book blogs I follow and enjoy (though don't always agree with) named it the best American novel of the year. As you know, I love alternative opinions, and so wanted to point this out. I think the end of the book simply went over my head, and wouldn't want my ignorance or cluelessness to get in the way of others picking up the book.

And that’s a wrap. I was deluged with wonderful books at Christmas and can’t wait to get started reading in 2011!

Books I Read In 2010

1. Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King

2. Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Schteyngart

3. The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman

4. The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff

5. Beneath The Lion's Gaze by Maaza Mengiste

6. Do I Want to Be A Mom? : A Woman's Guide to the Decision of a Lifetime by Diana Dell and Susan Erem

7. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

8. Pol Pot by Philip Short

9. The Lecturer's Tale by James Hynes

10. Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher

11. The New Rules of Lifting by Lou Schuler and Alwyn Cosgrove

12. In Search Of My Homeland by Er Tai Gao

13. The Frozen Rabbi by Steve Stern

14. Burning Bright by Ron Rash

15. Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier

16. Solar by Ian McEwan

17. Hitler's Empire by Mark Mazower

18. Tech Transfer by Daniel S. Greenberg

19. The One That I Want by Allison Winn Scotch

20. Sum: Forty Tales From the Afterlives by David Eagleman

21. Blind Submission by Debra Ginsberg

22. Monumental Propaganda by Vladimir Voinovich

23. Opposite Of Me by Sarah Pekkanen

24. The Castle In The Forest by Norman Mailer

25. The Drinker by Hans Fallada

26. Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

27. The Looming Tower: al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright

28. Fresh Kills by Bill Loehfelm

29. The Age Of Absurdity by Michael Foley

30. American Rust by Philipp Meyer

31. Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower

32. The Best American Short Stories 2009 edited by Alice Sebold

33. The Best of H.P. Lovecraft by H.P. Lovecraft

34. The Right Hand Of Sleep by John Wray

35. The Hidden by Tobias Hill

36. Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore

37. Under The Dome by Stephen King
38. Why I Write by George Orwell
39. The Discomfort Zone by Janathan Franzen

New Year's Resolutions, Goals, And Plans For 2011

2011-01-05T06:00:00.005Z

Happy New Year!

From a psychological perspective, the New Year is a nice time to assess and make some resolutions and plans (I also point out every year that it's totally arbitrary, so I won't do that this year, though it is...oh, wait.). I have a couple of resolutions for 2011, though nothing terribly major, plus a writing plan.

Let me start by checking how I did with the resolutions and goals I laid out last year.

First, my wife and I have begun to discuss seriously whether to have kids, but we didn’t get to a counselor to talk about it in 2010. We should do that in 2011, probably relatively early in the year.

I think in general I’ve been a bit more efficient with my time this past year, and of course I will work to ensure that continues, but I have no specific resolution around it.

I was fairly diligent in the staying-late-at-work thing through March. I stayed late Thursday nights and used that time to get in a workout in the building gym and work on writing-related tasks. But for some reason, and I'm not sure why, doing this made me incredibly cranky, so I stopped.

Now, with my new job, there is no building gym, and I am far busier, staying late one or more nights a week to do work-work (as opposed to writing-work) anyway. The key under these circumstances is simply taking advantage of the time I have: being flexible but efficient. Just holding it all together is accomplishment enough, so I’m not making any special resolution around this either.

I do have a minor but significant resolution around my workouts. 2010 was a good year for lifting for me, especially considering all the changes that happened. My weight, which fluctuated in 2009 between 205 and 180 or so, has stabilized at a shade under 190, and that's fine with me. I've gotten my three weight workouts in most weeks. But I have let my cardio lag.

Now, I do walk quite a bit during the course of the week (sometimes as much as 14 miles, almost never less than 7 or 8), much of it at a good clip, but that’s not really enough. I’d like to add those two intense cardio sessions back into my week. It can be two 20-minute high-intensity interval sessions, or two moderate 30-minute sessions, or one of each, or whatever. But I’d like to get those two in each week.

My last resolution for the year is to go get a check-up with a doctor. I don’t have any particular reason, just that it’s been more than two years since I had any blood-work done, and many many years since I had a check-up of any kind. I’m not getting any younger, so stopping by to make sure all is well is worth the inevitable scolding I will receive about my drinking. I'll add that my joints sometimes feel older than they should - the issue I had a few months ago after being crammed in that hotel conference room is just one example, but I managed to screw up my shoulder at the gym over break again and am actually taking a break from lifting right now until it heals - and I'm starting to take some supplements (specifically glucosamine/chondroitin and fish oil) to try to help things, but I wanted to talk to a doctor about that, also. Sometimes I sound like Rice Krispies walking around, and that's now good, especially at my age.

My wife and I found a new dentist who seems far superior (and more conveniently located) than the old dentist. I still have some annoyance associated with my gums/jaw/whatever, but this guy’s going to do more bite adjustments and even broached the possibility, which my old dentist wouldn’t even consider, of replacing the filling in the area where it hurts. Besides this, I am simply the picture of (physical) health. Ha-ha.

So now onto writing.

Last year I resolved to keep querying for my first novel, and indeed I have, though irregularly. I thought entering the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award content might be a good idea; I did enter, and it was worthwhile (I made it to quarterfinalist and received some good feedback). I also pitched at a conference and am now registered for another one. So yeah…no slacking off here.

I said I was going to do something with my short stories, and I did - in the first part of the year - submit one or two to journals and contests. But good Lord what a time suck that is, and the truth is my short stories are mostly old and I don’t feel much invested in them anymore.

Finally, I mentioned having two ideas for novels and thought I might work up one of them. I haven’t done too terribly much background work on the other (though I did take some time in August to sketch out a pretty good skeleton), but on the one I am somewhere in the high-40s in terms of word count (47,500 on 12/31) for a manuscript that will probably not exceed 55k. So I came close to that first draft I mentioned, and am anticipating finishing up within the next few weeks!

So, for 2011:

1) Keep on keeping on with my “first” novel. I’m not ready to give up yet. I’m going to New York in January and I will pitch the heck out of it. Then in February or March I’ll continue working through querytracker the way Travs and others have suggested. Slow and steady, just hoping to keep stuff out there constantly.

2) I want to finish a first draft of my WIP asap and then get get it ready for querying. Perhaps, in the second half of the year, I will actually start querying. It’s totally different from my first novel and I’m just not going to agonize about it the same way. It’s also shorter and lighter and won’t take as much effort/revision to get into shape for querying.

3) Gear up to write, and perhaps begin writing, the third. This third is much more like the first, and that means it’s going to require more research and more work before the writing starts. An ambitious goal would be to aim to start writing next fall.

I can envision moving my emphasis between these projects at different points of the year. The only problem I notice with these three otherwise quite reasonable objectives is that there’s a lot of pre- and post-writing, but not a lot of writing. But that’s where I am now, and there’s nothing I can do about it except plug along.

I wish you all a happy and successful 2011, and best of luck with your own resolutions and goals.

Retrospective

2010-12-22T10:00:00.002Z

Before I call it a year, I figured why miss the chance to get some extra mileage from my 2010 posts? That's not as terribly vain and self-referential as it might sound, since I have gained readers during the course of the year and - with so many blogs out there - people always miss things.

So let's relive some of the fine moments we've had together. Here are my top five posts of the year by hits:

5. When Scientists Write...: from February, a very short post about the IPCC chairman's ill-fated romance novel. Relatively high hits because it was picked up by DC Blogs (they always pick the oddest posts of mine to feature).

4. Corpse on a Train: from May, about the poor bastard who died on the Metro and rode around for hours before anyone figured it out. Got lots of hits because the story made national news and, evidently, drew many morbid people to Google.

3. There is No Such Thing as a Postdoctoral Student: from January, the declarative title says it all, though many of my commenters seemed to assume I was a postdoc. Nope, haven't been for five years, folks. But the scars remain.

2. Writing Strategery Update: from March, I actually have no fucking idea why this post is so popular. Must be the sexy pic of Neil Young.

aaaaand....

1. On The Age of Absurdity by Michael Foley: also from March, many many people have read my not-very-positive review of this book.

OK, that was fairly unsatisfying. But here are my (with input from my wife) five favorite posts of the year. Let's run through 'em and then we'll stick the fork in this blog for the year.

5. A Day In The Life: from March, the Lt. follows a meme and writes about a typical day. As you might imagine, it's filled with existential angst, thoughts of violence, and alcohol consumption.

4. Lt. Cccyxx: Deerslayer: from October, the Lt. hits a deer with his car and deals with the aftermath, which unfortunately includes collision damage but lacks venison.

3. Kind of Sad: from May, a serious moment here on the blog as I go through my old papers from grad school and ponder what might have been....

2. The Lt.'s First Video Blog Post!!!1!: from October, as KLM said: that is one foul-mouthed little piggie-doggie.

and the #1 post of the year...

that's right, you guessed it...

and fuck you DC Blogs once again for totally ignoring it...

1. A Modest Proposal: from June.

oh, Lt., you crack my shit up!

On behalf of all of us here: myself, my wife, Arwen Undomiel, that literary agent with the Huck Finn overalls, General McC, that jackwad who yelled Tock, young Stalin, all the various Xerxeses, the Piggie-Doggie, Snooki, Cthulhu, and the hot chick who played Esther in that movie I watched that one time, I wish you all a wonderful holiday. I will be back in early January.

Peace out, yo!

2010 Blog Year

2010-12-20T10:00:00.001Z

Nearly 76,000 words: that's how much I have written on this blog in 2010.

(That figure, obviously, doesn't count this post or Wednesday's, which will be my last post of the year. I'm taking Christmas week off from blogging - in part just for the break and in part so I can crank on my WIP, on which I'm getting close to a first draft - but will return the first week of January with some cool posts, especially my book awards for 2010.)

That 76,000 words is up a little bit from last year's 70,000, but of course down from 2008 (when this was a very different style of blog) and I wrote 98,000. And my number of posts was 138, up from 89 in 2009 and 60 in 2008. With 76,000 words and 138 posts, that means my posts averaged about 550 words in length. That compares to around 800 words per post in 2009 and around 1,600 words per post in 2008. (Like I said, this blog has changed a lot.)

And now for the Wordle of this blog year, which we can compare to last year's.

click for larger and clearer

These are pretty but not easily interpretable. I notice, however, that "Lt" features more prominently this year, that "fiancee" has been replaced by "wife," that "book" and "writing" were more commons word in 2010, and that "time" and its various derivatives remains a focus of major attention, as do "people" and "work."

I set myself the blog goal last year of writing more book reviews, and I think I've done very well with that. Though I know these posts are hit-and-miss (usually miss) with my regular readers, they do draw traffic to the blog and - more importantly - force me to "analyze" the stuff I read, which I tend to try to do from a writer's perspective. So it is usually a valuable exercise for me.

Besides that, I'm pretty happy with things on the blog. I still do more or less what I want to do here, and that's the most important thing, because I am clearly not using this space as a marketing tool for me as a professional or me as a writer or me in any sense. I have some readers and my hits, while very modest, keep going up.

well, someone is getting quite good with those screen captures

Starting to incorporate graphics into many of my posts was one of the best things I've done and has definitely spiced up the blog and added a bit more character. And, speaking of character, I still haven't entirely actualized the overlap between me and the Lt., but one day the two of us will take a big bottle of whiskey and walk out into the middle of the woods to finally hash it out.

So let's hope 2011 is another stimulating, fun, and random year here on Skullcrusher Mountain, and I suggest you all stay and have another drink, and think about me and you....

Why Don't You Read?

2010-12-17T10:00:00.005Z

My wife and I went to a Christmas party at the home of a co-worker of hers last weekend. We are, honestly, not very social this way, and part of why is that it can become very involved.

The D.C. area is a big place and somehow all of our friends live in far-flung corners of it. Just getting there was a hassle-and-a-half. We decided not to drive because: a) it's clear across the city, and b) we wanted to drink. So we took Metro, which is never especially good on the weekend, but constant track-work makes it much worse. Metro is starting to become a system that is really only functional five days a week, and it might be better if they made a time schedule for the weekends so at least people could plan.

So, with the travel back and forth, we had a late night. It was fun, but we couldn't do it every weekend.

Anyway, I was talking to the co-worker's husband, and when his attempts to engage me on Snooki from "The Jersey Shore" and a few other contemporary references that I have only the vaguest of understandings of failed (re: Snooki, thanks, but I had quite enough of that in high school), we got to talking about books.

i think it is safe to say that if snooki and the lt. were the last two people on earth,
the human race would die out.

I should say this is obviously a smart and successful couple. Despite being significantly younger than we are, they own a townhouse on which they have already refinanced and done extensive renovations. They're married and have already decided not to have kids. They're college-educated (master's degrees, too, I think), have good jobs, have traveled. My wife really likes her co-worker; thinks she's smart and funny. So these aren't dim bulbs.

And, by way of comparison, when I was their age, I lived in a house with seven other people in the student ghetto of a midwestern college town, ate cheap pasta and sauce five nights a week on my $15,000/year grad student stipend, tried - mostly unsuccessfully - to meet women through online dating sites, and drank way too much Jack Daniels. That was about the extent of it.

Oh, but there was reading, too. I read.

They don't really read, and don't seem terribly interested. When I told the guy my wife and I follow books the way a lot of people follow movies or TV, he didn't seem to get what exactly that would mean.

And I noticed some weird disconnects in the discussion. For example, he was talking about upgrading their already ginormous television to a 65" screen and how they have more than one Wii in one breath, and in the next telling me they don't like to buy hardcover books because they're too expensive. He told me it was difficult to get into a lot of books, especially when you're trying to watch a movie at the same time. (Ya think?!) He also told me his wife doesn't like the aesthetics of having books around, which of course reminded me in a way of this.

He seemed to have actually thought through what he looks for in a book, though. The books they had were by Clive Cussler, Dean Koontz, John Grisham. He said he likes a book he can visualize. It's hard to knock that and say he ought to spend his time reading Faulkner and Joyce. I like books that are more about entertainment sometimes too - after all, one rarely gets more than that from Stephen King - other times I like to be more challenged.

I tried to engage him on nonfiction, and that had a bit more success, especially when I talked about some books that were related to his field of work. That not being interested in fiction but being somewhat more interested in topical nonfiction seems to be a very stereotypically male characteristic, doesn't it?

Anyway, as a reader myself and as a wannabe author, it was kind of disheartening, but the question is: what can be done about it?

All else aside, I think my wife and I both wish we had more friends around we could talk books, rather than Snooki, with.

"Resurrection" - The Movie

2010-12-15T10:00:00.003Z

I came home from work pretty cooked one night last week and decided the only thing I wanted to do was sit and watch a movie while having a couple of drinks. As I've probably mentioned before, there's been no television in the Lt. Cccyxx household for very close to a full decade now. Even though we own a couple of DVDs, it is really not very many at all (between my wife and me we probably own less than a dozen movies on DVD). And there's only so many times you can watch the extended edition of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

any excuse...

So I've occasionally gone and scoped out movies online: either at hulu.com or just youtube for those movies that have been uploaded. Hulu's selection of movies is a fairly baffling mix of stuff, but I find myself wanting to watch remarkably few of them, even when I go in with the intention of finding something mindless. There have even been a handful of times I've started watching a movie on hulu and then just given up, usually because it was: a) boring, and/or b) unspeakably stupid.

Well, last week I came across "Resurrection," a movie from 1980 I can't remember ever hearing about before, about a woman who has a near-death experience and comes back with the power to heal others. I figured it would suck, but that seemed fine, given I just wanted to chillax.

Anyway, maybe it was because of the mood I was in or the drinks, but I really enjoyed it. Even the parts where some of the plot developments made me go "hmmm - this doesn't especially make sense" I was along for the ride and persuaded not to think too terribly hard about it (which is quite an accomplishment for a movie to achieve with me). The acting was good and the story tied together neatly without too many big holes in it. It was also somewhat sophisticated spiritually, not to mention overall a very optimistic story.

So if you feel like taking a couple of hours off and have no idea what to watch, I'd recommend this movie. Who knows what other little gems hulu might have buried among the rubble?

hey...'memba me?!

Past And Future Self

2010-12-13T10:00:00.003Z

Continuing one of the threads I started last time, and hearkening back to my post about Morning Me and Evening Me, I've been thinking about self, or selves. Another impetus for these thoughts is Sierra's post touching on putting yourself in your writing.

It seems like many authors put themselves, or alternative versions of themselves, into their writing. On Sierra's blog, I mentioned Philip Roth. Orhan Pamuk does it, too. Stephen King puts himself and his "dark half" (Richard Bachman) into his writing, sometimes directly at odds with one another. Doesn't Jonathan Safran Foer do this, too? I'm sure we could brainstorm many others. This is not a new device. (And an alternative, taking one's characters out of the story at the same time they are characters in the story, may sound postmodern but dates back at least to Don Quixote, where it was done with - in my opinion - much brilliance and hilarity.)

Beyond writing, though, I was checking all my various mutual funds, 401k's, bank accounts, etc. and wondering about how aggressively, over the past few years, I have been trying to save for the benefit of some future me. Daniel Gilbert, whose book inspired the "Morning Me Evening Me" post, says we spend an awful lot of time trying to anticipate the needs of and please our future selves. If I buy a six-pack of beer on the way home from work, I am probably planning to please a self mere minutes (or, doubtfully, hours) in the future. When I sock money into my retirement account, though, I am thinking more about the me several decades down the line (though there might also be a component of pleasing myself in the short-term by "doing the right thing" or feeling more secure in my future). In both cases, though, I am making assumptions that may or may not wind up accurate.

And when I picture these future mes - you know, the ones living high on the hog on all the money I'm trying to sock away now - I have to admit they are murky, and the further into the future I look, the hazier they get (until ultimately we reach the one future self I can predict with surety - dead me. Though even then I wonder about my legacy: physical, emotional, intellectual, even financial for the people I care about...all of this is full of more assumptions.)

What is interesting, and this is a reference to my last post, is that I sometimes feel equivalent distance from past selves. I have a tendency to be simultaneously disgusted by and somewhat envious of the me at some point in the past, say 10 or 20 years ago. Disgusted when I think back at the mistakes I made, the little I knew, how I failed to enjoy what I had. (As Eddie Vedder was surely not the first to say: "If I had known then what I know now...") Envious when I contemplate certain accomplishments (shades of: "I could never do this now" run through my head).

It's like if you go back to visit someplace you used to live, and wander around town, go visit the friend or two who is still in town, and think to yourself how carefree your life should have been while you lived there, how short-sighted you were not to do a better job enjoying the life you had there, before you moved into another situation and things got really serious (your current circumstances, of course, are always really serious). The problem, of course, is that you visit your old town while you're on vacation: far removed from the people and situations and responsibilities you had back then, things that you rightly took quite seriously. You know you are not being fair, giving yourself short shrift. Yet part of you can't let it go.

This is how you treat the mes who did all kinds of shit to try to make you happy, by the way. This is how you repay them.

There's a meditation exercise I do sometimes where you close your eyes and envision yourself in a peaceful place, then envision that you are visited by yourself at your fullest potential. What does that mean? I think it is deliberately kept vague. Nonetheless, there is a concrete picture that emerges in my mind.

My fullest potential self is kind of like me. But his muscles bulge larger, his grin is wider, he's got a nice tan (not a John Boehner tan, but a nice, healthy tan), and his eyes are clearer and brighter. He glows. He radiates a serenity and, especially, a confidence. And the confidence isn't arrogance or showoffishness; it is simply confidence from within.

It is easy to imagine that this alternative version of me has achieved an incredible level of self-discipline, productivity, and balance. He goes around being kind to all, but it is neither a servile kindness nor a patronizing one. It's grounded in that confidence and balance. He's got nothing to hide. He's expelled his inner demons and the ghosts of the past. He's articulated, faced, and overcome his insecurities. He takes it all in stride, unfailingly does his best, but accepts that failures will occur sometimes. To sum it up, he has an unfailing sense of proportion and perspective on whatever comes his way.

I'm not sure he's even possible, and I want to hate the guy, but I can't. I can't hate him because I know he earned what he has.

The meditation asks whether "your full potential self" has a message for you, but mine never really does. He smiles, he says keep working at it bud, and he moseys on down the road (and where, I wonder, is he off to? to do some life-coaching or give a self-help seminar?). I think to myself that I might be closer to him now than some past self ever would have imagined when attempting to envision future selves, but still not very close. And likely that past self would not have envisioned a "full potential self" anything like the one I imagine now.

So the mes of the past who I don't understand anymore (if I ever did), and the mes of the future who I comprehend as mere shadows, and the fleeting me of now...we all sit there and watch our full potential self waltz by. And a small part of me wants to tear the fucker down a couple of notches by asking him how much is in his 401k, and whether his gums still hurt, and when the last time was he had a bad hangover. But I know just wanting to ask the questions establishes a distance between him and me. I know his answers might surprise me: not because he's sooo perfect, but because he takes it all in stride.

[Part of me wonders what a world full of "full potential selves" would be like. Would they be clones of one another? Would some full potential selves enslave others, because our potentials are so different regardless of circumstances? Or is "full potential self" as culturally-programmed (even though I am sure it has huge individual variation) as anything else?]

And if the me from last Thursday could get together with the me from, let's say, September 15, 1999, and could spend some time together, really get to know each other, and then maybe could interview some of the intervening mes...could they maybe write a paper together that breaks out some of the main differences between them, looks at a timeline of when they developed, tries to tease out causes, how much were external-driven and how much internal, how many happened suddenly and how many gradually, whether they were linear or sinusoidal or power functions or whatever, and whether the intentions remained true or veered off over time? And would that tell me anything I could use in the future?

Something tells me "full potential me" would have something to say about that little exercise, something along the lines of, "Very interesting, but don't confuse empirical and historical sciences. Think about natural selection, my friends. You're adapting, as best you can within constraints, to your immediate environment. And nothing more. No more teleology in your life than in evolution. You, and me, and your 1999 self, and all the others: it ain't the great chain of being, with me on the top. Being me is minute-by-minute, not year-by-year."

It occurs to me that, chances are, the poor bastard is constantly flitting into and out of existence. And so, I realize, my "full potential self" hasn't been totally stingy with his wisdom after all!

Some Random Friday Shizz-nit

2010-12-10T10:00:00.006Z

1) Agent Blog Unsubscribe: I unsubscribed from the blog of a major literary agency a few days ago. Why? No particular reason. Just that I was bored by their posts, and I thought they were a bit disingenuous in saying "we want this. we want that." where the "this" and the "that" were hopelessly vague.

Also, I'd queried one of their agents twice last year and never received a response (even though they promise one as agency policy). So I queried another one last month and got a form rejection so utterly vague as to be confusing (it had no agent name on it and for a minute I thought it was the long-awaited reply to one of my 2009 queries). Then, according to a recent blog post of theirs and even though I have no confidence a living human being actually looked at my query, a rejection from one means a rejection from all. So it's not like they and I have more business to transact. My Google Reader is way too full already. I won't miss them.

2) ScienceBlogs GAH!: I also went over to ScienceBlogs for the first time in a while and checked out some of the affiliated race/gender/whatever "science" bloggers. (You know, the ones whose every post goes something like: "I went to the grocery store and there was no price sticker on my favorite cheese sticks and I was just like OMGz I KNOW THIS HAPPENED TO ME BECAUSE I'M A WOMAN/BLACK/GAY/WHATEVER IN THE SCIENCES!!! & also, im smarter & wittier than u, especially if you're a clueless and bumbling white male")

It's like the land time forgot over there. By which I mean nothing ever changes. It reminds me of one time I went back to visit one of my professors at my undergrad institution. Years had passed and it appeared as though he hadn't even rearranged the papers on his desk or changed his clothes in the interim. It wasn't that he or his office looked older or dustier or more decrepit and rumpled. It was like three years in my life had been three days in his. And he was talking about the same exact stuff in the same exact way.

Life is a never-ending journey for the Lt., you know. Things are always changing, for better or worse. I'm always changing, for better or worse. I'm not at all the same guy I was five or ten years ago. Like, if you're a good friend of mine and then one of us moves away and we don't really see each other or talk for several years and then somehow we're back together in the same place, we are basically going to have to start over because while I can't speak for the friend, I can virtually guarantee some major stuff (internal if not external) has shifted with me. (This is part of why my family drives me bananas, btw. I half-expect them to ask me what grade I'm in and make a snide reference to something I said in 1984.)

I've just never understood how people hit a place (not a physical place - you know what I mean) and totally stop. It seems so tedious to be stagnant.

And, to get back to those bloggers and their outlook, it's not that their frame of reference isn't sometimes quite valid. It's that to see your entire life and every interaction and experience you have through this prism and only this prism - even in situations where your race/ethicity/sexual preference probably doesn't matter, and your being in science definitely doesn't matter (and guess what? 98% of America doesn't understand the culture of academic science) - is nutso. And really narcissistic. It's even worse when they are desperately unhappy in their current situation but simply won't change it - they expect the system to bend for them and they're going to sit there, the happy/miserable miserable/happy victim, until it does.

3) Sucky End-Year Book Lists: Is anyone else underwhelmed by the end-year "best book" lists popping up everywhere? (I'll do my own little book awards post here on this blog shortly after the new year, and hopefully it will be more exciting and entertaining than the lists I've seen at the New York Times, Salon, and other places so far.)

4) Hash-Tag Insanity: There's this woman I went out on a couple of dates with nearly 10 years ago (before I even met my wife) and I occasionally check in remotely with what she's up to because she's always got some kind of online profile accessible to the general web-viewing public, and it is like watching the world's slowest train wreck. I've mentioned her on here before, actually. Last time, it was a blog. Now she's got a Twitter account and - maybe you folks who use Twitter can fill me in - uses hash-tags in the oddest way imaginable. Like, she'll have a tweet that says something like:

My cat is in the hospital with a punctured lung and it doesn't look good. #sad #lotsofblood #neverthoughtalivingthinkcouldmakesuchhorrendousnoises #grieving

or

Home today with a migraine and a fever - wishing I had more Sudafed. #sick #bringmechickensoup #feellikeuttercrap #vomiting #explosivediarrhea

Do people really use hash-tags that way? I mean, who goes to Twitter and searches on "#explosivediarrhea"? Even worse, who turns their emotions and experiences into fucking hash-tags?

Yes, the Lt. dodged a bullet here.

5) Almost There: Two more work weeks 'til Christmas, peoplez. We can do it!!!

Have a great weekend.

On Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King

2010-12-08T10:00:00.004Z

I hate to surrender my book-reviewing mojo, but in this case The New York Times review does a pretty good job of making the same points that I would. Still, because I know many of the people who read this blog are writers, I wanted to highlight this book.

I have said it before, but in case you forgot or didn't know it, I am a Stephen King fan. Indeed, I probably read my first Stephen King book at the age of 13 or so, and here I am more than 20 years later still enjoying his books. How many other authors...actually, how many other things at all could I say that about? (Not many...food, maybe.)

I've found his books lately to be hit-or-miss, with the hits usually coming when he tries to be more literary (Lisey's Story) and the misses when he tries to be more trendy or topical (Cell and Under the Dome). Full Dark, No Stars, which consists of four novellas and is more reminiscent of The Bachman Books than anything else, fits...well, it doesn't really fit this mold.

Is it literary? Not really. Is it topical? A few of the stories, kinda. Is it hard to put down? Absolutely (I can't remember the last time I stayed up late because I couldn't put a book down before this one. It was basically impossible not to finish each novella in the same sitting I began it.)

Is it original? No, not very. Stephen King is rarely particularly original...and there are some other problems with some of the stories, too. As I was reading one, I thought to myself, "Gee, this sounds just like [famous criminal case from a few years ago]." And, indeed, SK admits that's where he got his inspiration for the story. I also find his views on gender a bit simplistic (this is a long-standing theme in his work with a couple of exceptions). In three of these four stories, men are the violent aggressors and women the avenging angels (against each other). It gets a little relentless in its consistency after a while.

But most of all: is it worth reading? I would say yes it is, especially for writers. He seems to have embarked on an experiment, something he laid out in his introduction to the Best American Short Stories volume he edited a few years ago and expands upon in his afterword to this book, in writing the most propulsive, in-your-face stories that he can. And, while it's not always pretty in its (sometimes literal) execution: there's really an important lesson here in driving the stakes up as high as possible at every single choice point.

If you look at these stories as no more than exercises in that, I highly recommend this work. As a bonus, you get SK's usual skill in creating characters and storytelling. If you want more to think about, my recommendation becomes a bit more tepid.

But no one can ever accuse Stephen King of getting boring as he gets older. Like I said, this stories come a lot closer to Richard Bachman that anything he has produced in many years (including the last few things attributed to Richard Bachman!).

5 Pop Songs That Are Deeper Than You Probably Think

2010-12-06T10:00:00.003Z

No, there's no Taylor Swift or Lady Gaga on this list. But here are five songs, mostly from the 80s and early 90s, that have a bit more meaning than you might give them credit for on casual listen:

1. "Be Good Johnny" by Men at Work. This superficially fun, light-hearted song just becomes more disturbing and creepy the more time you spend thinking about the lyrics. The overbearing parents, the anti-social kid, and of course the disembodied voice who says: "You sure are a funny kid, Johnny but I like you. So tell me: what kind of boy are you, Johnny?" Maybe Men at Work's "Johnny" grew into Pearl Jam's "Jeremy"? Regardless, it's hard to imagine things working out for the Johnny in this song.

i only like dreaming, all the day long

2. "Mother" by Danzig. This was Danzig's only foray into the Top 40 world, I believe, but the Elvis Presley of heavy metal has been making music (on his own and with the Misfits and Samhain) since the 1970s. Most people probably thought the lyrics to this song were just throw-aways, but to me it always seemed like he was actually targeting the parents of his young fans and other authority figures, essentially challenging them to try to wrest control over their kids back from him and the outside world, a challenge they would of course ultimately lose.

odd when the artist is buffer than his security

3. "In the Air Tonight" by Phil Collins. If you go to songmeanings.net and look under Phil Collins, this song has 174 comments, nearly more than all the former Genesis drummer's other songs combined. Indeed, an entire urban legend has sprung up around this song. Phil Collins is of course remembered as one of the most banal artists of the 1980s, and yet this song - with its undertone of rage, revenge, and recrimination - stands in a class outside the rest of his work. Collins himself (of course) disavows a deeper meaning for the song, but that doesn't detract from its brilliance.

4. "Crazy" by Seal. I admit this is the one of the five that I still haven't totally disentangled myself. But with several point of view shift and references to Vietnam, death, drugs, and spirituality, as well as a chorus that is meaningful on several different levels, there is plenty to mull over here.

never gonna survive, unless we get a little...

5. "All This Time" by Sting. While my wife is creeped out by Sting, I like him and I love this song, one of the few songs I know with a narrative arc. A musing on faith and the difference between the abstract and the personal, the message is subtle but solid enough to reference history without making explicit the connection to today. And the undercurrent of deeper time marked by the river grounds the whole thing.

I almost added "Head Over Heels" by Tears for Fears to this list. What other songs did I miss?

On Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

2010-12-03T10:00:00.000Z

Finally, I know what a dystopian urban romance would be, because this book is one! But that genre-ization doesn't do justice to Shteyngart's partly-parodic and partly-tragic vision of the future, which does most (but not all) of the things it tries to do well, and is complex enough to require some cogitation after reading.

Fundamentally, the book is indeed a love story, centered on 39-year-old Lenny, the misfit son of Russian immigrants, and Eunice, in her early 20s and the daughter of Korean immigrants. (The immigrant legacy issue is important to the book, though somewhat beyond this review.) Lenny and Eunice are interesting characters, though I must admit I still didn't quite understand them by the end and both of them are somewhat unsatisfying as people. Yet that is surely intentional, as the real story is the future world they live in.

Imagine if many of the technological, cultural, social, and economic trends (especially the bad ones!) we've seen over the past decade were extended linearly into the future. That is the world they inhabit. Our nation is crumbling, our economy is a wreck (we don't produce anything anymore), our troops have just been routed (In Venezuela), women buy clothing at places with names like AssLuxury and JuicyPussy, and the National Guard has morphed into this pseudo-private TSA on steroids. Not to mention that the culture is obsessed with youth (even more than we are now).

A lot of the focus is on technology, as everyone is constantly plugged into devices called apparats, which appear to be the distant and highly-evolved descendants of iPhones. Talking (now referred to as "verballing") has become passe and is frequently done in text-speech. People's credit scores and "fuckability quotients," among a variety of other personal data, are broadcast in real-time to the people around them.

amazingly, this book doesn't involve "twister" at all

It's easy to see us sliding down the slope Shteyngart shows us, but the technology side is also where I thought the book had its biggest failing. First of all, talk being replaced by text seems unlikely. Most of the book consists of three kinds of scenes: conventional narrative as recorded in Lenny's journal (a private document), lengthy e-mails between Eunice and several friends, and IM sessions between Eunice and her sister.

My problem, at one level, is that at least two of these modes of communication are already bordering on dated in some circles: when was the last time most people wrote in a private journal just for themselves, or wrote a pages-long prose e-mail to a single friend? In a world like he portrays, there would be a lot more video-conferencing and texting.

More fundamentally, what we seeing in so much technology (and especially "social technology") today is a diminution of private thought and personal conversation in favor of semi-public and public broadcasting of everything we think, say, and do (all of which tends to become derivative in that kind of environment). That so much of the book is couched in these forms of communication is a structural flaw, though I realize it would certainly be a formidable challenge to write a "novel" that effectively conveys this kind of environment.

Despite my gripes with the way this was handled (and I won't go on, though I could, and this is a pretty central issue to the book), this book is worth reading and it's also worth discussing. Lots to chew on, at a variety of different levels. I'd recommend it.

Pitch Slam

2010-12-01T10:00:00.002Z

So I have sent out my 30 queries in November. I have thus far received 13 rejections, 1 partial request, and three form replies telling me I won't receive anything else from those agents unless they are interested. I'd love another request or two out of this bunch, though statistically at this point I realize that is unlikely (based on my past experience).

Following through with my plan, I'm now back at work on my WIP, and have added around 2,500 words so far. My word count is getting very close to 40,000, and since I estimate the total length of this thing as barely cracking novel-hood (as in: 50,000-55,000 words), this means I'm much of the way through a first draft. In typical fashion, I've also done quite a lot of editing as I've gone through. I certainly don't think it is going to take me months and months of editing after my first draft to get it right. With some things, yes. But not with this.

Well, so as I continue to hobble forward on all fronts, I thought it might be a good idea to give myself (and, hopefully, my writing "career") a nice kick in the ass. So I decided to register for the 2011 Writers Digest Conference in New York, late in January. What really attracted me to the conference was the pitch slam, two hours in a room with 50 or 60 agents, where I'll have the chance to pitch my work to bunches of them. Having done pitches once before, at the AIW Conference here in D.C. in June, I know that it can be stressful, but also educational and very helpful.

the pitch

While I did two pitches of 10 minutes each at AIW (though my pitch only took up about three minutes of each, and the rest was some feedback from the agents and some "small talk"), these pitches at the pitch slam are much shorter. I have 90 seconds to pitch, then the agent has 90 seconds to tell me how awesome my work sounds and how they want me to send them the full manuscript immediately. (Or something like that.) Chances are I'll be able to pitch to a dozen or more agents in the allotted time, even making sure I don't pitch to the ones who are only looking for nonfiction or YA or whatever.

Anyway, I'm only registering for the Saturday, but will still take Friday off from work to get my ass up to NY. I found an amazingly cheap rate on Amtrak, though. And my wife is coming with me, so we'll make a nice weekend get-away out of it. She'll wander around NY while I go to the conference. To make it a nicer time, we decided to shell out for a room in the conference hotel rather than commute in from my brother on Long Island (which I probably would have done if I'd been going alone, though since no one in my family knows about this whole writing thing, I'd have to come up with some BS story about why I was in town, not that this would be terribly difficult).

the slam

Anyway, the conference is in late January and of course I'll let you all know how it goes. I certainly don't think I will be ready to query for my WIP by then (though I do hope my first draft is complete) but I can still identify people to approach with it when it's ready and use the conference as an entre (is that a word? did I use it properly?). Meanwhile, my focus remains on getting my first novel read.

Let no one say that the Lt. isn't expending blood or treasure ($$$) on this getting-published thing!

Sick

2010-11-29T10:00:00.004Z

Just in time to return to work for what is promising to be four really punishing weeks between now and Christmas....

Head like a jackhammer.

Nose like a geyser.

Sinuses under serious pressure.

Throat like the Atacama Desert.

It has been nine months since I was last sick, but here am. Nothing to do but drink this:

and eat this (turkey soup, actually, not chicken):

And take this (no, I'm not making meth at home):

And try to get enough of this so that going to work doesn't kill me:

Lt. says: "Being sick fucking sucks!"

Six Things I Am Thankful For

2010-11-24T10:00:00.003Z

I like Thanksgiving a lot, conceptually if not always in practice. What I mean is: I could give or take the turkey and cranberry sauce, the busy airports and weird family get-togethers (which I usually skip, and this year is no different), the whole pilgrims thing, the inevitable football game and sale days, and the Friday some people get off from work and others don't.

But I really, really like the idea of a secular holiday devoted to gratitude, especially here in the USA, where so many of us have so much and - day-to-day - there seems to be this sense of entitlement among many. It's just nice, occasionally, to reflect a little bit and appreciate the great things we have, even if those things are a bit different for everyone.

So here are six things I am thankful for this year:

1. My health. I always thought this one was a throw-away when I was younger, but as I get a little older, I'm beginning to realize how important it is, and how it shouldn't be taken for granted. Part of your health is, of course, up to you, but much is just due to the vagaries of chance and genetics. Well, I'm still a pretty healthy guy, and I'm glad for it.

2. My wife. No other person on earth - and this includes my parents, my friends, and all my teachers - has helped me grow as much and in such good ways as she has. Looking around as I go about living my life makes me realize more and more how remarkable what we have is, and then I realize how much dumb luck went into us getting together and staying together (of course there was some effort on both of our parts, too). So whenever I think I'm not a lucky person, I think of this. And I'm grateful for it.

3. Our country. I honestly don't know if I believe the mantra I heard so many times growing up, that the U.S. is the "best country in the world." (I'm sure, if nothing else, that depends on who you ask.) We have definitely got problems, and there are always threats (both internal and external), but we have it really good here overall when you compare us to so many other people. That doesn't mean we can be complacent, or that justice is served in every single case. But we are, indeed, a democracy, and ultimately the will of the people is done: for better or worse.

4. The state of literature. We can bemoan the publishing industry all want, and bemoan (rightly) all the crap that gets published. But the truth is there is plenty of good stuff that also gets published - more than any person could ever hope to read. I keep picking up new books and finding ones I enjoy, and it's hard to imagine that ever stopping.

5. My community. I've lived in my building for 5 1/2 years now, which is the longest I've lived anywhere save the house where I grew up. I love our gym, I love having Rock Creek Park so nearby, I love our little shopping center, I love our front courtyard. The place ain't perfect but it's pretty darned good, and I'm grateful we live here.

6. All of you. Thank you for reading, for commenting, for keeping me company as I continue to muddle through living and working and writing and trying to figure it all out.

Wishing you a happy Thanksgiving....

300...And A Rough Analysis Of Query Response Times

2010-11-19T10:00:00.011Z

That's right: this is my 300th post. Happy 300th post to Skullcrusher Mountain and the sometimes-me sometimes-alter-ego that is Lt. Cccyxx!

tonight, we dine at burger king!

I sent out the final two queries of my 30-query November query extravaganza last night. So far I have received one partial request, 10 rejections, and 3 form acknowledgments. I'm excited about the partial, and really excited about getting back to my WIP for the next couple of months!

Anyhow, I have been curious, as I send queries out into the ether, about both the likelihood of a response and the timing of any responses I might get. We know some agents guarantee a response but most say no response = no (even though sometimes they respond anyway) and yet others simply leave it cloudy.

Not including two partial and one full requests (one partial request came the same day as the query while the other took four days [including a weekend], and the full request happened at a conference), I've received 35 rejections to my queries (I can't put a precise number on the response rate because some are still pending, but it's very roughly 50%). That's a small but decent sample, and I thought you might be interested in seeing its distribution.

You should hopefully be able to click on the chart above for a bigger view. But basically what it shows is that most rejections come in within a couple of days of sending the query. It looks like there's a slight uptick between one and two weeks, but that's not entirely real (it's just that things tend to slow down toward the end of the first week). Check this out:

This really tells the story (no pun intended). I received 40% of the rejections I was going to get within two days of querying. By three days it was nearly 60%. By two weeks the total was more than 80%. By a month it was more than 90%. Think about that for a moment.

What this means is that - regardless of what agents say on their websites with this 6-8 weeks stuff - the conscientious ones (the ones who'll take the trouble to send you a rejection, at least) are looking at their queries pretty quickly.

Now you might say it only takes one exception, and honestly who cares about rejection times? What we really want to know is how long requests for partials and fulls take. But I think, actually, that rejection times are a good proxy for request times, because they show you how long agents are taking to look at and evaluate the query.

What am I going to do with this information? Nothing, really, but it's interesting to know.

The Lt.'s Interview With A Famous Literary Agent...aka Lt. gets pwned.

2010-11-17T10:00:00.005Z

Your intrepid blogger interviews a famous literary agent. Shocking revelations and juicy insider tidbits about the publishing industry fall from her lips like manna from heaven in the clip below. Enjoy!

Sgt. Shopper!

2010-11-15T10:00:00.002Z

Before I start today's post, let me put in a plug for my post this coming Wednesday: I managed to secure an interview with a big-time literary agent, and will be posting the interview right here. Trust me, you do not want to miss it!

In other news, I successfully finished my 8-day detox and am generally feeling a bit better. I had some trouble getting to sleep a couple of the nights, but when I did finally get to sleep, my sleep was better. My neck/shoulder seems to have settled down and relaxed pretty much back to normal. I didn't manage to avoid Diet Coke completely, but I only had 3 cans for the whole week.

I really wanted a drink a couple of nights this week - that was really the only tough part of the detox - but I held out. So then on Saturday, when the detox ended, I drank trashy American beer out of cold 16 oz. cans.

I've also been making these simple but delicious fruit smoothies: take 12 ice cubes, one banana, about six strawberries, 1 cup of orange juice, and 1 cup of grapefruit juice, and blend. There is a whole day's worth of fruit in there.

My wife and I were at the supermarket last night when we noticed this older middle-aged woman wearing camouflage blouse and pants. This is D.C., and it is certainly not unusual to see military personnel in uniform. But looking closer, this woman's pants were not exactly the bulky military style, and the black leather boots on her feet were definitely not army issue. She was wearing a little jacket and was with her husband, who was most definitely not military.

"clean-up in Aisle 10, maggots!"

I do not know why she was dressed that way, but after passing her twice in the supermarket aisles my wife and I dubbed her "Sgt. Shopper." I wanted to snap her a salute when we walked past her again. Of course, just not laughing was already a considerable achievement.

oooh, put me in the stockade.

I am in the process of executing my query plan. You might remember that I sent out 10 and then decided to send another 20 before Thanksgiving. So far I've sent 6 of those 20, with another 8 ready to go in my e-mail drafts (I often work on queries on the weekend, but lately have been trying to send them during the workweek...no, I doubt it makes a difference, but what the hey?).

Anyway, so I've sent out 16 so far and have received 5 rejections. No positive responses yet. I continue to tweak the query letter and think that the very latest version does a better job showing how the protagonist is squeezed on all sides. I am also realizing how indispensable querytracker.net is as a resource.

And that is all. Don't forget to come back Wednesday for my interview!

Why Do All My Friday Posts Suck?

2010-11-12T10:00:00.002Z

If you are one of my 21 followers, or the few other readers I have, you might be asking why it is that the Lt. seems to be phoning it in on Fridays lately (if he even posts at all). It is a fair question.

Basically it has to do with the timing of when I write my posts.

(As a brief and pedantic aside, each blog entry is called a "post" or a "blog post," not a "blog". The blog - short for web log, of course - is the whole damned thing. Thus, it is incorrect to say I have a new blog up when you mean I have a new blog post up or I have a new post up. I have a new blog up means you have started an entirely new blog. Lately I see a lot of people using "blog" as a synonym for "post," and that is annoying.)

Anyway, back to the topic at hand...Monday's post is usually written at my leisure over the weekend. Wednesday's post may be written Sunday, or Monday evening. But then the week hits. Tuesday is a gym night. Wednesday and Thursday have been popular evenings lately for either staying late at work or having some event afterward. So then Friday rolls around and I got nothin', or else I post a wacky stream-of-consciousness at my desk at 8:30 that morning.

Also, I am frequently cooked by Friday. When I moved to D.C. and started my first position, which was on the Hill, I was thrilled to learn that I would have most, if not all, weekends off. I knew I'd be facing long hours during the week, but that didn't dissuade me at all. I was used to pulling long hours seven days a week when I worked in a lab.

What I didn't bank on was the intensity of the workday - the constant meetings, putting out fires, juggling multiple priorities, dealing with a demanding boss - with real and immediate consequences for myself and for the constituents or groups I was working with. And as an introvert, those hours spent in meetings and on the phone would cumulatively take a toll. Each week was truly a marathon.

In subsequent positions (and I've had three since then) things only rarely rise to that level of frenzied activity (though every place has its crazy weeks that are equivalent - it's just that on the Hill this is constant, with the occasional exception for recess - or, in correct parlance, "district work" - periods). Also, the smarter and more empowered I feel in my job, the less I mind the intensity, because it's all more under my control. Yet I still feel, sometimes, that I'm on my last gasp as Friday rolls around. I tend to think of it as a day to be productive and catch up, but in reality I'm often too roasted to get much done even if it's quiet, which it frequently is not.

I've posted this before, but it's a classic!

Not this week, though! That's right: today's post was written nearly a week ago - again, at my leisure, over the weekend - as I contemplated my weak bloggy showing on Fridays lately.

Have a great weekend.

On Beneath The Lion's Gaze by Maaza Mengiste

2010-11-10T10:00:00.002Z

One of the reasons I have questioned people's fixation on first pages and first chapters is because I have seen too many books - fiction and non-fiction - start off strong and then completely fizzle. (My review of this book, one of my most popular posts in terms of hits, btw, is a great example.)

Maaza Mengiste's Beneath the Lion's Gaze, which I would rank overall among the best fiction I've read thus far this year, has the opposite problem. The first section is slow, a little sloppy even, and I saw places where, as a writer, I thought she must have done some revision and rewriting that didn't fit in so seamlessly with the rest of the book. Indeed, I wondered how she got this book past agents.

(A little research indicates that I queried another agent at the same agency that represents this author earlier this year, but was rejected two days later on query alone by an assistant. Sigh. There's little similarity between my book and this one, anyway.)

Yet as the story took off, historical and personal events began to unfold, and the characters began to develop true depth, I became completely absorbed. The book wound up being exciting and very satisfying as a narrative.

The faults? Well, the slow start is the worst. The characters seem to spend the first 100 pages alternating scenes between their homes and the hospital.

This is literary fiction, but at times it's maybe a bit too literary. One of my pet peeves are scenes where characters are in pain and the language is both subdued and alludes to abstractions like moonlight and trees. Is that how you feel when you're in pain? Fortunately there's relatively little of this, but I just didn't find the comparison of dying to moonlight particularly apt.

Finally, a relatively minor quibble, the historical aspect of the narrative was an inconsistent mixing of the real and the imagined. The story takes place around the time when Emperor Haile Selassie, ruler of Ethiopia, is overthrown by the Communist Derg. Haile Selassie is a character, and indeed makes some cameos (direct cameos by major historical figures is another pet peeve, unless there's a really good reason for it). But the ruler of the Derg, Mengistu Mariam, does not appear in the book. Instead, there is a fictional alter ego called Major Guddo. I don't know why the author did things this way - perhaps there are good narrative reasons (Guddo is not just Mariam but somewhat of a composite, and maybe this is part of it - also, in a great example of injustice, Mariam is still alive and well in Zimbabwe) - but it strikes me as odd.

With these asides, however, let me reiterate how much I enjoyed the book. Each of the characters is drawn in just enough detail that we can appreciate them in all their complexity. And I mentioned before that the book is "satisfying as a narrative" and I mean that in a classic way: each character has a narrative arc that is well-done, even as the author manages not to beat the reader over the head with it. I was, it is true, a bit impatient at the beginning, but once the narrative picks up it really picks up and I could hardly put this book down.

I also liked that this is a book about big topics. For those readers unsatisfied because they feel books like Jonathan Franzen's Freedom draw life too small, Mengiste's book makes that connection between people's lives and big events. Her characters certainly resonate, although it is not fair to expect them (living in Addis Ababa in the 1970s) to resonate with contemporary American readers the way Franzen's do. I don't want to go too far down this road, because these two books are apples and oranges, but they both do show - in their own ways - that people are people.

This book is going to be a contender for the best novel I've read all year, and I strongly recommend it.

8-Day Detox and Querying Mini-Blitz

2010-11-08T10:00:00.002Z

I ate and drank too much while I was on my work trip a few weeks ago. One of the nights I drank three different kinds of beer, two different kinds of wine, scotch, and Jack and Coke (and yeah, I had more than one of most of them). I've been eating too much rich food, drinking too much, and working too hard. Too many meals out, too much junk food at work.

The numbers on the scale have been creeping upward - just a little, but still - over those last few weeks. Even worse, as I mentioned, I fucked up my shoulder about a week ago after spending the morning in the conference room from hell. I've been going to the gym but only working with 1/2 to 2/3 my usual weight just to ensure I don't make it worse. And I've been experiencing a variety of other little aches and pains, especially in my joints: my elbows when I lift, my right ankle. (Though, oddly, my perennial jaw tension/gum issue has been better than I recall these past few weeks. Correlation?)

So I decided I need about a week of detox. That doesn't mean nothing but spring water and celery, but it does mean no booze at all until next Saturday. No Diet Coke either, if I can help it. More water. Good nights' sleeps...or, since I can't exactly control that all the time, at least being in bed to give myself those 8 or so hours. More fruit and vegetables and light meals, less heavy stuff. And more exposure to daylight, to the extent I can control that.

I've also been thinking about where I am with writing and with querying.

Various advice that I've been reading indicates that, after Thanksgiving, the querying season is over - for those of us who try to be strategic about these things and actually want our queries looked at (my response rate for queries sent last December, btw, was only 30%) - until at least mid-January.

So I was thinking of trying to get my queries out before then, and then just saying fuck it until February 1 or so, spending December and January focused on my WIP.

There's been some suggestion in the comments that maybe it's time for me to query bomb a la Travener style. That is, go to querytracker.net, identify all the agents who represent my genre ("literary fiction" btw) and then send them all basically the same letter. Travs has had tons of full and partial requests (to the Lt's one of each after nearly 60 queries, and remember that my full came from a conference pitch rather than a query) and I have to ask myself what it is I am waiting for.

I think this warrants a fuller discussion than I am prepared to have here, but my thinking works like this:

First, the genre "literary fiction" is different from a lot of other genres, being somewhat of a subject matter trash bin, characterized more by style than plot or anything else. I wish I could more particularly genre-ize my book (my WIP, by contrast, can be much more specifically genre-ized) but I can't.

What this means is that...you know that sentence in the query where you're supposed to basically kiss the ass of the agent and say why they and they alone are just the most perfect agent to represent your book evah!? Well, that sentence has been really tough for me to write because the lack of genre-ization means comparing the books they represented to mine usually fails.

I don't want to squander any connection - however tenuous - I may be able to find between an agent's interests and my books. Unfortunately, in 90% of cases, this winds up being "Because of your interest in representing literary fiction, I thought you might be interested in my book...." Which is weak but no matter how much research I do (and the Lt. has been accused of many things over the course of his life, but being a slacker when it comes to doing research has never been one of them - indeed, it is the Lt.'s mad research skillz that pays the billz) I just can't do better.

So I realize that what I have just done is undercut my own argument on why not to blitz. Except....

The only other reason I can think of to batch instead of blitzing is in the expectation I will learn something during the process. For a while I was hoping to actually learn from feedback from agents, but when even those who request the full manuscript have no feedback, that's pretty much a vain hope.

Despite this, I have learned, my friends. From you all, from blogs, from the writers conference I attended. If I'd sent out 150 queries with my very first query letter I'd be wanting to go back in time and slap myself for squandering my chances. I might also learn more about agents and books that would help me overcome the impediment to personalizing most of the queries that I mentioned above. I continue to hold out hope for such break-throughs.

So here's what I think I'm going to do. There are about three weeks between now and Thanksgiving. I will query one agent per day between now and then: that's 20 more queries, which means I'll have sent 30 queries in Thanksgiving. I will do as much research as I can. Trust me, I'm not a fool, querying agents who only want romance or YA. I know where to find agent interviews and if they say anything meaningful and relevant I'll stick it in the query. In those rare cases where I can say something about their books you bet your ass I will. But everyone else is going to get the generic literary fiction sentence.

Then, when Thanksgiving comes, I'll put aside querying and get back to writing until next year.

What do you all think?

Querying and the Election

2010-11-03T13:22:00.005Z

(No connection between the two, except low expectations.)

I finally sent out a new batch of queries on Monday. This is my first systematic querying since March and the first query at all since July, when I sent one to an agent who promised at least a critique if I purchased one of her client's books. I purchased said book and sent my receipt in with my query. I have heard nothing back. (By the way, I also read said book and thought it was pretty awful...but 3.5 months later, who's the sucka? Yup, the Lt.)

So I sent out 10 queries in this round, which means that if Travener's twin Querybombs (TM) look like this:

then mine looks like this:

13 hours after sending, I received my first rejection. So one down and nine to go, I guess. The rest of November shall be devoted to finding at least another ten agents to query and my WIP. I also had a bit of a breakthrough on one of my amorphous ideas (that is, project #3, which will likely come after my WIP). That, at least, was cheering. Spending Saturday afternoon putting together query letters made me want to take that gun in the picture above, stick a real bullet in it, and put myself out of my misery.

As for the elections, I'm not terribly political but I do work in D.C. Here's what I think we can expect over the next two years: so much gridlock it makes the last two years look good. The House has turned quite R, and the House is very rules-based. So the House is going to do some crazy shit. The Senate, in contrast to the House, is consensus-based. It won't be able to do *anything* - if you thought they were bad before, just wait. Even worse, I predict the Senate and the House will work very poorly, if at all, together. So there won't be much landing on President Obama's desk, but at least he is there to smack it down if somehow something crazy makes it through.

The real battles may be fought over the budget. Depending on what they decide to do with the CR (continuing resolution = continues last year's budget for a certain time period because they were unable to pass new appropriations bills for FY2011) when they have their lame duck session, I cannot rule out the possibility of a government shut-down sometime next year. The Rs have talked about cutting spending back down to 2008 levels. Not only is this some really crazy shit, but it won't save us all that much money when you think about how much of our overall spending is non-defense discretionary.

Now, as for the longer-term outlook: I've been as frustrated with the Ds as anyone else, and I would much rather see things improve than see my party win, but think about it: if people can be so frustrated after two years, how will they feel two years from now when even less has gotten done except a constant stream of crazy from House of Representatives that instantly dies because the Senate (wisely) ignores it, not that they could get anything done anyway? In other words, not only is this not 1994, but it could actually be good for the Ds (at the Congressional and the Presidential level) in 2012.

OK, enough. We now return you to your regularly scheduled whining about how the Lt.'s writing career is going nowhere fast....

Hell Is A Hotel Conference Room...

2010-11-01T10:08:00.001Z

...very similar to the one I spent Thursday morning in, in fact.

The room, first of all, does not really fit all the people in it. The tiny hotel chairs have been pushed right up touching one another, even though each of them is too small to actually hold a person. The rows are long and closely spaced, making it difficult to maneuver in or out. Even the back walls are lined with chairs, leaving nowhere to stand.

The crowded nature of the room means there's no place to put your bag, so your feet rest on it as best as you can.

All that body heat means the room is too warm. But, once you're seated, there isn't enough space to take off your jacket, much less hang it over your seat.

There are refreshments - glasses of tepid water and tepid coffee - but you can't actually reach them, and even if you could, you'd need to be as coordinated as a professional acrobat to get something back to your seat without spilling it all over yourself and/or others.

It probably goes without saying, but the subject matter is stultifyingly esoteric and boring, spoken in a jargon-laden code you can barely understand. The sound is bad, the speaker has annoying verbal tics, and the Powerpoint slides are tedious - with too much text in too small a font. You can't see them, anyway, since a tall guy in front of you is blocking one part of them and a pillar blocks the rest.

Someone sitting right behind you has a throaty cold you just know is contagious.

Someone else's phone keeps going off.

And you have to go to the bathroom.

Heaven, of course, is a concurrent session right next door.

In this room, where the temperature is about 15 degrees cooler, the chairs are spaced out so as to be occupied by actual adult human beings, and only about one of every three is taken, anyway.

There's an interesting and engaging panel having a dynamic conversation about stuff you care about.

The food is good, and the drinks come in cans and bottles you can take back to your seat. Indeed, there is even a table between each well-spaced row (and not those silly rounds, either, where half the crowd is facing away from the speaker) for you to put your stuff on and take notes or eat comfortably.

The Lt. was stuck in the hotel conference room from hell Thursday morning. He literally could not sit back in his seat because everyone was so packed. He wished for the spaciousness of an airplane middle seat. He did his best but left after an hour, kind of knowing he was in for it.

And the next morning, like clockwork, the muscles joining the right side of his neck to his shoulder seized up in response to having been clenched the previous day.

Stretches, alcoholic beverages, light exercise, ibuprofin, and several massages from kind Belimperia and he is starting to feel OK again here on Sunday night.

Lesson learned: look out for yourself first, worry about the conference second.

Lt. Cccyxx: Deerslayer!

2010-10-27T10:00:00.004+01:00

No, James Fenimore Cooper, a different sort of deerslayer.

Not the way you think. You see, the Lt. didn't use a bow or a rifle to slay his deer.

He used a Mazda.

And the Lt. didn't retreat to the woods or drive up to the mountains to kill his prey as part of a hard-drinking weekend with his buds.

No, he took care of business right in the middle of six lanes of traffic, within sight of the Metro and the Beltway.

Let's set the scene, shall we? Saturday evening, and the Lt. and Belimperia are returning home from their weekly grocery shopping (venison was not among our purchases). They are driving down Rockville Pike, a major north-south thoroughfare in the Metro D.C. area (approximate site of the accident was here). Six lanes of traffic, and traffic that evening is actually fairly heavy. It's not late, but late enough to be dark. Nonetheless, conditions are clear and the Lt. anticipates nothing worse than a few idiots on the road. The Lt. does not anticipate that any of those idiots will have antlers.

Rockville Pike, less than two miles from the scene of our deer-strike.

The car in front of the Lt. slows to turn right. After it leaves the road, he begins to accelerate back up to speed. Keep in mind, he is in traffic: he can see cars in front of him, and there are also cars behind. All of a sudden - literally - a flash and boom!

"Was that a deer?" asks Belimperia.

By the time the image was imprinted on our brains, I'd already hit it - what seemed to be a glancing blow - and it had run off.

My first thought - and I know this is wrong - was "I hope the car's OK." The engine didn't smoke, there weren't any odd sounds, and - again - we were in traffic - so I kept driving. I turned off at the next place I could and we examined the front of the car. It's not like it had crumpled, but we had some damage. There was enough gore on the front of the car that we could see the deer had been significantly - no doubt ultimately fatally - hurt by the collision. I felt terrible that such a wound had been inflicted without killing it instantly, and just hope it was quick.

With the deer gone, our car driveable, and a trunkload of groceries, there was nothing else to do but drive home. We called our insurance company and then the police non-emergency number (they don't do reports for deer hits here in Montgomery County, we learned).

In the light of the next morning, we could see there had been more significant damage than we thought. Chances are they'll wind up replacing a lot of the front of the car. We took more pictures in the daylight (I will spare you - they are ugly - let's just say the deer must have caught on the metal panel on the passenger side of the hood, which buckled and evidently speared the poor thing), then scrubbed off the blood, hair, etc. as best we could. This morning we drove the car to our dealership and we hope to have it back next week. I'm thankful we forked out for the $250 deductible.

The guy at the dealer's body shop was nonchalant.

"We hit a deer," I said. "Right here on Rockville Pike, if you can believe it!"

"Oh, I can believe it."

When we go hiking in Rock Creek Park, we often see deer. I've even seen them dead on the roads around here on occasion, though not on such major traffic arteries. I don't know what, if anything, is being done to keep the deer population at manageable levels. But if these kinds of accidents are becoming more common, maybe something should. Having grown up in a place with little wildlife and certainly no deer, I've always found them kind of charming and never quite got the "rats with antlers" label so many put on them (of course, I also don't have a garden). Still, a little bit of country charm in the city or not, they are a danger on the road.

The Lt. prides himself on being a safe driver. I've never been in an accident before, never even had a speeding ticket. When I think back on Saturday night, what I might have done differently, there is really nothing. It just happened too fast.

We were very very lucky. We were not hurt, the car remained driveable, no other vehicles were involved...the only casualty was the poor deer. It was a freak accident and I am thankful it wasn't worse.

I feel like, after my last posts, I ought to start a new category about vehicles killing (or almost killing) things. Seems to be a regular part of my life lately.

Voting For Barbara Mikulski: It Pains Me But I'm Doing It

2010-10-25T10:00:00.003+01:00

She is the senior Senator from Maryland, and she's up for reelection this year. My wife and I are planning to do early voting, so I've been going through my ballot. I'm pretty much voting all Ds but in this case reluctantly.

You may wonder what my problem is with Sen. Mikulski. And you might laugh when you hear it, but here it is:

She's mean.

No, really.

Does she look mean? `Cause she's mean.

Year after year, in a survey of Capitol Hill staffers, she is ranked among the meanest Senators. (This year she won.)

For years, her primary competition was Arlen "Snarlin' Arlen" Specter. At first I was surprised that Specter was so high on the list because I'd watched him in hearings and on the floor and thought he was frequently eloquent and often thoughtful. (Or maybe just moderate for a Republican - this was back when he was still firmly R.)

The lesson I learned from Specter is that the disconnect between the public and private personas of these people is a total mindfuck...at least for those of us who have never worked in show business. As a Hill staffer, you start to get used to it after a while, but at the beginning it can be really jarring to see how certain people behave when the camera is off vs. when it is on.

I once walked past Sen. Specter in the Hart Building, and he gave me a look strongly suggesting he'd be much happier if I was on fire and screaming in agony. One article on him quoted a former staffer as describing the environment in his office as a "gladiator school," and when Sen. Specter was asked about this, he didn't disagree.

I watched Mikulski interact with her staff a couple of times and it wasn't pretty. There's an anecdote floating around that new staffers are brought into her office when she's not around and shown the approximate radius reflecting the furthest she has ever thrown a phone. Certainly I can tell you her office has tremendous staff turnover and I would look at the job ads and feel for the miserable wretches who had to write them.

I know, I know: who cares? These people are supposed to be effective legislators who work for their constituents. So what if they treat their staff like shit? Congress doesn't exactly attract the giving, selfless types. And Senators are under tremendous pressure just about every day. I saw it up close when I worked on the Hill and it is not a job for the faint-hearted. Many of them are fabulously wealthy and successful people who could go do whatever they want. It's service, and it's long and hard and ugly...it doesn't have to be with a smile.

The same is true for staff. It's service. You do it because you love it (for whatever reason). No one is forcing you to be there and, indeed, the environment is extremely competitive. Serving as Congressional staff gives you the opportunity to try to do a lot of good, and also, it opens up tons of opportunities if you stick it out. But it is also a job where everything has to be about the boss, for obvious reasons. You have to put yourself - your time, your ego, often your own views - second (or third, or fourth, but not first).

All that being said, public officials who treat their staff like shit bug me. Part of it is my very strong visceral reaction to authoritarian bully types, no matter who they are. Part of it is that other Senators have other management styles and are just as effective, if not more so.

Senator Stabenow: now, she is nice. You know who else was nice? Larry Craig. I kid you not. I don't agree with him on a thing, but the "scandal" a few years back in the airport bathroom broke my heart because he seemed like such a decent man.

Part of it is that, while members of Congress have really tough jobs, they are also totally coddled by their staffs. And I wonder whether people with those kinds of temperaments really have the judgment to be leaders. (John McCain, anyone? Another one famous among staffers for his temper.)

I know I can't vote against Mikulski (and for who? a Republican? god help us) because she's mean to her staff. If I'd really cared I would have gone and voted against her in the primary, and I didn't.

So my choice is clear. But I'm not happy about it.

Agent Battle Royale...And Another Near Brush With Death On The Metro

2010-10-22T10:00:00.002+01:00

I exaggerate...at least the first part. But celebrity blogging agent Janet Reid got quite testy over some advice given out by another blogging agent, the Agency Gatekeeper. And it's the testiness that makes this worth a mention, really, rather than the subject of their disagreement, which strikes me as fairly minor and esoteric (at least to most writers).

First of all, the Gatekeeper is a real agent, and isn't any more anonymous than the Query Shark, so if you want to find out who she is, a good five minutes of research will suffice. I have interacted with her over my manuscript and I found her pleasant and professional, if not exactly overly helpful. (I have not queried or had any interaction with Janet Reid.)

It's pretty clear, too, that Janet Reid is a much more experienced agent, which is why I thought the tone of her remarks was a little disproportionate.

And then, of course, the sycophantic commenters unleashed their full, and unwarranted, fury. That level of sycophancy is common on scienceblogs, which is part of why I never go over there (to keep my blood pressure down), and also common on agent blogs, but wherever it manifests itself, it is pathetic. If my online identity consisted largely of telling Nathan Bransford and Janet Reid how fucking brilliant (and right! always right!) they are, I would...well, go jump in front of a train.

I think the essence of the disagreement between the two agents is telling. Janet Reid says to read many agent blogs and balance the opinions your hear. And that is sensible advice that no one in their right mind would disagree with.

Agent blogs, like hers, provide a service to writers, but they are also self-serving. They strive to cause writers to behave in ways that benefit the agent (some of these behaviors might also benefit the writer, of course, but some may not).

Her indignation towards the Gatekeeper's advice seems to stem precisely from the fact that following such advice would not benefit the agent (it might or might not benefit the writer). Gatekeeper was, explicitly, trying to give the writer who asked the question advice for the writer's own benefit, not the agent's. And therein lies the rub.

On another note, you all may recall the attempted suicide at Rhode Island Avenue Metro Station that occurred right in front of my train last month. As it turns out, I was also very close to another situation where a train almost hit someone on the tracks the month before.

I was between jobs then, you may remember, and that day I went in to visit my wife at her work and have lunch with her. Our train stopped abruptly a couple of stations before hers, and all of a sudden the driver got on the loudspeaker and absolutely screamed, "Get off the tracks! No one else get on the tracks!!" We sat there for a good 15 minutes before we pulled to the station, where there was little to see. No more explanation was forthcoming.

But there is video of the incident, courtesy of Belimperia, who found the link here. I was on the train in the video (first view: follow the link). It's worth watching, especially the second view (which I embedded above - there's another view on the link). Seems to me that the person who ran down the platform waving his arms for the train to stop did a lot more good than the so-called hero who jumped onto the tracks and ran across the third rail to get to the person on the tracks and then...not much.

Two near-brushes with death (neither time my own, fortunately) in two months on the Metro. Querying can't be this scary.

Can it?

Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!

2010-10-18T10:00:00.003+01:00

The Lt. is traveling, so this will be short.

But unsettling!

Check out this freaky news article about a new fossil penguin from Peru. The color stuff is interesting, but it's the size of the thing that grabbed my attention: 5 feet tall.

A giant penguin. Remind you all of anything? Anyone, anyone?

How about this? (gotta love the cover quote from Michael Chabon, of all people. like seriously, who'da thunk it?)

OK, so was it like this?

Or maybe more like this (credit for this lovely image belongs to my friends here)

Either way...Ker-ee-pee!

That Jackwad Who Yelled "Tock!"

2010-10-15T10:00:00.002+01:00

Autumn is finally in the air, and something about the cooler, crisper mornings makes me want to switch out my commuting music. I've been listening to old U2, music that for me - probably idiosyncratically - definitely summons leaves changing color and chilly nights. I can't explain precisely why this is - I was a big U2 fan while growing up, and so it is music I've had around with me with a while. And it makes me think somehow of 7th grade (maybe not specifically, but you know, that time), and (amazingly) without making me want to hurl myself out of a window.

"old" U2, by way of explanation, means from the 1980s. "Rattle and Hum" (1988) was the last U2 album I enjoyed, but I like virtually all of their stuff prior, including the songs that never got radio play. I feel like when they released "Achtung Baby" it reflected a serious change in style. Their lyrics were less poetic and earthy, and The Edge's harsh electric guitar was replaced by more synthetic sounds.

(Indeed, as a brief digression, I am very much of child of the 80s and have a real soft spot in my heart for, not to mention nearly encyclopedic knowledge of, 80s music. This, by the way, is not to say that I think all 80s music is good - there is plenty that is not just bad but monumentally bad, and I disliked a good amount of it even back when it came out. But I also liked a lot of it, and still listen to it, even as I otherwise pride myself on a general disdain - and lately, nearly complete ignorance - of pop music.)

So I have been listening to albums like "Boy," "War," and "October," some songs I haven't listened to in quite a while. And one song I have got is a version of "11 O'Clock Tick Tock" recorded live in the Marquee Club in London sometime in 1980, a great song that showcases all the strengths of the young, energetic U2.

This song starts off with a few seconds of the noise of the crowd, and then Bono says, "11 O'Clock...Tick..."

And it is here that some jerkoff in the crowd yells, at the top of his lungs, "Tock!!!"

(I've had a heck of a time finding a way to embed the song here. The best I can recommend is go here and click on Track 15 under Disc 2. You only have to listen to the first few seconds to see what I'm talking about, though you should listen to the whole thing.)

I've taken to wondering about this guy. Did he think perhaps Bono had forgotten the title of the song? Was he just impatient? What's it like to watch Jeopardy with him? (probably pretty unpleasant in those rare instances he knows the answer)

This was probably his closest brush to fame in his whole life. Do you think he brings girls back to his place and plays the track and when it gets to the "Tock!!!" part says, "Baby, that was me"? Do you think one day, years later, he managed to get a backstage pass at a U2 concert, and when he got to shake Bono's hand tried to remind him of the good time they'd had together? Perhaps he even sought royalties; after all, the song wouldn't quite the same without him.

Of course, this song was recorded at a show in 1980. So if "Tock!!!" Guy was a sprightly young 20 years old back then, he's 50 now. Do you think he occasionally gets a little tipsy and wanders downstairs, disturbing his teenage kids, imploring them, "Listen to this"?

And they say, "Dad, we know you're the guy who yelled Tock." and roll their eyes and go back to listening to Lady Gaga (or whatever).

Do you think he goes to bars and tells it to perfect strangers? Perhaps has it in the "about me" on his Facebook profile? Maybe has a t-shirt he wears around the house that his wife bought him years ago: I picture a green shirt with white lettering, now stained with paint and caulk, that just says "TOCK".

Do you think they are one of those creepy couples who complete each other's sentences?

Do you think once he went hiking and was walking through the woods when one of his companions brushed himself off and said, "Tick!" And he yelled out....

Well, here's to you, Tock Man. Maybe one day, your mighty feat will be known to all, and you will live in obscurity no more.

On Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

2010-10-13T10:00:00.004+01:00

Is there any point to my reviewing this novel? Certainly there is no shortage of reviews out there, ranging from very good to very bad. I think the way to approach it is simply to treat Jonathan Franzen like exactly what he is to me: an author whose last work (The Corrections) I enjoyed, so I decided to pick up his new one. (I am not enough of a fan, by the way, to have sought out any of his other work in the intervening years.)

free your mind...of all the hype

Freedom is a good novel by just about any measure. I feel as though some critics who have been particularly harsh have judged it against an impossible standard (which is probably due a little bit to all the hype and a little bit to the overblown praise of other critics who loved it). That being said, I also think it's safe to say that it will not win Best Fiction for 2010 on this blog, nor even be one of the top contenders. Let's look first at the novel's special strength, and then I'll talk about what I see as the weaknesses.

Franzen's strength is not especially his prose (though it is certainly smooth and keeps the reader turning the pages) nor the plot. It is that one rarely encounters a writer who can draw such complex characters.

Now, there are sometimes drawbacks to making characters so complex, and in a few instances the characters in this book engage in behaviors that I as a reader simply didn't understand, and that's much more bothersome than it would be were the characterization more opaque. But there are other times he shows the complex psychological and emotional interactions that underlie even mundane actions or thoughts...to the point where I thought more than once that if I - a chronic overthinker - applied this level of analysis to myself, I would be utterly paralyzed.

Franzen seems to deliberately make his characters unpleasant or imbue them with serious flaws, which is very different from a lot of the protagonist-driven fiction out there, and it can make it more difficult for the reader to find an anchor. My guess is that this alone is enough to drive some people away. Yet even as he gives us plenty to despise about the characters, he also gives us plenty to empathize (or even sympathize) with. Both Walter and Patty Berglund, the couple around whom the plot revolves, overcome childhood traumas that predispose the reader to cut them some serious slack.

So where are the shortcomings? Critics have pointed to Franzen's "juvenile" prose, but one could argue the prose fits the setting and certainly his prose style is good enough to make most writers envious.

Critics have pointed out that his work deals with small things, not the big things that big novels should tackle. The allusions to War and Peace in Freedom work against the author. But again, Franzen could (and, I believe, did) argue that he did this deliberately - that most of our lives deal with the small, that he was drawing the contrast between those epic novels of the 19th and early 20th centuries and our lives here in contemporary America.

Several critics have harped on the parts of the book ostensibly written by Patty, claiming that her voice doesn't match her character. They are correct, and this was something I noticed while reading. It's just that it's not that big of a deal. Certainly, introducing Patty's perspective this way adds to the complexity of the work.

The biggest problem is that it's hard to believe, sometimes, that characters who are so self-aware are also so powerless to alter their behavior (and this is a problem for Patty but I think it's most damaging to the book in the form of Richard, the third wheel in the Berglunds' marriage, who seems to know precisely what is in both Patty's and Walter's hearts, but assigns himself no responsibility in avoiding breaking them both).

The most effective criticism I have read is that the book is more a mirror than a lamp (to paraphrase the review in The New Republic). It shows us how we live now, sure, but what does it tell us that we don't already know? Where is the greater truth? Leon Wieseltier (whose columns I love to hate because he is so grumpy and dated, yet still occasionally brilliant) calls it ethnography rather than literature. Without taking anything away from the ethnographers among us (I will leave that to others), I'll concede he's got a point. I'll also ask whether that kind of criticism would even be warranted for a book that wasn't so hyped and wasn't so good at a certain level.

Franzen understands people and puts them in our current time and place, lets them run around. The inter-generational interactions are most revealing because we see that same human nature playing out in different sociocultural milieus over time. The stakes are small because our lives are small. Rather than seeking truth and happiness, these characters seek only to choose their unhappiness. It's a disturbingly cynical vision.

To take the analogy probably too far, we don't like what we see in the mirror, but when we go to turn on the light to illuminate ourselves better and dispel the shadows, we find the bulb is out. We're stuck with what we've got.

It's worth reading this book.