Allotropic Lucubrations

Writing Update: Darcie Chan’s and Mine

2012-02-07T09:01:00.000-08:00

A couple of things have been going around this week. I just finished reading Darcie Chan’s e-book, The Mill River Recluse. It’s the very articulate story of a disfigured, wealthy Vermont widow living alone in her marble mansion. At her death, she bestows her fortune on the townspeople who barely know her. Only the town’s priest — her sole contact with her neighbors — knows her secret phobia created by a childhood rape and an abusive husband. This is a story of triumphs over tragedy, insights into friendship, and love that comes from unexpected places.

It’s also an amazing accomplishment for Ms. Chan. First, I enjoyed the story enough to send a thumbnail review over to Anne Bendheim, books editor at the Asbury Park Press. (It should be in print shortly.) Second, the “amazing” part is that Chan is a youngish lawyer who drafts environmental legislation — not a novelist. Recluse is her first book, and was self-published when publishers rejected it. Word of mouth, I presume, garnered sales of the 99 cent book, she took out some advertising and — voila! — sales have gone over 400,000 copies. She’s now on the New York Times best seller list.

I wrote Chan, “I'm a few weeks late in telling you I loved The Mill River Recluse,” and have drafted the thumbnail book review. She responded, “I am thrilled that you enjoyed Recluse, and I am so excited about the review! Thank you so, so much. You probably know that it is very difficult to get any kind of review of any self-published book into any mainstream newspaper, so I really appreciate this.” Don’t tell me it’s tough getting reviews. I have two collections of short stories just waiting.

Second item is that Every Day Fiction — one of my fave online publishers — has accepted “Nun on the Run.” This will be the seventh story of mine to go up at EDF. The 800-word story covers a late-night cab ride that becomes an invitation to realize a fantasy. And where are the dividing lines between the living and the dead, the real and the pretext in New York City?

“Nun” was actually written in 2006 in response to a prompt put up on Wordtrip, but I never submitted it. Rewriting it with some added depth to diminish the ending collected these comments: “This one made me laugh. I wasn't expecting the ending,” said one reader. The publisher commented, “The ending is a bit of a punchline, sure, but the storytelling is strong enough to make it work for me.” Look for it in March or April.

Belly Up for an Egg Cream

2012-01-24T13:08:00.000-08:00

I had one of those Proustian moments last week when The New York Times ran a story on preservation efforts in the Lower East Side of the city. Happily, they didn’t call it the “East Village,” named when the hippies left and the kids moved in using Dad’s credit card. The story included a photo of Gems Spa at the southwest corner of Second Avenue and St. Mark’s Place in 1969. That might even be me — if you squinted — standing at the window waiting for my egg cream.

Marcel Proust immortalized the past in his recherche du temps perdu. I wrote Cruising the Green of Second Avenue to fictionalize those golden moments in 1969. In “Big Willa and a Push Toward the Edge,” published in Lunch Hour Stories shortly before the book came out, I relied on my memory to describe that “The long, sun-drenched evenings usually started with a group of us sitting on a stoop drinking beer. Maybe we’d go up to a bar. Then someone would suggest walking over to Second Avenue to get a bialy smothered in cream cheese and onions and pickled herring. Saturdays, there were demonstrations and protests to watch, but no one got involved. It was too hot, and carrying a placard was depersonalizing. Our Tar Beach was the rooftop on East Sixth Street. We'd wait until after sundown for a breath of air floating up from the river, and then, if we were lucky, we'd listen to the sounds of Country Joe and the Fish or the Fugs playing a free concert a block away in Tompkins Square. Always, there was the sound of drums echoing down the street.”

Who were the Fugs? A garage band without a garage, participants in the Peace Eye Bookstore, attendees in exorcising the Pentagon, and players of a certain amount of unexpurgated musical diarrhea. It didn’t matter what kind of diarrhea back then if you were stoned and the concert was free. For three decades I’d squirreled away a mimeographed copy of The Fugs’ song book, a treasure of the past.

Same week as the preservation story appeared in the Times a note also reported that Ed Sanders, leader of The Fugs, had written a new book. Lunch Hour Stories is out of business, but Ed’s still alive. The Fugs song book also has been preserved in the archives of the U. of Connecticut’s Babbidge Library, along with the underground comix I donated.

Time rolls on, but some things get caught in an eddy of the river. They’re preserved the way Carl Gossett’s 1969 photo of Gems Spa has been filed in the Times’ morgue. Ed is still playing with his group (http://www.thefugs.com/), whom the Voice’s Robert Christgau called “the Lower East Side’s first true underground band.”

At the conclusion of “Big Willa,” Jake says, “Willa had asked the universal question—‘You gotta hope, else, what’s left?’ And she was right. But I wish it were easier to believe in miracles and magic. That the dead will come back to life and long-lost lovers will be reunited. Instead, we go to the movies. We cheer Peter Pan. We click our heels together and bring Dorothy back to Kansas. I didn’t tell Willa that the Donnas come and go, illuminating us with a hot, bright light until they disappear into places like Atlanta. The Carolyns hit town as comic relief, and then they’re gone, too.”

If this teaser sounds interesting, send me an e-mail and I’ll send you a copy of “Big Willa.” You can also buy a download of Cruising the Green of Second Avenue at Barnes & Noble or other online retailers. And stop by Gems Spa for an egg cream.

Thumbnail Reviews for 2011

2011-12-30T09:29:00.001-08:00

I review books feeling like the guy who says, “I know you’re really going to like [insert title or author].” Well, dammit, I like the books and want others to share my happiness! The reviews have gone up on Amazon and B&N, and on Roberta Stuhr’s site, Favorite Books and Book Review (http://philadelphiabookreview.blogspot.com/).

Here, then are seven thumbnail reviews of 2011 that were published in Book Editor Anne Bendheim's "Tell Us What You're Reading" column in the Asbury Park Press:

Fur-Face by Jon Gibb is an e-book for young adults that will also fascinate older adults. A young boy, a newcomer to the English countryside is confronted by a talking cat, who — like his friend Razor the fox — has been part of a mind control program. Challenges confronting him include a secret deal with Russians, concerned parents, nefarious scientists, and secret tunnels under the animal park. And a budding infatuation with a young girl.

Pirate Latitudes was a manuscript discovered after Michael Crichton died in 2008. It’s a rousing good page-turner in the tradition of Treasure Island and Pirates of the Caribbean. Capt. Hunter is technically a privateer who learns a Spanish galleon filled with treasure is being repaired in a fortified harbor. He assembles a crew with the Governor’s blessing to hijack it. Along the way, all of the mishaps and conquests possible — shipwrecks, imprisonment as a pirate, battles —confront Hunter and his misbegotten crew.

Who knew my favorite meteorologist is also a writer of whodunits? The Morning Show Murders, first of Roker’s three published novels, concerns the death of Billy Blessing’s TV show producer who’s been poisoned by food from Blessing’s restaurant. Worse yet, the Manhattan DA closes Blessing’s restaurant and the new exec suspends Blessing from the Morning Show. Blessing has to become a sleuth to find the murderer. It’s a rollicking, fast-paced mystery, filled with New York’s sights, sounds and personalities. Follow up this one with “The Midnight Show Murders” and “The Talk Show Murders.”

Fascinated by Caleb Carr’s treatment of 19th century forensic psychiatry in The Alienists and Angel of Darkness, I continue to search out this author. In The Italian Secretary, Carr takes Sherlock Holmes and Watson to Scotland. A pair of murders at a castle being restored leads Holmes to suspect Queen Victoria is next, her demise orchestrated by the German Kaiser, Scottish nationalists—or even the ghost associated with Mary, Queen of Scots.

With Mexico’s drug battles in today’s news, Arturo Pérez-Reverte gives us a literary backstory to a Latina who becomes The Queen of the South. Theresa, girlfriend of a narco pilot, gets a call warning that if this special phone ever rings, he’s dead and the narcos are coming for her. Theresa flees to Spain, surviving over the next 12 years by building one of the biggest drug rings in the Mediterranean. She’s one tough woman in a man’s world, and you have to love even the bad guys.

John le Carre’s A Most Wanted Man follows a Turkish Muslim boxer who unknowingly takes in a medical student. The book shows us the post 9/11 rivalries of spy agencies in three countries as we learn the student is actually the terrorist son of a Red Army colonel with a mysterious bank account. This may be le Carre’s best work — and most humanistic. John le Carre is a “must-read” author.

Dennis Lehane delivers horrifying insights into 1918 Boston with The Given Day. After the Great War and influenza epidemic, but before the ‘20s began roaring, police officer Danny Coughlin has to contend with leading a strike, mayhem from his policeman godfather, anarchist terror, and unrequited love for the Coughlin family maid. Lehane, author of “Mystic River,” has written a terrifying novel of Boston’s large-scale rioting, families torn asunder by pride, Bolshevik bombers, and wanton murders.

I know you’re really gonna like them.

Fool Me Once, Shame on You

2011-12-22T11:36:00.000-08:00

Now I’m mad! Barnes & Noble rejected my review of Thomas Matthews novel, Rejection. Nameless moderators said, “Your Review is no longer visible by others because it contains inappropriate language which violates our Terms of Use. If you update your content, it will be reconsidered by our moderators within three business days. This message will be removed when your content is approved.”

The trouble is, there’s no apparent way to “update the content.” This Kafka-esque situation gives me no alternative but to post the review to Amazon. There , that’s done. But while waiting for that review to be approved, here’s an advance look at my review of a one-star novel….

I downloaded Rejection for my Nook on the basis of a Facebook friendship, several ecstatic reviews that now seem highly suspect, a bias toward new writers, and a love of the detective/mystery genre.

This is the first time I’ve been upset by a carelessly edited, poorly written, badly researched, clichéd novel. My disappointment wouldn’t have been so deep if I hadn’t just finished Pete Hamill’s Tabloid City and Dennis Lehane’s The Given Day. In contrast, both are richly textured, almost literary works whose focal point is crime. Rejection is a potboiler.

The saddest sticking point is that Matthews has given us “Malcolm,” an invented borough of New York City. Please! NYC has five distinctive boroughs, and none of them are 19th century hamlets. New York has a Delancey St., but none spelled without the “e”. (Check your city guide, Mr. Matthews.) And for a police writer to refer to “Dunkin’ Doughnuts” is unforgiveable (as much a calumny as his having overweight African-American women cops reaching orgasm over doughnuts). The lack of editing goes right on through a major character named Smythe being referred to as Smyth.

It’s dangerous to try describing a place you don’t know. For example, “Avenue of the Americas [New Yorkers call it Sixth Avenue] stretches out like the movie set of a quintessential New York landscape. Here [sic] business and commerce embrace the swirling lifestyle of the printed word. The place is lousy with magazines, book publishers and high rent offices, all connected by text messages, phone lines and power emails that jump from one side of the concrete canyon to the others.” Aside from the geographic invention, I defy anyone to make sense of this paragraph.

I think Matthews has never met a punctuation rule he didn’t ignore. It’s common to find commas missing after an interjection, periods missing in sentences, and often entire words missing in a simple declarative sentence. My proofreader would have characterized this work as a “dog’s breakfast.” Jerry Shapiro, the publisher, says it on p. 330, “I’ve looked at some of these [POD] books and the covers look good, but inside is a nightmare of bad writing, misspelled words and poor editing. It makes the heart weep.”

Somehow, the entire strength of this mystery lies in the fact that literary agents are being murdered in gratuitous venal ways. (No spoiler alert, but the case is resolved 50 pages from the ending.) Is this a case of Matthews transferring his own professional problems onto his stock characters? If this is the situation, there should be a “Predators and Editors” Web site warning agents against amateur writers who self-publish.

The rejection of this book lies not only in the title. As Shapiro the publisher says, “It makes my heart weep.”

2011, That’s a Wrap

2011-12-11T12:52:00.000-08:00

As I wrote in my Christmas letter to far-flung relatives, this has been a fulfilling but uneventful year, and there’s much to be said for the lack of drama. No hospital emergencies, no tragedies, no unforeseen circumstances.

What I did make happen was to bring 10 short stories to life in print and online (two more slated for 2012), nine commentaries and reviews, and six humor pieces. I feel proud to have had seven thumbnail book reviews carried in the Asbury Park Press, and want to take some small credit for keeping this column by Book Editor Anne Bendheim alive when her submissions dried up.

Of those short stories, Bill Olver of Pulp Fiction has submitted “Misunderstood Identity” for the 5th annual Micro Award program, an annual competition for fiction in under 1,000 words. I feel honored — and all giggly, too, because I’ve loved this story since I read a first draft to a church congregation. In case you missed it, the story is still up at http://bigpulp.com/issues/2011_09/giersbach_misunderstoodid.html.

Throughout the year I managed also to read 28 books. Well, I went through some of them quickly because they were turgid; others weren’t worth archiving and those were downloaded to my Nook. I'll confess I read too muc Ellmore Leonard and Dennis Lehane. I found it tough to read James Ellroy (American Tabloid and The Big Nowhere) because they were so slow and dense and admit that I put them aside. Several harked back to the early 20th century (Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest and Norman Springer’s The Blood Ship) and are still viable pieces of writing.

That was the year that was. Nothing dramatic, but very satisfying.

Memories Are Hard to Lose. And That’s Good

2011-11-21T13:14:00.000-08:00

The past never leaves us is a cliché that can be useful to a writer. That applies to my story, “Silver Screen Saver,” just published by The Corner Club Press. (You can read it at http://www.thecornerclubpress.com/uploads/6/0/5/3/6053731/the_corner_club_press_issue_5.pdf. That’s Issue #5, pp. 26-31.) Shamelessly, let me add that this is my fourth story The CCP has published in its first five issues.

“Silver Screen Saver” came to me because as a post-pubescent kid I never forgot seeing Marta Toren on TV. This relatively unknown actress played in a 1948 remake of Algiers. There's are almost no filmography references to Marta (she died at age 31), which allowed me to recreate her as the actress who never grew old. Play that against a romantic nostalgist so wrapped in the past that he can't move forward and you end up with — excuse the left-handed pun — "Silver Screen Saver." In her way, she could have been as iconic as Veronica Lake.

Okay, moving right along with revising the past, “Carnival’s Last Show” was also published this month by The Jersey Devil Press. That’s up at http://www.jerseydevilpress.com/?page_id=1792. The piece is a reimagining of the day in the eighth grade that I played hooky. I hitched in to Portland, Oregon with my friend Frank Dunham to see Clyde Beatty’s Circus. That incident was anaturally matched pairing with Bruce Springsteen’s “The Last Carnival.” I ask, “Where does the magic go when the carnival train leaves and the carousel music ends? Where does a roustabout kid go when a legend walks into the desert to die?” It’s a short bit of fiction that’ll take just a minute to read…and dredge up some of your own memories.

Hitching to see Clyde Beatty was earlier revisited in “Louise from the Bar.” The story recalls that life can be thrilling, dangerous and filled with stuff you’ll never forget when you’re 14. It was published May 11, 2009 by Paradigm Journal at
http://www.paradigmjournal.com/sagan/Giersbach_Louise%20from%20the%20Bar.html. Sadly, Paradigm has closed its doors. R.I.P.

See, the past never leaves us. And that’s good. (Sometimes.)

When the Devil Leaves the Porch Light On

2011-11-10T14:10:00.000-08:00

When Colson Whitehead published a genre novel about zombies (Zone One), New York Times reviewer Glen Duncan made the analogy that it was akin to an intellectual dating a porn star. A literary shooting star was slumming! Epiphany! So that’s why I love writing pulp. Besides, it’s hard to dance with the angels when the devil leaves the porch light on.

Those thoughts tugged at my nether regions as Pulp Modern this week accepted “Gaslighting.” (“Being a kid can be stressful even without having someone abuse your girlfriend, Halloween or not. And then there’s that thing with living lawn ornaments.”)

This was followed a few days later with Big Pulp accepting “Flying Objects.” (“The green baize of a blackjack table is a playing field worthy of the best antagonists when love and money are at stake.”) Why is pulp fiction so much fun to write while stories of literary quality languish?

Today, “Carnival’s Last Show” went up at The Jersey Devil Press (http://www.jerseydevilpress.com/?page_id=1792). Read it, and tell me a tear doesn’t come to your eye, all you tough guys who wanted to run away as a kid.

And The Corner Club Press also accepted “Silver Screen Saver,” with editor Amber Forbes saying, “I think by now you can at least suspect you're going to get into our issue 5. Your stories are always so diverse, and from one story to the next, I wouldn't be able to pin that it was you who wrote it, which is probably why I'm always accepting you. [WG note, this will be story No. 4 in CCP’s five-issue run.] So it's fantastic that you can write all these stories and make them so unique with different styles.” [WG note, Ah, shucks.]

Back to the point of pulp: I try to keep my mind on higher things, like eternal love, the meaning of life, and if there are clues to the meaning of life in Lindsey Lohan’s adventures. Look, I researched, wrote and posted a review of Dashiell Hammet’s Red Harvest last week. And, a thumbnail review of John le Carré’s A Most Wanted Man was printed in the Asbury Park Press Nov. 1. I moderated a real, live writing group, and I advised my grandchildren on the meaning of life, value of hard work and to not mix the grain and the grape. That ought to deliver a couple of karma points.

So, don’t give me any guff about pulp. I’m working on a serious literary story now. (See, there's this kid who duct-tapes the slacker to death and ends up getting devil’s 1960 Chevy pickup truck.) But it’s the cocktail hour. Stay tuned.

Marginal Thoughts

2011-10-27T12:49:00.000-07:00

Turkish Taffy: Back in 2003 I began reading My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk. Pamuk is a Turkish writer who received the Nobel prize for literature. Totally bored and confused by the book, I passed it on unfinished to the director of WestConn U’s Haas Library. He shrieked that Pamuk was a great writer. I shrugged; not my cup of tea. Elif Batuman writing in The New Yorker [Nov. 24 issue] said she was asked not only about Pamuk but about her inability to finish Pamuk. “Why don’t we talk about something else?” she asked. “I’ll tell you why,” the Turkish interviewer responded. “None of us can finish Pamuk, but you’re the only one who says so openly.” I feel vindicated.

Score Card: I’ve finished (or am still reading) 27 books this year and it’s not yet Halloween. My bogey is two dozen books a year. Less than that, I’ve either begun writing another turgid novel or goofing off. My scorecard is a Readlist of title and author I’ve maintained since 1971. Maintaining a score card also keeps me from wallowing in science fiction or mystery/detective genres.

The first half dozen “reads” that year were The Greening of America (William Reich), Future Shock," (Alvin Toffler), Diary of an Old Man (Junichiro Tanizaki), War and Peace in a Global Village (Marshall McLuhan), Blue Movie (Terry Southern) and Cat's Cradle (Kurt Vonnegut). So many “must read” authors back then. But nowadays, does any college student pick up Magister Ludi by Herman Hesse or anything by Buckminister Fuller or William Burroughs? Perhaps the bestsellers define our thinking as much as we search for truths that become bestsellers.

E-Books for Ephemera: I think I’ve reached a conclusion as to which books to download and which deserve killing a tree. If I don’t care to shelve it in the bookcase and go back to it as an asset, I find the electronic version. I download books written by friends and acquaintances because — face it — none of them are beauties like Colson Whitehead’s Colossus of New York or textually thick resources like David Hackett Fischer’s 900-page, heavily footnoted Albion’s Seed.

Like most readers, I also regularly flip back to confirm a character or situation, flip ahead to see where the next chapter break is, or meander to the table of contents or author’s bio as my own amuse bouche. This demands paper leaves with all their smell and typography. And, truthfully, I love bookmarks, always adding to my little collection from Borders (R.I.P.), the Coop in Harvard Square, the Bryn Mawr Bookstore, Porter Square Books, Mad Tom’s in Manchester, Heffer’s in Cambridge, England, and the Globe in Boston. E-books are unable to engender or hold memories.

Writing to Meet Evolutionary Expectations

2011-10-20T13:08:00.000-07:00

I suppose it was revolutionary when the codex replaced the papyrus scroll, just as the e-book reader is replacing the bound volume. But is the actual writing keeping up with readers’ expectations? Is stylistic form following function?

In 2005, the Japanese use of emoticons — kaomoji, or face marks — far outstripped Western usage. And, in 2008, Yume-Hotaru's first novel became a best-seller in Japanese bookstores; he wrote it entirely with his thumbs. His novel, First Experience, a story about love and sex in high school, became a top title in one of Tokyo's biggest bookstores.

Since it emerged in Japan nearly a decade ago, the cell phone novel -- keitai shosetsu — has moved from a little-known subgenre to a mainstream literary phenomenon. Today, keitai shosetsu sites boast billions of monthly users, while publishers sell millions of copies of cellular stories taken from phones and turned into paperback.

By 2007, half of Japan’s 10 best-selling novels were written on cell phones,

I began wrestling with this thought a few years ago when netspeak began appearing on cell phones. (“R u listening? Lol.”) And, to some extent, leet (733T) speak became a secret code. (Oh, I was so proud of myself when I deciphered someone’s e-mail address—disbm3g—as a phonetic of her name.)

Last week, a neophyte writer in our bricks-and-mortar group read an e-mail diary: Letters written to herself. While the writing was rough, it was insightful in an epistemological way. I think she’s on to something if it can be polished.

Similarly, “Big Biz @ the Mall” was an experiment in the quotidian way people write on Facebook and in their instant messaging. (You can read “Big Biz” diary writing in The Corner Club Press,, pp. 50-51, at http://www.thecornerclubpress.com/uploads/6/0/5/3/6053731/the_corner_club_press_issue_4.pdf)

I’ve just subbed a second story in the same style to another market. “Movin to the Moon” follows a girl in crisis...

“R u suffering a midlife crisis” she asks, all serious like Dr. Phil.

Just a tiny one I tell her, but it might be PMS. Then I see a guy w/ a mic interviewing people. Hes got a PA system and is wearing a necktie so I know it’s the real deal. I shout ITS SHOW TIME!!! All the geri freaks wake up and stare. “Time for Beauty and the B***h!” I shout to the old guy near me.

Hard to read? Jarring to those literate senses honed in English Lit 101? Yeah, it might be. In fact, I feel sympathetic for those 3rd century Romans wondering why they stopped making scrolls.

Oh, the Ennui, the Despondency—Wait, There’s My story!

2011-09-24T13:32:00.000-07:00

I’ve heard runners get depressed if they don’t jog or sprint or run for awhile. The very thought of running depresses me, but real despondency comes when I haven’t written. It’s the ‘Oh, God, I’m Blocked’ syndrome. Not that I’ve ever been writer-blocked, but — like Alzheimer’s — it’s not something you want to consider.

This is why I desperately polished “Testing Time for Politicians,” a humor piece that came to me from reading a New Yorker review that included a few questions on how to determine someone is a psychopath. Always handy to know these things when you meet up with a Middle Eastern death squad leader. The piece was posted at The Short Humour Site two days ago, at http://www.short-humour.org.uk/3writersshowcase/testingtimeforpoliticians.htm.

The need to write was also filling in for the ennui that came from waiting for “Big Biz at the Mall” to go online at The Corner Club Press. The editor said two days after I submitted it, "You knew we were going to accept this." Well, no I didn't. But that was months ago.

How about you? You can find “Big Biz” in Issue IV, pp. 50-51 at http://www.thecornerclubpress.com/uploads/6/0/5/3/6053731/the_corner_club_press_issue_4.pdf, issue IV, pp. 50-51. Short enough that you can read it between subway stops, while waiting for the barkeep to bring your beer, or during your first bathroom break at work.

p.s. I bounced a draft copy off an 18-year-old to get her thoughts. "Any typos or misspellings?" I asked. "No," she replied, "well, maybe one word's misspelled." (You know who you are, young lady, but I won't embarrass you or anything.) How about you?

Trying to Stay Out of Trouble

2011-09-04T12:23:00.000-07:00

A couple of pieces of writing have popped into the ether. That makes me happy, and when I’m happy I’m really a very sanguine fellow.

Oh, yes, the writing. “Queen at the End of the Bar” was published by Gumshoe Review on Sept. 1st, at http://www.gumshoereview.com/php/Review-id.php?id=2915. Editor Gayle Surrette was even nice enough to link it to a previously published story there, “Joined at the Heart.” This "Queen" story had been around the block for the longest time, getting submitted and quickly being rejected with quizzical editorial looks. I thought maybe it was the anatomical references, or maybe just cross-genre of noirish bounty hunter meets eco-catastrophe. I may never know if it’s my dubious taste or less than correct thinking that scuttles a story.

Similarly, “Working Woman’s Wife” was rejected over the past several years. One editor allowed as perhaps it just a mite sexist. Well, damn! Don’t confuse the writer with the writing. Fearing it would die stillboarn, I shot it off to The Short Humour Site and saw it also posted on Sept. 1st. Read it at http://www.short-humour.org.uk/3writersshowcase/workingwomanswife.htm.

Then tell me if I have bad taste and am sexist to boot.

Catching Up After Racing Off in All Directions

2011-08-16T09:00:00.001-07:00

It seems like the summer of spinning my wheels, but I look back and think I accomplished something.

Last week, “Where’s Old Bill Hughes, Now?” was published at The World of Myth as an action/mystery story. (See http://www.theworldofmyth.com/.) It’s a quirky little thing that bugged me for years because there really, really was a William Hughes who “kept popping up.”

And, did I forget to mention that “Misunderstood Identity” was published by Big Pulp in soft cover in July 2011, and online at http://bigpulp.com/issues/2011_09/giersbach_misunderstoodid.html. Life is a mystery, but that doesn’t mean a guy has to put up with someone stealing his identity.

Two others pieces are also slated for publication. I ranted earlier about women writing from a male point of view (and vice versa). “Gender Bias in Writing” will be published by Flash Fiction Chronicles on/about Aug. 27. Now, the mystery remains: Is gender-specific writing biological or cultural or …?

Finally, “Big Biz @ the Mall” will be pubbed by The Corner Club Press shortly. But let me stop and come back to Big Biz in a matter of days. We’ll talk then about language and netspeak and leet.

I think a couple of mysteries have been solved regarding my fave children’s book writer, Holling Clancy Holling. Go to http://hollingcholling.blogspot.com for the story of how another piece of this man’s commercial artwork was finally catalogued and archived. And the second mystery had to do with connecting a correspondent with the Leslie, Mich., museum director to help identify one of Holling’s early illustrations. More on that to come, as the mystery hasn’t been completely solved. Yet.

The Power of the Pen—er, Networking

2011-07-29T13:53:00.000-07:00

A month ago I was in a state of despair. Oh, excuse me for being weak-minded, but when I buy the Sunday Asbury Park Press at my 7-Eleven, the first thing I read (really, and before the comics) is Anne Bendheim’s column on “What You’re Reading.” This is a review each week on what a reader submits that he/she finds interesting. I’ve had seven reviews published there.

I don’t know how many of you read Sunday’s Asbury Park Press, but you may have noticed on June 26 that the “Tell Us What You’re Reading” column was missing. I fired off a shocked e-mail to Anne, who edits the page. (Anne describes herself as not being on Facebook and “the only person in New Jersey without a cell phone.”) I wrote, “This page is the only voice of the people, except for reader rants on the Op-Ed page.”

She replied, “I had no choice but to pull the column. I had no reader responses for more than six weeks. I was reduced to calling my friends for their suggestions—and I ran out of friends.” Isn’t that an outrageous state of affairs?!

Now, Anne was suggesting that “it might be the case” for the column to be reinstated if she were deluged with thumbnail book reviews. She’d need four or five in advance.

It’s a simple process to send an e-mail to abendheim@pressmedia.com about the book you are reading, and a short description of the book and why you like it. Include your name and town, and put “What I’m Reading” in the subject line.

I wrote a note to the two score names on our Writers’ Circle mailing list, suggesting they stop and send a review now. I told them, “C’mon. We’ve read Peter Pan, and we know Tinker Bell will live if we all clap our hands — and post a book review.” That done, I sent a note to the Monmouth County writers’ group on Yahoo! I sent individual e-mails to others I knew were literate. And then I sat down to scribble a review of Caleb Carr’s The Italian Secretary.

The next day, Anne sent me a note, saying she “just got a new cat and named her Tinker Bell.” Is that a coincidence or what? A week went by with no review … and then it appeared. The following week, my Caleb Carr review appeared. I won’t take credit for this, but in a small way I hope I’m responsible for bringing back interactive reader-newspaper communications on the subject of books we like.

Tubing Down the Stream Called Summer

2011-07-20T10:21:00.000-07:00

I admit it. I have little discipline to keep up this blog unless news intrudes. There’re distractions like drinking beer on the boardwalk. Moderating a writing group. (I’m so proud of them — us.) Going to jazz and wine festivals. Hanging out with my family. The usual summertime activities.

But to the news. Bewildering Stories has just published “Fish Stories and the Mermaid,” at http://www.bewilderingstories.com/issue439/fish_stories.html. I was chided that this was PG-rated and I should have issued a warning to young people (who already know things I have to look up, like what a “Norwegian ice rocket” is).

But don’t distract me. What I want to say is that I ran across a heavy word: synanthropes. (It’s G-rated, so keep reading.) The word refers to curious ways that animals adapt to humans as they’re crowded out of their habitats. For example, trainers in Hawaii’s Sea Life Park were stunned when a 400-pound gray female bottlenose dolphin gave birth to a dark-skinned calf that resembled the 2,000-pound male false killer whale with which she shared a pool. The calf was a wholphin, a hybrid that was intermediate to its parents in some characteristics, like having 66 teeth compared with the bottlenose’s 44 and the 88 of the false killer whale, a much larger member of the dolphin family.

Talk about moral breakdown! This sent me to the keyboard. There was a story here! But in July ’09 the first editor rejected “Mermaid,” saying “I was expecting something more ‘mythic,’ something more in keeping with the theme of ‘synanthropes.’” The next editor said, “Ummm, this is an entertaining story, but I have to say no to it. Largely, I'm not into stories where the punch line is basically, ‘I'm pregnant.’” The third editor flatly stated, “Unfortunately, we cannot accept your story for publication.” Cannot? Like, I made a mistake and sent this to a children’s mag? The fourth editor remarked, “Although we really liked the voice of this piece, we both felt that it was the beginning of a story that could go much further.” No, sorry. That was the story. The fifth editor had two objections, apparently pulled from a list: “Incorrect formatting, language, italicized words not underlined” and “The genre of this story was not clearly defined. It read more like a ‘slice-of-life’ story than anything that I would consider fantasy, horror or science fiction.”

Finally, a sixth editor wrote back, “Thank you for ‘Fish Stories and the Mermaid.’ It's one of your most interesting ones.” Don Webb, editor of Bewildering Stories, then proceeded to point out — accurately and line by line — where I had been careless. He asked if I could help readers over these rough patches. I said I could indeed. That was in mid-spring of this year.

Thank you, Don, for running six of my stories and an excerpt from my Cruising collection over the years. Bewildering Stories is one of the best.

The Enchantment of Flea Markets

2011-07-01T12:35:00.000-07:00

I’ll be the first to admit that collectors often are avaricious people who want to swallow the whole world. Often, however, they restrain themselves to collecting all of a single class of objects. My weakness is cast iron ashtrays with figures, usually drunks leaning against lamp posts. I have a dozen of ‘em. And white-knob windup toys, of which there are scores sitting in the attic.

This led me to write “Million Dollar Find,” a story published June 30, 2011 in r.kv.r.y., an online magazine, at . R.kv.r.y., explains editor Mary Akers, is the phonetic spelling for recovery; these are stories of the recovery process. Was my protagonist Archie Mezinis recovering or just searching? He’s a widower and retired who wanders. His week’s happiness is assured if he finds one of those plastic pencils with a ball at the end — a telephone dialer from the 1950s shaped to keep women from breaking their fingernails. Or a toogle. (What? You don’t know what a toogle is?)

The story was meaningful for me to write because of associations and — well, some things are disappearing and need to be saved. (The first draft was done in 2007.)

As many of you know, the flea market is a field of dreams for the Saturday-morning searcher — a place where past and future meets and the unraveled pieces of lives are knit together. Often, the treasure found is unexpected. I used to drive my daughter to Englishtown on summer Saturdays where she sold T-shirts and sweats. And I’d walk the avenues quickly, scanning every table in half an hour. It’s where I began picking up fast food collectible glasses, which at one point reached over a thousand in quantity.

To this publication, there’s other good news to add:

“Nature Story” was published in Summer 2011 in the Southern Fried Weirdo: Reconstruction anthology (p. 251-53) to benefit tornado victims. Ornithology wasn’t Jerome’s strong suit, but then Jerome wasn’t a normal child. You can download this book from Smashwords, find some enjoyable stories and consider the royalties Publisher/Editor T.J. McIntyre is contributing to Alabama tornado victims.

“Carl’s Heightened Sense of Loss” was published by The Corner Club Press in its second issue, pp. 147-149, May 15, 2011, at http://www.thecornerclubpress.com/uploads/6/0/5/3/6053731/the_corner_club_press_issue_2.pdf. An absurd story? Certainly. Offensive? Perhaps, but nonetheless an experiment in a new genre.

Cooking Corn Fritter Muffins

2011-06-28T07:53:00.000-07:00

Let me get away from the writing thing, and talk food. My very inventive wife has just created corn fritter muffins. You know the deep fried things you eat with syrup? These have chives added, no sugar, and are yum-yum good with butter ‘n’ honey. Betty Crocker Cookoff, here we come.

1 ear of corn (cooked)
¾ C. flour
2 eggs
½ tsp. salt
2 tsp. baking powder
¼ C. milk
3 tbsp. chives, chopped finely
1 tsp. olive oil

Mix all ingredients. Heat oven to 400 degrees. Bake in tiny muffin pans for 18 minutes. So easy a kid can do it!

Another Day, Another Rant

2011-06-21T10:06:00.000-07:00

Forgive me if I repeat myself, but the world as I knew it is changing.

The Tribune is declaring bankruptcy. A Glendale, Calif., paper is outsourcing its news-gathering to India. My granddaughter writes her book review on her iPhone while watching TV. Is this the end of written communication as we once knew it?

The writers I knew—-literate, insightful, thought-provoking-—are being replaced by bloggers... Readers are downloading e-books instead of buying paper... Borders (pre-bankruptcy) had only one of the 10 NY Times recommended children’s books I was searching for when I shopped... My former employer was the largest independent yellow pages publisher in the U.S., but its stock has dropped from $62 to 33 cents as people shuck the books out in the garbage... And Sarah Palin had a $7 million book deal to tell us all how to “progress freedom in the U.S.”

Then I ran across a jaw-dropping cultural benchmark in a New Yorker ad. Victory for writers has been snatched from the jaws of defeat by Books by the Foot (http://booksbythefoot.com/). The firm offers modern cloth-bound hardcovers for only $6.99 per linear foot. “Tonier” modern cloth with black spines, however, will run $13.99 per foot. The purveyors of this literary wealth-—by the foot, not the words—-remind us that Heinrich Heine stated, “A house without books is like a room without windows.” The motto of this “bookyard” then—this Home Depot of illiteracy—must be a God-like “Let us have light!”

How many layouts in Architectural Digest show rooms without books-—truly the mark of a plebian hedge fund manager. The badge of real literacy is to display yards upon yards of books when your guests come to swill champagne. Then, when the casual visitor asks if you've read them, you can say, “My interior decorator may have, but I don’t need to. I pay his/her salary.” This is perhaps the same decorator who goes to Barnes & Noble looking for a red book...to match her purse.

On the upside, I found a superb historical analysis of 17th century Virginia, written in 1917, free at Google books! Now I can publish my article on Bacon’s Rebellion. Circle the wagon, Folks. It’ll be hard times when the printed word disappears.

Publishing Is Dead - IV

2011-05-30T14:14:00.000-07:00

The Oops Factor, or, You Mean I Have to Proofread?

The information technology industry has long been aware of the GIGO factor of input/output: “Garbage In, Garbage Out.” It’s unfortunate that writers usually aren’t their own best editors. POD sadly allows them to escape a strong editorial hand. The result is manuscripts full of factual errors, ungrammatical parsing, spelling errors, and clichéd phrasing.

This is the Devil’s Pact. The writer trades off the benefits of distribution and royalties accruing from POD but forgoes professional guidance. Self-publishing is very much like an indicted person serving as his own lawyer: he has a fool for a client and a fool for a lawyer.

Pundits compare Congressional legislation to sausages: you don’t really want to know what goes into the result. “Vanity press” publishing is also like a sausage full of strange ingredients. A friend, unfortunately, has had her POD book shelved at the area library, and the patrons have taken to marking up the copy for its egregious errors.

At least, Xlibris and Lulu offer some editorial guidance to the neophyte. For a price.

Where Is Publishing Headed?

There was a 6-column-inch blurb in The New York Times noting that Seattle-based Amazon on Christmas Day 2009 sold more e-books for its Kindle reader than it did paper-based books. (In July 2010, Amazon sold 143 digital books for its Kindle for every 100 hard cover books.)

Interesting factoids, but more startling was the next sentence that Laredo, Texas (pop. 250,000) closed its last bookstore. (Laredo's population is only slightly smaller than that of Newark, NJ, one of the poorer urban areas.) I checked my online Yellow Pages, though, and actually came up with eight Laredo bookstores, three of which were Christian and one Spanish-language. Two recognizable names were Barnes & Noble and B. Dalton. That left two that appeared to be independent bookstores.

What's the takeaway? Actually, I came up with five.

One, a lot of people got Kindles for Christmas. (My Seattle-based friend has 4,600 books on his e-reader, most which he admits he'll never read.)

Two, Texans read less than Newarkers, where there are 84 listings for bookstores. Newark's median household income is $26,913. Laredo's median HH income is $23,832, but the area has a lower cost of living index.

Three, there's a sea change coming in the way — and whether — we read books. (Does Steve Jobs know something about e-books that led to the iPad?)

Four, Laredo's population is 97.1% Latino, but unemployment is just 6%. Are Hispanics working too hard to read?

Finally, bookstores are an endangered enterprise, even big box outlets like Borders and BN that are flirting with bankruptcy.

In other words, publishing’s dead; long live the new paradigm.”

Publishing’s Dead - III

2011-05-27T09:34:00.000-07:00

Long-Tail Marketing, or One of Everything Available

The strongest features of POD are the broad distribution possibilities and the breakdown of proprietary fences. Any of the publishers above — Amazon, BN, SmashWords and others — may also strike a distribution deal with BrookStrand, Amazon, BN, Google Books, Borders (R.I.P.), eBay and other booksellers. Royalties may change in the process. In addition, there are online book retailers — iPad and iTunes, Kobo, Android, Diesel and Sony — who are defining the book-selling picture.

This has been termed “long tail marketing,” a business model “invented” by Amazon and named by Chris Anderson in his book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. Instead of one essentially bricks-and-mortar outlet stocking just the high-volume products, a few online retailers can in effect stock everything.

A more formal Wikipedia reference states, “The distribution and inventory costs of businesses successfully applying this (long-tail) strategy allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. Total sales of this large number of ‘non-hit items’ is called the Long Tail.”

Multi-book author Konrath says, “Do you know what that is? That's distribution. The very thing print publishers have had a lock on for a hundred years. Except now, authors control their own distribution.” He also notes, the e-book rights his print publishers control “are missing from many of these key markets. On a daily basis I get emails from fans who want Whiskey Sour or Afraid for their device or in their country, but my publishers aren't exploiting these rights.”

Breaking News: The traditional “books-and-mortar” business scheme may change if John Malone, “who made a fortune in cable television,” succeeds in buying Barnes & Noble for $1 billion. So saith The New York Times on May 20. Malone is sick of businesses like BN attracting people to come in and read for two hours. In the near future BN may look sort of like an Apple store.

Publishing’s Dead - II

2011-05-26T07:05:00.000-07:00

Who Are Those POD and E-book Publishers?

A typical Xlibris contract takes your work, manufactures the book as orders come in, and ships to the customer or author. It’s up to you to promote the books, whether through author signings at libraries or standing in front of a supermarket. You pay for what they manufacture. Your tab begins at $499 and can run up to the “platinum level” of $14,999, depending on the level of services you choose.

Take a look at their Web site (http://www2.xlibris.com/) for detail. In order to review their 42-page publishing brochure, you’ll first need to provide them with your name, e-mail address and telephone number. (Wait a day for the phone solicitations to arrive; the e-mails will begin immediately.)

Lulu.com offers a similar business of manufacturing a writer’s book according to a schedule of services.

In this fast-moving business, a number of sites recently have come up offering no-frills POD. Amazon Publishing may be the biggest and neatest “no-nonsense” publisher. Its Amazon CreateSpace self-admittedly “provides one of the easiest, fastest and most economical ways to self-publish and make your content available to millions of potential customers on Amazon.com and other channels.” CreateSpace formats include books, DVDs, CDs, video downloads and MP3s. The company takes care of customer service and order fulfillment with no up-front author investment. And (whew!), there are no membership or title setup fees, there is a flexible royalty model, a non-exclusive agreement keeps the writer’s future publishing and distribution options open, and Amazon provides a free ISBN or UPC.

SmashWords is a contender to Amazon, inviting the writer to download a work and come up with—huzzah!—a finished book. SmashWords allows authors to sell their e-books through their site, while also supplying e-books to Borders’ Kobo, Apple’s iPad, B&N’s Nook, Sony, and Diesel. SmashWords’ variable agreement on royalties is based on the outlet and sales method. The company pays the author 85% for sales that originate at SmashWords or Stanza, and 70.5% for sales through its affiliates. “Net proceeds,” however, doesn’t mean cover price. Net is the received sale price less payment for processing fees, affiliate fees, retailer discounts, credit card charge-backs and the like.

Barnes & Noble’s publishing venture is titled Pubit (pronounced with a soft ŭ – not “pyu-bit.”) BN sets a “List Price for each e-book between $0.99 and $199.99. For e-books with a List Price at or between $2.99 and $9.99 the author receives 35%. For books listed at or below $2.98 or at or greater than $10.00, the royalties are 40%.

Hewlett-Packard’s MagCloud is another entrant, at http://www.magcloud.com/.

Long Live the E-book

What’s the value of an e-book self-pubbed over one handled by a publisher? A lot, according to J.A. Konrath on his blog, at http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2010/09/konrath-ebooks-sales-top-100k.html. You’re going to do all the marketing yourself, so face it: Do you prefer to share royalties with a publisher charging $4.69 for your book or sell it direct for $2.99? Jack Konrath does the math for you, using Amazon and SmashWords as examples.

He reports that his best selling Hyperion e-book, Whiskey Sour, has sold 2,631 copies since 2004. That earned him about $2,200, or $34 a month since it was released. $34 a month per title is a far cry from the $1,700 a month per e-book he’s making though self-publishing. Hyperion is the Walt Disney Co. publishing unit.

Hyperion priced Whiskey Sour at $4.69 on Amazon, while he prices his e-books at $2.99. “For each $4.69 e-book they sell, I earn $1.17,” he blogs at http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/. “For each $2.99 e-book I sell, I earn $2.04. So I'm basically losing money hand over fist because Hyperion is pricing my e-books too high, and giving me too low a royalty rate.”

Publishing’s Dead; Long Live the New Paradigm - I

2011-05-25T11:52:00.000-07:00

The Wild, Wild West of Book Dealing

Publishing and book retailing are going through a technological, cultural, and marketing shift of tsunami proportions. When the tidal waves subside, there will be a lot of dead fish on the beaches of big business.

Publishing Trends reports, “On-demand publishing has overtaken traditional publishing in yearly title output, signaling a surge in products like customized print-on-demand books, according to a recent Publishing Business webinar, ‘Customized Books: What Is The Opportunity?’”

The number of POD (print on demand) titles published in the U.S. increased more than 200% in 2008, up from 285,394 in 2007. In the same period, publication of traditional titles dropped 3% to 275,232. In other terms, according to industry resources Bowker and Interquest, the POD market increased from 20 billion pages in 2006 to 38 billion in 2009.

The “vanity press” has been around as long as there have been printers waiting to take an author’s money. The distinguishing factor in the rise of POD is the technological ease with which a writer can get a work into print and have it broadly distributed.

Publishers Are Their Own Worst Enemy

What makes POD attractive? Cover prices that are reduced. Royalties that accrue to the author in greater amounts. Wider distribution through “long-tail” marketing. (A single outlet, like Amazon, carries hundreds of thousands of books, while a mass retailer is limited by store size.) And publishers have virtually eliminated marketing and promotion for all except major (i.e., money-making) authors.

At the same time, publishers continue to hold sacred the Depression-era practice of accepting the return of any book that the retailer cannot sell. This strange marketing practice began as a way to ensure that retailers would continue to stock new titles. In 2005, however, the Association of American Publishers reports that of the 1.5 billion books shipped, 455 million were returned to publishers — 31 percent! — at the publishers’ expense.

Would General Electric ever consider shipping refrigerators to Wal-Mart under these consignment conditions? Or Ford Motors to its independent dealers?

Publishers are scrambling to meet the new paradigm by discounting, spiffing (Sales Performance Incentive Fund) the big box outlets, and flirting with new techniques. Textbook publishers are raising prices to outrageous heights while introducing CD workbooks on three-year revision cycles to reduce the effect of students reselling their old texts. Price cards, like Borders or Barnes & Noble “memberships,” are resulting in a barrage of e-mail solicitations and discounting. And prices continue to rise, with e-books often marketed at over 80 % of the hardcover price.
Pricing is the new battlefield. In October 2010, I searched Barnes & Noble for Special Projects in Calamity Physics by Marisha Plessl. This 2006 novel had been an immediate bestseller. Now, Amazon was discounting the trade paperback down from $15.00 to $10.50, while offering a Kindle download for $12.99. Barnes & Noble listed the trade paper at $10.80 and the e-book at $12.99.

Pause and think about it. It doesn’t take a wizard to know something’s wrong when the cost of a digital product approaches or exceeds the cost of a formatted, typeset, printed, bound and shipped version that is subject to returns.

Next: Who Are Those POD and E-book Publishers?

Update on Writing and the World As I See It

2011-04-11T08:00:00.000-07:00

One of the enjoyable things about writing short stories is being able to jump from genre to genre, doing a mystery one week and speculative fiction the next, a serious examination of life here and a bit of buffoonery there.

This week,"Rosetta Stone" and my cruise ship from Hell was published by The World of Myth Issue #47, at >http://www.theworldofmyth.com/">

"Astroturfing," the satirical blog entry on writing your way to fame and success, posted below, was published Apr. 7 by Flash Fiction Chronicles. Thanks to Gay Degani for being such a sanguine editor. You can read it in living color, at http://www.everydayfiction.com/flashfictionblog/astroturfing-your-way-to-publishing-success/">.

Oh, and lest I forget there's even a bit of humor--er, humour. “My Son, the Ingrate” was published by The Short Humour Site Mar. 16, at
http://www.short-humour.org.uk/3writersshowcase/mysontheingrate.htm">

“Planting Roses” and the Sub-Text

2011-04-06T07:33:00.000-07:00

You see the news stories every morning and evening: “Man kills family because they forgot his birthday.” The individuals, motives, circumstances are irrelevant — or they are all reduced to being the same. Violence has no respect for class, gender, age, or geography.

This repetitive, mindless brutality made me consider that perhaps the dead could make us all more aware of the living, whether in New Jersey or half a world away in Iraq.

Not to be obsessive about this problem—and the existential question of whether America is still a Cowboy Nation — I wrote “Planting Roses in Iraq.” In accepting the story, The Corner Club Press editor said, “Congratulations. I would love to feature your story in issue 1! It was deeply moving, sad, and haunting, especially at the end. Just what we need.”

You can read it at http://thecornerclubpress.com by clicking on then scrolling to page 109. Hope this is enjoyable — and perhaps instructive.

Astroturfing Your Way to Publishing Success

2011-03-28T14:49:00.000-07:00

These are hard times for writers due to a Malthusian conflict: There are more writers than readers. Soon, there will be room for just 20 authors — those featured on The New York Times Book Review best-seller list. (This may devolve to zero readers when the NYT ceases publishing.) Most writers’ work will then be consigned to desk drawers or photocopies they sell outside supermarkets.

But, there’s hope. Four “hopes,” specifically, that you can use to gain writing fame and fortune.

1. Censorship. Google some secrets that might embarrass the CIA, NSA, or people in high places, then go to print on demand with your manuscript and order 50,000 books. The government will buy up all copies and reimburse you. Operation Dark Heart by Anthony A. Shaffer irked the Pentagon, Defense Intelligence Agency, and a few other espionage agencies in 2010. The Pentagon paid St. Martin’s Press $43,000 for all 10,000 copies, then pulped them.

2. Insult that Religion with No Name. This is somewhat dangerous, so first secure your family in Arizona where even children can carry guns. If no one pays any attention to your turgid-but-blasphemous book, notify an imam. He will issue a fatwa to kill you. Join your family in Arizona (after calling The New York Times) and wait for the royalties to roll in from the resultant publicity.

3. Build a Ghost Audience. Contact all of your friends by e-mail, texting, Tweeting, and Facebooking. Instruct them to go to their local bookstore and demand your book. You don’t actually have to write it yet. When thousands of people begin screaming for, say, Existentialism Takes a Pratfall by [insert your name], publishers will come running to you. This happened in 1957 when radio personality Jean Shepherd had his audience demand I, Libertine, a non-existent book about an 18th century rake. Three months later, Ballantine rushed the book into print.

4. Calling Tree, Prayer Chain. Call it what you will. The author needs to have 10 friends each call 10 of their friends who, in turn, call 10 more friends. Arrange to meet on a Saturday afternoon at a central, urban location like New York City’s Union Square. The police will be very perplexed. So will the TV and newspaper reporters. They’ll want to know why you’re all demonstrating. Everyone should insist they’re not protesting, just minding their own business and thinking about your book. This is benevolence at its best. Like a good Japanese wabi sabi print, the space becomes solid and the non-event takes on substance.

Some people may accuse you of perpetrating a cheap marketing trick, like telling everyone it’s your birthday so they’ll give you presents. What you’re really doing is opening the floodgates of communication.

Rallies are fundamental grassroots efforts by people who believe in a cause. They’re a manifestation of our populist culture. With the demise of culture and any pretense of serious thought today, you will have created Astroturf — bright, green grass that is plastic and artificial. Just like money.

Sayonara to Media Tools Just Because They’re Old?

2011-03-24T12:48:00.000-07:00

A New York Times opinion piece today suggested you can toss your iPod because it’s been replaced by the Smart Phone. A desktop PC is a cumbersome, archaic machine easily replaced by a laptop, iPad or 4G Kindle. The GPS device in my Subaru is less portable than an Android already equipped with turn-by-turn navigation. A digital point-and-shoot camera is only a tad better than a Smart Phone, as is a camcorder. Cable TV and a DVD player can be replaced by the cheaper WiFi that plays Netflix downloads on demand. And the landline phone is a relic Verizon and AT&T don’t like any more than they do phone booths.

This bothers me. I have an attic full of dot matrix printers, software to load MultiMate, 3-1/2-inch floppies of games, and loads of cassette tapes. Do I really have to trash them all? I know my grandmother’s stereopticon is an antique, and sold it. But I love the memories of a device I’d hold up to a phone and push one of 10 buttons to dial a number. And the little flash chip on a key chain that scrolls through photo downloads. What about the slide rule that confounds my accountant friend? Or the Rolodex with business cards from suppliers now collecting Social Security?

I have to dig around flea markets every decade or so to replace my turntable to play LPs and 45s, but it’s getting hard to find one that plays 78s. Reluctantly, I also passed my Argus C3 rangefinder camera and my Voightländer 120 bellows camera on to my daughter.

I think the alternative to junking my archaic small electronics is to open a museum in my attic. A very small museum full of memories. These are my sleds named “Rosebud.”

High Times in the Colonies - II

2011-03-20T10:19:00.000-07:00

Homes Away from Home In the days of unpaved roads and an absence of hotels, taverns served as both hostelry and “watering hole.” Today, you can still note the abundance of places in New Jersey named for one-time taverns. Burnt Tavern Road in Brick Twsp., Stump Tavern Rd. in Jackson Twsp., Bear Tavern Rd. in West Trenton, and Boyd’s Tavern in Whiting; Four Mile, Old Halfway, Three Tuns, and Ong’s Hat were named for taverns in unincorporated areas of Union County.

In 1717, the Colts Neck Inn was built by a Laird ancestor as a way station for coaches and dispatch riders between Amboy and Freehold.

In 1850, the New Jersey Legislature created Ocean County out of the southern half of Monmouth County. The first organizational meeting was held at Thomas P. Barkalow’s tavern on the corner of Main and Water Sts. in Toms River. Much of the meeting concerned building a Greek Revival-style courthouse modeled after that of Hudson County. After the building was completed in 1851, the plans were entrusted to a local man to be returned to Hudson County. He didn’t get far out of town, on horseback, before stopping at Hyers Tavern in Jackson. The plans were never seen again. 6

The Ocean House Hotel (earlier known as the Toms River Inn) began as Barkalow’s Tavern about 1787, and served as a coach stop between Freehold and Tuckerton, as well as west to Burlington County and Philadelphia. It was here that Ulysses S. Grant dictated part of his memoir. Ocean House was demolished in 1952, but the oldest portion was saved and relocated as The Old Time Tavern to Main St. (Route 166) and Presidential Blvd. 7

Taverns were a basic element of New Jersey’s development. Haddonfield’s Indian King Tavern is one of the state’s more important historic buildings. In 1777, as the Continental and British armies devastated Trenton, the Assembly convened there to officially create an independent state and adopt its Great Seal. Legend has it that Dolley Madison, née Payne, was a frequent visitor. 8.

The Merchants & Drovers Tavern Museum Association maintains another stopping-off place, a tavern built in 1798 at the corner of St. Georges Ave. (Rt. 27) and Westfield Ave. in Rahway. The Association also owns and operates the Abraham Terrill Tavern behind the Merchants & Drovers. 9.

And in our own neighborhood, Moore’s Tavern at 402 Main St. (Rt. 537) in Freehold dates back to the Revolutionary War. Moses Mount, an aide to General Washington, returned to Freehold after the war and built this inn for tired travelers. 10

An Army Marching … Sort of The immigration of Scotch-Irish in the 1730s dealt a blow to rum being shipped inland. These new Americans had their own taste for grain alcohol, brought their distilling skills with them, and accelerated the movement toward whiskey. The American Revolution further sped up the migration to corn and grain whiskey as imports disappeared. Royal Navy blockades effectively stemmed the importation of rum and molasses, while American grain was plentiful. A single bushel of corn, for instance, yielded three gallons of whiskey.

Liquor historically played an infamous hand in reducing militia drills to bumbling demonstrations. While training was crucial, many drill sessions were mostly social gatherings with liquor as a central focus. An 18th-century Virginia militia commander recalled that he frequently gave his men alcohol and that afterward “they would…come before his door and fire guns in token of their gratitude, and then he would give them punch ’til they dispersed.” While this kept morale high, it did not build crack regiments. (In the 1600s, Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts saw a sober drill on Boston Commons and was especially pleased.”)

Before and during the Revolution, inns were favorite places for political discussion, they served as rallying points for the militia, and became recruiting stations for the Continental army. During the war, Ethan Allen held the equivalent of senior management meetings at the Equinox Hotel in Manchester, Vt.

One of the biggest consumers of whiskey was the Continental Army itself. Soldiers were given a daily liquor ration of roughly four ounces. 11

A good soldier follows his senior officer, and in this case George Washington, the distiller of Mt. Vernon, was the model. Washington worried in writing about the morale and condition of his troops. To comfort them “when they are marching in hot or Cold weather, in Camp in Wet, on fatigue or in Working Parties,” Washington said it was “essential” that troops have “moderate supplies” of whiskey. 12

6 The Ocean County Bar Association. http://www.oceancountybar.org/link.php?link=ninetenth_century_725
7 Sadly, time ran out for the renamed Old Time Tavern, and it was destroyed. The Asbury Park Press on Dec. 17, 2008, wrote a feature on the demise of this tavern in order to widen Route 166. http://forum.aboutnewjersey.com/showthread.php?t=5129
8 http://www.levins.com/tavern.html.
9 http://www.merchantsanddrovers.org/ and http://www.hmdb.org/marker.asp?marker=7808.
10 Moore’s was modernized in 2009, with wi-fi, 14 HD flat screen TVs, and serves today as a sports bar. The original architecture, however, has been preserved. http://www.moorestavern.com/
11 DUI.com’s Web site provides a lengthy history, Drinking in America: A History, by Mark Edward Lender and James Kirby Martin, The Free Press, 1982, a division of Macmillian Publishing Co. Inc. During the war, profits were very attractive to distillers, whiskey was easy to transport, and it kept longer than grain. In fact, so much grain was directed to distilling that it began to concern the Continental Congress. http://www.dui.com/dui-library/studies/research/history-of-drinking
12 http://www.hoboes.com/Politics/Prohibition/Notes/Drinking/

High Times in the Colonies -- I

2011-03-19T08:28:00.000-07:00

Hard to imagine, but by the late 1700s, the average American over age 15 drank almost six gallons of absolute alcohol each year. That’s the equivalent of 34 gallons of beer and cider and almost a gallon of wine. Today, the average is less than 2.9 gallons per capita. 1 Below is an article I just had to research my way into.

It’s safe to say, America wasn’t “founded” as much as it floated on a sea of booze. The Mayflower dropped anchor at Plymouth in 1621 with its crew and passengers deathly ill from exposure, scurvy, pneumonia and other maladies. Worse, the Pilgrims’ own beer had run out and the crew’s supply was “perilously low.” The most popular drink was a dark, strong brew of barley malt flavored with hops – like today’s porter and stout and about 6 percent alcohol. In that age, alcohol was safer than polluted water, so finding safe water in Massachusetts was a surprise. Back on board, the sailors knew they might not have enough beer for their return trip if they shared it with the religious dissenters.

Governor William Bradford wrote that the settlers “were hasted ashore and made to drink water that the seamen might have the more beer.” Bradford’s pleas from the shore for just a “can” of beer brought refusal. If he “were their own father,” one sailor said, “he should have none.”

Still, when the Arbella brought Puritans to Boston in 1630, the ship sailed with three times as much beer as water – in addition to 10,000 gallons of wine. 2

In 1639, Harvard’s President Nathaniel Eaton lost his job when he failed to provide enough beer to students. 3

Drunk, but Not Disorderly Drinking to excess didn’t bother the colonials as much as it represented a threat to community standards. In 1624, a Virginia General Court found against three defendants for “having kept company in drinking, and committing a riot.” The rioting and disorder bothered the court more than being inebriated. The trio paid heavy fines for disturbing the peace.

Colonial magistrates in the north and the south rarely let concerns over excessive drinking affect their disinterest in alcoholic consumption. At least, no one went on record that legal prohibition was needed for harmony in the communities. The fault wasn’t in liquor, but of deviants misusing this wholesome, healthful, and necessary product.

Both the Anglican and Puritan churches used wine for communion. Any idea that Christ had broken bread with grape juice was simply 19th century theological tinkering.

Distilled Spirits as American as… The colonials proved ingenious at making the brews and spirits they had left behind in Europe. A verse written in the 1630s went: “If barley be wanting to make into malt, / We must be content and think it no fault, / For we can make liquor to sweeten our lips, / Of pumpkins, and parsnips, and walnut-tree chips.” Their beer was probably no better than their poetry.

Distilled spirits were portable and took less space than beer. Sprits were even used as wages in Massachusetts until it was felt a worker drinking his “wages” probably wasn’t a very effective employee.

Gradually, however, the colonials were wooed away from beer to “strong waters.” Some of it was gin, which had roots in English culture. Grain spirits infused with juniper berries came from the Low Countries to England in the 1530s, was cheap, and became popular among the poor. The British government became shocked at a “gin epidemic” until it was staunched by edict in 1751, but gin never caught on in America – except in the Dutch colonies and elsewhere when the martini was invented in the 20th century.

Technically, it was easier for Americans to distill palatable liquor than to brew good beer. Rum was the most popular distilled drink. It was made using the rinds and juice of imported limes, lemons – even oranges – and then mixed with rum and sugar. Most taverns served a lime punch, warm, in a bowl. Toddies were rum mixed with sugar and water. Sangre – wine or beer sweetened with sugar and flavored with nutmeg – was also served by the bowl. Brandy, usually imported, was also made from peaches, apples or cherries. In New England, pears were distilled into “perry,” while Vermonters distilled honey into mead. 4

Where was wine? It wasn’t generally available outside of cities since it was imported from Germany and Spain. (New Jersey’s Renault winery didn’t open until 1864.) Madeira was the most expensive and popular wine, and was served with meals.

But, back to local improvisation. If you were rural and poor, you turned to making apple cider or bought it by the jug. Thanks to the English, apple seeds grew very well in the hospitable American climate. Hard cider was fermented to about 7 percent alcohol, and then distilled. The best came from New Jersey, where it was known as “Jersey Lightning.”

In 1780, Robert Laird established America’s first commercial distillery in the little town of Scobeyville, N.J. Laird was a Revolutionary War soldier who served under General Washington. In fact, the good general wrote to Laird in 1760 asking for the recipe for producing applejack “cyder spirits.” Laird was happy to oblige. Laird’s applejack cost four shillings, six pence per gallon, or about a half-day’s wages. 5

1 Increase Mather wrote in 1673 in Wo to Drunkards, “Drink is in itself a good creature of God, and to be received with thankfulness, but the abuse of drink is from Satan, the wine is from God, but the Drunkard is from the Devil.” http://www.hoboes.com/Politics/Prohibition/Notes/Drinking
2 ibid.
3 Colonial Williamburg notes that John Adams started the day with a draft of hard cider, Thomas Jefferson imported fine wines from France and tried without success to grow grapevines, Samuel Adams managed his father's brewery, John Hancock was accused of smuggling wine, and Patrick Henry once worked as a bartender. http://www.history.org/foundation/journal/holiday07/drink.cfm
4 The DUI Library offers cautionary news about drunk driving, but includes a lengthy history. http://www.dui.com/dui-library/studies/research/history-of-drinking.
5 Laird & Company provides a nice history of applejack. It notes that Abe Lincoln served applejack in his Springfield, Ill. tavern. His published list of rates in 1833 shows Apple Brandy at 12 cents a half-pint, while a night’s lodging cost 12-1/2 cents, and a meal was 25 cents.

The Adjustment Bureau

2011-03-04T13:35:00.000-08:00

The release Mar. 4 of The Adjustment Bureau, starring Matt Damon and Emily Blunt, will send some movie-goers back to their sources to review author Philip K. Dick’s oeuvre. They should. This seminal author’s 46 books and 121 short stories have been adapted to 10 films. (Confession: I have 13 Dick books on my shelves and one e-book collection of stories.)

It wasn’t always this way, in the 1950s and ‘60s when Dick was writing for pulp science fiction magazines. Jonathan Lethem notes in the foreword to The Philip K. Dick Collection that Dick worked to gain recognition and usually failed. He also takes note of Dick’s “remarkably personal vision of paranoia and dislocation.”

Laura Miller, an editor at Salon.com, amplified this: “Dick has his share of champions, ranging from rock musicians to French postmodernists. Since his best work was published as pulp science fiction, they've had their hands full just trying to win him a little credibility. Meanwhile, almost unremarked, Dick's sensibility has seeped wide and deep into contemporary life.”

Some writers rise like Roman candles before fading, their books relegated to flea markets and used-book bins. Fortunately, Dick has heirs and a literary executor maintaining his reputation, and I presume merchandising his work beyond his death in 1982. In lieu of a seeing his works reissued, there are always new and used bookstores, and his official site, http://www.philipkdick.com/, to keep his work alive.

The plot of The Adjustment Bureau isn’t material here. (A man confronts the fact that he doesn’t have free will in the face of the Bureau that guides his decision-making process.) In any case, it was extensively rewritten by Writer-Director George Nolfi. Key to the storyline of both book and film, however, is Dick’s existential question of what is human and real.

The other films were adaptations as well, often surprassing the original story. You’ll remember Blade Runner (based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"), Screamers (based on "Second Variety"), Total Recall (based on "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale"), Confessions d'un Barjo (French, based on "Confessions of a Crap Artist", Impostor, Minority Report, Paycheck, and A Scanner Darkly. King of the Elves is set for release in 2012.

Dick wrote of made-up worlds: a farmer on Mars, or a police agency that arrests criminals before they commit a crime, or an alternative history in which the Axis powers won World War II. Often, he posed the questions of what is human and what is real. This might also have been Dick’s own cri de coeur for never being recognized as a “real” literary writer.

Publishers Are Their Own Worst Enemy

2011-02-23T12:52:00.000-08:00

We know [below] that POD titles are increasing and traditional print is dropping.

So, what makes POD attractive? Cover prices that are reduced. Royalties that accrue to the author in greater amounts. And, wider distribution through “long-tail” marketing. (A single outlet, like Amazon, carries hundreds of thousands of books, while a mass retailer is limited by store size.)

The "economic winter" that leaves traditional publishers shivering means they've virtually eliminated marketing and promotion for all except major (i.e., money-making) authors. At the same time, publishers continue to hold sacred the Depression-era practice of accepting the return of any book that the retailer cannot sell. This strange marketing practice began as a way to ensure that retailers would continue to stock new titles. In 2005, the Association of American Publishers reports that of the 1.5 billion books shipped, 455 million were returned to publishers — 31 percent! — at the publishers’ expense.

Would General Electric ever consider shipping refrigerators to Wal-Mart under these consignment conditions? Or Ford Motors to its independent dealers?

Publishers are scrambling to meet the new paradigm by discounting, spiffing (Sales Performance Incentive Fund) the big box outlets, and flirting with new techniques. Textbook publishers are raising prices to outrageous heights while introducing CD workbooks on three-year revision cycles to reduce the effect of students reselling their old texts. Price cards, like Borders or Barnes & Noble “memberships,” are resulting in a barrage of e-mail solicitations and discounting. And prices continue to rise, with e-books often marketed at over 80% of the hardcover price.

Pricing is the new battlefield. In October 2010, I searched Barnes & Noble for Special Projects in Calamity Physics by Marisha Plessl. This 2006 novel had been an immediate bestseller. Now, Amazon is discounting the trade paperback down from $15.00 to $10.50, while offering a Kindle download for $12.99. Barnes & Noble listed the trade paper at $10.80 and the e-book at $12.99.

Take a deep breath and think about it. It doesn’t take a wizard to know something’s wrong when the price of a digital product approaches or exceeds the cost of a formatted, typeset, printed, bound and shipped version that is subject to returns.

Dipping another Toe into the Rapids

2011-02-17T07:19:00.000-08:00

Borders has declared chapter 11 bankruptcy, allegedly because e-books are stealing their cake. More than a quarter million books were published last year, but I betcha one third go back to the publishers to be pulped. In fact, the number of POD (print on demand) titles published in the U.S. increased 200 percent in 2008. In the same period, the publication of traditional titles dropped 3 percent to 275,232. And –zowee! – this week’s New York Times Book Review bestseller list has been expanded to include e-book sales.

Events are moving so fast that my head spins. Scrolling through my Palm Tungsten makes me feel like a caveman making fire with two sticks while my kids are equipped, figuratively, with Zippos. Should I buy an iPhone with a GPS app, Web access and tinny little iTunes? I rarely call people, so the telephone aspect is irrelevant, but then, younger people eschew e-mail in favor of texting. And I cherish my CDs of Billie Holiday and Chet Baker.

But maybe I can adapt slowly, the way dinosaurs turned into birds. Our WPIX-TV commentator said last night that everything is devolving onto the Internet – and now someone in Congress wants to give the President unilateral control to shut down the ‘net if there’s an emergency.

Wordsmith, author and webmaster Jon Gibbs [http://www.acatofninetales.com/] talked with our writers’ group Tuesday, and we were all enthralled with his explanation of how book marketing works (and what doesn’t work), social networking as a merchandising tool, and technological proficiency as a must-have for any writer. There went my head spinning again, and I thought I was successfully tracking developments in the publishing world.

Perhaps if I just pick at the new, digital world, the way I ate my mother’s cauliflower, I’ll see what works and what doesn’t. And I won’t need to throw away my Palm PDA just yet. Or eat cauliflower.

A Big To-Do List Staring at Me

2011-01-25T13:05:00.000-08:00

Having a lot of chores beats the alternative: terminal tedium. I’m a third of the way through the late Michael Crichton’s Pirate Latitudes, a neophyte’s self-published novel, and James Ellroy’s American Tabloid … I write our church newsletter and am slogging through a draft of the annual report, hoping to get this off to layout in a few days … I really want to begin researching American drinking habits in pre-Colonial days. (By the 1790s an average American over 15 years old drank just under six gallons of absolute alcohol each year.) … There’s an intriguing new writing prompt up at Every Day Fiction (These teasers are like putting jet fuel in my Zippo.) ... I need to brave the frigid attic to dig out a book that has a map of the Nabateans, Judeans, Samaria – crazy little kingdoms it would be good to know more about.

However … I did blog some new material about Holling and Lucille Holling working on a hotel mural in 1929 and illustrating a series of Indian postcards in 1941. (More on this archeological ephemera at http://hollingcholling.blogspot.com/) … I spent too much time today responding to a high schooler wanting to interview me on the King Philip’s War paper he’s writing … I framed one and hung two pictures today … sent a short book review to the Asbury Park Press … continued waiting with bated breath for two stories to be published.

But the quotidian chores interrupt. Out with the garbage, in with the mail. Time to eat, time to sleep. And if I forgo the cocktail hour then I figure the terrorists have won.

A Helluva Year Revisited

2011-01-03T11:47:00.000-08:00

I mentioned a few wins in the blogs below. Here, for my own record-keeping, is a more complete benchmark of the year gone by:

It’s been satisfying to meet with fellow writers—some seasoned and many neophytes—twice monthly at the Manchester Writers’ Circle. Reading a work aloud and receiving comments on it is a valuable way to review, proof and critique ones own work. We now have our own blogsite, too, at http://sites.google.com/site/manchesterwriters/home.

Publishing short stories and articles are gratifying and personally validating. The works that saw print or appeared online include “Epitaph with Flowers”(February), “Girl Talk” (March) and “Misunderstood Identity” (March 2011) to Big Pulp; “Gothic Revival” (January and later included in its Editor’s Choices), and “Angel in My Coffee Cup” (August) in Bewildering Stories with a probable sale there of “Fish Stories and the Mermaid”; “Footsteps” in Everyday Weirdness (December); “Last Year’s Icon” (February) and “Day of Moving Hell” (July) in Every Day Fiction; “Joined at the Heart” (December) as Gumshoe Review’s first piece of fiction; five short analyses and commentaries on writing to Flash Fiction Chronicles; “Paying the Devil” was awarded 6th place winner in the 79th annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition (October); “Chain of Events” in Over My Dead Body! (July); and “Play Date” in Pif magazine (October).

"Philip's War: America's Most Devastating Conflict," posted to Military History Online, reprinted in The American Museum magazine (May); “Stanley at Shiloh: An Improbable ‘Indiana Jones’” published by Military History Online (July); “There’s More to Jersey Wines than You Think” in two community newspapers (August and September); and eight short humor pieces to The Short Humour Site.

Along the way, a couple of other articles were reprinted and five “flash” reviews were published by the Asbury Park Press. Reading wasn’t stinted, and I plowed through 27 books, three of which were e-books on my new Nook.

One of my favorite children’s-book authors is Holling Clancy Holling, and I got a tip of the hat from the HCH museum in Leslie, Mich., to build a semi-official blogsite as homage to this author, illustrator and naturalist, at http://hollingcholling.blogspot.com/.

It's All Gonna Get Better

2010-12-30T11:30:00.000-08:00

It’s been a helluva year for writers, or as Mickey Spillane might put it, “as tough as a Times Square babe with one hand on your wallet and the other hailing a taxi.” But we can trust that the New Year will be better.

I hope that marketers will stop naming products and companies with exclamation points (Yahoo!) or lower case aberrations (eBay), or changing their name for no good reason (Wal-Mart to Walmart).

…That new words will continue to be coined, like locavore (buying locally grown food), Obamamaniac (self-explanatory), fang-banging (sex with a vampire), and shovel-ready (infrastructure projects ready to spend stimulus money). My favorite: googlegänger, for the person always looking up his/her name. And who knew the distorted letters I puzzle through to respond to a blog is called a captcha? (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). But I still don’t know what you mean when “you get the jones for a pizza.”

…That writers will kill needless adjectives and adverbs that allow them to be lazy. (And that young wannabes will learn what adjectives and adverbs are!)

…That young people and the intellectually challenged will stop signing off with lol and consign smiley faces to the archeological midden heap of bad communication. I’m tempted to exclaim, “WTF!” and hit the delete button.

…That reporters everywhere will remember to spell minuscule, that media is plural, and that the Smithsonian is an Institution.

…That elected officials not proclaim ordnances (subject to a statue of limitations), and that Congressional reconciliation does not mean head banging. Are they aware that election results is an anagram for lies—let’s recount?

Peace and good health to you and yours. May 2011 be a prosperous year in all ways. May your editors be benevolent and your proofreaders aware that a living language is not prescriptive.

Those Chores That Interfere

2010-12-14T13:15:00.000-08:00

Why should I bitch because I ran ragged today through Costco, Bed Bath and Target? (“It’s good to be an aAmerican!”) No, all the chores are done, the present is almost made for our 3-year-old grandson, the larder is full, and the bank account still solvent. Least of my worries should be my writing.

I had an idea recently about metaphors because people kept telling me, “Jesus, where do you get those images?” (Well, really, it was one image--‘Her breasts were like two supermarket chickens reincarnated into flying eagles, threatening to escape her skimpy red tank top.’ It made me think that imagery is key to much of my writing being memorable. The reflection led to a 600-word piece for Flash Fiction Chronicles, up Dec. 13, at http://www.everydayfiction.com/flashfictionblog/keys-to-memorable-writing/#comments. In the process, I mention similes, synecdoche, zeugma, and chiasmus. Tell that to your 5th grade English teacher!

And, did I mention why I have that benevolent smile on my face as the holidays approach? “Joined at the Heart” was published by Gumshoe Review in its December 2010 issue, at http://www.gumshoereview.com/php/Review-id.php?id=2594. This was Gumshoe’s first venture into fiction. I have been peddling this story—satire that is near and dear to my heart—since 2005. Thank you, Gayle Surrette, editor of Gumshoe, for taking a chance on this piece of fiction. I remind people that a cynic is just an idealist with experience.

Book Burning Party; Bring Your Own Matches

2010-12-06T13:35:00.000-08:00

Something on NPR reminded me that this is the date Joseph Goebbels stood in the Reichplatz helping to burn 20,000 books. At the same time, our Sunday paper headlined the fact that book banning is accelerating.

It’s Fahrenheit 451 all over again. Parents Against Bad Books in Schools (www.pabbis.org) has a list if you’ve got the matches. The organization states, “Bad is not for us to determine. Bad is what you determine is bad.” Ergo, every reader should bring his/her own criteria to the bonfire. There is no quality except that which you determine.

They recommend starting with Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. Continue with Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Capote’s In Cold Blood, Doctorow,s Ragtime, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, and that perennial hazard to mental health, Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.

Oh, I can’t go on! No, wait, I can. Happily, we still celebrate Banned Books Week. Banned Books Week is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment. Held during the last week of September, Banned Books Week highlights the benefits of free and open access to information while drawing attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted bannings of books across the United States.

Banned Books Week is endorsed by no less an organization than the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress.

Can’t happen in your town? Go to http://www.bannedbooksweek.org/Mapofbookcensorship.html and click on what’s happening in your neck of the woods. Down the road from us in Vineland, NJ, Bill Aquado and Richard Newirth's Paint Me Like I Am had its pages literally torn out by the principal of Landis Intermediate School. The pages contained Jayson Tirado's poem 'Diary of an Abusive Stepfather' and were ripped out after one parent raised concerns over the age-appropriateness of the poem's content.

Update on Writing and the World As I See It

2010-11-29T12:47:00.000-08:00

If the past week is any indication, all’s write—er, right in my world. I had an e-mail from Gumshoe magazine editor Gayle Surrette that she was sorry to have held onto “Joined at the Heart” overlong. “The length of time is due to the waffling. I figure if we’ve waffled this long that it sticks in yur head and we should go with it.” Love it! Sticky stories are my favorite too.

A story that had been universally rejected—often with a snort—got a thorough reading by Don Webb at Bewildering Stories. He pointed out some problems in my craftsmanship, and I heartily agreed that I had lapsed. I also took this as a conditional acceptance, upon rewrite, since he noted, “Fish Stories and the Mermaid” was “one of your most interesting” stories.

Thank you, Don and Gayle.

And while watching mindless commercials on TV, I’ve also penned 30-word book reviews that have been appearing in our Asbury Park Press. Capsule reviews of Jamie Ford’s Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Martin Cruz Smith’s Three Stations, and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest were printed over the past few weeks.

And five other stories are out looking for a home. Some of them, I’m sure, will find lodging.

‘Crash Blossoms’ Are…Well, Blossoming

2010-11-15T10:14:00.000-08:00

Ever scratch your head over a news headline and wonder what the heck the writer meant?

Take the classic picked up from Japan Today: “Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms.” Dan Bloom, writing in an online language forum, suggested these mix-ups might be termed “crash blossoms.”

Usually, the confusion comes from the reader mistaking a noun for a verb, or vice versa. Years ago, The Guardian wrote: “British Left Waffles on Falklands.” Does that make you think of the islands littered with breakfast? Or an AOL head, “Gator Attacks Puzzle Experts.” Or (perhaps apocryphal), “MacArthur Flies Back to Front.”

The other day the Dayton Daily News stated, “Man Shot in Chest, Leg Knocks on Door for Help.” It must have been a coronary-inducing situation when the door was opened to find a leg knocking. But no, that’s not what the writer meant.

Tight writing is the holy grail of news writers. (“McDonald’s Fries the Holy Grail for Potato Farmers.”) But we writers all need to peer from under the green eyeshade to make sure we’re not writing, “Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge.”

When Someone’s Got Your Number….

2010-10-30T13:51:00.000-07:00

I was very happy to sell a quickly written 851-word tongue-in-cheek mystery, submitted to Big Pulp exclusively and for the first time. “Misunderstood Identity” will be online in March 2011.

The thesis is simple: Life is a mystery, but that doesn’t mean a guy has to put up with someone stealing his identity. Imagine a case of identity fraud, not theft. When a complete stranger is wooing women and leaving them languishing in hotel bedrooms across the country. Then they start calling you and leaving you love letters and lipsticking your car. What’s a poor mystery writer to do? Well, I’ll leave that until you read it in a few months.

‘Paying the Devil’ a Prize-Winner

2010-10-20T13:31:00.000-07:00

I was extremely happy to learn that a 4,400-word short story I wrote, “Paying the Devil” was awarded 6th place in the Writer’s Digest Writing Competition. The story had been out so long that I thought it had been forgotten.

To the economics of the thing, after paying federal and state taxes and deducting the submission fee, I will have broken even when I get the prize money.

I thanked Editor Jessica Strawser because the story was personally meaningful to me and not simply an intellectual exercise. Ficton is rarely “intellectual” or simply an “exercise.” “Paying the Devil” let me get a lot of thoughts off my chest. In particular, this exchange:

Alison called again at exactly nine o’clock in the morning—ten a.m. in Montclair. She was observing the proprieties of never calling before nine. “Well, have you talked?” she demanded.

“Good Lord, I’m making my first cup of coffee. Your daughter isn’t even awake yet.” I grabbed a cigarette, lit it and snapped the Zippo shut.

“Dad, please do not tell me you are smoking in the house, polluting my daughter with second-hand smoke. Do you have any sense of what you’re doing to people’s lives with your drinking and smoking?”

“And my liberal politics? Alison, you are a maternalistic altruist. You’ve been one all your life. Just get off your high horse.” I’d been waiting three years to tell her this.

“Materna…? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means,” I said, exhaling loudly, “you care only about some aspect of another person’s behavior—some characteristic that irritates you. Then you frame it as a danger to the world. That everyone should stop smoking, and wear helmets and seat belts, and get annual colonoscopies, and….”

“You are putting my daughter’s health at risk!”

“She’s running away from you, Alison—not me.” I always felt tense and defensive talking with Alison. Fathers shouldn’t be made to feel like ignoramuses by their children. “You’re like the authorities that make laws to help you cross a street safely. Then they won’t let go of your hand when you get to the other side. You don’t allow for a certain amount of risk taking. Well, I’m a risk taker. Get used to it.”

Where Do Those Stories Come From?

2010-10-04T13:04:00.000-07:00

There are a number of ways to keep writing when an original thought won’t come. One is to dig into the slush pile of rejects and see what’s salvageable. Another is to throw Serious out the window and invite Humor into your bed. Three is to read the paper and see what craziness is out in the world knocking on your door.

This has worked for me in the past week. First, I was overjoyed to be notified Pif magazine would publish “Play Date” in its October issue. I had worked long and hard on this 6,000-word, serious examination of loneliness and terrorism and a few other themes. Read it at http://www.pifmagazine.com/2010/10/play-date/. I hope you enjoy it because it vindicates me as a serious writer.

I also tripped over a piece I’d written some months ago about archeologists discovering the world’s oldest shoe. (Thank you, New York Times for this gem.) This subject could only be handled humorously, and it was, becoming “The World’s Oldest Shrew—er, Shoe” A little rewrite and off it went to The Short Humour Site in the U.K. (http://www.short-humour.org.uk/3writersshowcase/worldsoldestshrew.htm). As I mentioned on Facebook, I wonder what the sketch would have looked like if it had been the world’s oldest underpants.

Finally, the exercise in writing college admissions essays came to fruition when I took a subject my granddaughter was given by Temple University. But that’s not worth quoting, or linking to, or explaining. While funny, it could tip my darling grandchild the wrong way—getting her rejected before she gets her foot in the door of a university. Don't read the last post, below. And pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Toughest Assignment: College App Essay

2010-09-25T09:05:00.000-07:00

College app essays are TOUGH. Tried my hand at one as a writing exercise yesterday, on my granddaughter's behalf. It would guarantee her application never saw the light of day. First part goes like this....

Reunion with classmates, garrulous friends, geekie book wonks and nondescript hallway passersby equated to anticipation. Anticipation felt by the one-time Rutgers student formerly known as M--, class of '15. It was both a gleeful countdown to a birthday party and furtive calendar glances at an approaching dentist appointment. The year clicked over to 2025, then marched downward to June, zeroing in on an appointment with her return to New Brunswick. It was Au recherche du temps perdus with no petities madeleines.

Was there no way to stop the clock, tear up the calendar and hold back the moon?

The M-- who showed up at the meet-and-greet was nonplussed. The room exuded an eerie, surreal quality, like being in Chicago and finding House comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 8:00. The air was scented with cocktail franks and cheese plate hors d’oeuvres, the hum of chatter and buzzing conversations were akin to the sound of a dentist’s drill. What had she been thinking?!

“So you’re M--,” a man said, squinting at her name tag. Or was he staring at her breasts? Half a container of gel made his hair glisten like nose hairs after a sneeze.

“Formerly M--,” she said. “I’m incognito, masquerading as an alumnus.”

“Alumna,” he corrected her. “I remember you from…oh, who was that professor who kept looking at the clock, waiting to get out for some mysterious appointment? Our class in history, archeology. One of those old things.”

“And you’re…” She squinted too. “Frank. Let’s be frank, Frank. What are you doing now that you’re not throwing water balloons?”

He flinched. Just a bit, a tightening around the eyes, as if he had bitten into a jalapeño pepper and didn’t want to cry. “Real estate. I do condos. Make ‘em, sell ‘em. Land is the only thing they’re not making any more of.”

“Never end your sentences with a preposition, Frank. But enough about you, what about me?” Frank was growing on her like he was a colony of E. coli and she was room-temperature hamburger.

Drop me a line if you want the rest of this exercise in academic futiliy.

People As Distinctive as Parking Meters

2010-09-10T09:46:00.000-07:00

At last I know what ails me. It’s prosopagnosia, or the inability to recognize faces. Faces just don’t register in my mind, or with about 2 percent of the population. I’ve been called stuck up and standoffish, but really, I’ll sometimes pass right by close friends without recognizing them. It’s partly why I have to call my wife when we’re in the supermarket and ask what aisle she’s in.

Prosopagnosa sufferers recognize their problem and ask people to wear a carnation (figuratively). It’s not a disaster, like Capgras Syndrome, when you believe your spouse or sibling is an imposter. Those people totally disbelieve there’s anything wrong with themselves.

Years ago, I worked for Western Electric in Kearny, New Jersey. This vast, 19th century factory had more than 10,000 employees. My job, among other tasks, was to interview employees heading into retirement and sum up their expectations in 50 words of copy for the employee newspaper I edited. I found that after talking with one – any one – I might pass him in the hall two hours later and totally fail to recognize him. They wore gray suits. White socks. Brown shoes. Had short hair. They all seemed to be department chiefs, a kind of limbo classification whose work took over when their dreams were cut short. All seemed uniformly gray-skinned. All said they were going to spend the next month at the Jersey shore, and then putter around their gardens in Toms River.

My problem was that unless I associated each person with a mnemonic clue – a scar here, a missing finger there, a VFW pin in the lapel – I couldn’t recognize him in passing two hours later. (The women were different. Though all of a class, their curves and hairstyles made them individuals.)

Apart from my prosopagnosia, another horrifying realization soon hit me. In six months, I was also writing their obituaries. My job was to chronicle both departures. These people not only looked alike, they subscribed to the same short destinies.

There’s a story in here somewhere.

Packing for the Big Trip

2010-09-01T07:21:00.000-07:00

With all the new adults trekking off the college for the first time, I thought it’d be interesting to show you what my School Shopping List looked like in 1957. I was going off to Grinnell College (Iowa), and ready to say goodbye to the parents at Grand Central Station before beginning a 1,200-mile cross-country journey. Alone.

All summer long, personalized mailings from Wanamaker’s, Macy’s and Gimbels advised the class of ’61 that every boy needed at least one dark suit and one sport jacket, so my parents dutifully drove me into New York City to shop. The houndstooth jacket came from a discounter on 23rd Street (down the street from Dad’s office and adjacent to the shop selling “Horehair petticoats”) and was hideous. The suit was a Macy’s blue serge.

Also needed was a sturdy cardboard mailing box so dirty laundry could be mailed back to New Jersey for Mom to wash. (That exchange lasted six weeks before I went to a Laundromat and discovered “whites” and “colors” should be separated.) Grinnell, for its part, advised freshman to talk with their prospective roomies so everyone in a threesome at Smith Hall didn’t arrive with a giant 32 watt stereo. And, I was reminded, males were required to wear coats and ties for evening meals.

Into the footlocker (which I still have) went my Olympic portable typewriter, desk lamp and a leather notebook with my initials in gold (the latter was Mom's gift). The brown Samsonite suitcase was filled with T shirts (white, no ads or logos), dress shirts (button down), and khaki (with belts in the back). My education began in sartorial splendor, lasted a semester, and then the bluejeans took over. But I always remembered: separate colors from whites when doing the wash.

More to Jersey Wines Than You Think

2010-08-16T11:07:00.000-07:00

New Jersey wines are the Rodney Dangerfield of oenology. They get no respect. Sometimes, that’s a deserved reputation, but there are surprises. Part of the reputation comes from a historical invisibility born out of post-Prohibition politics. For years, the state allowed only one wintery for each million residents. In 1981, the laws were relaxed as consumer palates became more sophisticated.

And, I didn’t know till I studied up, wine-making in New Jersey was begun at Renault Winery in 1864. Renault, in Egg Harbor/Galloway Twsp., is still going strong, winning many medals in the New Jersey State and the Finger Lakes International competitions.

This has all come together in an article I've written by the same title as this blog. It was just published by an area newspaper, The Association Reporter and will be coming out in another adult-community publication, River Pointe. Write me if you’re interested in seeing the entire story.

No kidding. Kevin Atticks, writing in The New York Times, stated, “If you go into a wine shop and blindly grab a California wine, your chances of getting something mildly unpleasant are greater than if you pick up a wine from New Jersey.”

There’s Hope for the Next Generation

2010-08-07T10:19:00.000-07:00

Judging the 19 entries in the local Summer Writing Contest was not only entertaining but educational as five members of the writing group I moderate went through the entries.

A surprisingly high level of achievement appeared as we tried to measure each entry against four criteria:
• Characterization: Are the characters well-rounded, developed?
• Plotting: Did the author begin, develop and end the story capably?
• Concept: Are there new ideas, strong imagination, or high levels of insight?
• Writing Ability: Does author show a good command of language?

My matrix—judging each criterion from a “1” (needs work) to a “4” (excellent)—revealed remarkable ability. Not one entry scored lower than a 10. In fact, four entries scored 15s, and three scored 14s—testimony either to the scholastic abilities or personal interests in writing of these young people.

Writing is the art form that most precisely allows a person to express his or her feelings and response to the world. Secondly, people write in order to truly communicate, to reach out in the hopes that another person will say, “Yes! I understand completely what you’re trying to say or how you interpret the world.” To have 9- to 12-year old writing at this high caliber is a joyous experience.

Of course, there were entries that seemed to be right out of a comic book or video game. These are kids! But others believed in magic. One—our first place choice—showed expression and communication in an outstanding way. It was an epistolary piece telling his absentee father that the boy would be a success in spite of the missing dad.

I wish I could’ve written like that when I was in grade school. My hat’s off to these kids. I'm looking forward to meeting them at the ice-cream-and-awards program next week.

Playing Catch-up with a Published Piece

2010-07-25T10:50:00.000-07:00

As Uncle Wiggily used to say, “Now, where were we, boys and girls.” Summer is moving too fast for me to keep up. Anyway, I was relieved when Over My Dead Body! Published “Chain of Events” at http://www.overmydeadbody.com/giersbch.htm.

My notes show that I queried the editor in early summer last year. She told me to shoot the story over to OMDB, which I did July 1, 2009. Then I waited. And waited. I queried the status, and she explained there’d been an illness, personal problems. Then, finally, an e-mail asking whether I’d received the contract and check.

“Nooo,” I replied. “Hmmm,” she said figuratively; there’d been problems with the mail. “Perhaps it’s your name,” I offered. “Homeland Security thinks you’re a terrorist organization.” “Would you mind if I mailed it from my home, with my personal address?” “Nooo,” I answered. And even before she got my mail and I cashed the check, the story was up.

Uncle Wiggly’s advice is to have patience, children. And if you don’t know who Howard Garis’s Uncle Wiggily is, go look him up. You’ll be tested on this.

Not All Lawyers Are Like This

2010-07-19T12:55:00.000-07:00

New York is more than the colossus on the Hudson River. It occupies its own universe, overwhelmed by hubris and unimpressed by authority. Nowhere is it more evidenced than by lawyers. Well, if not in fact, then legend.

And I contributed to their legendary hubris by writing “Day of Moving Hell,” published July 19 by Every Day Fiction, http://www.everydayfiction.com/day-of-moving-hell-by-walt-giersbach/. It dissects the relationships that try one’s soul—even my own at times. Enjoy.

Oh, and regarding estoppels. Watch what you promise someone. I had this point of law checked by a practicing lawyer.

A Brit Fighting for Seccession?

2010-07-13T07:21:00.000-07:00

My article on Henry Morton Stanley, "An Improbable 'Indiana Jones,' is now up at Military History Online (http://www.militaryhistoryonline.com/civilwar/articles/stanleyatshiloh.aspx). The Civil War is writ large in terms of battles, strategy and politics, but its human dimension often is made clear by the events of a single man like Stanley. This struck me most about Stanley (not his real name), not an American either, who went on to become one of the leading 19th century explorers. Aren't accidental heroes the stuff of drama in any age?

Summertine, and the Livin' Is Easy

2010-07-03T18:53:00.000-07:00

I usually write, rewrite and polish a blog until it feels right, but now myPC has crashed with all my documents, memos, pix and notes. So, let's wing it on my netbook because the summer is rolling on.

News notes: Every Day Fiction will publish "The Day of Moving Hell" on July 19. This story (link to come) was generated by hearing about a legal "estoppel." A young lawyer friend hipped me to this take on verbal contracts and I applied it to an ambulance chaser who hates hippies and artists when one gets the better of him.

Bewildering Stories will publish "Angel in My Coffee Cup" on Aug. 2. This flash piece started eight or nine months ago as a prompt on Wordtrip's "Fast Fiction Friday" challenge. Normally, I'm skeptical of inspirational stories as being as charged with false emotion as nostalgia is. They're set to play on our hardwired emotions in the way that producers of Lassie movies jerked our strings to make us laugh and cry. But, I hope you enjoy "Angel" as much as I liked writing it. If you did, ask to read my serious, literary antecedent story about Gramps and the kid that I'm still shopping around to editors.

Kicking Out the Words

2010-06-09T12:43:00.000-07:00

A good week and it’s not over yet. Bewildering Stories accepted “Angel in My Coffee Cup” after a rewrite—and I didn’t even follow my advice about narrative hooks. (Hamlet wasn’t talking about angels when he said, “There are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” The phrase kept going through my head as my granddaughter, Morgan, sat across from me at breakfast.) Maybe my magic realism got to their flash fiction editor.

I sent my “Henry Morton Stanley at Shiloh” article off to Military History Online, but no word back. Yeah, I guess I could polish it some more, but let’s see what happens.

The Asbury Park Press invites reader book reviews. Last Sunday, they picked up mine for Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played with Fire. (“…Unmasks the sanctimonious Swedish society and the murderous tendencies buried in mystery. And what a superb heroine the tattooed, dyslexic hacker Lisabeth Sander is!”)

There’s still a wealth of material for my Holling Clancy Holling blog (at http://hollingcholling.blogspot.com/) and I finished off the Web site for our writing group at the Manchester public library (http://sites.google.com/site/manchesterwriters/home).

I think I could be at Antarctica or Armpit, Ohio. as long as the party continues in my head.

Grab the Reader in 30 Words

2010-06-02T08:13:00.000-07:00

News writing is excellent training. I took journalism classes when I was 19 or 20, then really learned to write on the Hinsdale (Illinois) Doings. I had to get the who, what, where, when and why down in the 30-word “lede” (spelled that way so’s not to confuse it with Linotype “lead.”). Tough job. Try it.

Then news writing leaped back a hundred years. The soft and fuzzy lede would begin something like, “It was an idyllic day in June when nine-year-old Tabitha and her perky terrier, Mikey, romped down the sidewalk. Unbeknownst to them, Charles Meriwether left the bar inebriated and got into his buggy. The Gods must have cried in anguish as Meriwether’s buggy approached the corner where little Tabitha….” Well, you get the drift.

Now we’re back to requiring a narrative hook—the first handful of words that will capture the reader at his screen, make him click through to another Web site, and continue reading. Tough job. I began looking at leads from the RSS feeds that pour into my mailbox each morning. What I found is a picture of how short our attention span is—and how readers can be manipulated to click on links. Read more of how to “Hook Your Readers” at http://www.everydayfiction.com/flashfictionblog/hook-your-readers/#comments.

Oh, Tabitha? Along about the 10th paragraph you learn she'll be okay. But the dog is dead.

Everything Old Is New Again

2010-05-18T08:11:00.000-07:00

The score in 1675 was Indians-1, English-0. My article on America's most devastating war was just reprinted in American Museum Magazine, at http://www.theamericanmuseum.org/may.10.first.html. I had four ancestors in the conflict; some lived to tell about it.

The story originally ran in Military History Online and was perhaps my first foray into early American History since I had never heard of King Philip’s War. This was followed by pieces on the first shots fired in the Civil War—at Barrancas, Fla., not Fort Sumter; Nieuw Amsterdam’s notorious Gov. Willem Kieft who slaughtered area tribes people; and Bacon’s rebellion in Virginia a hundred years before the American Revolution.

Why can’t history be made more interesting to school kids? I would have been fascinated, but it took me half a century to come around and learn the hard way.

The New Yorker Suffering Alzheimer’s?

2010-04-29T07:16:00.000-07:00

It had to happen, that one of the New Yorker’s fabled proofreaders missed a diacritical mark. If you don’t know it, this magazine is the last hold-out for spelling co-op with an umlaut, but no hyphen. Coöp. And, actors who rôle play.

So I nearly coughed up my lunch when I read [Apr. 26, p. 20] “Obama’s terminally naive 'engagement' has achieved nothing but the loss or 15 months.” NO! It’s naïve with an umlaut—those two little German dots on a French word that changes the pronunciation.

But, the New Yorker can’t claim to have misplaced its pocketbook full of punctuation following an afternoon of sherry tippling, because in the next column we see Richard Perle, “the Reagan Administration’s über-hawk.” For a moment, I thought I saw the sun setting on the tidal flats of American civilization, but it really was a lapse caused by age. Don’t we all forget where we put our accent marks now and then?

Away in a Manger, Darkly

2010-04-25T11:41:00.000-07:00

People who identify taboos should realize they wouldn't be so popular if, well, if they weren't labeled. I guess the Bible had a thing or two to say about bestiality. Not that I think it's high in popularity--sort of like a book ranking 10,000 on Amazon. But it's funny. Sex of any kind is funny to begin with, but here's another take on the subject at The Short Humour Site. Snicker and click at http://www.short-humour.org.uk/3writersshowcase/awayinamangerdarkly.htm.

Hook Your Readers

2010-04-04T14:01:00.000-07:00

Advertising copywriters insist that a good poster capture the attention of a commuter dashing to catch the 8:05 train. That’s a tough chore—almost as tough as grabbing a reader in the first 30 words of your short story.

The grabber is called a narrative hook, an intriguing opener that makes the story impossible to put down.

I’ve been scrutinizing the openers from flash fiction sites that depend on a feed into your mailbox and a click-through to their site. These teasers must make you hit their link or they’ve failed. Check these out from Everyday Weirdness (http://everydayweirdness.com)

• “Faith Stands Guard” by Deborah A. Blood: “Holy shit, Faith,” Todd cried, hopping awkwardly to avoid the small terrier. “Do you have to lay there?” He continued toward the kitchen, shouting over his shoulder, “I’m gonna end up stepping on your dog!”...
• “A Note on Spiderlings” by Brenda Stokes: Not all spiders eat their young. Take this from one who knows. I love my spiderlings. All hundreds. I ’d never dream of eating them. It’s barbaric! But sometimes, exceptions must be made....
• “Scuttle” by Milo J Fowler: True Story: I never thought buying a gallon of milk would prove to be fatal. He came at us like the Marshmallow Man, pasty but hairy and flushed and sweaty, gargling and huffing, staring straight through us as he staggered, both arms flailing out...
• “Service” by M.E. Ray: The second person that showed up was carrying a shotgun. He had two Labs with him and looked like he’d been hunting. He made eye contact from the far side of the smoking crater and we both looked down at the cooling metallic teardrop embedded below...

Or these, from Short Story Library (http://shortstory.us.com/):

• “Wild Weather” by David McVey: There are two ways that I could tell this story. I could start at the beginning and keep going until the story ends. That, of course, is how it happened. But it’s not how I experienced it nor how I remember it. In particular, it’s not how I remember Kathy and she, after all, is the...
• “I Will Not Eat Cookies” by Amy Corbin: Recently, I gave all my size 4 clothing to Goodwill. This was very hard to do. I’d been holding on to those things for 10 years. I told myself I was not giving up on being size 4. It was just that these clothes were no longer in style, and when I got down to...

On of my favorite story feeds comes from Big Jewel (www.thebigjewel.com) This week’s lead features “New Old Wives Tales” by Whitney Collins: If someone dies on Good Friday, they go directly to heaven. If someone dies on Fat Tuesday, they probably had diabetes. If your nose itches, a fool is about to kiss you. If your crotch itches, blame Derek. Be sure to wait an hour after eating before dumpster diving. If you carry an acorn in your pocket, good [...]

C’mon, tell me that most of these leads make you want to shut out the world and read on.
Our reading culture is changing because of multi-purposing distractions. The TV is going, the iPod is playing MP3 downloads, the cell phone is dinging new text messages, you’re trying to Facebook a comment on your netbook—all simultaneously—and some presumptuous writer wants your attention? Get serious!

Darrin Miller states in www.Writing.com, “Writing that all too important hook…has to be done in this business in order to make it…. People are busy, too busy to waste their time reading a bad book or short. We have to make them want to read and not stop reading until it’s over and this has to be done at the beginning. All the greats have done it.

“Stephen King's It would have been impossible to put down. ‘The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years—if it did ever end—began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.’

“Or H. P. Lovecraft’s, Thing On the Doorstep. ‘It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to show by this statement that I am not his murderer.’
“And Dean Koontz, who is a master of the craft and of writing that single line, which would effortlessly snag his readers. The opener from Strangers, ‘Domimick Corvaisis went to sleep under a light wool blanket and a crisp white sheet, sprawled alone in the bed, but he woke elsewhere—in the darkness at the back of the large foyer closet, behind concealing coats and jackets.’”

When you feel your story is finished, go back and isolate the lead. Will it tease, intrigue, horrify, invite or cause the reader’s blood pressure to rise? Good. Now make sure the story’s last paragraph—even the last line—is just as memorable.

Sharpening Conventional Tools

2010-03-24T14:17:00.000-07:00

Neophytes often begin with genre fiction as being easy stuff to get into. And this is where I stumble when I critique their work. Their characters are overdrawn, descriptions distract from plot flow, story lines get bogged down in irrelevancies, and memoir fogs the exposition.

I was hauled back to the basics of conventional writing by James Wood, professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard, reviewing books in the New Yorker. Key here is his word convention: what today’s reader expects.

Stephen Crane could write in, “The Little Regiment,” in 1896, “And yet the spirit of this little city, its quaint individuality, poised in the air about the ruins, defying the guns, the sweeping volleys; holding in contempt those avaricious blazes which attacked many dwellings. The hard earthen sidewalks proclaimed the games that had been played there during long lazy days.” And so on. No reader today would patiently suffer an omniscient author describing an anthropomorphic little city.

Old fashioned? Yes. Now what are the new fashions we expect when approaching a story? Conventions are akin to entering a strange building and knowing where the facilities are located. Entering a dark house, we want to know the stairs will have handrails and there will be light switches next to the doors.

Here are a few of the amenities—Wood’s “basic grammar”—we look for:

Sweep and Focus. Wood sees “cinematic sweep followed by the selection of small, telling details” at the core of realist fiction. It’s the vernacular in which mainstream stories are written—the very language readers anticipate, beginning with the establishing location shot. (I stepped from the air-conditioned bus into another world. Humid air made me recoil as I dropped my bag and stared at the shimmering white courthouse, the blank-faced stores, the dusty asphalt of an empty street.)1

A Mix of Detail. These are the small, crystal-clear items that define a person in a few words. (Sam’s money needed to be leashed to keep it from running into a bar or bookstore. I figured I’d hit the middle class when I could afford to kill cockroaches with Raid spray instead of a hammer. Sam would need to borrow the hammer.)2

Specifics, Not Generalities. Where did Crane get off using a word like “quaint,” and what “games” were played there? Readers want details. (Evenings started with us sitting on a stoop drinking Rheingold. Then someone would suggest going over to Second Avenue to get a bialy smothered in cream cheese, onions and pickled herring. Saturdays, there were demonstrations and anti-war protests, but no one wanted to get involved. It was too hot and depersonalizing to carry a placard. Our Tar Beach was the rooftop on East Sixth Street. Always there was the sound of drums echoing down the street.)3

Characterization through Minutiae. Flash fiction’s word limitations require the most concise way of drawing a character. Done once—and well—you may not need to revisit your character’s description. (Sarah didn’t open up much. She kept her emotions tightly packaged like a souvenir piece of wedding cake, full of memories but totally indigestible.)4

Padding. A little filler helps a story the way bread extends a good meatloaf. Padding doesn’t move the story ahead as much as it lets the reader catch a breath and—hopefully—empathize with a character. (What made me feel so fine was the danger that I was Pinocchio and somebody would turn me into a donkey for running away to the circus. I don’t think Pinocchio ever had a girl hanging onto his arm, though. The warm sweat of her hand made the forbidden pleasure feel specially good.)5

Memories. Recollection and reflection offer depth to a plot, a protagonist or a situation. It’s also a way to bring in a back story. (They had been solicitous after David Marshall Sullivan’s coronary embolism. They regretted that by dying unexpectedly he hadn’t lived up to his contract, but they didn’t hold that against her when she was severed. They said it was just a corporate reorganization. Their severance package was generous when they fired her, but her own regrets had more to do with losing David than their employer.)6

Lyrical Phrasing. A touch of poesy ratchets the story up a notch over pedestrian writing. Call it a blossom dropped on a sidewalk; it heightens the beauty. (The trail of her footsteps in the sand back to L.A. would imitate those just-born turtles flailing their way to the sea to drink up a new life.)7

Writing instructors demand a “story arc,” from the introductory “narrative hook.” through increasing suspense, and on to a “blackest moment” before the story is resolved. This is satisfying to the reader, even if it’s predictable. At its clumsiest (and especially in movies), it requires the hero to duke it out mano a mano with the enemy, the alien, or the undead until the nemesis is properly dispatched and the screen fades to black. In flash, the resolution needs to take place in a final paragraph or even the concluding sentence. (Humans would probably call our love incest, but there’s no comparable feeling among androids.)8

Your challenge then, at least until your experimental or literary masterpiece is created, is to fulfill these conventions in the most inventive and entertaining manner. Grammar, sweep, detail, specifics, characterization, padding, memory and lyricism all function in greater or lesser amounts as the tools to build a short story. Sidestep or ignore them and the reader won’t recognize the “reality” of your story.

All parenthetical examples are from published stories I’ve written.
1. “Gothic Revival,” Big Pulp
2. “Sarah, My Donna and Child,” Cruising the Green of Second Avenue
3. “Big Willa and a Push Toward the Edge,” Wild Child Publishing
4. “The Ghost on the IND Line,” Cruising the Green of Second Avenue
5. “Louise from the Bar,” Paradigm Journal
6. “Cable Window,” Bewildering Stories
7. “Last Year’s Icon,” Every Day Fiction
8. “Who Dares Call It Murder?” OG Opinion Guy

Two Stories Aired, Recognized

2010-03-22T08:22:00.000-07:00

Two nice bits of news greeted me this morning.

Big Pulp has published “Girl Talk,” a bit of scathing humor, at http://bigpulp.com. Dishing the dirt can be so devastating, working like a slow-acting poison. But isn’t it entertaining to watch the victim writhe?

And, Bewildering Stories has chosen “Gothic Revival” for inclusion in its quarterly “Editor’s Choices,” issues 366-376, at http://www.bewilderingstories.com/anthologies/366-376/366-376_antho3.html. Who says literary allusion has to be scholarly and tedious?

I’m Only Going to Tell You Once

2010-02-25T08:51:00.000-08:00

In the 30-plus years I was a corporate mouthpiece and wordsmith, senior managers sidled up to ask if I had any tips for writing. Their memos and plans had all the verve of congealed mac and cheese. This was the crib sheet that I pulled from my desk drawer for them. The suggestions apply also to flash fiction.

1. Use short words and, when you edit your writing, cut, cut, cut! See what makes this piece stand out: “Our world’s well served by his last book, The Old Man and the Sea. He said words should be like small, bright stones, seen in the sand through a clear stream. You know it’s tough to find the ones that are lean, have strength, stand up, shout out and sing loud. At last, each best, true, sole verb or noun takes its place. On a good day, we might write just a page, two or three, then call them done.” Notice each word has just one syllable? It’s not that word choices are overwhelming, but that we move too fast to complete the assignment.

2. Decide what result you want to achieve, what message the reader should take away. Each word, each thought must support this end result. Kill the rhetoric that doesn’t have a damn thing to do with your message.

3. Substitute Anglo-Saxon words when you can. Use “strength” instead of “fortitude,” “start” instead of “commence.” Greek and Latin derivatives are soft and mushy. Why say “apprise” or “inform” when “tell” says the same thing in half the syllables?

4. Avoid clichés, as in this real-life example: “Opening night at the Cirque de Soleil was a strictly A-list affair, with a veritable Who’s Who gathered under the big top for a mind-boggling performance.” Neo-clichés also lurk in memos and meetings: think outside the box, paradigm shift, core competencies, strategic initiative, impact (usually as a verb). Tired words and phrases grow like nits into lice.

5. Don’t worry about the fine points of grammar. Sir Winston Churchill said about dangling participles, “They are an outrage up with which I shall not put.” The same is true about split infinitives. Capt. Kirk always wanted “to boldly go where no one has gone before.” Who’s going to argue with the Captain? Grammatical rigor mortis can make you sound stuffy.

6. As the Microsoft grammar checker on your toolbar demands, choose the active voice over the passive. How easy it is to say, “The policy was reviewed before implementation,” instead of “The manager reviewed the policy before….” It’s amazing to think how much work gets done by itself!
7. Avoid adjectives. They’re a lazy way to bring an idea to life. Instead of writing about a “lonely office after everyone has gone home,” go for the image with something like, “The loudest noise was the cleaning woman’s vacuum cleaner at the far end of the hallway.”

8. Prosaic writing dulls the mind. Rewrite sentences, such as “The performance was so exciting that the audience was stunned when it was over,” with imagery. Substitute “There was a minute of stunned silence before the applause broke out.” Undistinguished writing is the stuff of TV news reporters.

9. Lazy verbiage that searches for the dramatic will always hijack your story. Here’s an example that came from one of Mitt Romney’s highly paid Bain & Co. consultants: “When you join the Corporation, you also become a member of a very special and very unique team. It’s a worldwide team of over 50,000 men and women whose diverse mix of experience, energy and expertise makes us a true force to be reckoned with in the global marketplace. (And more blah blah blah.) Wow! Mind-numbingly vapid!

10. Computer spell checking won’t do your work for you. Spelling must be absolutely correct. If a person can’t spell the difference between burro and burrow, it’s fair to say he doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.

Mystery and Humor

2010-02-24T05:33:00.000-08:00

“Epitaph with Flowers” is a crackling good mystery that's now up at Big Pulp--love, death, lost treasure and betrayal. All in various shades of noir. Print it out for reading on the run, while waiting for the bus or during that bathroom break at the office. At http://bigpulp.com/chill_giersbach_epitaph.html.

Now, we all know there’s only a single letter separating “ironic” from “iconic.” You decide which is which, between the mystery above and the humor below.

If it’s not pollution making us irritable, it’s the alternative to fossil-fuel energy. Who’d ever believe freedom from the oil cartel would invite the dreaded “Wind Turbine Syndrome?” "Blowing in the Wind" is new satire at http://www.short-humour.org.uk/3writersshowcase/blowinginthewind.htm

Tsunami Changes in Book Selling

2010-02-03T10:20:00.000-08:00

There was a 6-column-inch blurb in Sunday's Times that Seattle-based Amazon on Christmas Day sold more e-books for its Kindle than paper-based books.

Interesting factoid, but more startling was the next sentence that Laredo, Texas (pop. 250,000) closed its last bookstore. (Laredo's population is only slightly smaller than that of Newark, NJ, one of the poorer urban areas.) I checked my online Yellow Pages, though, and actually came up with eight Laredo bookstores, three of which were Christian and one Spanish-language. Two recognizable names were Barnes & Noble and B. Dalton. That left two that appeared to be independent bookstores.

What's the takeaway?
> A lot of people got Kindles for Christmas. (My Seattle-based friend has 4,600 books on his e-reader, most which he admits he'll never read.)
> Texans read less than Newarkers, where there are 84 listings for bookstores. Newark's median household income is $26,913. Laredo's median HH income is $23,832, but has a lower cost of living index.
> There's a sea change coming in the way--and whether--we read books. (Does Steve Jobs know something about e-books that led to the iPad?)
> Laredo's population is 97.1% Latino, but unemployment is just 6%. (Are Hispanics working too hard to read?)
> Bookstores are an endangered enterprise.

I think all of these assumptions are correct.

Hey, Mr. Postman….

2010-01-29T07:38:00.000-08:00

I love to get mail. Well, not direct mail solicitations, but queries from people who’ve read what I’ve written. Some reflections on what it means for a writer to hear back from readers has been posted at Flash Fiction Chronicles (http://www.everydayfiction.com/flashfictionblog/when-readers-get-back-to-you/#respond).

My quote from Catcher in the Rye—Holden Caulfield on wishing he could simply call up writers he admired and have a chat—was entirely coincidental with J.D. Salinger’s death. My article was written two weeks ago. But I wish I could call him up and tell him what his writing meant to me when I was a confused teenager.

J.D. Salinger R.I.P.

2010-01-28T14:58:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was not a perfect day for bananafish. Jerome David Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye and other books, died, on Wednesday at age 91, of natural causes at his home in New Hampshire, according to a family statement provided today. His first story, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," was published by The New Yorker in 1948. His last was published 16 years later after he retired to reclusiveness in New Hampshire. His output was small for a writer given so much acclaim: Nine Stories (1953), a collection of a novella and a short story, Franny and Zooey (1961), and a collection of two novellas, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963). His last published work, a novella entitled Hapworth 16, 1924, appeared in The New Yorker on June 19, 1965.

Salinger was an evergreen writer whose books are still assigned to high schools. One 16-year-old recently told me she hated Catcher and thought Holden Caulfield a wuss. I said, well, he defined my life as a 17-year-old kid. He also defined a certain writing style for me, as well as the purpose of writing when he had Caulfield say, “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.”

The New, NEW New York Times?

2010-01-24T12:35:00.000-08:00

The front page of Sunday's Times made me choke on my bacon and eggs. There, under the head "Foot on Bomb, Marine Defies a Taliban Trap," I read the quote, 'Goddamn, Matty, Man,' said Cpl. Joshua Villegas, allowing his eyes to roam over the intact Marine after the patrol backed away away from the dud. 'Lucky son of a bitch.'"

Is this the first time the good gray Times wrote "goddamn" and "son of a bitch"? On page one, column 7? I'm used to the New Yorker sprinkling its copy with "fucks," but the national paper of record--a family paper--is getting it on! Going with the times, so to speak. I expect tomorrow's paper will have Pres. Obama stating, "Screw the banks, I'm really pissed off now!" And Speaker Nancy Pelosi fuming, "Those shits are wrecking my legacy."

Ah, well, if little kids now use good Anglo-Saxon epithets, can the rest of journalism be far behind in trying to sell papers to the illiterates?

Now in a New Anthology of Short Stories

2010-01-24T07:27:00.000-08:00

Ever watch your future melting away, moments before the reprieve comes? That may not be the end though.

“Death in the Afternoon” has been selected for inclusion in Every Day Fiction’s new anthology. So nice, too, when readers say things like, "Good story, nice twist, great images." When readers are happy, I'm happy. There's more information at http://www.everydayfiction.com/features/print-books/the-best-of-every-day-fiction-two-anthology/. Then curl up and enjoy some of today's top flash fiction writers.

Keep Your Philtrum Dry

2010-01-18T08:36:00.000-08:00

I’m often inclined to pitch a story as seen through the eyes of children, schizos and other-worldly personalities. It allows me to describe impressions of these innocents, while you, dear reader, know the truth. (Don’t you?)

I got a question from my 3-year-old grandson today asking what the indentation below the nose and over the lip was called. A quick Google check revealed it’s a philtrum. Who knew? I wrote back to his Mom to tell him tonight, “Your philtrum should look like your Mom's or Dad's because the shape is inherited.

“I like to watch and see if people's earlobes—the dingle dangle—is separated or is tucked up next to their jaw. This is also inherited, so if you marry a woman whose ears don't dangle then your baby boy or girl might not have a dangle ear and you can't sing ‘Do your ears hang low, do they wobble to and fro, can you tie them in a knot, can you tie them in a bow...?’

“Also, if you put your finger at the end of your nose, you'll find a little separation under the skin. Go on, wiggle it. I don't know what this is called, but I think everyone has one. If you don't, then maybe you're an alien from Mars!! Write and let me know!”

Now, all I have to do is put together a thousand words about a boy with no philtrum, no dangling earlobes and no thingy under the tip of his nose.

On a Roll Again

2010-01-08T13:31:00.000-08:00

My New England genes told me I’d be despondent after overindulging in wine, pâté, cookies, more wine, eggnog. January is an anticlimactic come-down. I need Viagra for the soul.

But relief came with publication this week of “Gothic Revival,” vindication for my falling asleep during American Lit 101. I did my homework for this! The story began as a half-hour exercise in “Two weeks as a redneck librarian” and continued into seeing beauty in the grotesque and the grotesque in beauty. Read it in Bewildering Stories, at http://bewilderingstories.com/issue366/gothic_revival.html.

Also this week, Every Day Fiction had a press party blowout in Vancouver for its anthology containing “Death in the Afternoon,” a flash fiction piece published there on Oct. 18. (Tag: Ever watch your future melting away, moments before the reprieve comes? That may not be the end.) You can buy a copy—please do—shortly

Big Pulp e-mailed me just before the holidays that they’re buying “Epitaph with Flowers,” a murder/love story that Mouth Full of Bullets accepted just before closing down. That’s good to look forward to.

And finally, Flash Fiction Chronicles posted my commentary on “Tackling the Trash,” a question of what to do with the stories that once written become orphaned, stillborn, rejected or subjected to euthanasia. (See http://www.everydayfiction.com/flashfictionblog/)

Eensy little wins also included our Ocean County Library branch asking if our writing group would judge a kids’ writing contest, I opted into doing our church newsletter, and Judy’s cookbook was brought up to date. I think it’s going to be a good year.

New Year Greetings

2009-12-31T11:44:00.000-08:00

It’s been a helluva year, or as Mickey Spillane might put it—“as tough as a Times Square babe with one hand on your wallet and the other hailing a taxi.” But we can hope that the New Year—and the new decade—will be better.

I hope that marketers will stop naming products and companies with exclamation points (Yahoo!), lower case aberrations (eBay), or changing theose names for no good reason (Wal-Mart to Walmart).

…That new words will continue to be coined, like 2009’s locavore, (buying locally grown food), Obamamaniac (self-explanatory), fang-banging (sex with a vampire), and shovel-ready (infrastructure projects ready to spend stimulus money). My favorite: googlegänger, for the person always looking up his/her name. And who knew the distorted letters I puzzle through to respond to a blog is called a captcha? (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). But I still don’t know what you mean when “you get the jones for a pizza.”

…That writers will kill needless adjectives and adverbs that allow them to be lazy. (And that young wannabes will learn what adjectives and adverbs are!)

…That young people and the intellectually challenged will stop signing off with lol and consign smiley faces to the archeological midden heap of bad communication. I’m tempted to exclaim, “WTF!” and hit the delete. button.

…That reporters everywhere will learn to spell minuscule, that media is plural and that the Smithsonian is an Institution.

…That elected officials not proclaim ordnances (subject to a statue of limitations), and that Congressional reconciliation does not mean head banging. Are they aware that election results is an anagram for lies—let’s recount.

And to all, a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year and New Decade!

Tackling the Trash

2009-12-26T09:19:00.000-08:00

I told editor Gay Degani this was what I was writing the day before Christmas instead of wrapping presents. She seemed to agree that writing trumps everything else, so I’ll give you an advance peek at what’s coming up on Flash Fiction Chronicles (http://www.everydayfiction.com/flashfictionblog/ ).

My groaning file cabinet is filed a score of published pieces along with a hundred rejected or unsubmitted orphans that just don’t work. Either I killed the idea or editors responded, “We wish you luck in placing this with another publisher.”

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were an archive for failed efforts, like Jasper Fforde’s brilliant Well of Lost Plots where all unpublished writing resides? My flash story “Alien Nation” (read “Alienation”) about a werewolf vegetarian would sit next to Fforde’s “unread and unreadable Caversham Heights, a cliché-ridden pulp mystery.” My three novels—begun but never completed—would collect dust until some literary archeologist cried “Eureka!” And “Gaslighting,” where I poured my heart into a tale of spousal abuse ending with a Halloween murder, would lie comatose.

Or—and this is the germ of an idea—could my orphan stories be posted where struggling writers might find they serve as the perfect prompt needed to re-energize their spirits? I would get a credit line, much like F. Scott Fitzgerald did when he failed to turn in a satisfactory script for Tender Is the Night. And the new author, bound for the Elysian heights of publishing, would add insights into the successes and failures of humanity.

Let me think about it before taking out the trash.

I’m Talking SHORT Here

2009-12-10T13:36:00.000-08:00

I was taken aback when I learned three of the top five best-selling novels in Japan were keitai shousetsu—novels downloaded to cell phones with chapters of just 70 to 100 words. The days of 5,000-word stories in Collier’s are only dimly remembered. Playboy is known for its fiction (who looks at the photos?), but that magazine is rarely displayed outside of Borders or Barnes & Noble.

The short writing we see today is defined by my e-mail pal Brian Huggett. His Short Humour Site (http://www.short-humour.org.uk) offers 500-or-fewer-words stories to meet today’s rush-hour needs “between stations on the metro, during lovemaking, during lovemaking between stations on the metro, during free-fall skydiving.” Truly, this is reading on the run. (Disclosure: Brian has carried half a dozen of my pieces.)

How short can you go? Flash (fewer than 1,000 words), drabble (exactly 100 words, nano (300 to 500 words, depending), dribble (50 words), the 55er (yes, just 55 words), one-sentence stories and six worders. Yes, there are online sites, contests and paying publications that champion this kind of brevity. For a deeper look into a lesser form of writing, see my comments at Flash Fiction Chronicles (http://www.everydayfiction.com/flashfictionblog/) by scrolling down to Nov. 30.

Can you write “flash”? It’s tough. It was Blaise Pascal who famously stated, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” There. Glad I got that off my chest.

Excuse Me, Your Fist Is in My Nose

2009-12-03T08:01:00.000-08:00

Perhaps I overdosed on Anderson Cooper’s frenetic chatter or four extremist heads arguing political nonsense or Sarah Palin and Levi the tattooed opportunist jawing at each other. Anyway, I came up with the feeling that the greatest problem we face (apart from Peace in Our Time) is a lack of civility. Courtesy. Politesse. Good manners. How could I have overlooked this bit of dialogue I wrote several years ago that encapsulates my argument?

[The school teacher tells her lover,] “You know what I believe? Anti-social behavior is the biggest, most major problem now. Before 9/11, but more now. Anyone who doesn’t think so just ain’t serious.”

“What’s the solution?” he asked, admiring this reflective side of her. “Do what your brother [the police officer] does?”

“No, of course not.” She propped herself on an elbow and tapped his chest with the pack of cigarettes. “Love ’em. I love people, but just the ones who deserve it. I can love them even though I don’t like them. Certain people…well, I also make love so they know that I care.” Her tongue rotated lasciviously around her lips.

He felt a laugh gurgle up. “You can’t make love to the whole world! It’d take forever.”

“Well, for evil people, there’s another answer.” Her large eyes twinkled. “Throw all the guns in the ocean. Barring that, castrate all the sociopaths. Gotta be an answer there somewhere.”

This is an extreme dichotomy--and I’ll overlook the sexual intimations--but it's all there.

A Million Here, a Million There

2009-11-29T07:59:00.000-08:00

The figures are now in: Supporting a single soldier or Marine in Afghanistan costs a million bucks a year. Our school district recently asked everyone to dig into their pockets to maintain Manchester schools. The cost was two soldiers. Doctors Without Borders (USA) helps people in 60 countries—often risking their lives—through donations equivalent to 161 soldiers. Habitat for Humanity in New York City is building houses through benevolences that equate to ten soldiers.

Putting a price tag on education, health care and housing looks very different when they’re equated to expenses for military adventures. One is an investment; the other is an arbitrary expense. It’s the difference between a family separating its “needs” from its “wants.” Mine isn’t a question of where the money comes from. Just a moral awareness that an investment is better than a hazardous and costly expense.

It’s time to let the war makers know which is which.

Why Writing Groups?

2009-11-20T12:35:00.000-08:00

One of my first recommendations to anyone who’s even half serious about writing fiction or non-fiction is to join a writing group. They’ve been enlightening, educational, enabling and informative. A few of my thoughts on the subject are now up on Flash Fiction Chronicles (http://www.everydayfiction.com/flashfictionblog/why-writing-groups/#comments), a new site of, by and for writers of all styles and interests. Drop on by and bookmark it. There’s new commentary every day or so.

Oh, and another value in writers’ group: Great friendships are forged.

Photos for Our Time

2009-10-31T12:10:00.000-07:00

I thought today of those “iconic photos” that define a point in time and enlighten us with moments of reflection. There was the flag raising at Iwo Jima (Joe Rosenthal, photog), the sailor kissing a woman in Times Square as the world celebrated VE Day (Alfred Eisensataedt), the woman kneeling in front of student Jeffrey Miller shot at Kent State in 1970 (John Filo), General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon soldier (Eddie Adams).

I’m sure you can think of others. The question is what photograph describes our age most memorably? Somehow, Michael Jackson lying in his coffin doesn’t have the esthetics or meaning even of Demi Moore’s profile in pregnancy or George Bush, the little emperor, crying “Mission Accomplished”? And don’t suggest President Obama looking Heavenward like a cheap litho of Jesus.

Bill Safire, R.I.P.

2009-10-06T07:36:00.000-07:00

The New York Times Magazine is the last section of the Sunday paper I read, and then weeks pass before I get to this mostly innocuous magazine. But when I open the pages, the first piece I stop at is Bill Safire’s “On Language” column. I’m a word nerd, keep a list of new words to learn, read Quinion's World Wide Words RSS feed, and so on.

When I heard of Safire’s death, Sept. 28 of pancreatic cancer I felt the loss of a kinsman.

The Times obit mentions Safire’s “rules for writers,” which I love. “Remember to never split an infinitive. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. Avoid clichés like the plague. And don’t overuse exclamation marks!” I even forgive him, when he was Nixon’s speechwriter, for coining Agnew’s phrase about “nattering nabobs of negativism.”

He was the kind of guy I’d want to have a beer with. He reportedly needed a shoeshine, hair could’ve used a trim, clothes were rumpled. “He was tall but bent—a man walking into the wind. He slouched and banged a keyboard, talked as fast any newyawka and looked a bit gloomy, like a man with a toothache.”

Yep, I know that kind of guy, and I recall banging out copy on a Remington when I was a cub reporter in the Chicago ‘burbs.

I’ll keep his last column when I find it in the pile on the coffee table. Now, the editors report he will be “on hiatus for a while.”

Bite the Bride

2009-10-05T07:44:00.000-07:00

A news story out of Ohio gripped me by the, er, throat. A middle-aged couple was married, with the groom arriving in a coffin and dressed like Dracula ,while the bride was also dressed as a vampire. The minister appeared as Jason in Friday the 13th.

Now, I know Twilight soared to the charts and half a dozen neck-biting novels are on the best-seller list, but isn’t this carrying things a bit far? What did “Jason” say when the ceremony concluded? “You may now bite the bride?” Was the Champagne toast replaced with Type O blood—or plasma for those on a diet?

I know there’s a back story here somewhere!

All the News from Sioux City

2009-09-27T11:42:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, it’s true. Even trying to call up the devil with the best of intentions can go awry. All hell can break loose. The news from Iowa gripped me in its cold fingers until the real unvarnished, true back story emerged: The ritual killer was simply dyslexic. You've heard of the dyslexic who walked into a bra? That's Louis Harris, Jr.

Read the truth of “Satanic Ritual Gone Bad” at
http://www.short-humour.org.uk/3writersshowcase/satanicritualgonebad.htm.

Don’t Overlook Elmore Leonard

2009-09-09T11:30:00.000-07:00

Is 9/09/09 an auspicious day? Hell no. I wrote about it in “Number Eleven” years ago. Check it out at http://www.bewilderingstories.com/issue272/number_eleven.html.

Okay, to another subject: Elmore Leonard has written a new book, the 41st notch on his gun, not counting 31 works turned into movies and TV shows. Robert Pinsky, in The New York Times, said Elmore Leonard’s Road Dogs “is about the varying degrees of truth and baloney in human relationships. Sometimes the truth or the baloney is lethal. Droll and exciting, enriched by the self-aware, what-the-hell-why-not insouciance of a master now in his mid-80s, Road Dogs presents interesting questions: Can a grown person change? Specifically, can a man abandon expertise that wins him respect but makes a mess of his life? Can anybody trust anybody? Is love ever true? Is friendship ever real? Or, leaving aside love and friendship, does loyalty exist? We road dogs—trotting along companionably on our way to sniff and woof and boogie-woogie and perhaps knock over an occasional trash barrel together—are we reliable?”

I’ve kept a list of every book I’ve read since 1973, starting when I realized I was reading an embarrassing amount of pop fiction at the expense of more worthy literary efforts. Not that Robert Ludlum is bad, but it’s genre writing.

Finishing my seventh Elmore Leonard opus I realized it was time to get back to Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering or David Liss’s Conspiracy of Paper. Then I had my epiphany: Elmore Leonard is a damn good writer.

You know Leonard from the films Get Shorty, Stick, Mr. Majestyk, Jackie Brown and 27 others. You just haven’t read him.

The Christian Science Monitor’s James Kaufman wrote in 1983, “It’s taken awhile for people to catch onto Leonard, though Stick finally brought him the scrutiny of the critical establishment…. But like more overnight successes, Leonard had been writing…since 1953.” Newgate Callendar, writing in The New York Times Book Review, stated, “When [Leonard’s] 52 Pickup appeared in 1974, it had some critics talking in terms of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald

Leonard’s characters are for the most part, good, decent people, but ones who might challenge you to arm wrestle. The writing is spare and lacking in simile or metaphor. His protagonists have interior thoughts and existential questions. What remains when the reader puts down a Leonard work are characters drawn in clean, sharp lines. He is Hemingway, unexpurgated and sitting in a bar or police squad room. Don’t apologize for going out to pick up Road Dogs. You'll find Leonard is addictive.

Sayonara Summertime

2009-08-23T14:41:00.000-07:00

One more week to Labor Day. Is it too soon to fear the end of summer is creeping in like a bad dream? Time to shake the sand out my beach towel and gird myself for autumn? No matter, it’s been a great summer. The family is doing well. The heat has been tolerable. My only regret is that if we’d had more rain I’d’ve written more instead of hanging out at the pool or hitting the Point Pleasant boardwalk or eating at the raw bar on the Manasquan Inlet.

Still, I did a fair amount of writing. “Demon Switch” suggested measures to prevent demonic mayhem, published June 5 by Everyday Weirdness, at http://everydayweirdness.com/e/20090605/. “Death in the Afternoon” took a metaphorical look at adolescent relationships through melting ice cubes, published by Every Day Fiction. July 4, at http://www.everydayfiction.com/death-in-the-afternoon-by-walter-giersbach/. “Who Dares Call It Murder?” was a venture into near-future speculative fiction, published by OG Short Fiction on July 15 at www.theopinionguy.com. Bewildering Stories has slated “Gothic Revival” for an upcoming issue. And a trio of humor pieces was published by the U.K. site, http://www.short-humour.org.uk/3writersshowcase/deathbyapathy.htm.

Still, I wonder if I have the energy, endurance and perspicacity to write a novel. Maybe I'll know when NaNoWriMo—National Novel Writing Month—rolls around in October. Hell, maybe I won’t shake out the beach towel just yet..

If There’s a Doctor in the House…

2009-08-02T06:53:00.000-07:00

Until recently, I’ve been running to doctors for checkups like a rat chasing nachos. All I get are concerned frowns as they consult their PDRs. So, perhaps I’m not the best of patients. But there are worse, and they’re part of “Innovations in Medicine, at The Short Humour Site. Read it at http://www.short-humour.org.uk/3writersshowcase/innovationsinmedicine.htm and call me in the morning.

“Who Dares Call It Murder?”

2009-07-15T12:57:00.000-07:00

It’s murder when George Bush, the little emperor, sends kids off to Iraq to be killed. And it’s murder when healthcare costs mean neglecting a doctor because the rent is due. But is it murder when you kill your wife? Ah, but I hope you’ll read the whole story, “Who Dares Call It Murder?” at The Opinion Guy. It’s up at http://www.theopinionguy.com.

Author David Levy (Love and Sex with Robots) caught my eye when he suggested that in the future, people will fall in love with robots. Robots won’t be cold, predictable machines, but actual lovers—precocious, sexy, remarkably humanlike in appearance… And in the progressive states, some people will even marry a robot.

Editor Seth Crossman said of this speculative fiction, “Hah! I don’t know what I like more, the depth of character you present in so few words or the frustration I feel at wishing I could see more of this love story.”

Jersey Tawk

2009-07-09T06:41:00.000-07:00

People not from the South Jersey shore probably think we talk—or tawk—funny. A long meat-filled sandwich is more often a hoagie (Jersey shore and South Philly) than a hero (New York dialect), sub (North Jersey), grinder (New England) or blimpie (commercial name). Similarly, the candies on an ice cream are jimmies instead of sprinkles and the tourists are bennies or shubies.

I was tawking with an in-law from Manahawkin last weekend, and he mentioned some of the shore towns have no parking areas. This is to discourage the shubies. Sometimes spelled shoobies, the word refers to visitors who used to bring their beach snacks in a shoe box. A bit farther north, say Point Pleasant, every kid knows the auslanders are bennies. The come, variously, to absorb the benefits of the Jersey shore or because they’re from Brooklyn Elizabeth, Newark and New York.

There’s even a language distinction that separates Ocean County from the hillier north counties. We call a truck with detachable trailer a tractor trailer, not a trailer truck. You fetch water in a bucket and not a pail.

As for the accent, there really is a Jersey-New York accent, according to Rutgers linguist Fay Yeager. Our accent lacks the “th” diphthong and the “r”, she says, very much like British English. And that was adopted in the 1920s by the upper—uppah—classes. “Finga” sounded classier than finger, apparently. If you’re still confused, give the Jersey speaker the finga. “We been true dis tree times awreddy.”

International Relations Improving

2009-07-02T08:11:00.000-07:00

One of the most amazing things happened when I submitted a short humor piece —excuse me, humour—to The Short Humour Site. Editor Brian Huggett e-mailed me from England an hour later with an acceptance and the piece already on the board. Wow!

I responded, “I’m totally amazed that you digested the piece and had it online within the hour! My writing isn't Dickens or Shakespeare. It's not like editors are knocking down my door, crying balefully for gripping stories.” I added that I would submit more, although America isn't a place that encourages warm humor or wit.

He answered, “We look forward to reading other submissions. Neither Dickens nor Shakespeare have submitted anything thus far, so you are ahead of them already.”

You can read “Tidings of Great Woe” at http://www.short-humour.org.uk/3writersshowcase/tidingsofgreatwoe.htm. And a big thanks to my fellow blogger Avis for hipping me to this market.

New Distributor of Cruising

2009-06-22T12:11:00.000-07:00

Cruising the Green of Second Avenue now has an additional distributor. The two volumes of my short stories are e-books available from BookStrand (http://www.bookstrand.com/product-cruisingthegreenofsecondavenue-15029-332.html). Thank you, Marci (my publisher)!

“Demon Switch”

2009-06-05T07:45:00.000-07:00

Odd where ideas come from. I was lying in bed reading the Sunday comics and laughed out loud at the cartoon “Baby Blues.” The thought of a “ghost switch” that brings the ghosts out—scaring the shit out of baby brother—stayed with me through church service as I blocked out the short story. “Demon Switch” is now up at Everyday Weirdness. (Sorry, Pastor.) Catch it at http://everydayweirdness.com, at today’s date, June 5.

By the way, the good people at this e-zine are fast! One month elapsed between my writing the and their publishing it. As my college English professor ruefully noted, I may not be an A student but I'm facile.

Steal This Book, or This Book’s a Steal?

2009-05-25T12:29:00.000-07:00

Story in the New York Times’ Week in Review focused on readers kvetching about Amazon selling e-books for $9.99. David Baldacci, the ubiquitous writer whose hardcovers regularly turn up in flea markets, had his new title stonewalled by readers who felt a great fat opus (in electronic form) wasn’t worth downloading for the cost of a couple of Starbucks lattes. Call it the Kindle conspiracy to mark up e-books. Worse yet in the fare hikes, there’s Sony, selling releases for its Reader at $11.99.

What the heck is going on? Marketing, dear friend, when costs don’t disappear simply because publishers eliminated paper, ink, binding and freight.

Now, have I got a deal for you! Cruising the Green of Second Avenue is available from www.wildchild.com for only $4.75. If that price is a choke point, go to www.fictionwise.com for a pleasantly discounted price. There, put that on your Kindle or Sony or iPhone.

Hey, Mr. Jones, Where’d Ya Come From?”

2009-05-15T11:58:00.000-07:00

I was stopped short by a reference in the New York Times Book Review (Mar 1, 2009)—Rich Cohen writing about the explorer Percy Fawcett. “He got the jones [sic, lower cased] for exploring, which back then you could catch like a fever.”

Where’d jones—or Jones—come from? The street corner or some nabob of neologism?

Inventing a new word lends itself to a kind of immortality. At least, if future generations have forgotten your name they’ll at least remember the word you invented.

Imagine being Herb Caen, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, who coined the word beatnik. For Mr. Caen, there were two shots at immortality (in addition to his wonderful columns): he also created the neologism hippie to describe the generation that followed the beatniks chronologically and in spirit.

John W. Tukey was another immortal, both for his neologisms and as an influential statistician. He created the word software. “Three decades before the founding of Microsoft,” the New York Times wrote in his obit July 28, 2000, “Mr. Tukey saw that ‘soft-ware,’ as he called it then [with a hyphen], was... ‘at least as important as the hardware of tubes, transistors, wires, tapes and the like.’” A dozen years earlier, while at Bell Laboratories, he coined the word bit, an abbreviation of binary digit.

Variety, the daily newspaper of show biz, is famous for creating a host of neologisms. They claim such commonplace terms as sex appeal, corny and sitcom. Their glossary of terms is listed at www.variety.com, and includes boffo, moppet, scripter and dozens of other insider terms.

“Kathryn Cason, the widow of management theorist Elliott Jacques and coiner of the phrase ‘mid-life crisis’ has been trying to [evaluate leadership potential],” reported the New Yorker in the May 10, 2004, issue. Did we know there was a mid-life crisis before Jacques invented it in his book Death and the Mid-Life Crisis? And, are we better for knowing now?

Back to jones. The Urban Dictionary (www.urbandictionary.com) defines it as a “desire for something that may be sought irrespective of the consequences.” The earliest definition appears in 2002. As a verb or noun, it can apply to humans, love, and is strongly associated with heroin. We may never know the origin of jones, but it’s another example of English delivering an enchanting, descriptive, organic approach to communicating as well as prescriptive school-marm ordination.

Good Things Happening

2009-05-04T11:34:00.000-07:00

I’ve been woefully derelict in managing this blog…and it’s all due to time-wasting on Facebook. (My uncritical friends laugh uncritically at my bons mots.) While I’ve chronicled my writing on this blogsite, Facebook sucked away my attention to such things as e-books. (“For those who buy/read/enjoy e-books, there’s a great site for interacting with others like you. Forums are set up for a variety of interests, news of e-book promotions, vulnerability of Adobe pdf’s, and more.. There’s more, at http://www.mobileread.com/.”)

All the while, I’ve been writing to some good reception while tediously marketing older stories. “Who Dares Call It Murder?”, a piece of near-future speculative fiction, will be published by OG Short Fiction in July, at www.theopinionguy.com. And, “Louise from the Bar” recalls that when you’re 14 life can be thrilling, dangerous and filled with memorable sensations. It’ll be up in a week at Paradigm, an online quarterly, at http://www.paradigmjournal.com . In particular, Matthew Norris, co-publisher at Paradigm, was so complimentary he can be assured they’re tops on my list of favorites. “We sincerely appreciate the opportunity to see your work,” he wrote. “We feel that ‘Louise from the Bar’ exemplifies the spirit of Paradigm, not to mention being something others will undoubtedly find exciting, inspiring, and worthwhile.” Ah, that is so nice. Thank you!

And, I’ve been having an inordinately good time working with the Writers’ Circle, a group of 15 or more (they come and go) now gathering fortnightly at our Ocean County library branch. Reading your work aloud is valuable. I used to have a cat who was a good listener, but the feedback was terrible.

High School Memories?

2009-03-27T14:08:00.000-07:00

Duotrope—the writer’s conscience—suggests that I have an extraordinarily high rate of acceptances. I think they believe I’m cooking the books by not reporting my rejections. T’ain’t so!

Anyway, I’m happy that “Conehead,” a short humor piece, has been published by Big Pulp. (Students can be merciless with their teachers, but anybody can be their own worst enemy if they presume too much.) So, click on http://bigpulp.com/goldenark_giersbach_cone.html and remember what devils we were as high school students.

By the way, this was rejected once before Big Pulp bought it. Maybe the title should have been two words, as Microsoft Spell Check reminds me. Thanks, Bill Olver, editor and fave publisher.

When Paper Cuts Scissors

2009-03-17T07:45:00.000-07:00

When you’ve lost your last dollar, watch out for the stranger who still wants to gamble with you: there’s a sucker punch coming. By counting the woman you left behind, you may also have doubled your losses.

That’s the thought behind “Paper Cut,” just published by Big Pulp. exactly one year after it was accepted. Take a moment and read it at http://bigpulp.com/chill_giersbach_papercut.html. My thanks go to Bill Olver, editor and publisher of some fine noir fiction.

“The Iceberg” Floats

2009-02-23T08:38:00.000-08:00

When a deep pit of loneliness and despair consumes a child, something will emerge to fill it. Often, the truth of the matter is a dark object that floats just below the surface. Ever felt this way? More on this thought has just gone online at Bewildering Stories Issue 327, Feb. 23. Read my new short story, “The Iceberg,” at http://bewilderingstories.com/issue326/iceberg.html.

The story examines an environment that’s a few degrees off center, drifting toward that elusive sense of unreality. But then, isn't that what hedge funds, children’s wishes and waking dreams are all about?

Separately, I’m sad to hear from my editor at Wild Child Publishing, Faith Bicknell-Brown, that she’s leaving the organization. She’s the sort of person who would blue pencil a phrase, mixed metaphor or anachronism in my collection, Cruising the Green of Second Avenue, and demand an explanation. Usually, it was my oh-my-Gawd mistake. Thanks, Faith, for your encouragement and…well, faith in my writing. You’ve been the spoon to stir my coffee. (Is that metaphor okay?)

Bad Usage, Bad! (A Rant)

2009-02-18T08:03:00.000-08:00

The misuse of two words—fulsome and enormity—are fingernails on the blackboard of my nervous system. James Wolcott, not usually guilty of careless locution, writes in Vanity Fair (February 2009), “My fellow comrades are still walking around with Obama buttons stuck to their fulsome bosoms.” Ouch! Fulsome means offensively flattering or insincere, ME disgusting. Oh, James, how could you!

Then our beloved leader Barack stood at the lectern and pronounced on the enormity of our financial meltdown. Well, the country’s broke, but I’m still $47 to the good. Still, enormity means excessive wickedness or outrageousness. Yes, Bernie Ponzi—er, Madoff—can be accused of enormity, but Barack really meant enormousness.

There, I’m glad I got that enormity off my fulsome chest. But James and Barack, I’ll be watching.

Oh, damn, I couldn’t stop without passing on this gem from the att.net homepage today: “On Net This Week: Spring Fashion for the Economically Conscience. Whether you want to role back the hands of time to some of the most controversial trends of the 80’s or borrow fashion tips from our incredibly stylish first lady, this spring will be a unique blend of fashion.”

How many “gotchas” can you find? Conscience should be conscious, and role should be roll. And then, why doesn’t this entertainment scribbler connect frugal buying with retro fashion or the First Lady’s (caps, please) clothing? My retort to AT&T’s OJT writers: “Thoughts tumble in your heads, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.”

History Talks to Me. (You? Us?)

2009-01-26T09:25:00.000-08:00

Someone—Alexis de Toqueville?—called Americans autodidacts. We teach ourselves and proudly ignore authority. But something in that description made me dig around to find out who that English aristocrat was who rebelled against the Crown in 1675-76 Virginia, burned Jamestown, and attacked Native American camps with abandon. His actions—known as “Bacon’s Rebellion”—capture the tenor of the times. They may also be applicable to our world today as we struggle to regain control of government.

My synthesis is that it’s difficult to look at 17th century American history without generalizing the clash of cultures as “grasping Europeans annihilating the Native American” or “angry savages attacking innocent settlers.” Neither was the case, of course. Theirs was a power struggle between strong egos representing established government, populist immigrants and indigenous peoples.

The article (and photos posted with the footnotes) can be read at http://www.militaryhistoryonline.com/17thcentury/articles/baconsrebellion.aspx.

On another historical note, I was pleased to have my article on “Barrancas: The First Shots Fired in the Civil War” reprinted in the Camp Chase Gazette, a reenactors magazine. The piece—as above, written because of curiosity—was first carried in Military History Online (http://www.militaryhistoryonline.com/civilwar/misc/barrancas.aspx) Originally published in Jan. 2005, “Barrancas” is a review of the initial assault on a Union fort, four months prior to the fall of Fort Sumter. That dramatic confrontation included a four-month stand-off and spies who aided the Union cause. Among all the statues and medals for heroism, I don't think there's any comparable testimonial to the intrepid courage of Lt. Adam Slemmer and 82 Union troops.

Who Was that Masterful Writer and Illustrator?

2009-01-19T08:08:00.000-08:00

A nice incident came around this past week as the American Book Collectors of Children’s Literature newsletter carried my longish piece on children’s book author/illustrator Holling Clancy Holling. (See www.abcocl.org and click on Vol. 20 No. 2 in the Archives.) HCH has fascinated me since childhood, as much for his magnificent drawings as for the curiosity of a man who named himself twice. Paddle-to-the-Sea, Tree in the Trail, Seabird and the other Houghton-Mifflin titles are luxurious in their drawings and sidebar intelligence.

This was a writer whose books are still in print almost 70 years after winning a Caldecott prize. Curiously, there’s very little in print about HCH, and biographies are limited to the most obvious details. However, a librarian near Holling’s home county came to my rescue with “hometown” information, and a researcher at the Leslie (MI) Area Historical Museum offered a bounty of undiscovered details. After more than a year of doing detective work into his life, I’m sure there’s a great deal I still don’t know about him. But it’s this serendipity in tracking down clues and details that made this a rewarding project.

Happiest of New Years

2009-01-01T09:46:00.000-08:00

Here’s wishing everyone a healthy, bountiful New Year. May your favorite bookstore remain a welcoming hearth through these perilous times, may all your rejections from editors and agents be positive and constructive, and any gift cards you received continue to be negotiable. To Barack Obama, here’s hoping his new home at 1600 Pennsylvania is fulfilling, and that a dictionary there shows him the word is not pronounced “ir-re-VOC-able. To departing Dick Cheney, an invitation to take up water boarding, assuming there’s no surfboarding in Wyoming. And, let us all have a moment of silence for the demise of Polaroid film before cheering the advent of phonographs that convert our 33 and 45 rpm records to digital files and CDs.

Hello? Is Anyone There?

2008-12-20T10:42:00.000-08:00

The Tribune Corporation is declaring bankruptcy. A Glendale, Calif., paper is outsourcing its news-gathering to India. My granddaughter writes her book review on her iPhone while watching TV. Is this the end of written communication as we once knew it?

The writers I knew—literate, insightful, thought-provoking—are being replaced by bloggers... Readers are downloading e-books instead of buying paper... Borders had only one of the 10 New York Times recommended children’s books I was searching for when I shopped last week... My former employer was the largest independent yellow pages publisher in the U.S., but its stock has dropped from $62 to 33 cents as people shuck the damn books out in the garbage... And Sarah Palin has a $7 million book deal coming to tell us all how to “progress freedom in the U.S.”

Then I ran across a jaw-dropping cultural benchmark in a New Yorker ad. Victory for writers has been snatched from the jaws of defeat by Books by the Foot (http://booksbythefoot.com/). The firm offers modern cloth-bound hardcovers for only $6.99 per linear foot. “Tonier” modern cloth with black spines, however, will run $13.99 per foot. The purveyors of this literary wealth—by the foot, not the words—remind us that Heinrich Heine stated, “A house without books is like a room without windows.” The motto of this “bookyard” then—this Home Depot of illiteracy—must be a God-like “Let us have light!”

How many layouts in Architectural Digest show rooms without books—truly a mark of the plebian mind of a hedge fund manager. The badge of real literacy is to display yards of books when your guests come to swill champagne. Then, when the casual visitor asks if you've read them, you can say, “My interior decorator may have, but I don’t need to. I pay his/her salary.” This is perhaps the same decorator who goes to Barnes & Noble looking for a red book...to match her purse.

On the upside, I found a superb historical analysis of 17th century Virginia, written in 1917, free at Google books! Now I can publish my article on Bacon’s Rebellion. Circle the wagon, Folks. It’ll be hard times when the printed word disappears.

In Hindsight, a Spectacular Year

2008-12-13T08:03:00.000-08:00

Woe is me for being sooooo far behind in communicating. It’s all been bottled up inside. Writer's block is a situation akin to constipation--except, sometimes great works don’t emanate in the end. Just shit.

However, these are the things weighing on my mind….

Two short stories have been accepted, by Big Pulp and Bewildering Stories, and await publication in 2009, and an article on the first shots fired in the Civil War will be reprinted in the Camp Chase Gazette. I also await publication of my article on Holling Clancy Holling in the American Book Collectors of Children’s Literature newsletter; I especially want to send a copy to the dear lady in Michigan who helped in my research… Several other stories need rewrite as I face the devil who sneers at my inability to express myself in the ways I want… My research into Bacon’s Rebellion looked complete until I discovered Thomas Wertenbaker’s Virginia Under the Stuarts written in 1913; this added an entirely new dimension to the rebellion.

Other quotidian chores included holiday shopping and entertaining. I’m in the spirit of Christmas early and lovin’ it. The family letter is written and about 70 cards are in the mail. The presents are all bought and there are a few bottles of wine to split with family and friends.

An additional task has been of my own making. I’ve begun leading a new writing group of a dozen area people. We’re gathering at the Ocean County (N.J.) Library twice monthly for a chance to critique, compare notes and share in a love of writing and reading.

This has been a very good year. The usual blessings—knock-on-wood good health, low stress, excellent wife and family—make it so much better in the face of the tribulations so many people are facing. But the writing has also gone well, with 10 short stories and articles published during the year. Most happily, there are the small joys, like my granddaughter exchanging thoughts on the literate life from her vantage point of a 15-year-old using an iPhone. There is hope for the future.

Meet You at Fictionwise

2008-10-31T07:54:00.000-07:00

I’m pleased that Fictionwise is now carrying Cruising the Green of Second Avenue. Look for it (at a pleasantly discounted price) at www.fictionwise.com. Simply key the title into the search engine at the top left of the site. You’ll even find an excerpt from “Frank Cassidy and the Canarsie Chick.” By the way, someone has figured out the book takes 100-141 minutes to read.

Christmas is coming. Make a reader happy with a gift and an author happy with a royalty.

The Magic of Childhood

2008-10-18T11:10:00.000-07:00

I left a mistaken impression here on Sept. 26 that Written Word Magazine (http://www.writtenwordmag.com/) was nearing defunction. It’s very much alive, but its Web site was coming up oddly on my PC. I’d wait interminably, wanting to go out for a long walk or a short beer, until the graphics loaded. Then—huzzah!—there in its archived June 2008 issue was “The Wishing Pool.”

This has been one of my favorite stories, written in January of ’06. Why? My childhood days were ominous, filled with omens, portents and symbols. The child matures when the signs come together. I put together a few of these signs and secret codes in “The Wishing Pool.” I’m happy, not only for its publication, but because the youngsters in the story nibbled at my heart. Perhaps I once was “Otto,” making bets on when the first snowfall would close school and wondering when my father would come home from his business travels.

My own childhood days in a small Oregon town were filled with tokens as powerful as having a Lone Ranger pistol ring. They were as mysterious as the X-ray machine at the shoe store where we watched our toes wiggle while the salesman sought out our Buster Browns. We believed in 1946 that the dead cat we found in the bushes had died violently. Why else would its mouth have turned into that horrible rictus? It was poisoned—and this was our nexus of fear: To touch it would be death for us too.

We were in awe of tramps, like the one who reputedly lived in the willow grove by the Northern Pacific tracks who carried a shotgun loaded with bacon rind. Yes, bacon rind, my brother, Chuck, explained: This was so he wouldn’t actually kill you when you were shot for intruding. We knew tramps left secret messages on our houses, messages hidden so carefully that only other gypsy tramp initiates could tell whether this house or that one would offer a welcome.

Every event, every glance, every crack in the sidewalk was filled with meaning. Dogma was established by my friends in second grade. “If you step on a crack, you’ll break your mother’s back.” And, there was World War II revisionism, “No, no, if you step on a crack you’ll break Tojo’s back!” And each of us guaranteed a little good luck by stamping on a Lucky Strike pack.

Oh, and in regard to “The Wishing Pool,” sometimes kids know everything and understand very little. You know this. You were a kid once, weren’t you?

Kid Stuff and Deadly Games

2008-10-07T07:30:00.000-07:00

Did the adulterous couple run off together, or are they dead?—or is there more to their disappearances? This is the question Mike, the cop from Newark, has to unwrap. This Chinese puzzle of boxes within boxes has just been published in Big Pulp (http://www.bigpulp.com/chill_giersbach_boneyard.html). Yup, another mystery, this time with a Jersey detective who’s up in Connecticut’s “Forgotten Corner.” Then the strange truth comes out.

Oh, by the way, the Forgotten Corner in the state's northeast quadrant is the land that time passed by. Back in Newark, people call those places graveyards.

And the Black Dog Legend? There are still believers there, but that’s another story.

Where Have All the ’Zines Gone?

2008-09-26T11:14:00.000-07:00

Bad news in my in-box. Head honcho Ace Masters of Written Word (http://www.writtenwordmag.com/) wrote early this month that the magazine is on the rocks because someone has hacked their PayPal account. I noted in June that Chad Plunk, who founded and ran Short Fiction World (http://shortfictionworld.com/) closed the door on my submission before making an editorial decision regarding it.

I fondly remember Mud Rock, a fine print magazine, which folded January ’07. Now, Mouth Full of Bullets, a terrific mystery-detective magazine, is also defunct. There’s a continuing shake-out of many magazines, and the current weekly e-newsletter from Duotrope (http://www.duotrope.com/) notes five dying or unresponsive Websites, as well as a description of other fledging publishing enterprises. How come the volatility of Web publishing? Is this indicative of inept editors or over-energetic amateurs?

BJ Bourg, publisher of MFOB, wrote to me, “I've spoken with a few editors who were forced to shut down their magazines/e-zines, and nearly all were due to financial or health problems. Neither is true in my case. In actuality, you helped me solidify my decision. I read a message you posted on WordTrip (http://wordtrip.com/) where you mentioned having to ask me about the Spring Issue and then having to listen to me talk about working two jobs and publish the magazine. This made me realize two things. First, there was no law saying I had to publish a magazine. I was doing it for the sole purpose of helping other writers. When writers have to start asking me when an issue would be coming out or when I would be able to send payment for their story, that was the point when I was no longer helping them to the best of my abilities. Second, I realized I was putting MFOB before my family because I was putting every spare, non-working moment into MFOB, when I should have been spending it with them."

Ah, life. Where would it be without death—in love, finance or publishing?