But enough about you…

Pakistan is apparently planning to put up an amusement park at the site of Osama bin Laden’s former hideout.

Jihadworld? Deathtothegreatsatanland? With rides like ZeroDarkThirtyMountain.

There are many paths up crazy mountain, but they all reach the same, shrill, defensive, paranoid, inexplicable peak, and one way to tamp it down is to put a waterpark on top of it.

Apparently the Pakistani park “will include a zoo, water sports, a mini-golf course, rock climbing and paragliding”. Living in up-state New York I can tell you this plan makes way more sense than fracking, so you go, Pakistanis. I honor the space where your mini-golf meets America’s insane Creationism.

It’s a small world after all.

We’re walking in the woods beside the Little Beaverkill and I ask my daughter why moving water won’t freeze. She thinks about it and says, “It’s too busy.” Which is an awful answer, so I send a note to her science tutor asking for our money back. But she responds that it’s not a bad description at all: Still water freezes at 32F, but moving water wants to freeze and can’t, because the movement stops the water molecules from organizing into crystals. So in a way you could say it is busy. Which is also a bad answer. What’s this about water wanting?

So we come across another section of very still, unfrozen water at the base of a beaver dam and I ask my daughter why that water isn’t frozen. “Too lazy,” she says. Which makes perfect sense. Busy water. Lazy water. And water that just wants to get somewhere.

Even though I’m putting out my first novel as an eBook I definitely have a foot in the paper-based book world as well. Sure, the iPad’s a beautifully conceived and engineered thing, and when you hold one in your hand, you’re holding a piece of sci-fi gear our primitive ancestors from the 1980s never conceived of — a book reader, phone, movie camera, video display, global mapping service, all in one? Jimmy Carter’s science advisers would have taken a break from picking the lice out of each others’ back hair to snicker in derision; Heh. Man from future claims humans will, one day, tweet. Heh..

But don’t hate on the Book Classic either. The Book on Paper. The pBook. Here on my desk I have a hardcover copy of Garret Oliver’s The Oxford Companion to Beer. I have a nice, 2002 hardcover copy of the Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai and a paperback copy of the way creepy People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo–and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up. In the Hagakure I learn that focus, intention and readiness is everything. In Oliver’s beer encyclopedia I learn that it is proper to crash a Japanese barbeque with a shout of toriaezu biiru! (“I will start with a beer!”). Cheers, Mr. Oliver, you beer samurai; knowing the right term for crashing a Japanese barbeque shows great focus, intention and readiness.

It would have been impossible to write the above paragraph with only an iPad on my desk. Electronics resist random connections. Random connections assist lateral thinking. Therefore electronic readers can make you narrow. QED (which is Latin for Quaff Every Day, which I didn’t have to look up because I remember it from college).

A paper-based book is even more that just an aid to casual browsing: It’s a memory-retention device that requires no energy to hold information once the ink is loaded onto the paper, and the only energy required for information retrieval is easily supplied by a bag of M&Ms. A book is a link to history. Cloth binding itself is history. Marginalia is history, patina and, sometimes, solid gold information all its own. When you own a book, you know it’s a first or second edition and that it contains various errors, peculiarities and perfections that might have been smoothed out in later editions (think James Joyce and the pathetic attempt by the Joyce estate and Random House to replace the accepted text of Ulysses with a “corrected” text that would, just by chance, also extend their copyright). With an eBook, you can keep improving and re-uploading with no particular need to inform readers that there’s a better or, sometimes, newly en-fucked-up, edition available. Those who don’t own a copy of history are condemned to accepting the scrubbed version. Your paper copy of “Catcher in the Rye” says it’s a second edition and it will match every other second edition out there. In the virtual world, history is what the guys with access to the digital master say it is (I’m looking at you George Lucas; some of us remember when Star Wars was just Star Wars without all this Stalinist Episode IV: A New Hope revisionism in the opening crawl. Here’s a new hope for you: In a galaxy far, far away, in an alternate universe, there is no fucking Jar Jar Binks.)

So much for focus and intention. I started out meaning to write about Joe Simpson’s decision to walk away from his Random House deal to go it alone with eBooks. This must be a tough thing for writers with long-standing publisher relationships. You put out a hardcover book for $19.99 and it sells well enough to go to softcover after a year or so, and the softcover edition sells for $10.99, and the writer’s making $2.00 to $4.00 per copy, depending on the sales channel and the timing and where you are in the life cycle of the book. And you don’t pay any attention to the eBook part of the contract because who cares about a $1.99 sale to a few geeky college kids, of which you get something like $.30 per sale?

And that’s a fine way of thinking, right up until you realize that the sale of paper copies has trailed off to the point you’re barely making coffee change on paper-based book sales but that if you owned the better portion of your Smashwords<>/a> or BookBaby sales you wouldn’t have to keep getting up at night to move the Porsche you haven’t made a payment on in three months to a new secret location so the guys from We Never Sleep Collections can’t find it.

Welcome to Cadillac Records, new writer, this is what it feels like to not anticipate success.

Sounds like I’m down on paper publishers, but I’m not. I would purely love a traditional book deal, and to prove it, I just spent the past 8 months trying to woo a top agent at Writers House Literary Agency. And it wasn’t all for nothing because said agent’s assistant gave me no end of fantastic notes on my manuscript before I changed course toward e-publishing.

But if you’re going with a traditional publisher in this day and age, why not own your own electronic sales outside their purview? At some level this doesn’t work, because agents and editors do a huge amount of work to shape your manuscript, to market your book, and to position you in the public sphere. After all the work of shaping your baggy monster of a space-age-love-story-mystery-horror-noir-coming-of-age-tone-poem into a coherent story that might actually appeal to an audience of readers, they’ve earned their money and you and they are partners in the deepest sense of the term. But you can take a different tack if you’re willing and able to be your own best editor, and that is to go electronic first.

Always bargain from a position of strength. Get your material out there. Take the lousy reviews like a grown-up and learn from your mistakes. Evolve. That’s where I’m heading anyway.

Biiru no naka ni makoto ari.

He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
–G.B. Shaw, “Maxims for Revolutionists” in
Man and Superman (1)

and those who have finished their books and are twiddling their thumbs waiting for the cover art to arrive (all hail, my very cool cover artist, Ken Taylor) can do little but turn to the interwebs to let off excess steam. So it’s time to dust off the blog.

I created an inkan for my hero: Just what every sword-wielding Japanese warrior girl needs; a signature she can carve into the bodies of her slain foes, like Zorro, except with a brush-like flourish and a Buddhist respect for the teachings of her calligraphy sensei.

Namaste, Indigo, wear your new gago-in with pride:

So this guy, Michael Erard, wrote a column for the series Draft in the New York Times. What worries me is, I’m pretty sure Erard burrowed into my mind and stole my thoughts. He then used them to write a terrific article on the problem of structural priming. Structural Priming is the theory that you’ll tend to reproduce patterns you’ve most recently experienced — so as a writer, you’ll reproduce the pattern of sentences you’ve most recently read, because you’re primed to do it; a pretty serious problem for anyone trying to break into writing while holding down a day job that involves words (ask any Hollywood script reader when was the last time they tried to write anything of their own and you’ll generally elicit a gag reflex at the thought of dealing with more words). The Evidence of Erard’s thought-stealing is clear: he says he’s written short stories, news articles, essays, reviews and a couple of nonfiction books, whereas I’ve written screenplays, stage plays, software reviews and a children’s book. See? All he did was change everything except the part where I was worried about my own poor sentence structure, and then put it into a really well crafted article. But now I’m afraid to say anything bad about this guy because he’s got a grip on my brainstem like one of those L. Ron Hubbard engram-thetan-brain-control critters and he might do something evil like put the squeeze on my corpus callosum and turn me into a streaker or a flat-earther or a Red Sox fan.

Anyway, Mr. Erard’s got my writing problems nailed down like scrap of cheap carpet in a doghouse. Alan’s day, thy name is fracture: Programming, texting, posting, wiki-writing, blogging, more programming and more programming. And then, somewhere in the late night hours, some actual writing. Most of the time I’m at the keyboard; little of the time I’m at my manuscript. This is a sure formula for writing a novel that sounds like an extended warranty disclaimer for a bottom-of-the-line toaster oven. Wiki description of record class exceptions leech into my story of young love, thwarted by condition code 7: invalid input to third parm.

Sigh.

Erard suggests a few solutions: work in a different location for your night writing than the one that might prime you for your day writing; don’t let the web or email intrude on creative writing time; re-prime yourself by typing out some sentences from a writer you admire. Good ideas all.

The thing that works for me, which he doesn’t mention, is getting out there and getting your heart pumping. I do this by walking the dog in the morning, then going for a mid-day run or a bike ride. But my routine is beginning to strike me as a little tame, and un-priming, so I’ve been looking into what other writers do to break up the day and send some blood to the frontal lobes. Other writers have gone further than I have in their aerobic approaches to clearing their heads and un-priming their sentence structure. Hemingway never said they were writing techniques, but he favored deep-sea fishing, running with the bulls, chasing women and shooting machine guns — good choices if you have a big boat, live in Pamplona, can handle rejection and know how to aim. Lord Byron reduced this to just skirt-chasing, but maintained an apparently energetic enough level that his writing was never in danger of sounding like it had been primed by all the threatening letters he got from cuckolded husbands. Hunter S. Thompson likes guns, but added hallucinogenic drugs in combination with rum, which can get the heart racing at epic levels while minimizing the danger of skin cancer by keeping you safely under your furniture.

Some writers go further, running marathons or doing yoga in steam baths. But at some level you’re moving away from un-priming exercises and getting into serious work-avoidance. The diminishing returns of having your un-priming exercise take up more of your day than your writing might be a good indicator that you’re actually meant to be runner, a professional dog walker or an experimental heart surgery patient.

There are heaps of other great articles in the Draft series, including one on how Miles Davis’ mid-century playing inspired the writer to simplify his own style. Check it out at the NY Times.

Go Sox!

Typed The End last night. Such a great, apocalyptic feeling that I have to cue up the late, lamented Jim Moorison and listen to the black helicopter thwacking of my PTSD dreams:

(For the record, I have never been in a war: My PTSD stems from an overly-aggressive hall monitor at Churchill High School, in Livonia, Michigan, who wore freakish amounts of eye shadow, color-coded to the marker she was using that day to check hall pass validity.)

I have, on occasion, in the middle of an uncooperative manuscript, just typed, The End. “Take that, manuscript; I’ve ended you. Now, do you want to come back to life and get some fresh adjectives? Well, do you?” This hasn’t generally gotten me much beyond that look my daughter gives me when I talk out loud to my laptop. Still, it feels good. Feels like victory. Charlie don’t web surf.

My Facebook friend Claire Lambe posted a reference this morning to a book review on “Structured Procrastination”, which is the technique I’ve always used to get things done, but didn’t know somebody had beat me to naming it (I’ve always called it The Alan Method, and I encourage you to do the same). Boiling the theory down to its essence, you lie to yourself about what you need to do and what you’re going to do, and you make a long list of crap that you claim is really important, and then you do something lower down your list because you’ve fooled yourself into thinking that merely finishing a book is so much easier than all the other stuff at the top of the list, like learning Finnish, cross-breeding a better roasting duck or sweeping all the highways in the state of New York.

My preference is to avoid writing by doing other writing, so if I get stuck on a screenplay I turn to a novel. If I’m stuck on the novel I turn to a play. If I’m stuck on the play, that’s what the blog is for. While writing this YA novel — and this is serious — I finished a screenplay, three one-act plays, and am 140 pages into converting an old Sci-Fi screenplay into a novel. That’s some pretty industrial-quality work-avoidance, with the slight down-side that stories written for one media tend to leak into others in a Cowboys & Aliens sort of way.

Like every other writer I just claim the reader is detecting the subtle, over-arching themes of my fiction — my broody and writerly concerns. Minor writers have tics and fall back on tedious patterns of over-used tropes. Big, important writers have themes and overarching concerns. I know which of these categories I’m heading toward, which is why you’ll see echos of of my early symbolism (the Frogs in my 1999 treatise on individual freedom and counting from 1 to 12), illustrated by Steven Kellogg, even in the edgy and transformative genre literature flowing from my pen today.

Namaste

Everyone who writes, writes for somebody. Today, I’m writing for people who wear corsets and prosthetic ears.

Don’t know what gets your keel out of the sand, but I just finished two chapters and I think these two young women will like them.

Writing isn’t hard. What’s hard is taking criticism from your wife.

Especially when she’s right.

My manuscripts exist in a state of prelapsarian perfection when they’re hot off the printer. Which is to say, before anybody else looks at them. Much the way my downhill skiing is a study in feline grace and power when I have a slope to myself and nobody pointing out that I lean back when I’m in trouble. I no more lean back on the tails of my skis than I over-use passive sentence structure, not, at least, in the mogul fields and manuscripts of my mind. It is possible that the pages I turn over to my wife/editor are not quite the Platonic ideal of the perfect story in which I am never using passive verbs. But they’re close.

And why would I lean back on my tails when I’m never “in trouble”? Black Diamond is my middle names.

All of which is to say thank you, Cheryl. You’ve given me notes on 270 pages so far and you don’t even like science fiction.

Spent last Sunday at the New York Renaissance Faire which might soon be renamed the We Accept Your Longing For Transformation Faire. As I understand it, the Renaissance spanned the 14th to 17th centuries.  But it turns out to have also included the Third Age of Middle Earth and the Shire,  the Edo Period and Star Dates 48916.0 through 53745.7. Everything from Wee Folke to dueling royals, fairies, ninjas and Romulons must have been pretty thick on the ground during this time period, not to mention pirates, belly dancers and tawdry, heavily armed wenches with dirks in their boots and breasts served up like quivering Jello(c) on corset platters.

That might sound sarcastic, but while I’m typing this I have a StarFire Sword catalog open in front of me and I’m weighing the benefit of a new rapier (how much use would I really get out of that if I didn’t also have a doublet?) versus some leather-plate armor (how often would I walk around in it if I didn’t have a rapier??)

The Renaissance Faire is great. It’s like 15thCentury++, all the stuff that should have been there, and would have been there except that nobody had thought up steam punk yet, and the Popes would probably have had all the belly dancers rounded up and brought to Rome for questioning.

(by the way, my own photos of the RF were pretty lame, so all the low-res photos on this page were lifted from an excellent photo site of Renaissance Faire Fairies and pirate maides, royals, nymphs and other Wodelynd Creytures here: http://www.flickriver.com/groups/1212688@N20/pool/interesting/).

But as the post title says, I’ve found my audience.  My writing is all about transformations and the desire for transformation, and the Renaissance Faire is the energy vortex, the Axis Mundi of alternate realities, of people who reject, well, the whole time and situation into which they’ve been born.  Or rather, borne.  That urge, I suppose, can be pretty shallow, but it can also be pretty deep, and you can tell which is the right way to go when you’re walking around the faire.  The guy who bought a sword and some devil’s horns, but is still wearing his Green Bay Packer’s sweatshirt and Sansabelt slacks, is sort of pathetic.  But only because he’s trying to stay halfway in the real world..  The girl in rainbow layers of skirts, with a leather corset and broadsword?  She knows which reality she’s heading toward and it’s not the one that has cubicles and 401Ks.  And the guy who’s gone the full retard (in the parlance of “Tropic Thunder”) with the doublet, hose, rapier, stuffed baby dragon on his shoulder and enough leather to get him a free pass at any Chelsea bar?  He’s cool, man.  He is so so cool.

 

So, Neil Gaiman was great and generous and funny and wildly entertaining last night at Bard. He read two poems, one silly and outrageous and the other dark and outrageous, and he read the new fairy tale, which was the purpose of the talk and it was so crowded there was no time to ask him questions, get an autograph or otherwise become a total PITA to him.

And then, as a special present to all of us for listening, Amanda Palmer, aka Amanda Fucking Palmer got up on stage in a rock-em-sock-em-robots pose and belted out her “Ukulele Anthem”. I taped it, but the jerk in front of me was distractedly playing with his fingers and hair the whole time (please develop a little body consciousness, people; maybe take up yoga or mediation. peace out. namaste.) so my video is awful because it’s just so full of this guy playing with himself.

But personal whining aside, here’s a version Palmer did with Gaiman, back when she hadn’t quite memorized her own lyrics yet (last night she totally nailed it). And Mr. Gaiman kicked back in the background last night rather than being up close & personal with the page-holding.

Great night was certainly had by me. And I’m pretty sure by the other 600 or so people in the concert hall as well.