Stephen Parrish

Groundhog Day

2012-02-02T12:44:00.002+01:00

I'm taking a year off from blogging. I'll still be active on Twitter (micropoetry) and Facebook (general silliness). I'll also be issuing a formal newsletter to keep people apprised of significant goings-on, including book launches. If you want to receive the newsletter all you have to do is make sure I have your email address. Mine is stephenparrish@hotmail.com. If you're a friend and fellow author, and would like me to include news of your launches, awards, etc., send me a note.

If Life can be Viewed as a Plot

2012-01-23T03:45:00.005+01:00

Oprah: When you decided to become a writer, did you know the boundary between the real and imaginary worlds would blur as they have?

Steve: Absolutely not. I started out rooted in the realistic tradition. For example, I loved historical novels that were meticulously true to factual detail. Later I learned to appreciate the abstraction of reality for a noble purpose, and presently view that as the essence of art.

Oprah: Like this interview. You're aware, of course, that I, Oprah Winfrey, am not, in fact, interviewing you. What you say in this "interview" may well be factual, but the interview itself is not actually taking place.

Steve: Yes and no. You presuppose the interview is either taking place or not taking place, i.e., there's no middle.

Oprah: Is there a middle?

Steve: I just created it.

The neighborhood boys called him Chubby Cheeks. Because his cheeks puffed out abnormally. None of us knew why.

Chubby Cheeks was an only child. He lived in a house that was little more than a shack, on the road between my home and the golf course where I worked. His father raised rabbits. His mother was a hairdresser.

Walking home after work, I would pass Chubby Cheeks playing in his front yard, always by himself. When he saw me he would plead in a whiny voice for me to join him.

"Will you play with me? Please? Just for a few minutes?"

Oprah: Even fantasy writers put their pens down at the end of the day, Steve. They know dragons don't really exist.

Steve: Ah, but dragons do exist. Writers create them. And they're every bit as real as, say, anyone's personal history. You remember acting in "The Color Purple," don't you? A myriad reviews of your performance, not to mention the film itself, the celluloid reproduction of the event, attest to the fact it happened. However, that's ALL that attests to it; the images in my imagination are no less vivid, or valid, than those in your memory, and I can put any imaginary thing on celluloid I wish to. And write any review as well.

Oprah: When did the hallucinations start?

Steve: I don't hallucinate, I dream.

Oprah: While you're awake?

Steve: I don't see dead people, if that's what you mean. I'm not being followed around by Bruce Willis in a blood stained shirt.

Oprah: It doesn't work like that.

Steve: Oh? Do tell, how does it work?

There was plenty besides Chubby Cheeks's cheeks that made me uncomfortable: a desperate countenance, a vague misshapenness of body and spirit, a troll-like otherworldliness that appealed to none of my appetites. I politely refused his requests to play, blaming a tight schedule, and hurried on.

To be fair, I was a busy boy. I worked 30 hours a week at the golf course and competed on the school track team as a sprinter and discus thrower. I enrolled in the hardest courses: accelerated math, all the science available. Often I fell asleep in bed doing homework, waking intermittently during the night, frantically trying to finish assignments before the bus honked impatiently in front of my house.

To be fair, when I walked home after work and passed Chubby Cheeks's shanty, I was too tired and occupied to play with him.

That never stopped him from asking. He was obviously lonely, so lonely he begged passing strangers to sit with him in the dirt and help build fantasies out of twigs and pebbles.

"Will you play with me? Please? Just for a few minutes?"

To tell the truth, even if I'd had all the time in the world, I would have walked on by.

Oprah: Okay, so you don't differentiate between truth and fiction, between the real and the imaginary. Why not take it to the limit, and blur the line between life and death?

Steve: Ah, but I do. You choose to believe you're alive. A suicide chooses to believe he's dead.

Oprah: So a suicide merely makes a choice, like turning left at the intersection instead of right, like chocolate instead of vanilla?

Steve: Remember what I said earlier about Bruce Willis in a blood stained shirt? Now imagine, instead of ghosts inhabiting that world, the world itself consists of death. The reason the suicide wants to die is to escape death, if that makes any sense. What can be worse than dead death? Living death, because you're conscious of it. It inhabits your nightmares. The objects around you, the furniture and walls and bushes, consist of death. It's better to die, it turns out, than be dead.

Oprah: Your hands are shaking.

Steve: Yes, they do that.

Oprah: Have a drink; it'll stop the shaking.

Steve: But then they'll shake even more tomorrow.

Oprah: Tomorrow, have two drinks.

One day Chubby Cheeks wasn't sitting in his front lawn. When I got home my mother, who patronized his mother's hairdresser shop, told me he had died. Whatever had caused his chubby cheeks and other mild deformities had finally killed him.

I tried to cry. I went for a walk in the woods around my house, kicking leaf litter and throwing fallen branches, trying to cry.

I blamed nature for allowing aberrations that didn't fit in, no matter how much they pleaded for acceptance. I blamed God for letting a little boy, one whose only fantasy was human companionship, spend his final days playing with sticks and rocks. I blamed the other neighborhood boys for not picking up the slack; none of us even knew his name.

I blamed everyone but myself. As hard as I tried, I couldn't make myself cry; anger and denial got in the way. Why can't I cry, I kept asking myself. Why can't I just let go, get it over with, and cry?

"Will you play with me? Please? Just for a few minutes?"

Oprah: Are you comfortable?

Steve: Yes, this is fine. I've got an air mattress beneath me. Besides, you know why we have to finish the interview in the basement.

Oprah: So your daughter doesn't see you when she comes home. Just a suggestion, but if the bag were transparent, you wouldn't be in the dark.

Steve: I want the dark. I don't want to see anything. Also, the room would be out of focus anyway.

Oprah: You're 6'2". Let's hope the EMTs aren't weak little men.

Steve: The last time an EMT came for me, it was a very young woman who cradled me in her arms. She didn't know me, yet she held me during the ride to the hospital as though I were her father. So long as people like her exist there's hope for humankind. I trust she'll get me up the stairs. With all the dignity I don't deserve.

Years later, as a graduate student at the University of Illinois, I was busy once again. I had a class load, a teaching load, a research load. I also worked part time in a jewelry store. I was too busy to stop and bother with neighbors, lonely or otherwise.

One day on my way home from campus I passed an old man in a ditch. He was clawing the grass and dry-heaving. As I walked by he looked up at me as though he expected me to spit on him.

I thought, "Drunk," and walked on.

A block later I stopped and turned around. I'll make sure he's only drunk, I decided, then be on my way. It'll only take a minute.

I asked him, "Are you okay?"

He looked up again, surprised to see me. He said no, he wasn't okay; he'd just been dropped off from the hospital after major abdominal surgery, and was in so much pain he couldn't make it from the road to the door.

I picked him up and carried him bride-like across the threshold. He weighed so little I hardly needed both arms. His bony frame was draped in thin, translucent flesh, and what little muscle he had quivered in spasms.

Inside the house I set him down in a recliner and went into the kitchen to scrounge up something to eat. He sat shaking and panting from exertion.

His cabinets only contained canned soup. "Do you want some soup?" I asked him. Yes, he gasped, soup would be fine. I started a pot of soup.

The front door banged open and a woman stormed in, going on about not having arrived home in time to meet the ambulance. Kicking her shoes off and tossing her purse into a chair, she ranted about stupid sales clerks, stupid cash register operators, stupid—

She saw me in the kitchen and froze. Before I could open my mouth to explain she hurled questions at me, the fear in her eyes hardening to fury. I decided there was no point in answering.

I left the house without comment as she threatened in brutal language to call the police. All the while the man sat in his recliner, eyes closed, gasping for breath, wincing in pain. He hadn't even told me his name.

One block away, at the spot where I'd previously stopped and turned around, I started crying. I finally started crying. After ten years of not being able to cry, I cried. "I'm sorry, Chubby Cheeks. I'm so sorry. I'll play with you all you want."

I weaved down the sidewalk with tears streaming down my face, not caring what other pedestrians thought, blubbering, "I'm sorry. God, I'm sorry. I'm so fucking sorry."

Oprah: The interview's over, Steve.

Steve: Are you going to stay and watch?

Oprah: No, I'll wait for you upstairs.

Steve: You're not Oprah anymore, are you?

Oprah: I never was.

The Art of Language

2011-12-20T13:58:00.003+01:00

This post has appeared on other blogs, where I've been a guest, but never here, on my own blog. Writing it was a challenge I assigned myself. I normally write a blog post the night before it's "due," tweak it a little the next morning, and publish. Not this one; after a month of wrestling with it I told Sarah Hina I didn't think I was up to the challenge after all. She encouraged me to keep trying.

Finally I wrote something I thought was good enough, and showed it to her. She sent it back. Good enough wasn't good enough. Not for this theme. And that's when it occurred to me what I wanted to say. Because art requires that good enough be wholly insufficient to the purpose.

If you believe as I do that language is art, I challenge you to answer the questions for yourself: how and why. And post it. You may be surprised at what you come up with.

The Art of Language

I grew up among artists who encouraged me to draw and paint; my room always smelled of turpentine and linseed oil and my pants were often streaked with charcoal dust. Since I write visually—I first see the scenes in my head and attempt to record them faithfully—it was only natural that I come up with an approach to writing that paid tribute to all those canvases I sacrificed.

First I “scribble” the scene by brainstorming, by slapping words and expressions down and trying to empty the vision from my head:

start with where she lived
then the train station at the end of her street
it was where you last saw her alive
something about the dirtiness of the place, for contrast
cigarette butts, old newspapers
the train emerging from the fog
after a pregnant pause, you’re in each other’s arms . . .

An advantage of scribbling is that I ensure my purposes are comprehensively addressed; I vent everything that comes to mind. Another is that I get to fill up blank paper at little creative cost. After scribbling I “sketch” the scene, placing elements in the right order, fleshing out, filling gaps:

you start with the street she lived on, how it wound around obstacles long since removed, how the remaining buildings seemed tired, seemed to lean over the sidewalk. at the end of the street was the train station where you last saw her alive. the floor of the platform was covered with cigarette butts, old newspapers, and grime.
as the train approached the station you saw only its distant headlamp through the fog. when she stepped onto the platform the two of you paused as though waiting for enough joy to fill your eyes. finally the joy overflowed and you were in each other’s arms. one last time, you felt her skin beneath your hands.
only time is inaccessible, never place. you can always go back to the place. you write to preserve moments in time.

I write only in lower case, and I use no indentations or quotation marks. Consequently the piece feels like a draft and I don’t have to worry about how it sounds. If you’re a perfectionist like me, this will spare you obsessive tooling. Finally I “draw” the scene; I go final.

I keep a journal. I think everyone should: a journal is to language what a sketchbook is to art. The scribble-sketch-draw analogy has helped me fill quite a lot of empty paper.

But that’s not what this post is really about.

A painting is a window to a world the artist has created. Likewise when we write a scene we attempt to describe a world in a way readers can grasp. The writer needs to provide just enough detail for readers to draw the lines and paint the colors in their imagination. Some details the writer will insist on: the scar was on the left side of the bad guy’s face. It was rain rather than crickets the lovers heard, or rather didn’t hear.

Most of the details, however, the readers must decide for themselves. I have little patience with writers who want to show me exactly what a character looks like, by inventorying traits and dimensions, by scanning figures from head to toe. If you tell me the bad guy has a scar, I’ll fill in the rest. Likewise, if you tell me the lovers don’t even know it’s raining, don’t even notice they’re getting wet, I can pretty much guess what’s on their minds. A visual artist who skimps on detail risks failing to achieve her goal. A writer who is heavy on detail stands little chance of achieving it; the reader doesn’t even make an attempt to engage.

When I paint, I fill my canvas with color. I leave no spot untouched. When I write, I provide as little information as I can get away with; less is more.

Still, that’s not what this post is really about, either.

Anyone who has been moved by a great poem knows the art of language has as much to do with sound and rhythm as visual detail. With rhyme and alliteration. With contrast, the foundation of all beauty. When it comes time to draw, after you’ve scribbled and sketched, there should be only one thought in mind: to push your work beyond what you’ve visualized; to take chances; to wrestle with the fear that no one will understand you, no one will be moved by your words or will share your vision of light and shadow.

You start with the street she lived on, how it wound narrowly around obstacles long since leveled by bankruptcy and wood saw; how it shouldered stayed and acquitted buildings that retained most of their dignity, except now they seemed to cant forward slightly, like opposing rows of aging chess players.

You describe the train station where you last saw her alive. The paint was yellow with age and smoke and the sour smell of unclean men. It peeled in the damp air and fell to join the cigarette butts, the empty bottles, and the foot-trodden newspapers; litter that clothed the cement floor no better than the rags on the men who drank and dreamed there.

The first you saw of the train was its headlamp, floating ghost-like over the fog. Then the engine broke from the mist and rumbled into the station where, here, the sun had burned the valley clean and the trunks of the Bruchweide were amber columns of light. When she stepped onto the platform the two of you stood apart at first and let the smile fill your eyes. Like spring-fed wells. Until the wells overflowed and you were in each other’s arms.

The first time was outdoors, as all first times should be. You felt her flesh beneath your hands, soft, pliable, giving, welcoming. The pine needles against your back. Her voice, the rhythm of her chatter, a tonic, the day washed of its drabness. The smell of cut grass, of burning leaves, of moss and humus and primeval soil. A visceral sense of early and distant rain. It’s only the time that’s inaccessible, not the place, not even the person. You write to preserve moments in time. That’s what art is for. You write to capture the love you felt before it broke something inside of you. The volume set too high, yet never high enough. A timeline, a Cartesian grid, curved space, a forest of stars, darkness at night, and an abacus in the hands of a man gone mad.

That’s what this post is about.

Empty Lot

2011-12-18T10:19:00.001+01:00

I've been grocery shopping with you a hundred times
We stroll the aisles together, take turns pushing the cart
Show each other stuff and compare prices
Point out the artificial ingredients
and salt

I've been grocery shopping with you a hundred times
You laugh at how I write the list
With "let us" for lettuce, "onyums" for onions, and "peas, please"
Yes, I'm a silly, silly man, a goof,
a dork

I've been grocery shopping with you a hundred times
We hold hands, press shoulders, bump hips
Our unconceived child wanders off, he wanders off
Loiters in the cereal aisle with Tony the Tiger
and Cap'n Crunch

I've been grocery shopping with you a hundred times
This time I find myself alone in an empty lot
A chill wind pushing dry leaves across the cobbles
And weeds growing where no grocery store ever stood

Wildcat Caliber

2011-11-23T11:50:00.003+01:00

A friend loaded the shells
It was his hobby
"Reloader," he called himself,
someone who loads shells

He'd invented his own caliber,
for the sake of pride,
for a day in the sun,
a contribution to technology, history, humanity

"Now I'm a footnote," he said
And I laughed,
but cut my laughter short
when it occurred to me I wasn't

The shells fit a .32,
only they weren't .32
A reloader understands this
I didn't and still don't

My .32 had a five-chamber cylinder,
a twenty percent chance of firing
when four chambers were empty,
when loaded only once

When the cylinder was spun

I could have walked a reliable path,
one with a warranty,
a guaranteed destination,
one that took me home

I could have closed the door
to someone who had no cause, no intent, no desire
to hurt me
But hurt me anyway

I could have remodeled the interior,
chosen wallpaper with a cosmic theme,
picked out the perfect dining table, a round one
And curtains

Instead I collapsed in the corner
and wept in wracking heaves,
because all they'd say when they found me
is what an odd caliber

M.C. Escher, "Eye"

Neverbe

2011-11-15T06:52:00.002+01:00

I neverknew someone I nevercalled friend
I neverbroke nothing I nevercould mend
I neverhad money I neverwould lend
I neverwas one not to neverpretend
I neveram no one I neverdefend
I neverwill neverwish never to end

M.C. Escher, Hand with Reflecting Sphere

Ruminations from Beneath the IV Drip

2011-11-14T11:02:00.003+01:00

I called her Granite Face because, well, you can guess. She was inserting an IV into my arm and I asked her to fill the bag with beer. She gave me a dour look, then turned once more to stone; her face was so hard and lifeless it made the Mount Rushmore presidents come to life.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Parrish," she said. "Beer is not allowed in intravenous solutions."

"Is that a fact," I asked.

"Yes," she said. "It is."

*

My roommate had entered his second childhood. He wanted my things, only my things. His things didn't interest him. Even if I gave him something of mine to keep, he didn't want it anymore, because now it belonged to him, not me.

He got cole slaw for lunch, I didn't. This is significant because I love cole slaw, and nobody does it better than the Germans. If they ever have an International Cole Slaw Conference it would have to take place in Germany. Anyway, I told my roommate as I rose to go to the bathroom that if he touched one more of my possessions I'd eat his lunch.

When I got back from the bathroom he was lying in my bed.

The fucker's cole slaw was good. So was the fucker's pudding.

*

They gave me electrical shocks to slow my pulse. It was supposed to be like the emergency paddles ("Clear!" WHUMP) except, they assured me, with less current.

"How much less current?" I wanted to know.

"The difference could power a light bulb."

Yuckity yuck. I'm supposed to be the one cracking jokes around here. So anyway, they had to look inside my heart first, to see if the shock would knock something loose and cause a stroke (that's how they splained it to me, I swear, goo-goo ga-ga) and for that I had to swallow a plastic tube. I don't know about you, but in any given day, my list of stuff to do always seems bereft of plastic tube swallowing activities. Maybe it's just me.

"Don't worry," they said. "Afterwards you won't remember a thing."

I have a pretty good memory, especially of stuff like, you know, torture. I've stepped on nails, and can remember each occasion; I've been rejected by girls so ugly, I'd just as soon forget; yet I remember. I was pretty sure I'd remember swallowing a plastic tube. But they were right. When I came to, the last thing I remembered was being sure I'd remember. That didn't stop me, though:

"It was horrible!" I wept. "I felt it go all the way down. And the voltage! It burned! Oh, the nightmares I'll suffer . . ."

*

There was an internet computer in the hospital cafe, only it was out of order. I asked when it might be fixed or replaced and was told it didn't belong to the cafe; I'd have to ask at the hospital information desk.

"They told you to come to us?" Hospital said. "Go back and tell them it's not our computer. Cafe is going to have to fix it."

"It's not our computer," Cafe insisted. "Hospital is going to have to fix it."

Whereupon I unplugged the computer from the wall and carried it away.

"Hey, where are you going with that?" Cafe shouted.

"If it doesn't belong to you, and it doesn't belong to them, it doesn't belong to anyone. So now it belongs to me."

(Of course I did no such thing, but wouldn't it have been poetic?)

*

Doctor: How are you feeling?

Me: Awful.

Doctor: Have you heard of the procedure whereby we cut into an artery in the thigh and ram a plumber's snake up the torso, into the heart, to check for blockages?

Me: Yes, I've heard of it. And I pity the poor schmucks who have to endure it.

Doctor: This afternoon you become one of those schmucks.

Me: You know, I'm not feeling that bad after all.

*

It was too good to pass up. A student nurse in her second week of training. An experienced nurse was showing her how to operate a portable EKG unit. Only mistake she made was using me as a subject.

After hooking up the electrodes to my chest and splaining the color codes, the experienced nurse said, "Then you just push this button here and the report prints out." That was my cue.

The student nurse pushed the button. I made electric buzzing noises with my mouth. I stuck my tongue out and shuddered and flopped on the bed in convulsions.

"Zzzzttt! Zzzzttt! Araaraargh!"

"Oh my god oh my god oh my god!" the student nurse said.

The experienced nurse didn't even crack a smile. "You open those sutures," she said to me, "and I'll just stand here and watch you bleed."

*

I didn't recognize God Lady at first, although I should have, given that she was carrying pamphlets. Anyone visiting hospital rooms with pamphlets is necessary on a mission from the Invisible Sky Wizard. She introduced herself as merely a volunteer who spread good cheer, especially to patients who received no visitors. I had visitors: friends, family members, and even a ladybug named Margaret who occupied my windowsill.

"I assume, being American, you are a God fearing person," she said.

It's true I had feared God in Catholic grade school; I had feared his sadistic wrath, as described in the Old Testament. But I knew what she meant. I told her my god and her god probably shared little resemblance.

"There is but one God," she insisted, "the God of the Bible!"

"You mean the Invisible Sky Wizard?"

I now perceived there were two granite faces in the hospital, for the second one did behold me, and her eyes did harden in the firmament.

"Enjoy your plumber's snake this afternoon," she said, and walked out. As she was a God fearing person, I'm inclined to believe she meant it.

*

While I lay on the operating table, waiting for the plumber's snake to invade me, I said to the cardiologist, "Keep in mind I have a lot to live for, Doc. I have a fifteen-year-old daughter who still needs me even if she doesn't know it. And many more books to write."

"Have you at least started writing the books?" he asked.

"Indeed, this very morning."

"And have you written the words 'The End' in any of them?"

"I didn't think it prudent."

"Count your blessings," he said. Then: "Lights! Camera! Anesthesia!"

String Bridge: A Chat with Author Jessica Bell

2011-11-11T11:00:00.000+01:00

Jessica Bell is a literary women's fiction author, poet and singer/songwriter who grew up in Melbourne, Australia, to two gothic rock musicians who had successful independent careers during the '80s and early '90s.

She spent much of her childhood travelling to and from Australia to Europe, experiencing two entirely different worlds, yet feeling equally at home in both environments. She currently lives in Athens, Greece and works as a freelance writer/editor for English Language Teaching publishers worldwide, such as HarperCollins, Pearson Education and Macmillan Education.

In addition to String Bridge, Jessica has published a book of poetry called Twisted Velvet Chains. A full list of poems and short stories published in various anthologies and literary magazines can be found under Published Works & Awards, on her website.

From September 2012 Jessica will be hosting the Homeric Writers' Retreat & Workshop on the Greek island of Ithaca, home of Odysseus.

Steve: Gotta ask it. What's a nice Aussie girl like you doing in a place like Greece?

Jessica: My step father is Greek and so I kinda grew up like one. Pretty much spent half my life here.

Steve: In addition to prose and poetry, you also write and perform music professionally. Do the two discliplines fuel each other? Distract from each other? Can an artist excel in more than one field?

Jessica: An artist can most definitely excel in more than one field. I don’t think I could do either of these things without having the skill to do the other. For example, sound is actually a very difficult thing to describe and I think being a musician helped me with that. Mind you, I spent a long time trying to perfect those parts in String Bridge where the sound of music is illustrated. It was quite a challenge to be honest. But what helps me, in general, is the fact that I thrive on making sentences with cadence. I love playing around with different words and sounds and seeing how differently they roll off my tongue. Writing is just like singing without a melody. It’s writing to a tempo.

Steve: Many visual artists say that as they work, the right side of their brain takes over and time seems to suspend itself. Do you go into different modes when you write music and fiction?

Jessica: Of course. And you know what? I can NOT write with music playing. If there’s music playing, all I want to do is sing and I get distracted.

Steve: How much of String Bridge is autobiographical? How much of you is projected onto your MC, Melody?

Jessica: To be honest, it’s hard to say. I think every writer puts themselves into every character, but the similarities come through in waves which depend on various factors, such as mood, while writing. I could try and give you a percentage, but I think I would always change my mind. Overall, I’m not Melody. I want to primarily write, not have a career in music. I don’t have a daughter. I’m not married. I’m happy with what has become of me in life. I have no regrets. Yes, I live in an apartment in Athens and I work as a writer/editor for English Language Teaching materials, and my parents live on a Greek island, but I used those aspects of my life because I needed to really ‘know’ what I was writing about. Being my first novel, I didn’t want to get caught up in a mist of research, so I figured if the basic details, such as setting and occupation were the same as my own, I wouldn’t stumble into any mind-numbing obstacles along the way. I needed to write what I knew to get that first book out of me. There is always going to be a piece of the author in every single book they write. And that cannot be avoided.

Steve: So tell us: your mother didn't really pull the heads off your Barbie dolls, did she?

Jessica: Of course not! Hahaha ... My poor mum ... I think she’s going to get these sorts of questions a lot now. Just for the record, Betty is not my mother.

Steve: String Bridge is, among other things, about broken love. At one point your Melody questions "whether it makes more sense to marry a great friend, rather than someone you love. Friendship does seem to last longer." I can't let you leave without answering the question.

Jessica: Luckily for me, I have a partner who is a great friend and who I am deeply in love with. But will that last forever? Time will tell, I guess ... I hope it does! Unfortunately, I don’t believe this is a question that can be answered yet. And I think, by the time it is answered, I’ll be too old and frail to give a damn.

Steve: What's next?

Jessica: My second novel, Bitter Like Orange Peel, is about a twenty-five year old Australian archaeology undergraduate named Kit, who doesn’t like to get her hands dirty. She feels misplaced and comes to the conclusion that meeting her father, Roger, will make some sense of her life, despite him being worth the rotting orange rind in her backyard. Well, at least that’s what she’s been conditioned to think of him by the three women in her life: Ailish, her mother—an English literature professor who communicates in quotes and clichés, and who still hasn’t learned how to express emotion on her face; Ivy, her half-sister—a depressed professional archaeologist, with a slight case of nymphomania, who fled to America after a divorce to become a waitress; and Eleanor, Ivy’s mother—a pediatric surgeon who embellishes her feelings with medical jargon, and who named her daughter after intravenous. Against all three women’s wishes, Kit decides to find Roger, but in doing so, discovers he is not the only rotten fruit.

My third novel, Muted, is set in Arles, France, in a totalitarian society where it is illegal to wear clothes. In some streets, it's also illegal to sing without accompanying instruments. Concetta, a famous Italian a cappella singer from before “the change,” breaks these laws. As punishment, her vocal chords are brutally slashed and her eardrums surgically perforated. Unable to cope with living a life without song, she resolves to drown herself in the river, clothed in a dress stained with performance memories from her hometown, Milan. But Concetta's suicide attempt is cut short as someone grabs her by the throat and pulls her to the surface. Is it the busking harpist, who encouraged her to feel music through vibration, acting as saviour? Or a street warden on the prowl for another offender to detain? From this moment, the reader will discover how Concetta came to be in this position, and what will happen to her after the suicide attempt.

Muted will explore a variety of themes such as overcoming loss, coping with mental illness and disability, dealing with discrimination, loss of freedom, inhibited self-expression, motivation to succeed, escaping oppression, expression through art and music, self-sacrifice, channelling the thoughts of the deceased, and challenging moral views and values.

Thank you for having me!

Buy String Bridge at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or an independent bookseller near you.

Jessica's website is here. She blogs here. She sings and dances here.

No srsly! That last link is her book trailer, in which it really is her singing. I made up the dancing part.

She's conducting some kind of give-away. I think it's "Free Trip to Greece for Everyone who Buys her Book," but you might want to confirm that in advance.

Of course, if you want to pay your own way, she's putting together a writing retreat and workshop on Ithaca.

No, not Ithaca, New York. The Greek island, in the Ionian Sea.

Which isn't to say upstate New York wouldn't be nice, too . . .

The Feedstore Chronicles: Guest Post by Travis Erwin

2011-11-07T14:00:00.000+01:00

First.

Say it with me ... first. Such a magical word full of wonder.

First. The ruler, the king, the bad ass of the ordinal family of numbers.

We anticipate a baby's first word, celebrate first communions, cheer first place finishes.

First is what those who compete strive to be. With First comes the loftiest podium, the shiniest gold, the sweet music of one's anthem.

So with that in mind here I am going all Sesame Street on y'all with my number of the day. Hello boys and girls, can you say ONE, UNO, EIN?

Right about now, you, the dedicated readers of the famed and fabled Mr. Stephen Parrish may be asking yourselves, Who the hell is this guy that has taken over our beloved Stevey's blog? And for all that is holy, why is he rambling on about ordinal numbers?

For those who do not know me my name is Travis Erwin. I live in Texas. I write about this, that and everything. I rant about meat, shout LETTUCE IS THE DEVIL to anyone who will listen, and otherwise haunt the blogosphere and social media sites with what I like to refer to as humor. Yeah, I've been called a dipshit a few times, for as it turns out there are some folks who have no sense of humor.

Like that guy way in the back right now, grumpily muttering, "What the hell does this have to do with the word first."

You see, after better than a decade of writing, of collecting rejection slips for my various novels and full-length book projects, I can today for the FIRST time lay claim to the title of published author. Today, THE FEEDSTORE CHRONICLES is available for purchase.

But the release of my first book is not the only tie to the word first, for you see, THE FEEDSTORE CHRONICLES is all about the firsts in life. Based upon the my formative teenage years, when I worked for a gloriously nefarious boss at a dusty Texas feedstore, THE CHRONICLES is a comedic coming-of-age tale littered with firsts. First jobs, first dates, first experiences in handcuffs – unfortunately not as a result of first, second or even third dates. Embarrassing, painful, and yes, even criminal antics are shared as I venture toward adulthood under the guidance of the world's most morally bankrupt boss.

Of course some first experiences are better, more magical that others. Here is an excerpt leading to one such first ...

Before even my first visit, Cody mentioned the chickens. At first all he’d say was, “If Candy asks you to help feed the chickens, make damn sure you go.”

I pestered him for details, until he finally relented and said, “Candy gives the best blowjobs.”

Now to a high school boy, the words blow and job used in direct sequence with one another are mystical in nature. The very idea of being on the receiving end of such an act is enough to stimulate the body and mind of any pubescent male. Part fantasy and part legend, blowjobs were the sexual equivalent of Sasquatch or the Chupacabre. Every teenage boy had heard stories of their existence, yet most of us had no firsthand knowledge.

I won't spoil it by telling you what happened next, but trust me when I say the only thing you could expect around the feedstore, was the unexpected.

Should you enjoy a raucous comedy THE FEEDSTORE CHRONICLES is available for purchase or order in print via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and most other book retailers and my publisher tells me it will soon be available electronically in both Nook and Kindle formats.

This is my first stop on my promotional blog tour, and I wish to extend a hearty thank you to Steve for letting me occupy this space. Steve, despite the fact we've never met in person I mean it when I say you are one of my very favorite people in this world and someday, soon I hope, we must sit together and partake in a few beers for you are a eine erste rate freund.

And thanks to Steve's readers for letting me horn in on their Stevey time.

Steve's turn:

I know an honorable man . . .

. . . and his name is Travis Erwin.

Travis's blog was my first stop when I began promoting Tavernier, so I was delighted when he suggested a reciprocation. I received his guest post a few days before the originally scheduled Feedstore launch but then suddenly found myself in an ambulance on its way to the cardiac unit. I kept telling the EMTs, "But I have to get Trabbis's post ready! Just give me an hour!"

I missed the launch date. My daughter wrote to Trabbis and told him to make someone else his first stop. He would hear nothing of it; we'll start when Steve gets out of the hospitable, he said. I finally convinced the doctors to teach me how to give myself shots, and they let me come home for the weekend.

They say you can judge someone's character by observing how he treats waiters and waitresses, for example. It's always the little things. Like delaying a book tour because of a promise made. Please buy Trabbis's book, not only because he's a skilled and entertaining writer, and Feedstore is sure to be a treat, but also because honorable men are rare enough that when we find them we should honor them.

A Yellow Sunset

2011-10-25T08:46:00.003+02:00

Violet had to die. There was no question in my mind. In fact, as I wrote the synopsis of my WIP it never even occurred to me to let her live. Somebody had to die, and Violet was the most heart wrenching choice.

Sorry, Violet. Maybe in someone else's novel you'll get your pony, your sixteen candles.

But then I asked my daughter Sarah to read the synopsis. Like every other writer who masturbates and lies about it, what I really wanted from her was validation, not criticism. I wanted Sarah to sigh in admiration, to assure me that my talent was quintessential, unassailable. To genuflect before her dad, the master. To delude me.

Instead she said, "Violet can't die. Violet must live."

"But," I scoffed, "that means I'd have to change the entire ending."

She looked down at the floor, and it wasn't to seek a spot to plant her knee. "Right," she said.

I pestered her over the next few days, but all I could get for a reason was, "It just doesn't feel good." She was going on instinct. To tell the truth, I had killed Violet in the synopsis without due consideration for my own instincts. Death is moving, I'd argued. Death is poignant, death won't let go of us.

Death makes readers cry.

But Sarah was adamant: "You'll ruin the book if you kill her."

So I took another look. I saw an ending that was upbeat, full of promise. I saw a family that defeated its obstacles rather than succumbed to them. I saw a purpose in telling the story that went beyond exposé. Looking back, what has moved me most in drama hasn't been sadness, it's been happiness. What has made me cry the most hasn't been death, it's been life.

Maybe I need a fifteen-year-old to remind me now and then that the things most worth writing about lie above the sod, not below.

Longtime readers of the blog know how much I dwell on death. It's my second favorite subject, after boners. Yet lately I've directed my attention to the Overworld, particularly to activities I enjoyed as a boy, and one persistent memory is of wading barefoot in wilderness creeks.

My friends and I would take off our shoes and socks, roll our pant legs above the knee, and trudge in slow motion against the current, feeling the sand and gravel slide beneath our feet. We caught minnows, and let them go. We searched the banks for fossils. We temporarily suspended our disbelief that the wilderness was a castle, the dragonflies were knights-errant, hovering above the ferns to guard our passage, and the call of the hoot-owls as dusk gathered were trumpets heralding our arrival at the moat.

Wading in a creek one more time is near the top of my bucket list.

On our way home we would stop to watch the sunset, trying to choose its peak moment of beauty. Problem was, the moment wasn't obvious until after it had passed. My favorite color was yellow, so naturally I looked for it whenever I gazed at the western horizon. But sunsets are never really dominated by yellow, are they? Orange, yes, and often purple, but I don't remember ever seeing a truly yellow one.

This past month has been pretty rotten. I did a stint in the hospitable and will probably return for another. But even so, I did my share of laughing too. I love to crack up nurses (when I succeed in cracking up a doctor, I'll let you know). At one point I had a nurse giggling so hard she couldn't insert a fresh IV; she had to step away and wipe her eyes. Of course as soon as she aimed the needle again I launched her on another fit. I had the wonderful fortune of rooming with two guys who shared my dry sense of humor, and our room became The Room on the ward.

Those two guys were both diagnosed with life-shortening illnesses. Neither abandoned his sense of humor. Both were younger than me.

I skyped last night with a friend who followed up with an email that concluded, Had you been more compliant we could have talked about ice cream. Or radio signals from space. Or mapmaking. You could have told me all about that little thing in the corner of maps that points north, whatever it's called. We could have talked about the moon orbiting the earth, or how I have a phobia about garbage disposals or even . . . how earthworms are beneficial to the planet. We could have talked about swarms of butterflies that hang off eucalyptus trees or why the breeze feels so good against our skin or how crayons are made.

And there you have it. If I'm ever driving down the highway and I see a sign to a crayon factory, one that offers tours, I'm taking the exit. And as long as I can say that, I'm still alive. And it just so happens that last night, for the first time in a month, I was able to take a complete, lung-filling breath of air. And it felt so fucking good that I decided, oh, what the heck, I think I'll take another. And a bunch more. And then my face was wet, and not because little girls were dying in novels, rather because for the first time in my life I knew the simple joy of breathing, and could well guess the joy of crayon factories, butterflies hanging off eucalyptus trees, and yes, even those little things in the corners of maps that point north. Whatever they're called.

I think my luck is changing. Glancing out my window the other day, just as the sun was slipping down from an ultramarine sky, what should confront my disbelieving eyes? I ran for my camera. Here was one peak moment that wasn't going to get away.

Maybe Sarah is right. Maybe Violet should live. Maybe life is moving, maybe life is poignant, maybe life won't let us go. Maybe life makes readers cry.

Violet, honey, you'll get your pony after all.

The Squint

2011-10-11T13:59:00.002+02:00

I live across the street from a grade school, and during the ~~numerous and lengthy~~ rare and exasperatingly short breaks I take from writing I like to stand at the window and watch parents drop their kids off and pick them up from school. My favorites are the daddies holding hands with their little girls. But I just witnessed another recurring theme, one that is perhaps most poignant of all.

A mother walked her son to school and dropped him off on the sidewalk. He continued alone to the entrance. In order to improve her view, the mother crossed to the other side of the street; she watched as the boy reached the end of the sidewalk, trotted up the concrete steps, and disappeared into one of the buildings.

She continued to watch for a few more seconds, even though there was nothing left to see, before turning toward home.

There's a kind of squint a mother adopts as her kid disappears from view. You don't see it quite as a narrowing of the eyes, as though she's gazing into the sun. It's more of an intense concentration, a rapt attention to the environment, to its obstacles and hypothetical threats. It's the look of a bird kicking a fledgling out of the nest, of a mammal weaning a suckling. Of any creature whose offspring has parted with them, and is no longer under their uninterrupted and comprehensive protection.

The squint doesn't stop when the child is out of view. The mother will worry all day about how the boy is doing in school, whether he's treated well in the playground. She'll squint at the clock.

The squint doesn't stop when the boy has grown into a man. The mother will worry about his health, his happiness. She'll squint at the calendar.

If you want to see the squint yourself, visit an elementary school at morning drop-off time. You'll observe parents climbing out of their cars to help kids with their backpacks, making sure they have their lunchboxes, checking whether their coats are still buttoned. As the kids run off to join their friends, suddenly oblivious to the parents from whose grasp they've just wriggled, watch the faces of the mothers during those few seconds before they climb back into their cars. That's the squint.

Each footprint we leave gradually disappears with time. Choose carefully where you step. Later, if you squint, you can still see yourself on the path, accompanied by the people you love, their own footprints preserving and deepening yours.

My Last Rant About Wine

2011-10-10T16:24:00.004+02:00

I quit alcohol. If a single yeast cell so much as farts in my beverage, I won't drink it. So this is my last rant about wine. And the beautiful thing is, no one can tell me to try this or that, in an attempt to show me how wrong my opinions are. From now on my opinions cannot be changed, which means whatever I say is irrefutable, which means I'm right, always and interminably. Sobriety has its advantages.

Let's get straight to the rant:

1. Chardonnay is a wholly uninteresting grape. It's the white workhorse of the Burgundy region of France and thus constituted the "White Burgundy" Americans used to drink by the jug. The reason it became so popular as a varietal is because the word rolls nicely off the tongue. Americans love to order it in restaurants, as though speaking a French word so easily, so fluidly makes them more sophisticated. You can pump it with CO2 and falsely label it "Champagne," it's still a mediocre grape.

Gewurztraminer (for example) is tastier than Chardonnay, but not as much fun to pronounce. So don't look for it on the menu. By all means keep ordering your Chardonnay, just stop believing you have good taste in wine.

2. Pinot Noir, the red workhorse of the Burgundy region, is always expensive even when it's bland and disappointing, which is most of the time. Pinot's popularity in the U.S. increased with the release of the movie "Sideways," which, again, tells you how sophisticated American wine consumers are. Buy Cabernet instead; it's reliable. Hell, an Austrian Blauer Zweigeld will almost always give you a more satisfying experience. As will any red wine from Sicily, any at all.

3. Almost every description of wine you ever hear, especially those comparing wine to other edible and sometimes inedible things, is bullshit, the result of wine writers trying to outdo one another. Wine should be at least a little fruity (because it comes from fruit), it should be balanced (no one quality overwhelming the others), and it should be pleasant (for me, spicy). End of analysis.

Jonathan Nossiter in Liquid Memory quotes a 2008 description in the "Wine Spectator" of a $115 Washington State Cabernet: "(It's) richly aromatic and brims with dark berry and currant aromas and flavors, shaded with espresso and dark chocolate overtones set against somewhat gritty tannins. A meaty note adds extra depth as the finish lingers on and on against the tannins. Best from 2010 through 2017."

If you buy into that kind of horseshit, I know a rich widow in Nigeria who wants to meet you.

4. Just the other day I saw a 15% Chateauneuf for about $12. I couldn't believe it. A French wine that cheap cannot possibly have the fruit and spice to balance fifteen degrees of alcohol. I can taste the difference between 12.5% and 13%, and I know people who can do better. Most of the wines we buy are ordinary, on a budget, for immediate consumption. In my experience such wines begin to taste overdone—overwhelmed by the flavor of ethanol—when they pass twelve or thirteen degrees. Yet any low-latitude grower who bottled at 12% (which to me is ideal) would consider his effort a failure.

5. The prettiness of the label has nothing to do with the contents of the bottle. Europeans know this.

6. Aging wine in oak barrels allows it to spend time in the cellar because the tannins act as a preservative. But almost all wines nowadays are consumed within five years of bottling, and besides, do you really enjoy drinking wood juice?

7. There is no "correct" type of glass with which to drink anything at all, including wine. A water glass half filled with wine will trap vapors just as effectively as any Riedel. And if a Champagne flute hinders effervenscence long enough for you to drink the Champagne before it loses its sparkle, you're drinking it too slowly anyway.

There's a word for someone who insists there's only one way to drink wine: snob.

Loaves and Fishes

2011-09-28T20:17:00.003+02:00

When my daughter was in grade school I packed a lunch for her every day, and I always prepared more than she could eat; better to have leftovers than go hungry. Came a time there was never anything left over. I attributed it to appetite, and put even more food in the lunchbox. It disappeared as well. After a couple of weeks I asked where she was stowing it all.

"Oh, I'm not eating everything myself," she said. "I give half of it to Andreas."

Andreas was a little boy in her class whose mother had just died. His father hadn't yet assumed the duties of lunchbox packer, no doubt because grief had gotten in the way. Possibly he didn't even know of the responsibility; elementary schools in these parts don't have cafeterias. They don't even have water fountains, so your kid has to pack enough bottled water to get through the day.

At any rate, when my daughter discovered Andreas had nothing to eat, she shared her lunch with him. As soon as she told me this I began packing her box extra full. Until, once again, leftovers came back, and we'd reached equilibrium.

Eventually Andreas's father was tactfully informed of the situation, and the lunch ritual returned to normal. I was proud of my gerl. I still am.

One snack I included regularly was a bag of salted pretzel balls. None of the stuff ever came back, not even an empty bag. After Andreas was getting food from home again I asked my daughter about the pretzel balls, why she liked them so much.

"I don't eat those," she said. "I give them to Melissa, who feeds them to her parrot. He's crazy about the things."

Some years ago my daughter rescued a maple sapling a classmate had torn from the ground. She brought it home and potted it in the back yard. It has since outgrown the pot, so recently we took it up the hill to the woods above our home and transplanted it. Since the roots are shallow they can't yet reach deep enough for the moisture that is readily available to other trees. Therefore every couple of days I trudge a mile uphill with a jug of water.

I want the tree to survive and grow to maturity. I want my daughter to visit the tree in her old age and remember the day she transplanted it with her dad. As I once did with mine.

I talk to the tree. I reassure it that I won't let it down. That I'll bring water until its leaves have dropped for the winter and frost has set in. That I'll check back in the spring. It tell it, times are tough at the moment, because transplantings are always tough, but they'll get better. I stay and chatter until I sense the tree saying:

Leave the water and blow, would you?

On my way home I observe squirrels nervously gathering late September nuts, and leaves falling blithely to the earth, and decaying trunks hosting beetles and bracket fungi, and splintered stones glazed emerald green with moss, and sun-hungry shrubs colonizing canopy breaks, and everything dead alive again. A quote by Tobias Wolff rolls over and over on my tongue:

Surely the most beautiful words ever written or said: His father, when he saw him coming, ran to meet him.

Pillow Talk

2011-09-19T12:27:00.003+02:00

A girlfriend once woke me from a deep sleep and demanded to know who Gloria was. I didn't know anyone named Gloria, and said so.

"Then why are you speaking her name in your sleep?"

"I'm saying 'Gloria' in my sleep?"

"Yes!"

"I'm enunciating that particular name? Glo-ri-a?"

"Well, not exactly."

"Then what, exactly?"

"You say something that sounds like "Glrorhiahhggh."

"In other words, a guttural utterance, the sound one might make by clearing his throat."

"Yes. Now, out with it. Who the hell is she?"

Later she woke me again from a deep sleep and complained I was scrogging more than my share of the blanket.

"But I'm bigger than you," I said. "I need more blanket than you."

"And since I'm smaller than you, I need more protection."

There was no arguing with that. I gave her more blanket. Now most of me was exposed to the cold night air.

"I can't sleep when you shiver like that," she said.

"Coincidentally, neither can I."

Later she woke me yet again and insisted I check the apartment for prowlers. She'd heard a noise.

"But we live in an efficiency," I said. "If there were a prowler in the apartment, we'd be exchanging scowls right about now."

"Do me a favor and check the kitchen."

"You don't understand. We're sleeping in the kitchen. We live in an efficiency."

"At least check the bathroom and closet, please."

I did. Dutifully. Thoroughly. No prowlers, no monsters, nothing. The sun was coming up. A few minutes of REM sleep would have been nice before I trudged off to the factory. I returned to bed to report the results of my investigation. She was sprawled across the entire mattress, scrogging every stitch of blanket.

"Make room," I said.

"I have a better idea. Make breakfast. Since you happen to be up."

Poor White Trash

2011-09-18T10:46:00.003+02:00

I was once a card-carrying member of the club. The Grand Poobah of my lodge. When I was an undergraduate I took time off between semesters, because I couldn't afford the tuition, and worked as a restaurant line cook for minimum wage. At first I lived in a room in a house, like other poor white trash. But soon I tired of having to put my pants on just to go to the bathroom, and commenced a search for an apartment.

Eventually I found one I could afford. The front faced railroad tracks and the back faced a junkyard. But I could walk to the shitter in my Fruit-of-the-Looms, so I felt like a king.

Problem was, after paying the deposit I was broke, so although I had an apartment, it was empty. My friend Val, the social worker, began dragging me to yard sales. I felt right at home, since I was with other poor white trash who also used cardboard boxes for furniture. We shot one another knowing glances: Yes, that fifty-cent sweater will fit your snot-nosed kid. You should buy it. I won't tell anyone where you got it.

A guy Val knew wanted to empty a rental unit he owned, and when she told him she had a charity case, he allowed her to take whatever she liked. So I got a couch, a bed, lamps, all free. I began to think of myself as Squire Parrish. A waitress at work didn't want her old coffee table anymore, and offered it to me. It didn't matter that one leg was fractured; I rested the stump on an empty Planters peanut can. The surface of the table was thus level enough to hold a full cup of coffee. I didn't drink coffee, but so what? I had a coffee table, just like rich people.

I took the backboard off my bed and leaned it against the wall of the living room. Voilà! A bookshelf.

One gap remained: the kitchen. I had no plates, utensils, nothing. So Val took me to an auction. At every community auction in the American Midwest there is a big box of used kitchen goodies up for bid, and our auction was no exception. This particular box was so big, so full of stuff, it would stock my entire kitchen, serve all of my culinary purposes. It even had one of those hand-operated mixers from pre-electricity days. And a toaster! One half of which still worked!

The bidding started at a dollar, and I raised my arm, high and proud. Come after me, fellow trashers! Bring it on!

"We have a dollar. Do we have two?"

I checked my wallet. I had three dollars! I could outlast anyone who upped me an increment. Then maybe I could bluff my way to the end and borrow from Val.

"We have one. Do we have two? Do I hear two?"

I looked around. People were talking among themselves, and nobody was paying attention to the auctioneer. Even though a veritable treasure was at the mercy of his gavel. How could they not be interested?

"One dollar, going once, going twice . . ."

I closed my eyes. Please no last-second snipers.

"Sold! For a buck. To the gentleman in the flannel shirt."

Later as I carried my loot home, it occurred to me why no one else had bid on it. The spoons and forks were used. They'd been in someone else's mouth. All of it was used. Nobody, not even the lowest echelon of society, bought used kitchen utensils. Turns out, among poor white trash I was poor white trash.

No matter. Next on the list: curtain rods! With any luck I'd find a few in the junkyard behind my apartment. Or some good, stiff wire that would do the job just as well.

For Wendy, who made me tell it.

I'm allowed one sexist post, and it's time to cash in my voucher

2011-09-13T19:42:00.003+02:00

Here goes:

Clothes for girls are so much fun to buy. It's not why I wanted a girl, but it was one of the pleasant side benefits. With boys you have a choice between black, navy blue, and black; put any other color pants on your boy and he runs the risk of getting his ass whooped during recess. And though girls can wear boy clothes if they want to, a boy had better not cross-dress, even for Halloween, else he be branded for life. Later he can stand out from the crowd with a unique tie, but that's about all he can do. And he'd better not stand out too much.

If a guy shows up in the office in loud colors, he gets stared at. If he shows up in a skirt he gets fired.

Back when my girl was little, and her dad could still buy clothes for her, I traveled twice a year from Germany to Florida. I used the opportunities to shop at a Gymboree, usually accompanied by female colleagues and a nervous credit card. Come time to leave my hotel room to visit the store, word got out among the colleagues and soon we became an entourage.

This is where the post gets sexist.

No female can resist a shopping expedition. All the way back to caveman times (er, cavewoman times) it was Grogette, not Grog, who filled the shopping cart with arrowheads, ground ochre, and animal hides. So when any of my female colleagues caught wind I was going shopping for clothes for my daughter, the communication network cranked up and buzzed. It operated so efficiently that the U.S. military ought to have studied it for adaptation to combat operations. Forget walky-talkies. These girls employed telepathy:

Stockings-5, this is Heels-27. He's about to leave for the mall.

Roger that, Heels-27, I'll alert NippleRing-11. Meet you in the parking lot.

Someone needs to inform Garter-9.

Negative, Heels-27. Garter-9 is observing from a helicopter and will see him depart the hotel lobby.

Ten-four.

We advanced upon the store like a swat team. The girls fanned out and entrenched themselves in strategic locations. Stockings-5 went straight for the pre-assembled outfits, the ones that always seemed to cost more than the sum of their individual pieces. Heels-27 was all shoes. NippleRing-11 evidently thought underwear made a fashion statement. And Garter-9, arriving late in a huff, having just landed her helicopter in the parking lot, assumed command. She asked what kind of credit card I had, and when I showed it to her she pocketed it for safe keeping. Then she winked at the sales girl: You just watch us go to work, honey.

Every man reading this is thinking the same thing. 1) I didn't have to do anything. That's the entire objective when men go shopping with women. In fact, if they can find a pub nearby in which to pass the time, so much the better. 2) I was about to go bankrupt. That's the entire objective when women go shopping with men. 3) I had nothing to feel guilty about: the forces dictating my circumstances were whipping up strength long before my first meek footprint on the Earth.

Garter-9, this is Heels-27. He's beginning to look nervous.

Don't worry, Heels-27. When he gave me his credit card I took his car keys too.

Roger that.

At the end of the engagement a wide assortment of skirts, blouses, stockings, shoes, and complete outfits was arrayed on a display table, price tags tucked away. I surveyed the collection, then uttered words no female ear can bear to hear:

"Now I have to decide which ones to buy."

That's when they tackled me. I confess I should have seen it coming, but I was too busy counting the shoes. I watched, bound and gagged, as the sales girl rang up each article, the women staring transfixed at the cash register's price display, pumping their arms and chanting "Go girlfriend!" at each incremental leap of the tally.

The sexist part of the post is almost over.

Clothes for girls are so much fun to buy. It's even more fun to watch your girl sort through them, try everything on, and grin with delight. You don't even mind when she asks, "How come so few shoes?"

A Hooded Man

2011-09-12T07:45:00.002+02:00

A hooded man
Shops at my local grocery store

He wears the hood
Morning and night
When the Earth is green and when it is brown
Rain or shine

He fills his shopping cart
In silence

Only a narrow oval
From eyebrows to chin
From cheek to cheek
Is exposed to the light

I watch him frankly
He glares back defiantly

And I can't help thinking
How handsome he would be
How warm his countenance
Were it not for the hood

His eyes would seek
Rather than sear

Were it not for third degree burns
Flesh scorched and scarred
Sagging like melted plastic from his face
Tucked into a prison the shape of a hood

I fill my shopping cart
In silence

He goes through the checkout line
With head hung low
And turns the other way
When pretty girls pass by

The Pall Bearer

2011-09-08T12:20:00.002+02:00

I can't accompany you
Of that, at least, I'm sure
But you can listen while I tell you
About grief and stratigraphy

Someone says, watch your step here
And again here
Now all together, lift
Try to walk in a straight line

And the grass grows ever greener
At the roadside, on the berm

The butterflies delight us
Until the novelty wears off
And by season's end they're gone
From neglect, no doubt

Or captured by high school biology students
In glass jars
Anesthetized
Pinned to styrofoam displays

When the summer rain is warm and the drops are big
Tears lose their way as they trickle down my cheek
And fall to the earth
And start all over

Cumulonimbus rolls off the tongue
As does her name
As do yarrow, sweet william, foxglove, and flax
(Then she'll be a true love of mine)

Someone says, watch your step here
And again here
Left side, shorten your stride for a turn
Try to keep a straight face

And the grass grows ever greener
At the roadside, on the berm

Gods I have known:
The almighty creator, the invisible sky wizard
The thrower of tantrums
No evidence of you

The everything god
The pantheist
Already have a word for that
No need for you

The geometer, the grand designer
Who left us after resting his compass and protractor
Where oh where are you now?
No sight of you

And one of them said, let there be a tsunami
And let thousands of innocent people gurgle and gasp
Let their lungs fill with water
And the evening and the morning were the first day

If you ask the Pope for an autograph, what does he write?
Best wishes, The Pope
Ol' Beanie Head
May I introduce your nine-year-old to some friends of mine?

Someone says, watch your step here
And again here
Uphill now
Try to keep the casket from tilting

And the grass grows ever greener
At the roadside, on the berm

Her head was wrenched around by the impact
So it faced to the rear
Like a cartoon
Like a carnival freak

How did they place her in the casket?
On her back, with her face buried in the pillow?
On her stomach, so however vacantly, up she looks?
On her side, because they couldn't make up their minds?

Don't put me in a box
My spirit will fight to escape it
I will kick and scratch and claw
Instead lay me naked in the earth

Then plant a maple over me
When the maple matures, graft it
And replant the saplings
So that I may live forever

Someone says, watch your step here
And again here
Downhill now
Try to keep the body from sliding

Don't worry, they said
You won't find any blood
The rain that followed the accident
Washed it off to the side of the road

And the grass grows ever greener
At the roadside, on the berm

Two Events That Left Me Weak in the Knees

2011-08-06T12:32:00.006+02:00

I once had the extraordinary good fortune to witness a total eclipse of the sun. Afterwards I understood why people went out of their way for the experience.

During totality only the sun's corona is visible, and day becomes night. Immediately before and after are the aptly named "diamond ring" phenomena, as the corona wanes or waxes respectively, and a burst of light preceeds and subsequently follows the moon.

As the moon glides before the sun you get a sense of the gigantic size of the two celestial bodies, of their three-dimensionality. No disks in the sky are these, rather incomprehensively large spheres playing tag-team in the heavens; they seem so close together, and so near to the Earth.

Everyone watching is dumbstruck. I can't begin to describe the feeling. It's easy, very easy, to believe in God.

I once had the extraordinary good fortune to witness a launch of the space shuttle. Afterwards I understood why people went out of their way for the experience.

What's striking is how slow it starts, like a building lifting off the ground. That it moves at all is a testimony to the thunderous power of the engines driving it. And drive it they do; the craft overcomes maddeningly resistant inertia, accelerating with almost palpable composure toward the stars.

As it rises you can't help but think of all the engineers whose efforts went into the mission. Of all the scientists of generations past who fantasized about witnessing such an event, who devoted their lives to moving us incrementally closer to achieving it. Of men like Galileo, and Robert Goddard, who would have given their lives to be on board.

Everyone watching is dumbstruck. I can't begin to describe the feeling. It's easy, very easy, to believe in Man.

Requiem Revisited

2011-08-02T17:58:00.004+02:00

This is a reprint of a post I wrote in 2008 called "Requiem for a Story." I'm diving back into the short story market, mainly because suffering builds character, but also because I've accumulated a stack of ideas and sketches that demand the same condescending rejection their forebears enjoyed.

Welcome, Steve, have a seat. Now, tell me about your short story.

Well, sir, it's about a married couple. The wife lives, figuratively speaking, in "Shouldsville" and the husband in "Wouldsville." One night as they're driving home in the rain—

Stop right there. I've heard enough.

But I haven't even told you what it's about.

That's the problem: you're able to tell me what it's about. Therefore I'm not interested.

Excuse me? You don't want a story if the writer can tell you what the story's about?

Exactly. What's the last published short story you've read?

Oh, some drivel in the Atlantic Monthly about a boy whose brother was in Vietnam.

What happened in the story?

Nothing happened. There was a boy, and his brother was in Vietnam. That's all.

You see? Had something actually happened in the story the Atlantic wouldn't have touched it with a stick. Nowadays everything's slice-of-life. Nothing happens, it just is. If you can explain what the story's about, you haven't got a story for the modern market.

All right. Suppose I rewrite my story and take out the parts that make it something I can say something about?

You mean the plot?

Right.

That's not good enough. Do you have characters too? Do they change?

Well, sure.

You'll have to change your story so that nobody changes. Theme?

I like to think so.

Eradicate it. Slice of life, nothing else. I should be able to finish the story and wonder, vainly, what the hell you were trying to communicate.

Okay. Let's say I take out everything that has any meaning, purpose, or integrity, and leave only that which contributes—unwittingly, of course—to slice of life. Will you publish my story then?

Not so fast. I've got sixteen short story slots to fill, four in each of four quarterly issues.

Cool.

Five of those slots are already booked with manuscripts I overbought last year.

That leaves eleven.

I'm a creative writing teacher, and I reserve four slots, one per issue, for my students.

Fair enough. That leaves seven.

I'm also a writer myself, and I want to place my stories in other literary journals. Therefore I have to leave slots open for the editors of those journals. Say one per issue.

Leaving three.

Not quite, because writers like John Updyke and Joyce Carol Oates often contribute stories to small literary journals like mine, to help them out. I have to keep a couple of slots open for distinguished contributors.

Meaning . . .

That's right: the fifteen thousand unsolicited manuscripts I receive every year are competing for one lousy slot. And I'm sure as hell not giving that slot to someone who hasn't even bothered to remove the story from his story.

Fine. Let's say God intervenes and I manage to get in. How much do you pay?

How much what? Money? Ha ha ha ha ha!

An Irreverent and Possibly Libelous Interview with Alissa Grosso, Author of POPULAR

2011-07-25T13:37:00.003+02:00

For reigning popularity queen Hamilton Best, the very idea of graduation is filled with fear. She's always been the star of Fidelity High's most exclusive clique, idolized for her perfection and her fabulous parties—you know you're "in" when you make Hamilton's guest list. As high school draws to a close, Hamilton is about to lose everything that makes her who she is.

To make matters worse, the clique is slowly coming apart at the seams. Although the hand-picked members—Olivia, Zelda, Nordica, and Shelly—all have their own agendas, desires, and secrets, they do have one thing in common: they're desperate to break away from Hamilton. Yet Hamilton has the biggest and most shocking secret of all, one that only her devoted boyfriend Alex knows. If the truth got out, it would completely destroy her fragile world.

And she'll do anything to keep that from happening.

Steve: So, which of Hamilton, Olivia, Shelly, Nordica, and Zelda do you most identify with? If it's Shelly, this is gonna be a short interview.

Alissa: I really like Olivia, and I think those chapters were my favorite to write. However, I probably have a lot more in common with Nordica. I was definitely way more like her in high school. True fact: I was voted “Most Bashful” in my high school class.

Steve: I wanted to hate Hamilton, and eventually changed my mind—anyone who's read the book knows why. The ending floored me, caught me completely off guard. Well done. Did you have that in mind all along, or did the idea suddenly strike you when you reached a certain point in the book? I'll believe any answer except the first one.

Alissa: I may have to strain your credulity a bit. I knew the beginning of this book and the end (well, sort of) when I set out to write it. It was the stuff in the middle that was tricky. Actually, my original ending had the book ending way too abruptly. So, my last chapter was stretched out and expanded and became Part 2 of the book.

Steve: Ah, Part 2. You switched to a male perspective. Did that come naturally? Or did you have to practice by walking around scratching yourself?

Alissa: I did have to do a lot of walking around and scratching myself, also quite a bit of rewriting. Writing as a boy was the most difficult part of writing Popular.

Steve: Earlier you said you were bashful in high school. Yet bashful people can be popular too. (I personally didn't make the cut.) Were you popular? Did you kiss the boys and make them cry?

Alissa: I was very much not popular, though earlier today someone told me they were impressed that I was valedictorian. I wasn't that either. Apparently, there's a lot of misinformation out there. I pretty much spent my teenage years reading books and running in circles, well, more like ovals. I was on the track and cross country teams.

Steve: You know that ninety percent of my readers are aspiring writers. (The other ten percent lie about masturbating.) So, out with it: how did you land Dystel & Goderich?

Alissa: I sold Popular without a literary agent to Flux. They're a small YA imprint, and they used to accept unagented submissions. They also made me an offer on my second novel, Ferocity Summer, but when I received the contract on that one the terms were not quite as favourable as they had been on the Popular contract. So, with contract in hand I went shopping for a literary agent. Jim McCarthy at Dystel & Goderich was able to get that initial contract reworked. So, long story short, I went about getting an agent in a very backwards way.

Steve: Lightning round:

Johnny Depp or Ralph Fiennes? Johnny Depp.

Cate Blanchett or Scarlett Johansson? Funny you should ask since I'm forever confusing these actresses even though they are completely different.

Pinot Noir or Cabernet Savignon? Those are wines, right? Just kidding. Seriously, though, I am not a wine drinker at all. My parents are appalled.

Monet or Manet? Monet, I guess. Like him (well, probably much worse than him) I am very near sighted.

Neil Diamond, or some shitbird usurper? There's probably no right way to answer this. I'm thinking there might possibly be a live version of "Coming to America" on my iPod. I know for sure that there is a very enjoyable punk rock cover version of "Sweet Caroline".

Steve: I knew you were one of us! Okay, last question, then you can go back to work on your party guest list. Assume all the world's aspiring novelists are listening. In one sentence, what advice would you give them?

Alissa: Write a book that you would enjoy reading.

Buy Popular at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, Chapters, or IndieBound.
Alissa lives at alissagrosso.com.

Steve's take on Popular: The interactions between the principles—Hamilton, Olivia, Shelly, Nordica, and Zelda—shed new light on quite a bit of stuff I observed in high school. The writing is polished. I highly recommend this novel, not only to teenage girls who are coping with high school (and teenage boys who are coping with teenage girls who are coping with high school), but also to any fan or practitioner of YA fiction: the way Grosso concluded the novel was both perfectly logical and completely unpredictable.

My daughter Sarah dyed her hair blue* and appeared in Alissa's book trailer! Look for her at the 43 second mark:

*It only took three months to wash out.

What Counts

2011-07-22T10:44:00.006+02:00

I once attended a horse jumping competition at Schloss Biebrich, on the former ducal hunting grounds behind the palace. The riders wore dark navy jackets over white shirts and pants, knee-high black boots, and those distinctive equestrian helmets with chin straps. They steered their horses around a devilish course obstructed by horizontally suspended poles and planks, walls that looked every bit like the bricked barriers they were supposed to imitate, double and triple combinations, and of course water. Spectators were allowed to watch from the very boundary of the track; I stood next to a water hazard, at the end of which was a five-foot fence.

It looks a lot harder in person than on TV. You can see the anticipation in the posture of the riders, especially in the way they hunch their shoulders as they approach an obstacle. You can feel the pounding of hooves. Several horses balked at the pond/fence obstacle where I'd posted myself, and either slowed to a halt or tried to run around it. The riders had to choose between a refusal or the precious time it would cost to turn back and attempt the obstacle again. Their exasperation was evident; some wore spurs, and used them.

All horses are beautiful, but for some reason the darker they are, the more they appeal to me. As I watched from the edge of the pond, a dark bay thoroughbred over 16 hands approached to make the jump. Its rider was a debonair young man sitting tall and proud in the saddle. As they came near they increased their speed sufficiently to clear both the pond and the fence. But at the last second the horse stopped abruptly, causing the rider to somersault over its braided mane and splash in the mud.

There were gasps and moans from the crowd. A fall is an automatic disqualification.

The rider picked himself up, scraped mud disgustedly from his coat and pants, and returned to his horse, which was standing with head slightly bowed. He led the horse away from the track and into a sparse stand of trees. I followed them as my fellow spectators waited pond side—presumably to witness more falls. As far as I was concerned, the show had moved to new stage.

The rider stopped under an aging white oak and unbridled his horse. For a minute or so, as I watched invisibly from a hundred meters away, the two seemed to stare at each other, communicating silently. The rider then leaned forward and kissed the horse on its nose, and they nuzzled.

He stroked its neck. The horse bobbed its head gently up and down.

They stood under that oak for several minutes, a man and a beast, their heads pressed together, touching and reassuring each other, the horse stamping a hoof, the young man grinning, whispering words I couldn't hear, oblivious to the distant cheers of the crowd, the mud on his coat and pants drying in thin dusty cakes.

Sex on Sex

2011-07-13T09:56:00.003+02:00

Betsy Dornbusch, who blogs at Sex Scenes at Starbucks, is my guest today.

I’ve been asked why I write erotica. For a long time, my reply was the opportunity fell into my lap and I took it on as a creative challenge. We wrote two books and got some good reviews and some sales.

So, now the question would be, why do I continue to write the bastard child of fiction on my own when I have a burgeoning career as a mainstream speculative fiction writer, an urban fantasy coming out next January, and a longstanding gig as an editor at a respected ezine, Electric Spec? When I’ve heard erotica called dirty and trash and porn, even by writers? Especially when some people in my life pretend I don’t write some books with graphic sex scenes? When sex, and the portrayal of it, still carries such taboo?

I’m ashamed of my country on a lot of levels, but perhaps no more deeply than in regards to its attitude toward sex. Ironic and sad for a nation that prides itself in its independent thinking. It’s just not talked about enough, not free of shame, damn it, even though it’s all around us, on TV, movies, books, video games, bedrooms and some kitchen tables. And God forbid (literally, in some quarters) that we acknowledge gay sex as anything other than evil deviation.

There is cultural and religious history to account for this, but I think that’s the easy reason to point to. Writers are afforded no such luxury as the easy road, for it ignores the deeper reason why sex is an easy target to make taboo and secret, and why I write it: Orgasm is when we are at our most vulnerable. If it’s done right, that is. There is the moment of small death, of succumbing, the absolute setting aside of control. An awful lot of us only want to share that with one person. Some of us want to share it with many people. Either way is cool with me. But it’s an important moment, ranging from damned fun to life-altering. As I said before, writers don’t get to ignore the important moments, but we must circle them like carrion.

Dig deep, workshop leaders tell us. Where’s the motivation? beta readers ask. Push your characters to the brink, writing books advise. But not until I started writing sex - actual, graphic, blunt, messy sex - did I learn what digging deep really means, writing moments of utter honesty, of finding the motivation to bring two (or more) characters to vulnerable, naked release, body and soul. Once I opened that door in my writing, I couldn’t close it again. Ignoring such powerful moments just doesn’t work for me as a writer.

Avoiding the topic of sex no longer works for my country, either. As Wilhelm Reich, purveyor of “free love,” suggested, (before he went delusional, I assume) authoritarian government relies on the suppression of sexuality and anti-sex principles because shameless people won’t go to war or do stupid, horrible things like operate death camps. I’m not sure I agree with the war piece, jus ad belum likely exists, but I think my country, in order to truly call ourselves free, must liberate sex, as well. Hopefully my writing can play some small part in that.

It’s the most any writer can ask, after all.

Visit Sex Scenes at Starbucks to find out more about LOST PRINCE, read an excerpt, and learn about the author: betsydornbusch.com

Buy the book at whiskeycreekpress.com or at amazon.com for your Kindle.

The only thing that’s kept Alaric, the so-called Lost Prince of Calixte, from giving into his grief over his beloved homeworld is the thought of revenge against the man who betrayed his people. But he couldn’t be more wrong about Haydn, who actually saved two thousand Calixten soldiers from certain death and secreted them on an inhospitable planet. There, they’ve launched a fledgling rebellion against the Coalition that rules six galaxies, including the lucrative Salt Road. They only need their prince to lead them.

Alaric needs a pilot to get him to his soldiers, someone too desperate to betray him. Katriel, a hotshot deserter pilot enslaved to Haydn by debt, is perfect for the job. But neither Katriel nor Alaric realize how the battle over Calixte binds them closer than blood, and when they find out, their collision will send shockwaves through the universe.

Steve speaking now. Betsy was one of the first people to read my blog, back in 2006, when we met via Miss Snark. She had already been blogging for a couple of years, and thus knew her way around HTML and stuff, and was generous with her knowledge. She's been instrumental in the careers of a number of authors, including Stuart Neville. She's a quiet, hard working pillar of our community; at first she couldn't remember why I'd added her to the acknowledgements of my first novel. If you don't already know her and are looking for friendly, helpful, connected (especially if you write speculative fiction) citizens of Blogtopia, stop by her blog, Sex Scenes at Starbucks, and introduce yourself.

The only good poem I've ever written

2011-07-09T17:59:00.001+02:00

Nadine

Oh Na- Na- Na-
Na-dine!
My little jelly bean
With eyes of aquamarine
Whoa, whoa, whoa,
Na-dine!

What you do to my
Spleen
Is positively
Ob-scene
I need to visit the
La-trine

Whoa, whoa, whoa,
Na-dine!

If we had a time
Ma-chine
We could look up Steve
Mc-Queen
And invent the Salk
Vac-cine
And lots else
Un-fore-seen

My Na- Na- Na-
Na-dine!

The Voice Within

2011-06-13T17:45:00.003+02:00

I asked my friend Jon VanZile in an interview what advice—in one sentence—he would give every aspiring writer in the country. He answered, "Read a lot." I can't argue with that. If there's any single trait a writer must have, in the absence of which he or she will almost certainly fail, it's an omnivorous appetite for literature, dating back to an early age.

The natural follow-on question is, what's the second piece of advice you'd give. And since Jon has left the building, it's my turn to answer: Be true to yourself.

It's not the bromide it first appears to be.

My first novel was pitched by my first agent at 140,000 words. The New York editors were of one mind: there were too many perspective characters. Also, I spent too much time on history: old maps, legendary gems, life in the seventeenth century. It was slowing down the story. No one wants to read that stuff, they said. It just gets in the way.

So I cut it down to 90,000 words. I killed off three characters and trimmed the "nonessential" stuff to a minimum. The result, while a faster read, is not the book I set out to write. To this day, those three amputated characters haunt me. It was wrong to cut them. I know because my guts tell me so.

And yet, my book probably wouldn't have been published. Do you remain true to yourself, or do you do whatever it takes to break through? Having once opted for the latter, I now swear by the former.

There comes a time in every writer's life when she's no longer tentative about her writing. She has mastered the grammar, the vocabulary, the language; she has a voice, a sense of style, an ear that is tuned to the complexities of fiction; she's in command. The paintbrush in her hand obeys her, not her crit partners, not the publishing industry, not even her writing idols.

That sense of mastery doesn't descend from the stars, it comes from within. Like all the Whos down in Whoville singing on Christmas morning, it starts out low, then it starts to grow. You first notice something's changing when you draft a sentence or paragraph that sticks with you the rest of the day. And behold, when you read it again the next day, it doesn't suck. Eventually you write longer passages that don't suck. And this is really my point: the only way we know something is good is when it fails to make us blush when we read it again after having put some distance between it and us.

Because doubt manifests itself in your gut. Doubt doesn't let you go. Doubt cannot be silenced by covering your ears and chanting, "Nyah, nyah, nyah." If you experience doubt about your writing, if you fear it might not be accomplishing what you want it to accomplish, it isn't. In fact, if you even suspect it might be a shade less than great, it sucks. If you wake up in the middle of the night because chapter seventeen doesn't feel quite right, chapter seventeen sucks. If you suspect readers might think your piece sucks, readers are going to write reviews on Amazon that begin, "It sucks."

When your doubt-guts are quiet, when you put some distance between you and your work, and upon returning are delighted by the way it sounds to your ear, you're done. The bad news is, nobody's watching at this point, no trumpets are blaring. Yes, you're in a stadium, but the seats are all empty. It's just you and a paintbrush. The difference now is, the paintbrush does what you tell it to do.

This post was inspired by conversations with Merry Monteleone, whose paintbrush knows its master.

Sometimes I Go to the Bathroom in the Dark

2011-06-08T07:56:00.003+02:00

The title isn't entirely metaphorical: sometimes I enter the bathroom and do my business without turning on the light. Because it's unlikely the toilet has migrated since my last visit, and why waste the electricity.

Unless you want to marvel at what you created.

Remember mailing off for real live sea horses advertised in comic books? And being told to wait six weeks for delivery? And checking the mailbox the very next day? Remember that? Me neither.

This is the approximate place, in my normal blog posts, where I indicate the direction I'm headed.

My father's second wife died of cancer. She was a sweetheart. The last time I saw her, she had just finished a program of chemo and had lost all her hair. I sat across the living room from her, watching her leaf through women's magazines, all the ones she could accumulate that illustrated different kinds of hairstyles. It's my last image of her, my final memory, an embossed video of a beautiful woman old enough to be my mother, who played tennis in a micro-miniskirt and got away with it brilliantly. Browsing a stack of magazines, smiling softly, her eyes lit up like a little girl, enjoying the prospect of choosing a hairstyle as soon as enough hair grew back to style it.

Later, while I was out of the country, she went away. She told my father she felt better than she had in a long time, even hopeful. Then she closed her eyes, went limp, and slid down the obliging canyon.

I can state my philosophical premises. Can you?

If my blog header still depicts a weedy creek and a concrete wall, that's where it took place. You know, the first kiss and all that stuff. Just to the right of the picture, just out of view. Somehow I feel obligated to describe groping in a literary or poetic way, but if you're a boy, you know what it feels like to grope, and if you're a girl, you know what it feels like to be groped. Substitute your experience here.

A couple of years ago she and I got in touch again, and in an endearingly sentimental gesture she drove out to the rural place in northern Illinois depicted above and visited the bank of the creek. Just to the right of the picture, just out of view. And stood remembering.

Intersections in space and time. Two vectors on a collision course. One launched an instant too late.

Up the hill from this very spot, donning eyeglasses for the first time, I looked up at the night sky and saw stars.

Once when I was in basic training, acting as platoon leader, I abandoned a man in the woods. Technically speaking. It had rained hard all day and my platoon had gotten hopelessly scattered. There was a place we were all supposed to regroup in just such a situation, but after most of the others had filed through, and returned disheartened to the bivouac, and I'd waited a couple of more hours, soaked and shivering, I figured the stragglers were back safe and sound and had merely bypassed the checkpoint. I trudged through the drizzle and mud and soggy, clinging brush to the shelter where my platoon huddled. All of my platoon. All but one.

The drill sergeant had no concept of happenstance, of rotten luck, of statistical randomness, of acts of God, of Schrödinger's Cat, of entropy, of hey, shit happens. You-don't-leave-a-man-in-the-woods. Period. No excuses, no exceptions. And he was right. The push-ups I had to do, in front of the entire battalion, lowered Fort Benning, Georgia an incrementally measurable distance closer to mean sea level. Which, for all the rain falling about me, could not have made the least fucking difference.

Imagine my dismay as I rose from the "leaning rest" position and spied the missing man watching from the fringe of the crowd.

Some things you just don't do. You don't take what's not yours, including credit. You don't hoard your wealth, your time, your experience, your elbow grease. You don't ignore anyone, even a stranger, in pain. You don't withhold your love when someone you love needs it. And if push-ups teach us anything, you don't leave a man in the woods.

This is the approximate place, in my normal blog posts, where the direction I'm headed begins to take shape, like blurred movie images, viewed by characters waking from dreams, slowly coming into focus.

Recently a surgeon made an incision in my right eardrum, to restore my hearing. Conjure up the loudest possible noise you can, all the souls in Hell and Purgatory combined, crying out in despondent anguish. Now multiply it by a hundred. That's the sound of a scalpel cutting through your eardrum.

There are three kinds of people: those who fall down and get back up, those who fall down and stay down, and those who maintain their balance all along. The first are known as winners, the second as losers, the third as pussies.

Five things I know for sure:

1. What I feel is so powerful, it will survive me.

2. The Golden Rule should replace all religious tomes.

3. The reason the world hasn't yet ended is because the Cubs haven't yet won the World Series.

4. Cats love birdsong too.

5. Ultimately we're all going to end up looking like Kurt Vonnegut. How many of us are going to end up writing like him?

I got drunk. Blinding drunk. Stumble-out-the-door drunk. Aimed my car down the highway, the German Autobahn. Without a seatbelt. I pressed the accelerator to the floor and closed my eyes.

The wind rattled the car, the wheels whined their protest. I understood the possibility I wouldn't die instantly, that I would get mangled and redistributed, that I would watch the blood run out of me, the life leak from me, that I would feel the agony of deep lacerations and shattered bones. But such was my preference. That justice be served. That I be punished for being the despicable man I was.

I kept my foot pressed to the floor, I kept my eyes closed. Seconds went by, then what seemed like minutes. I grew impatient. Shouldn't shards of glass be protruding from my chest by now? Shouldn't I be gagging on the steering wheel? Or is the transition from the here-now to the there-then so easy after all?

Does God lift you from one point in space-time and deposit you in another, without inconveniencing you to suffer the journey?

The wind went on rushing, the tires went on whistling discordantly. Finally I opened my eyes. My car was rocketing at a frightful speed down the highway, dead center in its lane. On an Autobahn normally dense with traffic. No other cars in sight.

Road signs stretched past as though distorted by relativistic dynamics. Stars perched on the horizon before me, growing no closer, no closer, no closer. I let up on the accelerator and drifted into the emergency lane. When my car came to a stop I buried my face in my arms and wept.

Happiness is nothing more than peace of mind. Peace of mind is nothing more than accepting things the way they are. Accepting things the way they are is nothing more than a choice one makes.

Are you sure you never ordered real live sea horses from a comic book? Am I the only one?

This is the approximate place, in my normal blog posts, where you finally get what I'm trying to say. Sometimes I don't bother turning on the light when I go to the bathroom. There just doesn't seem to be any point.

Crystal Gazing with Mark Terry: the Future of Publishing

2011-06-04T16:12:00.002+02:00

Mark Terry is the bestselling author of the Derek Stillwater thriller novels, as well as several stand alone mysteries, thrillers, and short stories. He's here today as part of his blog tour to promote The Valley of Shadows, which will be published June 7 and is already available for pre-order.

As far as I can tell, my 17-year-old son still wants to be a writer. (That’s changed somewhat. He still writes regularly and often, but he’s planning on majoring in digital media arts and working in TV or film. To me that’s something of a double or triple-threat. If he could get hired doing digital animation for Marvel Studios or Industrial Light & Magic, I think he’d be as happy as a pig in shit). But he wants to write, too. And he’s good at it.

So, here we are in 2011, and I’ve been in or around fiction publishing one way or another for 20 years or so, and so what advice would I be able to give him about the publishing industry?

Hell. I don’t know if by the time Ian graduates from college in 2016 or 2017 or so if there’ll even be a recognizable publishing industry. There are folks who are discussing the end of PUBLISHING-AS-WE-KNOW-IT and there are others who just say the big publishers will adapt, blah, blah, blah.

I think it’s entirely possible that if Ian decides in a few years to publish a novel or something, that it will be a perfectly acceptable approach to e-book self-publish for Amazon Kindle and other platforms. Not only “perfectly acceptable,” which suggests I might have some regrets about that approach, but “the accepted approach.”

I. Don’t. Know.

I’ve got feet in both camps now, but in five or ten years, who knows? After all the recent brouhaha (how often do you read that word?) about Barry Eisler turning down a $500,000 advance to publish two books with St. Martin’s Press, and he and JA Konrath making a big deal about self-publishing, Barry turned around and accepted a similar advance to publish paper books with a new publishing arm of Amazon, while still e-self-publishing. And this all happened within a matter of a few weeks!

There was all sorts of talk at the recent BEA about the deal and about an offer by someone to buy Barnes & Noble, but one of the things bandied about was that Barry Eisler and Amazon were expecting to use the paper books as loss-leaders that worked as an advertisement for e-books. (The Amazon publishing venture wants to have other book publishers do the paper publishing, although it’s been pointed out that getting a bookstore to stock books whose primary purpose is to drive readers to e-books is a fairly hard-sell).

Which all comes down to the one piece of advice I could give Ian: learn to write well.

Everything else is probably secondary.

Thoughts?

(Steve says, I'm furthering this discussion in comments. Come join us.)

About The Valley of Shadows: A raid on a Pakistan Al-Qaeda cell recovers two laptops. When the computers' booby-traps are defused and the computers decrypted and translated, they indicate that Al-Qaeda has planned a series of simultaneous attacks in five U.S. cities involving potential dirty bombs, biological weapons and maybe even a nuclear weapon-on Election Day. Derek Stillwater, troubleshooter for the Department of Homeland Security, is assigned to a multi-jurisdictional Special Terrorism Activity Response Team (START) to locate the weapon and terrorists in Los Angeles and prevent the attack. They have two days. But as they close in on their targets, Derek begins to think that the intelligence they gathered is a sideshow to distract them from the real target-one of the two candidates for President of the United States.

"Terry's work is closing in fast on grabbing that big-action, ticking-clock thriller franchise market." —James Grady, author of Six Days of the Condor

Tavernier's Last Hurrah

2011-06-03T13:10:00.016+02:00

My debut novel, The Tavernier Stones, was published a year ago. Today I'm promoting it for the last time. Please indulge my sentimentality.

Tavernier is "ebook of the day" at Kindle Nation. My publisher graciously and courageously granted my request to reduce the ebook (Kindle) price from $9.99 to $2.99. I described my rationale in a video here. KN will conduct more marketing blasts in both July and August, but they'll be on their own. I think I've tapped my community more than enough.

Last month Tavernier was awarded an Independent Publisher (IPPY) gold medal. It completes a circle for me, one that started a year ago with my first ever review—an awful one from Publishers Weekly. I needed all the strength I had to smile my way past that.

During the year that followed I tried every online marketing technique I could think of, including some I had little faith in. I didn't want to be able to say, afterwards, that I hadn't given my book all the opportunity it could stand. My advance was earned out within eight months. I did my job. One of these days I'll write a "lessons learned" post and detail what did and didn't work for me. My notions about book marketing are radically different from what they were a year ago.

So anyway, on the last day of the Transcendentally Titillating Tavernier Tour, I'm going to watch The Tavernier Stones climb the Amazon Kindle sales rankings and see how high it can go. Forgive me for updating the following screen shot as necessary; it took me years to get from conceiving the project while staring at my bathroom tiles (you have to read the book to understand the significance) to sitting in front of my computer tonight, clicking the refresh button, remembering everything I went through to get here:

Go on, advise me all you want, it won't do a bit of good

2011-05-26T17:50:00.004+02:00

For some reason female colleagues have long felt the need to advise me about romance. One told me, "Always wear a sweater. Girls can't resist guys in sweaters." I wouldn't know; sweaters make me feel itchy, and I'd just as soon chew a rock as put one on. If there's any girl out there who would have jumped my bones, had I been wearing a sweater, well, my bones regret having disappointed your superficial libido. Rent a gorilla, dress him in a cardigan, and enjoy.

A few women said, during my dating days, "Just keep asking. Girls like guys who don't give up." My experience was somewhat different: girls threw parties when I gave up. They put lampshades on their heads and danced the Charleston. They fucked every other guy they knew, just to celebrate.

One colleague said, "Steve, visit a park, one populated with women walking their dogs. Bring a notebook and pen. Write feverishly in the notebook, wearing an expression of passionate anguish. You'll get laid."

I take writing materials with me when I walk, but I prefer to walk in the cemetery, and visit departed friends. I can report that at least one of two postulates is irrefutably true: either cemeteries are target-poor environments, or I'm the ugliest guy who happens to be sitting in front of the mausoleum, writing feverishly in his notebook. In cemeteries, nobody gets better looking at closing time.

One generous and compassionate colleague, who knew I hadn't boned anyone since the Eisenhower administration, sought to construct a list of potential candidates. I do not have a poker face. I lose my shirt when I play poker, so honest and revealing are my twitches, gasps, and writhing spasms. She snatched the list away and said, "Fine, jerk yourself off."

Don't mind if I do.

On Facebook, in the relationship category, I say "It's complicated." Actually it's not. My right hand and my ardently hopeful Euphemism for Manhood have fallen into a simple and highly predictable routine.

So what's my point? I have none, to tell you the truth. I consider love to be eternal, even surviving death. If you're a friend or colleague, and you know of someone who doesn't equate love with a sweater or a hairy chest, by all means, lay your wisdom on me. I'm rather skeptical of advice nowadays, but I'm a sucker for all people—boys and girls alike—who think cemeteries are peaceful places to write, who close their umbrellas when the rain picks up strength, and who stay up all night just to hear the birds herald the dawn.

Memorial Day

2011-05-25T21:47:00.002+02:00

This is a repost from November 2008, titled "A Trade is Out of the Question." I've now lived almost half my life outside my native America. Once I had the privilege of describing military service to the staff of a publishing company, none of whom had served in the military. When I said I wouldn't trade my time in the U.S. Army Infantry for a Ph.D., the room broke out in laughter.

Monday is Memorial Day. Laugh all you want. The right to laugh is granted to you by soldiers who are willing, and sometimes called, to give their lives to defend it.

I love being a writer. There have been times I wished I were something else, for instance when I've paced my room in frustration, grasping vainly for that one elusive and taunting yet indispensable word. Most of the time, though, I wouldn't trade being a writer for anything. I create worlds out of nothing. I populate them with characters who triumph and fail, who love and lose. The events I orchestrate never actually happened, yet they stand for all the poignant episodes that have taken place in countless lives long since forgotten by time. Much as every ocean wave is a consequence of every other, and of the first, we are moved by the ripples in the spiritual ether that are left in the wake of every living being. When I write I amplify selected waves.

I think everyone should want to be a writer. That's how much I love being one.

I love being a parent. There have been times I wished I were something else, for instance when my daughter was in the Terrible Twos and discovered that throwing a bowl of soup at the curtains would contribute to her merriment. Most of the time, though, I wouldn't trade being a parent for anything. I'm going to live forever. And my mortal life is enriched in a way no childless person can understand; it's more than love, it's more than family, it's more than a mere willingness to fling yourself in front of an onrushing train, if doing so would slow the train enough to spare your child's life. It's a radical identity transformation. I'm no longer Steve. I'm Papa. Steve still inhabits my soul, like a childhood memory, but Papa is the guy who plays with Barbies, helps with math homework, and wages war against the ogres of the night.

I think everyone should want to be a parent. That's how much I love being one.

I love being an American. There have been times I wished I were something else, for instance when my country attacked another without provocation, or denied equal rights to all. To say the U.S. government has made mistakes is like saying Wrong Way Riegels cost his team some yardage. Most of the time, though, I wouldn't trade being an American for anything. America was the first country founded on principles rather than the rule of a despot. And those principles, to which the founders pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor, are every bit as sturdy and vibrant today as the day they were conceived: Equality under the law. An entitlement to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Truths considered self-evident. Rights considered unalienable; no man, no institution, no government, no army, no power on Earth can take them away.

I think everyone should want to be an American. That's how much I love being one.

Warping a Bit of Time and Space with Jon VanZile

2011-05-22T16:19:00.000+02:00

Jon VanZile has been writing since his earliest memory—his first story suspiciously took place on a planet called Narnia, but he figured since it was a space opera, it wasn't technically ripping off C.S. Lewis. Since then, he's written hundreds of articles and makes a living as a prolific ghostwriter and editor. He visits us today to answer questions about his debut middle grade novel, ZIG ZEPHYR AND THE FOREVER DIAMOND.

What would you do with a billion dollars?  

That’s the exact question Zig Zephyr asks himself when he inherits his family’s fortune. But money isn’t the only thing he inherits. Zig also gets his grandfather’s coded journal . . . the same grandfather who died escaping from the world’s most famous prison after being convicted of stealing the priceless Forever Diamond. “Save the family!” his grandfather scribbled. “Build the machine!”

Zig quickly unlocks the journal’s first riddle and discovers a secret lab on his family’s estate, where he finds plans for his grandfather’s greatest invention: a time machine.  

Zig and his friends soon embark on a journey through time that takes them to battlefields and beaches, inventors’ labs and the cradle of the American Revolution.

But can unraveling his grandfather’s impossible riddles across the centuries finally reveal the fate of the Forever Diamond? And will Zig ever be able to come home again?

Steve: Hi Jon. We might as well address the most important question first, and not keep our readers waiting breathlessly: do you believe time travel is possible? Theoretically? Practically? Hopefully?

Jon: Hey, Steve. Thanks for agreeing to let me take over your blog for a bit. And for the record, I'm half-convinced Erica used a Scrabble dictionary in your game (Actually, I doubt it, but I'm shameless when it comes to sucking up).

So . . . time travel. I read recently that humankind spent its first five millennia trying to conquer distances. It used to be all about making it across the oceans, making it around the world, getting to space, whatever. But now we've effectively conquered distance, literally and virtually. I spent 2 hours the other day on Skype with a friend in London. Full video, real-time sound, and he carried his laptop around so I got a tour of his flat just as if I was there. No cost. It's mind-boggling.

Now instead of distance, we are bending our energy to conquering time, and that's a tiger of a whole different stripe.

Time is an interesting concept that only seems concrete when you aren't really thinking about it. Sure, days and seconds and months and years dribble by and it seems to make perfect, logical sense. But in reality, time is a much more elastic concept than that. In fact, it's not constant at all—and I'm not even talking about our perception of time shifting during moments of high stress (like when you drop your Mom's favorite crystal vase and it takes three days to reach the floor and break). I mean in actual reality: time is variable. It is possible (and even common) to accelerate time with speed.

But here's the interesting part. We can accelerate time, so we can make time go forward, but so far, there's no plausible framework under which time can go backward. It's one of physics' little mind games. So perhaps it will be possible one day to rapidly accelerate time and travel into the future more quickly. This would be useful, say, during bad dates, arguments with your spouse, and deep-space travel. But going back in time, I'm afraid, will likely remain fiction.

Which begs the question: would you even want to go back in time? And my answer to that is absolutely yes. Of course I would. Who wouldn't?

Steve: Where in history would you go?

Jon: This question has always been a problem for me, because my temptation is to go somewhere I’d probably get killed, like when the meteor struck the earth that killed the dinosaurs or when Vesuvius blew up. I have a weakness for spectacle. So where would I really go? I’d like to see some dinosaurs in a primeval rainforest, I guess.

Steve: "The prison guards never looked up because nobody would be stupid enough to try the roof." Great first line. How important are first lines? How many did Zig have before you settled on this one?

Jon: Interestingly enough, it only had two, and the first one is still in the book, just in a later chapter. I do love first lines, though, and I frequently can't start a book until I get a good first line. I’m one of those gut readers that a book has to hit me right almost immediately or I set it down. I have little tolerance for books that don’t hold my interest. Incidentally, I read the Tavernier Stones in two days, I think, and thought it got off to a very strong start.

Steve: How did you come up with the name Zig Zephyr?

Jon: Zig occurred to me within minutes of the plot itself, and this was one of those projects where the whole plot basically comes at once. I tweaked it a bit here and there, and cut a long set piece from a first draft, but otherwise, it was always a time travel book into American history and it was always Zig Zephyr. Interestingly, I knew from the very first day what Zig looked like, too, and it’s nothing like me or anyone in my family. He was always a short, somewhat stocky, sort of beetle-browed kid.

Steve: Some novels don't stick well in my memory, even shortly after I've finished them. Yours is still vivid to me, from beginning to end. How does a writer create lasting imagery in a reader's mind? Or do you just fly by the seat of your pants?

Jon: That’s a great question. Great question. Is that a good enough answer?

No, really, I like imagery almost as much as anything else. Truth is, character is hard for me to get right, and I consider my dialogue to be serviceable. But I love a good setting. I love the sensory parts of setting . . . the feel, the smell, the temperature. My wife says I carry this over into my daily life: I’m often barely aware of people in my surroundings, but you can believe I’ll never miss a good sunset.

Steve: You decided to publish Zig independently. What led you to that decision?

Jon: Long story with a short answer. This is the original “almost” book. I shopped it traditionally first, and got serious interest from my dream publisher. We went through two rounds of revisions without a contract and discussions on the book went all the way up to the publisher level. Then, suddenly, it was November 2008 and I sent in my final manuscript. That month, the US economy collapsed, publishers froze, and poor Zig got stuck in the middle. They rejected it, after almost two years of work. It was heartbreaking. And I don’t want to give the impression it was PURELY because of timing—they cited other reasons also—but no matter the whys, the end result was a book that didn’t sell. I never shopped it again after that. I had another book ready, and I just didn’t have it in me. So I shelved Zig for another two years, and in the meantime, the publishing industry imploded and the e-book revolution happened. Finally, I felt like it was time to release Zig into the world, so I decided to self-publish it. Why self-publishing instead of trying to go back down the traditional road? Well, in part because I didn’t want to make this my life’s work. I wanted to let Zig go.

I knew, by the way, when I did this that there still isn't a market for middle-grade fiction in e-books. And I'm OK with that. Some day there will be, and Zig will be waiting.

Steve: To what extent do you agree with Joe Konrath's prediction that traditional publishing is doomed? That one day soon, the typical book will reach the typical reader directly from the typical author, without publishing houses guarding the gate?

Jon: Hmm, another good question. In brief, I think this business will be irrecognizable in five years, but in ways that perhaps no one has fully predicted yet. I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the future, publishers ONLY wanted to buy books from unknown authors who had a successful track record of self-publishing, kind of like they demand a platform from nonfiction authors. I mean, if you owned a publishing company, wouldn’t you rather bet on a horse you knew could run?

Steve: You offer editing services for indie authors. Can you tell us about that?

Jon: I’ve partnered with our mutual friend Erica Orloff in an editorial services company called Editing for Authors. I’ve actually been working with self-published writers for a long time now as a contract editor for the big print-on-demand companies. When the e-book revolution hit, it seemed like a natural business to start. And I’m always on the side of writers. Always. So my hope is to help self-published authors by providing high-quality editing.

Steve: If you could communicate one piece of advice—one sentence—to every aspiring writer in the country, what would it be? (Don't panic, they're not all listening.)

Jon: Read a lot.

Steve: Thanks for stopping by! I enjoyed Zig thoroughly and will be first in line to buy your next novel. And I won't tell Erica of your Scrabble blasphemy.

Jon: Thanks!

Download Zig Zephyr and the Forever Diamond to your PC or Kindle for only $2.99.

Listen to the Rain

2011-05-14T09:33:00.009+02:00

This is a repost from June 2009. My mother died ten years ago today.

My copy of the signed contract for The Tavernier Stones just arrived in the mail. It's been a long time coming. There are a squillion things I want to say about the process, things I've been waiting to say until I was near the end. I want to start with the first rejection I ever received.

It wasn't a rejection for this novel, rather for an earlier one, one that doesn't exist anymore. Still, it was my first shot at publishing a book-length manuscript. I didn't know much about agents—I still thought only established writers had them—so I sent my manuscript directly to a publisher. Just one, because I thought it only fair. It's how I apply for jobs, too.

I don't want to say which publisher. Call it Rinky Dink Press. I gave them the best I had, and I presented it the best way I knew how.

At the time I was an Army contractor with an office off-base. I had to drive about fifteen minutes each day to check my personal mail. One day, a few weeks after submitting my manuscript (the best I had) to Rinky Dink Press (the best way I knew how) I found a form rejection slip in my mailbox:

Dear Author: After giving your manuscript careful consideration . . .

I wasn't surprised. I figured I'd be rejected a few times. Still, that first one hurt. I drove back to my office, and as I parked in my parking space a thunderstorm struck. The rain fell hard, pounding the roof of my car. I didn't have an umbrella with me so I decided to wait until the storm subsided.

There's no better opportunity to reflect on things than when you're trapped in your car in a thunderstorm and your very first rejection slip is on the passenger seat next to you.

My Mom introduced me to books. She started me on Dr. Seuss and the rest, then progressively notched up the sophistication as I grew older. I wish I could remember all the books she bought for me, and recommended to me (she belonged to both Literary Guild and Book-of-the-Month Club). Some of my favorites are still on my shelf. Some authors are famous, like Robert Louis Stevenson, some less so, like Meindert DeJong. I cannot recall disliking a single title I read as I was growing up. Maybe that says something about me, maybe it says something about my Mom.

I remember the moment the possibility occurred to me to become a writer, specifically a novelist. I was twelve or thirteen and rereading a novel by Leon Uris that my Mom had given to me. I told her, wouldn't it be great to be able to write such books? She answered that doing so was merely a choice one made. The answer jolted me, because until then I'd always thought writing was something only writers did. A few years later, after an Air Force Academy nominating committee turned me down because of my poor eyesight, I made a choice.

The thunderstorm finally eased into a gentle rain. I snatched the rejection slip from the passenger seat and dashed across the parking lot to the office door. When I reached my desk I found a message from my Dad. My secretary was hovering nearby. "Call him right now," she said. I did. He told me my Mom had just died.

She won't see the printed version of The Tavernier Stones. Oh, I'll leave a copy on her grave; it will get rained on, and the pages will stick together, and the cover will fade under a Kentucky sun. But she won't get to enjoy the product of all her book purchases, her subtle prodding, her inspiration.

On the other hand, she was there for my first rejection, speaking to me in a rain shower. And that's when my determination to succeed was born.

Open Mic with Alan Orloff

2011-05-09T13:14:00.000+02:00

Leave it to Alan Orloff to write a mystery novel in which the first-person narrator is a standup comic. Killer Routine has just been released by Llewellyn/Midnight Ink in paperback and Kindle editions.

Alan's first novel, Diamonds for the Dead, was short listed for an Agatha Award. He has a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Maryland and an MBA from MIT. He's worked on everything from newspapers to submarines.

Now he writes. And he doesn't follow the beaten path:

Comedian Channing Hayes survived a tragic auto accident that claimed the life of his fiancée, Lauren. Physically and emotionally scarred, he’s put his performing career on hold, resigned to getting laughs vicariously as co-owner of The Last Laff Comedy Club. There, he instructs Lauren’s sister Heather in the fine art of stand-up.

When Heather skips out on her set during the club’s comedy showcase, Channing searches for his AWOL protégée. Then Heather’s ex-lovers start turning up dead—and Channing must fight to keep Heather from being the next hit in this deadly line-up.

Steve: My favorite aspect of Killer Routine was the insight into the world of standup comedy. What kind of research did you do to prepare for the novel? Attend a lot of shows? Interview comics?

Alan: The whole reason I decided to write about a standup comic was so I could turn on Comedy Central and call it research. Bada bing. Actually, I met with a local standup comic and he told me all about how comics really are. Very enlightening. And a bit frightening. I’ve also been to open mic nights which can be quite painful (and I’m talking about being a spectator!).

Steve: You're a funny guy. Did you ever want to be a standup? Are you living that life vicariously in this series? Or is it just backdrop?

Alan: When I was about fifteen years old, my family was on vacation in the Catskills and I snuck into a midnight comedy show. I laughed so hard my side ached the next day. Of course, since I was only fifteen, any time the comic said anything dirty, he had me in stitches. Ever since then, I’ve been fascinated by comedians. I think there is such a fine line between comedy and tragedy, and many of the famous comics have led turbulent lives. Great fodder for a mystery/suspense series.

You asked if I’ve ever wanted to be a standup. No, too chicken. But I decided to step out of my comfort zone during my current promo tour. I’ve developed a “simulated” open mic routine, which I performed at my book launch (and will perform at a few more events). No one threw any rotten vegetables my way, so I’m counting it as a success. But don’t worry, I’m sticking to writing.

Steve: The writing is highly polished. The dialogue is crisp. Is that just the way it spills from your pen, or do you rewrite a lot?

Alan: Thanks for the compliments, but if you saw my first drafts you’d use words like stilted, sluggish, and putrid to describe my writing (in fact, my first draft might actually cause physical harm to your eyes). So I rewrite a lot. A whole lot.

Steve: You started out life as a mechanical engineer, and this is one facet we have in common: I majored in math. Does your technical background help or hurt your writing? Do the English majors have an advantage over guys like us?

Alan: I believe the English majors do have an advantage over us, at least when it comes to the prose. I mean, they know how to wield a mighty gerund. When it comes to the storytelling, maybe not so much. What do you think? (BTW, your math background hasn’t held back your writing one bit. You, my friend, know how to write.) I honestly can’t say my technical background has helped my writing at all. Now, if I wrote a book about a murder in an appliance factory that involved a nebbishy guy with glasses…

Steve: Why mysteries? Is that the diet you grew up on?

Alan: I’ve always been a voracious reader, but not of the classics. My tastes ran (and still run) toward genre fiction. As a teen, I read a lot of science fiction. Then I moved on to horror. When I was in my twenties and working near Boston, a manager of mine turned me on to Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series. I’ve been reading crime fiction ever since. And what’s that saying? You write what you read?

Steve: So what's it like being short listed for an Agatha Award on your very first novel?

Alan: Very cool. It was an honor to be nominated alongside Avery Aames (the winner!), Laura Alden, Amanda Flower, and Sasscer Hill.

Steve: What's next?

Alan: Well, tomorrow, I’ve got some bills to pay and I may go shopping. Longer term, I’ve got the next book in the Last Laff series coming out April 2012. It’s called Deadly Campaign, and it’s about an unsavory congressional campaign that Channing Hayes is asked to “investigate” on a friend’s behalf.

Thanks so much for interviewing me for your most excellent blog—it’s always a pleasure to connect with you and your wonderfully-twisted blog readers!

Steve: Thank you! My wonderfully-twisted blog readers are only imprinting on me. And if you ever write a story about a murder in an appliance factory that involves a nebblishy guy with glasses, I'll be first in line to read it.

The Poetry of Joaquin Carvel

2011-05-07T13:10:00.002+02:00

I'd like to introduce everyone to the poetry of Joaquin Carvel. The three poems below are the three most recently published on his blog. They are reproduced here with his permission. If you like what you see, pay him a visit, scroll down, and read some more. Better yet, subscribe to the blog through your reader. Joaquin posts intermittently, but his poems are well worth the wait; I've yet to read one I didn't like. He has also published a collection of fifty poems available here.

Please give this guy a shot. I think he deserves it.

—Morgan—

Had a lucky silver dollar
stamped in eighteen eighty-four
kept it with me
in my wallet
maybe fifteen years or more

It was with me when I found out
they had kicked me out of school
and the day
that I got hustled
down in Austin, shootin’ pool

On the day that I got married
and the day that I came home
to a pretty note
she left me
and some other guy’s cologne

On the night that I got cold-cocked
For a stupid smart remark
and the time
I got arrested
just for pissin’ in the park

On the day I got evicted
and the day that I got canned
and the day
the IRS said
that I owed ‘em seven grand -

So I sold that silver dollar
for a fifth of sour mash
and a pack of
Hav-A-Tampas
and a couple bucks in cash -

By the bottom of the bottle
as I drank it in my truck
couldn’t stop myself
from smilin’ -
guess I’m finally
outta luck.

—Egress Largesse—

Tell me that you
bought a card
and I’ll pretend you sent it.

I’ll say it was eloquent
if you pretend
you meant it.

We can tell our friends
we’re friends
to ease their apprehension,

say we didn’t hit the roof,
that it was more
ascension.

Tell me that you
bought a card
and I’ll pretend it flatters.

I’ll say that I wish you well
if you pretend
it matters.

—Crossrode—

Spun out at the intersection
of Mistakes
and Misdirection

pealing tires pouring smoke
as the brakes
howl through the spokes

twisted mouth of the suspension
pulled apart by
torque and tension

it’s a cold and quiet night
not another soul in sight
just a silent swirl of dust
falling back to road and rust

Closed my eyes, held on and skated
through the cyclone
I created

wheel slipping through my fist
wrenching something
in my wrist

hoped and prayed and swore and guessed
‘til it shuddered
to a rest

it’s a cold and quiet night
not another soul in sight
signal flashing overhead
dim and doubtful pools of red

Didn’t think to try the engine
left the keys
in the ignition

just collected what I could
of my shredded wits
and stood

didn’t even shut the door
tried to stagger
to Before

it’s a cold and quiet night
not another soul in sight
trying to get where I can’t go
from someplace that I don’t know

Somewhere southeast of Disgrace
when a streetlamp
lit my face

on a corner, felt a breeze
read the signs and
hit my knees;

broke down at the intersection
of Renewal
and Redemption

Leila Marie

2011-04-30T17:59:00.009+02:00

In August of 2009 I blogged briefly about my gorjus friend Cyndi Hendrickson, whose newborn daughter Leila Marie had just died from TTTS, Twin-to-Twin Transfusion Syndrome. TTTS is caused by a disproportionate allocation of blood between a pair of twins and is usually fatal to at least one of them. Leila's twin, Chloe Bea, was born alive at 1 lb, 7 oz. She fought a long, soul crushing battle to survive, every bit as heroically as a gladiator.

And won.

When Leila died I felt awkward blogging about it, and especially posting the photograph below. In fact I announced in the post that I would only keep it up for a day or so. I wanted to be supportive of Cyndi but didn't know what to say. Chloe was touch-and-go, and you don't want to reassure the mother the daughter will be fine—if the daughter might not be fine. In Chloe's case it sometimes felt like cheering a basketball team that's four points down with three seconds left on the clock.

Fortunately for Chloe, no one told her you can't score four points in three seconds. Because you can, you most certainly can, if you believe you can.

I've since talked to Cyndi who has given me her blessings to repost the photograph and say anything I wish.

No words I could possibly write would describe what happened more vividly than this picture, nor would do better justice to the sorrow evident in Cyndi's face. If you knew Cyndi you would know she always smiles, always radiates:

Whenever Cyndi speaks of her family she includes Leila: We are: Dave (Daddy), Cyndi (Mommy), Solana (Kindergartener), and identical twins Chloe (former micro-preemie) and Leila (angel). Cyndi isn't in denial or anything; she just treats her TTTS angel in a natural, healthy way, a way more parents might consider treating their lost children. I once found myself speaking regularly to parents who had lost a child, not because I was especially close to them, rather because their close friends and relatives were uncomfortable talking about death, and even considered the subject taboo. Of course it's anything but taboo.

But that's not what I came here to say.

I take daily walks in my local cemetery. There's a section devoted to newborns, infants, and toddlers. Many of the markers indicate that the birth date and death date are the same. Yet some dates are as many as several years apart. Most of the graves are meticulously tended (in Germany, the families of the deceased are responsible for grave upkeep); I find toys and stuffed animals leaning against the granite slabs. It's heart wrenching.

Some graves have obviously been abandoned, even shortly after the burial. I can't help wondering what the kid would think: It's bad enough I only get to live thirty-six hours, worse yet is to be forgotten altogether.

Is the value of a life proportional to the number of hours it spent breathing oxygen? Picking dandelions? Paying bills? I don't think so.

But that's not what I came here to say, either.

In my online writing community, we often discuss why we write. It's a funny question, if you think about it: do brick layers sit around discussing why they lay bricks? But of course, what we really mean to ask ourselves is, why do it for so little pay, or no pay at all. Or only in the hope that someday, one day, there might be pay. Brick layers don't struggle with such questions, so far as I know.

Most of us want to entertain, and indeed it takes a lot of gumption to make up a story and ask strangers to set a few hours aside to read it. You have to be something of a ham to enter this business. But to be honest, although it's true that if you entertain well, you'll likely be successful, and if you don't you likely won't, ultimately we don't write "merely" to entertain. Or to get rich. Or even to answer a calling.

We write because souls like Leila Marie must not have struggled and died in vain.

The grief we bear and the joy we relish must somehow survive us. Every child's laughter we've ever heard, every train whistle, every whip-poor-will's enigmatic call, must be shared with everyone within reach of our words. What we witness, experience, learn, and discover must not accompany us meekly and silently to the grave.

I've loved and grieved so hard in my life, somewhere along the line something finally broke inside of me, like turning up the volume too loud will damage the speakers, so they never sound quite the same again. What I feel must continue to exist after I'm gone, if only in words that evoke similar feelings in the people who read them. What I say must not dissipate in the breeze, or be dispersed among the static echoes of all who have spoken before me.

We write to share pieces of ourselves, moments from our past, people we've known. To mold an influential acquaintance into a fictional character. Enough of him is real that—by extension—the flesh and blood version actually touches the reader, however indirectly. If my writing about Leila in this blog post touches you, it changes you, even if only subtly. You, in turn, change others as you interact with them.

We are all affected permanently by a little girl who barely weighed a pound and never saw the light of day.

I sometimes wonder if instantaneous communication is possible. Like dominoes laid end-to-end, when you push the first one, the last one moves instantly, no matter how far away it is. Do our words and actions have immediate consequences throughout the universe, or must we wait for the waves we create to reach distant shores? Everyone leaves ripples and waves in his or her wake. It's my duty as a writer to select some and amplify them.

It's your duty too. Ultimately the reason we write is to help tiny souls like Leila Marie live forever.

That's what I came here to say.

Biff One, Parrish Nothing

2011-04-17T13:58:00.002+02:00

I haven't talked about my early girlfriends much, except for Cathedral Gerl, who asked me to delete my posts about her. Which made me sad. But I understood.

I've been in love a very few times. Each time has ended in a bad place for one reason or another. One ended in death. If you think you aren't experiencing enough emotional suffering in your life I suggest you fall in love with someone who turns into a grease spot on the highway. I don't want to hear about your stopped-up toilet, your overdue mortgage payment, or your rejected manuscript: tell me about the love of your life, a boy or girl who got twisted and broken and squished when he or she lost control at the wheel.

About someone whose blood was washed into the roadside weeds by a gentle and indifferent rain.

The last time I fell in love, I got knocked down so hard, I will never, ever get up again. I'm finished.

Be reckless with your health, if you like; be reckless with your retirement funds; but damn you if you're reckless with Steve's heart.

There was a girl, a statuesque blond, a cocktail waitress where I worked as a cook; a nursing student earning money waiting tables for the summer. She was sharp and funny and beautiful, and I was naive enough to fall for her. She had a boyfriend I'll call Biff. To tell you the truth, his real name was even dumber, something like "Rock" or maybe even "Cock;" something that identified him as a low-dimensional pretty boy, the kind the girls always drop to their knees for.

Until they've been married a year or two, and they realize their husbands are making deposits in places other than the bank.

Turned out Cocktail Gerl liked me too. She made that clear. I was intelligent, if you don't mind my saying, and sensitive, and had a way with words. I enjoyed discussing philosophy. I could juggle! But there was a problem. I was a cook. When you're a nursing student who is sharp and funny and statuesque, you don't hook up with a cook, you hook up with Biff (or Rock, or Cock, or whomever) and devote yourself to him; even after you discover his penis is a time-share investment, at which time it's too late anyway to go back to the intelligent and sensitive guy (who can juggle!), because some nice girl has snagged him by then.

The boys get better looking at closing time, too.

Biff wore monogrammed shirts. Biff drove a convertible. Biff was a dick. The girls in his harem didn't seem to mind who he mounted, as long as he mounted them as well.

Cocktail Gerl was convinced she had to have Biff all to herself. She ended up with a lot of free time that summer, especially during evenings when Biff was squirting his seed into someone else, so I became something akin to her best gay friend. We did corny stuff like have picnics and go wading in ponds. Whenever it wasn't her turn with Biff, she called and asked me out. Most of my time with her was spent listening to her ache for Biff. I didn't mind all that much. I liked picnics.

Once she requested that I take her to a strip show. I'd never been to one, so I had to ask around. Turned out there was a regular thing going on in Joliet that was supposed to be pretty good, so I took her there. We sat in the darkness and watched a sequence of girls walk onto the stage and disrobe. I didn't get a thing out of it; the girls weren't even pretty. Cocktail Gerl was mesmerized.

Toward the end of the summer, as I was dropping her off at home after one kind of pond excursion or another, she said, "You can kiss me if you want to."

I wanted to. Her lips were soft and sensual and she smelled wonderful and I made a moment feel like a year. But as I pulled away I knew it would be the only kiss I'd ever get. She was throwing me a bone. I was a cook. I didn't wear monogrammed shirts or drive a convertible. I didn't have a harem.

You all know how this ends. Any one of you can finish the post for Steve. Nevertheless:

At the end of the summer Cocktail Gerl returned to college—and so did I. I became a chemistry major at the University of Illinois. Late in the semester she found out and wrote me a letter, throwing herself at my feet. She hadn't known, she declared, that I actually had a future beyond turning steaks in a broiler. She hadn't known, she confessed, that I actually had ambition and earning potential. She hadn't known, she pleaded, that I was actually a person . . . of quality!

I wrote back and told her very politely how much I appreciated her letter, and that I hadn't known, actually, how shallow a person could be. Besides, I had a new girlfriend by then. A girl who would have burst out laughing if some fuckhead in a convertible with B-i-f-f stitched to his shirt pocket offered her part time access to his heedless and undiscriminating boner. A girl deserving of love, rather than just desire.

A girl who earned that love, until an autumn rain rinsed her from the asphalt and a tactful breeze whisked her life force into the welcoming embrace of the trees.

Contrast

2011-04-12T09:41:00.006+02:00

I worked in four different jewelry stores. In each store there were pieces so expensive, they'd sat in the case for years, and no doubt continued to sit there long after I left. They're probably still on display, touched only when placed in the safe at night or when someone dusts their facets.

In each store there were pieces so ugly, they'd sat in the case for years, and no doubt continued to sit there long after I left. They're probably still on display, touched . . . well, never, since they don't go in the safe at night and no one bothers to dust them.

At first I wondered why a store would stock pieces that never sold, why the owner or manager would buy such jewelry in the first place. Turns out, one of the most effective ways to sell a commodity is to sandwich it between something ugly and something expensive. Next to the ugly thing it will look beautiful, and next to the expensive thing it will look affordable.

Hard to do with wineries, tropical islands, and surplus Atlas V rockets.

We judge things by contrasting them with other things. Susie is deemed pretty ultimately because she's prettier than Sally. Remove Susie from the square dance, and Sally rules the barn.

The girls get better looking at closing time.

Visual contrast is the province of the Art Kingdom, where every student learns that a hue is most visible and vibrant when placed adjacent to its complement (e.g., orange next to blue). But value, saturation, size, shape, spacing, orientation, and hierarchy can also be contrasted, and any student of mine who contrasted texture in a work of art would automatically get bumped up a grade.

It helps to flirt with the teacher.

The following is Ingres's portrait of the violinist Niccolo Paganini:

This is one of my favorite works of art, one I think hasn't received all the accolades it deserves. My scan doesn't do justice to the original (in the Louvre). In the debate between Ingres (form) and Delacroix (color), I'm an Ingres man all the way.

Notice how the face is drawn in exquisite detail, and the rest of the figure, even the violin, is sketched in rough outline. Ingres contrasted the detail in his drawing to make the face appear more real, more alive. Andrew Wyeth did the same in some of his works, which is one of the reasons he's my favorite modern artist.

Wyeth was an Ingres man too. Many of his paintings are almost monochrome. But that's a blog post for another day.

Contrast is good. Contrast is always welcome at the table. Contrast is our friend.

I don't draw or paint (so far as you know), I write. And I write very much with contrast in mind. This is the first paragraph of a flash fiction piece called "The Draftsman" I wrote for Clarity of Night:

Dinner was almost ready, so she peeked into his shop. He was leaning over the work bench, as usual. Toying with compass and protractor. Doodling. She looked over his shoulder and saw geometric figures he had sketched, objects with faces, edges, and terminating points.

My favorite comment to the piece began: "Wow. You have such a strong, clear style. It's particularly apparent in the first paragraph of "The Draftsman," with its varying sentence lengths, descriptive without being wordy . . ."

Thank you, Bekbek, whoever you are. Varying sentence lengths. Contrasting sentence lengths. But there's so much more than sentence length to contrast when you write.

There are sensations to contrast: the smell of an apple after you bite into it, the smell of fungus in the woods, just as night falls. The smell of burning leaves. The feel of tree bark, of wet sand beneath your feet, of naked flesh gliding under the palm of your hand.

I like writing about storms, because they serve so well as metaphors, and because getting caught in one contrasts so greatly with my ordinary routine. I know one's coming when I see the restless clouds roiling in. But I needn't look up; my primeval ancestors had to know it was going to rain even before they saw the clouds, and they've passed their genes to me. I taste the storm coming. I feel it in my knees. By the time thunder descends upon me, the storm is old news.

But the experience isn't. My string of dry days, of desk-bound days, of ordinary, to-do-list, pay-the-bills, brush-my-teeth, change-the-lightbulb days, is broken by jagged bolts of lighting scorching an irritable sky. Blitz. Sizzle. Crack. I'm drenched, and my clothes cling cold and wet to my skin. I lift my face to the dark and bruised vault above me, and laugh. Belly laugh. From deep down, where defiance and audacity spring, I laugh. Gimme-everything-you-got laugh.

The contrast is too beautiful not to celebrate. I raise my arms. I stomp through puddles. Because of all the things to experience in life, getting caught in a ferocious and unforgiving storm, one that pelts you mercilessly, refracts the scenery into a swimming blur, and reminds you never to take the simple and the natural for granted, ranks high, real high, right up there, near the top of all glorious adventure, and to think I started this post with "I worked in four different jewelry stores."

The Tavernier Stones: Ebook Price Reduced

2011-04-05T21:13:00.001+02:00

The Day Your Heart Breaks

2011-03-24T20:09:00.004+01:00

I stole the title from Heidi Willis, who wrote a very nice post about giving up on childhood dreams.

I wanted to be an astronaut. Granted, the choice wasn't very original, but at the age of ten originality didn't concern me, the stars and planets did. I was ten when I received my first eyeglasses. Until then I had only been able to see the brightest stars, maybe twenty or so. The first time I went outside at night wearing glasses the view took my breath away.

We lived in the country, where stars were dense and the term "light pollution" meant "lightly polluted" and nothing more. My late mother wrote a story once in which she compared watching the night sky to viewing a bright light through a threadbare blanket. And there you have it.

The age of ten is also when I got my first telescope.

There are any number of legitimate reasons we miss our youth. Life always seems simpler the further back you go, even if it's only due to editing. Also, the younger you are, the farther you are from those pesky cow horns. But what I miss most is experiencing glorious things for the first time, events that lose a little bit of their magic with each reiteration. One such event for me was pointing my telescope at Jupiter and seeing the four Galilean moons.

Stumbling from the front yard into the family room, I breathlessly described the apparition to my family and invited them to come see for themselves. No one turned away from the TV.

I poured through books on astronomy, caressing photographs and illustrations of the planets. I dreamed of collecting rocks on distant worlds. When I was fifteen I began flying lessons, and when I turned sixteen, the youngest allowed, I had my first solo flight. I was still too young to drive a car, so my dad had to take me to the airport.

Now if you recall, the title of this post is "The Day Your Heart Breaks."

It was the eyesight. I should have known it would be a problem, but I was in denial. How could something so mundane as prescription eyewear stand between a boy and his dream? The day my heart broke was the day I heard back from my U.S. senator's Air Force Academy nominating committee, announcing that my nearsightedness disqualified me for admission. At the time, most astronauts were still military test pilots.

I went for a walk in the woods that evening and gave myself time to grieve. The crickets matched the stars in number, or so their racket made it seem, and a Bobwhite called incessantly. I tried to track down a Whippoorwill, but the sound of its call remained distant no matter how far I wandered. Finally I went home and trudged upstairs to my room.

That's when it struck me how many novels I owned. It was as though they'd been invisible the whole time. Novels filled bookshelves, novels were piled on the floor, novels spilled across my nightstand. Lined up on the headboard of my bed were novels. Novels were stacked in the closet. They even occupied a couple of dresser drawers. There was no room on my desk to do anything, because its surface was covered with novels.

Turns out, a Whippoorwill is as elusive as any star. A cricket bug's mossy world is as vast, to the cricket bug, as the heavens are to us. And drawing comparisons between the majestic vault of night and a threadbare blanket is every bit as noble as trailblazing frontiers on Ganymede and Callisto.

My Funeral

2011-03-15T18:41:00.007+01:00

We mourn death even though it's a necessary part of life, without which our species can't survive, can't benefit from replacement and natural selection. But why not mourn birth, and celebrate death? After all, given the bullshit a kid must suffer for decades after his debut on Earth, maybe we've got the grieving and the celebrating mixed up.

Probably both events ought to be parties.

I have a morbid fascination with the after-death (I don't believe in an after-life). Sometimes I think I want a grave and a marker, because the marker would be made of rock, and if you know anything about me, you know that rock is good, rock is always welcome at my table, rock is our friend. However, I like to take walks in cemeteries, and the one rock I would want casting a shadow on my plot is already being used by someone else.

We are not rude. We will let him keep it.

Sometimes I want to be buried without casket in the earth, and have a tree planted over me. The tree would be nourished by my remains; I would live on in its leaves and branches. I can envision cemeteries designed on this model, and funerals that consist of the planting of a sapling. Just in case it turns out this way, I want a maple.

Having said all that, my preference is to be cremated and have my ashes scattered here:

It's a small lake in Minnesota. I'll leave directions to it in my will. I'll also leave enough money to fund travel and lodging for my blogging buddies. Everyone who calls me Steve is invited. If you're still calling me Stephen by the time my curtain falls, you can watch the end on pay-per-view.

Trabbis will be in charge of the grill. Richard will select the wines. I hope he won't be offended if I say I never much cared for pinot noir, and never understood the hype.

I'm Norwegian, so everyone will be issued a Viking-style cow horn:

Pete will kick a soccer ball into the air as a signal to commence blowing the horns. I'm budgeting for several hundred people, so ya'll ought to make a racket.

Blow with gusto. Blow like it's the last time in your life you'll ever blow a cow horn at a funeral (which, statistically speaking, is rather likely). Blow in proportion to your gratitude for the trip to Minnesota, the steaks, the booze. Blow like you're heralding Armageddon. Blow like the force of your breath alone will propel me to Heaven.

Blow so loudly, the invisible sky wizard Himself will hear you.

When the noise dies down, Erica will read a prayer:

Hey you, God. Sorry to disturb your nap. We are pleased to present Steve.

It's time to abdicate your throne. Hand over your scepter, stand aside. Given all the misery suffered on Earth during your reign, we figure Steve can do a better job. Like, duh. Take your angels and harps with you, they never did anyone any good. But leave the desk. Steve likes lots of drawers.

On your way out, summon Mohandas Gandhi, would you? He and Steve need to talk. And FYI, lunch today will be with Mark Twain.

Evil Among Us

2011-03-06T10:42:00.018+01:00

Some of us are trying to help a fellow aspiring writer, Melanie Hooyenga, attract readers to her blog. The occasion is the one-year anniversary of her return to the U.S. after two years in Mexico. Melanie is running a short-essay contest to celebrate the anniversary. In the interest of full disclosure, I have entered the contest.

So far, so good.

However. There is among us an element of despotic and tyrannical avarice. A sorceress who will stop at nothing to win the contest, who has already recruited her vile and wicked minions in the cause.

Today is the last day to vote. I implore all my friends—all who have not yet fallen under the soul-immolating Orloffian spell—to visit Melanie's post and vote for my entry.

A vote for me is a vote for goodness, wholesomeness. For America, and all it stands for. A vote for me is a vote against totalitarianism and apocalypse.

Also, if you vote for me, you get a tropical island named after you. I'm a cartographer; I can do shit like that.

Steve the Dude

2011-03-02T19:01:00.035+01:00

Not me, a race horse. I'd spent an afternoon at Churchhill Downs in Louisville, betting each race "across the board" (spreading money evenly on Win, Place, and Show—first through third finishes), when a horse named Steve the Dude approached the gate. Whereupon I put everything down on him, all the money I had—to Win.

Because my Aunt Mavis told me to.

I don't know where she acquired her knowledge of horse racing. She lived in Nevada and was visiting Louisville for a family reunion. We'd snuck off to the track to gamble some dough, drink some hooch, and release a few pent-up F-words.

She was a cautious bettor. The less confidence she had in a race, the less she bet, and the more she spread her money. Through five races I followed her lead, betting conservatively, winning modestly, drinking profits from a plastic cup. If you've never been to a big race track you're missing something. The infield at Churchhill Downs is lush and green, the buzz among the spectators is catalyzed by fortunes in the balance, and who doesn't like the smell of horseshit?

Steve the Dude was on the card in the sixth race, and that's when Mavis altered her strategy.

"Bet everything to win," she told me.

"On Steve the Dude? A sixty-to-one shot?"

"Dig out your pocket change. Sell your watch if you have to. Bet the ranch."

A long shot hadn't come in all afternoon, she explained. If long shots never came in, people would never bet on them. It was bad for business. So now and then owners and jockeys quietly agreed among themselves to shake things up. Steve the Dude hadn't won a single time in his career. He was competing in the sixth race: the hour was late. The last two races on the card, the seventh and eighth, didn't have long shots. At this very minute, Mavis assured me, owners and jockeys were down in the paddock, winking and nodding at one another.

"You mean they're fixing the race," I said.

"That's one way of putting it."

We placed our bets and quickly returned to our seats. By the time the gate opened Steve the Dude was on the board at thirty-to-one; apparently other track goers were as street-wise as my Aunt Mavis.

Our horse launched himself out the gate with nostrils flairing. If his competitors were allowing him an advantage, he wasn't aware of the favor. He ran like his life depended on it. True to Mavis's word, the other jockeys held back. I was too far away to tell if they were smiling. But it was hard to believe they weren't. The crowd rose to its feet as Steve the Dude approached the finish line, ahead by a full length. His moment had come. It was his first win, and almost certainly his last.

I suppose there are any number of lessons I could draw from this experience. Not least of which is the value of being given a leg-up by friends. A lesson I've since gotten down pat. Or that you win whenever you're first to cross the finish line, even if the finish line happens to be moving toward you.

Or how to beat odds. Ours suck. They're far worse than anything Steve the Dude faced. In my unscientific and anecdotal estimation, only about one in 500 manuscripts gets published. The odds improve the more you write and the longer you try. But they're never worth betting on.

Some of my friends have quit trying. Their odds are precisely zero.

My Aunt Mavis was eventually diagnosed with Alzheimer's and placed in an assisted living facility. The last time I talked to her on the phone she answered my questions politely, but when I hung up I realized she no longer knew who I was. In the end she had to be tied to her wheelchair. Family members told me she constantly groped at the straps and strained to be free. In horse country we call it champing at the bit. She never gave up.

The mathematician Paul Erdös referred to his colleagues who died as having gone away. He referred to his colleagues who quit doing mathematics as having died. And there you go.

Mavis is in the center of the back row; I'm the pissant to her left, and to the left of me are my parents and two of my brothers:

Some of my blogging buddies didn't quit, and as a result they're debuting this year. Click on a cover to order or preorder a copy:

Meet the clique that rules Fidelity High: Olivia, Zelda, Nordica, and Shelly, each one handpicked by uber-popular Hamilton Best. You know you're "in" when you make the guest list for one of Hamilton's parties. And in the thralls of senior year, everyone wants to get noticed by Hamilton.

But Hamilton's elite entourage is coming apart at the seams. Olivia fantasizes about finally having a boyfriend, Zelda dreams of ditching high school, Nordica wants to be alone with her photography, and Shelly's plotting to dethrone Hamilton. Lies and secrets are ripping away the careful ties that have kept them together for years. But Hamilton has the biggest secret of all, one that only her boyfriend Alex knows. If the truth got out, it would shock everyone and destroy Hamilton's fragile world—and she'll do anything to protect her secret and keep her clique together.

Possum Summer is an uplifting novel about a girl and her father whose fractious relationship is healed by the hard lessons they learn about love and letting go. Eleven-year-old P (short for Princess) longs for a pet, but her father insists that all animals on their Oklahoma farm earn their keep. While he's away on combat duty, P rescues an orphaned opossum that she names Ike. When her father is injured and her world falls down around her ears, P knows she must find it in herself to betray Ike's trust and force him to survive in the wild—no matter how much it kills her to do it.

"Build the Machine! Save the family!"

But save the family from what?

At twelve years old, Zig Zephyr is the youngest billionaire in the world, but he has no idea what his dead grandfather's last, hastily scribbled words mean—at least until he discovers plans for a time machine in a hidden lab on his family's estate.

So Zig does what any kid would do—he builds the time machine and launches into history with his friends, following his grandfather's clues to battlefields and beaches, inventors' labs and the cradle of American democracy.

But the trail is long cold now, and Zig is afraid of what he might find at the end. Did his grandfather really steal the Forever Diamond? What kind of family are the Zephyrs anyway?

Find the answers—and why Times Square is overrun with thieving monkeys—in Zig Zephyr and the Forever Diamond!

Rule #2 in private investigator Nicholas Colt’s Philosophy of Life: If you have a good Tuesday, Wednesday is likely to be a bitch.

Welcome to Wednesday.

Fifteen-year-old Brittney Ryan has taken to the streets. Colt is hired to find her and bring her home.

Piece of cake, he thinks. A surprise visit to the forbidden boyfriend should put this one in the scrapbook.

But something more sinister is behind Brittney’s disappearance, and Colt soon finds himself in an ever-widening maze of deceit, betrayal, and murder.

And, when he learns what the mysterious phrase Pocket-47 means, he is haunted even more by the plane crash that killed his family and rock band twenty years ago—a crash he now realizes might not have been an accident.

Colt is determined to save Brittney and untangle the threads of his own tortured past.

Unfortunately, one of the most heinous and violent criminals in modern history has other ideas.

Which might be okay, because…

Rule #1 in Nicholas Colt’s Philosophy of Life: Screw the rules. Let’s jam.

Space travel is all fun and games until someone breaks the universe.

Jacob Wonderbar has been the bane of every substitute teacher at Magellan Middle School ever since his dad moved away from home. He never would have survived without his best friend Dexter, even if he is a little timid, and his cute-but-tough friend Sarah Daisy, who is chronically overscheduled.

But when the trio meets a mysterious man in silver they trade a corn dog for his sassy spaceship and blast off into the great unknown. That is, until they break the universe in a giant space kapow and a nefarious space buccaneer named Mick Cracken maroons Jacob and Dexter on a tiny planet that smells like burp breath. The friends have to work together to make it back to their little street where the houses look the same, even as Earth seems farther and farther away.

A Brief Yet Poignant and Unforgettable Visit by Jen K. Blom, Author of POSSOM SUMMER

2011-03-02T09:15:00.004+01:00

I've been trying to figure out how to introduce debut author Jen K. Blom, and I've just decided to be blunt: she's nuts. But in all fairness, the meds might have something to do with it, also that tree fort accident she had as a kid (the fort should have been on a much lower branch of the tree).

Jen's over here with me in Germany, and as you all know from reading about Hemingway in Paris, expat writers naturally find each other. (Actually she stalked me.) She's here today to be interviewed. "SP" is me, "JKB" is Jen, and "Princess" or "P" is her protagonist.

The drawing was done especially for this post. Take it away, Jen!

Welcome to the POSSUMS ARE AWESOME blog tour for the middle-grade book, POSSUM SUMMER, coming out in March! (Have you preordered yet?)

Stephano, he of the brilliant TAVERNIER STONES, has generously allowed me to showcase my little book on his brill blog. And of course hijinks ensued.

First off, a little about the book:

a lonely kid.

an orphaned baby possum.

a dad that says no way.

how do you keep that kind of secret?

and what happens when you’re found out?

Here we go!

SP: As you draft, do you see the scenes in your mind first, and try to capture them in words? Or do you find your way as you go? (Or are you a freak?) How many total drafts did BEAVER SUMMER require?

JKB: That's POSSUM Summer, Bill. I see scenes like that little kid sees dead people, so most of the time I pretty much write what's in front of me. That being said, I'll freely admit to being something of a freak as well.

Ha! Drafts? I stopped counting at eight. (though that was during the editor process too)

SP: That's Steve, Jen, not Bill. Did childhood experiences of your own inspire you to write RACCOON SUMMER? Oh, and how did you end up in Germany?

JKB: Childhood experiences definitely did, Randall, in writing POSSUM SUMMER. POSSUM. Traumatic tho they were. The entire first chapter was how I came to own (or be owned by) my pet possum.

And ending up in Germany? Why else would we do it, eh? All for love.

SP: My name is Steve. STEVE. What did it feel like when you first saw the cover of AARDVARK SUMMER? Have you seen galleys? How does it feel to finally be published?

JKB: Well, Frank, POSSUM SUMMER—that's P-O-S-S-U-M SUMMER—the cover fit perfectly. The girl's face was spot on, the dog and even the donkey pitch-perfect. I was pretty happy that day.
:-D

It feels weird to finally be published. Really weird. Like I'll wake up and it hasn't happened yet weird. (Though that feeling is slowly going away!)

(Blog owner's note: at this point Jen's meds took effect, and Princess wrested control of the interview.)

Princess: Hey look! Another person that don't live in America, hey Mr. Bibbity-boppity-boo!

JKB: Joe, I'm sorry. She insisted.

P: Insisted nothing! I wasn't missing this for the world! Mr. Spangalicious, what exactly do you like to eat?

SP: Just about anything natural. As Jack Lalanne, said, "If man made it, don't eat it." But above all, Doritoes.

P: Wha-at? I love Doritoes too! *is confused* Well, what do you like to do? I know Jen said you got a girl, and she's great!

SP: Reading. And doing anything with my daughter. I was happiest back when I could read bedtime stories to her. (Dammit, yer getting me all nostalgic, Muskrat Girl.)

P: *speechless* . . . for the record, I don't like muskrats! Who you calling a muskrat, eh? *rolls up jacket arms* *sees JKB* *Sighs* Well then, what's real inneresting about you then?

SP: My Christopher Walken looks get me autograph requests. Nothing else—just autograph requests.

P: Who's that? *looks on the internet* Uh, wow, really? Well, can I have one too? Ha, Ha, Ha! Listen. I drawed you:

P: I figured that because you love your daughter so much, you guys could be Black Tailed Prairie Dogs together! How cool is that, right? And I bet you wanna know all the really great habits about Black tails. They live in Oklahoma, and they—

**scuffle**

JKB: Robert, my apologies! But thank you once more!!

Jen K. Blom writes about animals, the land, and kids, not necessarily in that order. Her debut, POSSUM SUMMER, is available March 2011.

Just the thing to give to a kid to start their summer of reading off right! (Available from your local indie, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, or Book Depository!)

Seen the book trailer yet?

Want more POSSUMS ARE AWESOME blog tour tidbits? Go here and knock yourself out!

I'm back. Jen is resting comfortably. If you think it's hard marketing a novel from within the U.S., move five thousand miles away and try it. Help an expat out: link to Jen's book trailer above from any media, or buy her book, or host her—anything to help. I'm still trying to talk her out of building a tree fort for her daughter, and I'll keep you posted.

Passing the Spatula

2011-02-13T12:23:00.002+01:00

I was going to open this post with the sentence, "My mother-in-law makes the world's best potato salad." But I suspected some people, especially those who lack (shall we delicately say) culinary taste and sophistication, might decline to read further. So as you can see, I changed my mind and opened instead with, "I was going to open this post . . ."

It's true. I mean, about the potato salad. For years the recipe was a secret. The family often convened behind my mother-in-law's back to debate how best to extract it from her. To ponder what the consequences would be if she didn't pass it along before going to Heaven. To wonder how we'd cope with the loss.

Rich and creamy, the sliced potatoes just the right firmness, and seasoned exquisitely: the salad inspires moaning at my mother-in-law's dinner table. Srsly. No conversation takes place during its consumption. To speak, even of divine things, while chewing those heavenly morsels, would be sacrilegious.

It contains much of the usual stuff, of that we could be sure: mayonnaise, diced pickles, miscellaneous spices. Over the years we were able to identify specific ingredients and estimate their proportions. But one ingredient eluded us. We knew it was there. We just couldn't tell what it was. Enough of it was present to affect the flavor, yet not enough to allow identification, despite our best qualitative analyses.

My mother-in-law's secret recipe has a secret ingredient.

It lends an ethereal quality, rooted admittedly in the tangible, the earthly; yet it is sublime, otherworldly. We place it on our tongues. We chew. We close our eyes. We moan. We never could figure out what it was. We had to discover it.

We hired lawyers, but none was able to find a Potato Salad Recipe Inheritance Statute on the books. We submitted samples to chemical laboratories. Once we invited the family priest to dinner, so that he might taste the dish, but all he could suggest afterwards, while still in rapture from the experience, was that we torture the woman for the recipe.

"The church has lots of experience in these matters," he assured us.

My wife is my mother-in-law's oldest child, the apple of her eye. The love between them is inviolable. We turned to her, thinking perhaps an appeal to emotion would do the job. After an hour behind closed doors with her mother, during which we heard pleading and sobbing, my wife emerged, her face wet with tears, and suggested we follow the priest's advice:

"Rack the bitch."

We tried tricking my mother-in-law into thinking she had only hours to live. We dressed up in white sheets, masquerading as Ghosts of Meals Yet to Come, and haunted her bedroom. We recruited a distant cousin to pretend to be a cookbook author willing to pay millions for the recipe.

Nothing worked. My mother-in-law only smiled wanly at our efforts and kept her cussed mouth shut.

"Time to get the priest," I concluded. The consent was unanimous.

But my mother-in-law is wise. Aren't they all? She knew the time had come to select a Potato Salad Recipe Heir. Or else face the rack. I confess that after having suffered years of frustrated longing, I was hoping she'd opt for the latter.

That is, until I found out her selection was me.

It was a balmy autumn day. The call was ordinary: "Can you come over for a minute?" Naturally. I always came when my mother-in-law called. When I arrived she handed me the key to the basement door and beckoned with her index finger: follow.

She led me into a corner of the basement, where she pulled a string, switching on a light bulb that protruded nakedly from the cement wall. The light glowed in muted orange, diffused by dust and sagging cobwebs.

She looked around to make sure we were alone. I did too, although it was quite a stretch to imagine anyone lurking among the cardboard boxes and shriveled spiders. She leaned toward me, placing her lips near my ear. She hesitated. I stood motionless, my pulse rising. A solemn silence enveloped the space around us.

She whispered a solitary word. The secret ingredient.

At first I was stunned. What originality, I thought, what genius. The great poets of centuries past would be stricken dumb by its bold freshness, its novelty. It's virtuosity.

Few people before me had experienced such enlightenment: Copernicus, when he discovered his heliocentric theory. Shakespeare, when he penned Hamlet. Sarah Palin, when she learned to fire a rifle.

I dropped to my knees and gave thanks. To my mother-in-law. To my parents, for the selfish debauchery that spawned me. To Plato's Realm of Ideas, where my mother-in-law's potato salad surely represents the ideal of all potato salad in the vulgar, terrestrial domain.

The recipe will survive multiple iterations of the Big Bang. And every scientific revolution to come. When nineteenth century physicists postulated the "ether," wrong though they were, they unwittingly constructed a medium, an affirmation, a metaphysical stamp of approval, for the perpetuation of my mother-in-law's potato salad.

I was humbled speechless. Had a switch been at hand, I would have flagellated myself in compliant and docile subjugation to the Great Vortex from which Everything sprang.

My mother-in-law tapped me on the shoulder. I looked up. She was handing me a spatula. A symbol of the transfer of sacred knowledge. I took hold of it and wept. I understood my responsibilities as The Anointed One. I vowed never to let my family down.

They're treating me with newfound respect these days. When I enter a room, groups part and all eyes turn to me. The air is thick with reverence. I'm even getting curtseys from the younger girls. I let them hold my cape.

We're planning a gathering this weekend. The bustle of preparation pleases me. I happened to spy a couple of my uncles secretly building me a new kitchen counter. I'm touched. The counter is large and rectangular, like a medieval door, and it has ropes, spools, and a hand crank. Looks like I'm going to be making a lot of potato salad! I can't wait to try it out.

A big crowd is expected. Even the family priest has been invited.

The Photography of Nancy Bond

2011-02-09T18:12:00.000+01:00

Nancy Bond is a writer and photographer living in Nova Scotia. I would add "naturalist" to her credits, since nature is a frequent theme of her pictures and blog posts. I don't remember how Nancy and I first met, though it was no doubt through other friends in Nova Scotia; my earliest memory is of a poem she posted on her blog. I have a soft spot for poets and intend to showcase some, including her, in the future. For now, though, it's pictures. Nancy has won numerous awards in her thirty year career. Here's why:

All photographs are copyright Nancy Bond and are reproduced here by permission.

The Sound of Running Water

2011-01-14T10:09:00.008+01:00

A few days into the new year I contracted a virus and lost nearly all of my hearing in both ears. The degeneration occurred over three disheartening days, at the end of which I could only hear people if they shouted in my face.

Otherwise stifling, suffocating silence. Frustration rising to panic as I banged objects known to produce distinctive sound waves yet sharing none with me. Finally a macabre claustrophobia, the feeling of having woken up inside a buried coffin.

Sudden deafness.

As I was about to discover, however, gifts come in strange packages.

I visited an ENT doctor immediately, of course, and declaring myself an emergency, got in right away. My community of 43,000 is a medical mecca, with numerous clinics and several large hospitals. I sometimes refer to it as "the Mayo Clinic of Germany." Given that German medicine is unsurpassed to begin with, I have the best doctors in the world at my service. When your dermatologist has to schedule you around his international lecture tour, you don't need the Yellow Pages anymore.

My ENT played around with a tuning fork, said my problem would "probably" repair itself, and told me to go home and be patient.

I went home and tried to stay focused on writing and reading, activities that not only don't rely on external stimuli, they tend to dampen them. They make you forget you're deaf. But you can't write and read all the time. After a few days I was in such a panic I was nearly hyperventilating. That I would "probably" recover wasn't good enough. I wanted out of that coffin. Yesterday a friend ordered my ass back to the doctor to insist he do something.

He did. First, though, I have to tell you how I learned to trust doctors.

I'd been experiencing soreness deep in my chest, exactly where I thought my heart should be. A dull ache, deep deep down. The family practitioner listened to my description, then without even lifting a stethoscope informed me there was nothing wrong with my heart: it had to be a chest muscle. I must have put too much stress on one of the muscles in my chest.

What a quack, I thought. Here I was dying of a heart attack at his very feet, and without examining me at all he concludes there's no reason to call the priest. Besides, I was aware of all my recent activity and I'd done nothing to sprain or strain the muscles in my chest.

Back at my office, leaning over my light table, I realized I was pressing my torso against the edge of the table as I worked, making firm contact at the very spot where I was experiencing soreness.

So when my ENT said, "Trust me, it was a virus, it's gone now, your tissues are swollen, your passages are blocked, you will heal," I wanted so badly to believe him. He must have taken pity on my Eeyore expression for he said, "Watch, I'll prove it to you." Using a hand pump, he blasted air into my sinuses.

Hallelujah! For about fifteen seconds I had almost all of my hearing back. I wanted to sing. But the passages closed again, as he warned me they would: I needed to wait, he said, perhaps weeks. The tissues would heal themselves. I asked him to blast-thingy me again, and he did. This time I noticed the sound of running water, and looked around in surprise: we were in a doctor's office. It couldn't be. The sound must have been coming from inside my own head.

"I hear running water," I told him.

He laughed. "No you don't."

"It can't be my imagination!"

"No, but it can be the traffic."

He pointed out the window. Sure enough, the sound was coming from cars passing on the street outside. My brain was unable to resolve a familiar noise after only one week of deafness. Imagine what a year would be like. Or a lifetime. It was cars, not water. I wouldn't have believed it had my eyes not corrected me.

I asked him to blast-thingy me again, and again. I was euphoric. I could hear his chair squeaking! He said I could come back every day if I wanted, and get blast-thingied, and enjoy some relief from the suffocation. But I declined. There is no such beauty as that for which we yearn, just beyond our grasp.

Turn off every noise in your hearing radius, even the little ones, the ticking of your clocks. I keep a fan running at my side, and one next to my bed, and the way I test them now, to see if they're on, is to place my hand in front to feel if air is moving. Turn off every fan, every sound. Your own voice too, your breathing, the subtle rustle of your clothing. After a few days of total silence a slice of your reality will dissolve away. Deaf people have a different take on things, naturally. But it's not just a different angle or perspective. It's a view of a universe that is a fraction of the size of ours.

There's a spirit of protest in each of us, an evolutionary defense mechanism designed to keep us from slipping blithely into that good night. Under normal conditions it's dormant. When threatened with loss of life or the essential tools of living, it emerges as an outcry, a clamoring for illusory and fickle justice, a sword wielded in often capricious desperation.

I've been handed a gift, an insight into those who want no more than to burn their crutches. I get to walk. I get to see. I get to hold my daughter in my arms. Within a couple of weeks, my doctor assures me, I get to hear again too. Until then I'll putter about the house, whistling out of tune, waiting for the opportunity to drag a chair to the sidewalk. Sit facing the street. Eyes closed. Listening to the sound of running water.

Photo courtesy Jason Evans.

Addendum (9 February): I've since regained hearing in my left ear. The right ear comes in and out. When I first heard again through my right ear I was reading in bed with a fan blowing at my feet. Through my left ear I heard the fan, and through my right ear, for about five seconds, I heard running water—until the sound was resolved and I heard a fan through both ears. The sensation was one of the most bizarre I've ever experienced.

'Nother 'dendum (10 February): My ENT made an incision in my right eardrum to release trapped fluids, and now I have very good hearing in both ears.

'Nother 'dendum (16 February): My hearing is fully restored. If you're ever in Bad Kreuznach, Germany, and you go deaf, I have just the guy for you:

Memories of David Foster Wallace

2011-01-11T18:28:00.003+01:00

Following is a transcript of a memorial service held for David Foster Wallace on 26 October 2008 at Underwood Park in Normal, Illinois. Twenty-one friends and relatives attended, including Jim and Sally Wallace, the author's parents. The transcript has never before been published.

The first speaker, whom I've identified as J, recorded and transcribed the event. J later read my novel, and when shown my 2010 Christmas email, in which I alluded to depression and alcohol abuse, agreed through friends to release the transcript and allow me to post it. I believe it will be valuable to the many writers and fans who have taken an interest in Wallace's personal life.

Wallace taught at Illinois State University in Normal from 1993 to 2002. He hanged himself in September 2008. As will be evident, he was active in local AA meetings in Bloomington-Normal, and it is mostly for this reason I've used only first initials when identifying speakers from the community. I've also edited certain passages, denoted by [...] or [redacted].

J:

Dave was a writer. And you know, I'm a compulsive reader—D1 will tell you about that a little. I can't walk by a book without stopping and picking it up and starting reading it. One way or another, I went out—and Dave was trying to, I didn't know this, but he was trying to finish this great big huge book Infinite Jest. But somebody, I don't know who in the hell in was, suggested that Dave needed something alive in that house to kind of get his juices going. But he got a black lab pup, adolescent, just breaking out, just becoming aware of his sexuality—the dog was. He just couldn't handle life. And Dave was down to his last few I think. And he was trying to type on the computer and he was kicking the dog.

I said "Dave"—later on I found out that Dave was truly a genius. He knew everything about everything. But he didn't know a damn thing about dogs. And who was it? I went out and bought a cage for a dog. And that helped a lot. But this pup needed, I thought, maybe a little exercise. And that's when I fell in love with Dave's pup and Dave and the whole scheme of the thing. And I'd take that dog to Miller Park and let him loose, and he'd run like crazy. I'd chase him all over the place and we'd go out to one of the lakes around here, an of course he'd go out flopping into the water, get green slime all over him. I'd bring him back and Dave would get madder than hell and goes, "Why do you do this? Why do you bring this dog back so dirty?" I said, "What am I supposed to do?" He says, "Well clean him up." Well, so I start—Dave said, "Put him through a car wash." [...]

And I've got so many stories. I'm not going to do them all except that for a while—I wish J2 were here. I'd invite 3 or 4 guys over and we'd—I'd have baked chicken. And I'd tell these fellows that I baked the chicken. But I'd bought them at Schnucks for 4 bucks. Dave would always—we'd finish dinner and Dave would look around and say, "By the way, can I?" And he got pieces off of every plate, all the scraps, for the dog. [...]

But he acquired another dog Drone, a big one. And Drone got sick. Drone got leukemia. Dave puts this mutt through—well, anyways, he's trying to save him—he had a course of chemo and the dog got well and everything was fine. But about 6 months or a year later, Drone came out of remission. Dave wanted the vet to try another course of chemo and she wouldn't do it, she says, "No it's not going to help." And so she had to put the dog down. Came out to the house. And he had, you know, put the dog down—Dave was holding the dog, and that guy couldn't write for 6 months. [...]

S:

I think Dave was the first friend of my crazy new step dad that I ever met. Umm, and it just kept getting stranger. Dave was always at our house on all the holidays, filling us with useless information. But when times got hard, we went through those trying teenage years, Dave was there. Dave gave me a lot of confidence, and a lot of strength, and a lot of really good advice. He was my Uncle Dave and he always took care of us, when we needed it. He always made sure that we knew how important we are, and how special we are, and how smart we are, and he was always there.

D:

[...] So what I knew about Dave maybe 5 or so years as his sponsor and talks we had, some trips we took, short trips. I remember one. And we went to a campout in Memphis. And there was a bunch of us on the motorcycles. Dave took my car with a few guys that didn't have a ride and we went down there. And while we were there, we went downtown. And we were on Veale St. and the conversation we had had nothing to do with the blues and the partying and the things like that. But what upset Dave there was the horses and carriages. And I have no doubt if he had brought enough money, he'd have bought the horses and turned them loose. [...]

I also remember when I was at his house—I don't even remember if we were renovating or moving a TV tower, but we were doing something with it one day and how into it was like he could be. I mean, I remember when he went to the bread store and stayed there working because he was going to write a couple sentences about it. And more or less work there if you will. But this TV tower was—and while we were there—the dogs again, of course always his dogs and I used to shake my head, you know, and see him. But building the steps so they could get into bed with their bad hips. Because that was Dave. Dave wanted steps so the dog could have an easier time getting into bed to sleep with him.

Part of me thinks he understands why the world was too hard for Dave. Certainly he was plenty good for it. So I wish him well. And his family. That's all I have.

A:

I just wanted to more or less pay homage to Dave as a writer. Writing is always something that I've cared about deeply. I know how difficult it is to write. I know how much feeling he had to tolerate really to write even the simplest thing. And of course we all know that he wrote very complicated things, very intense things. And I think it takes a lot of integrity, and I think it takes a lot of resilience. And Dave showed a lot of those character traits merely by making the choice to write. It was a choice to consciously feel, really until he could no longer, I guess, tolerate that. Some people—you go through life—I'm [redacted], we're a similar age, and I respect him and admire him. And really there's no words for it, when it comes right down to it. Thanks.

V:

I didn't have the pleasure of knowing your son, your brother. Being here makes me wish that I had. I can remember the first time I ever heard his name, though. We were on D's porch and there were beetles in the corner and they were alive. And he caught me like sneaking them in my hand and throwing them out the door and he says, "Do you know Dave Wallace?" And he started telling me about this man and I didn't really understand the connection. But what a gentle soul.

B:

I think my favorite thing to remember about Dave is his sense of humor. I can't count all the times I laughed, you know, at the things he'd said. But he'd just moved into that house on Woodrig and his heat was broke. Something was wrong with the house, with the furnace. So I went over there and I was working on the furnace. And like true Dave fashion, he asked me everything about what I was doing, trying figure out what it all was. And a little later he goes, "You know, I think I'm afraid of my house." And he'd just moved in, he hadn't been there a month or so. He was kind of thumbs with the tools. And so he'd said, "I got a problem with a door bell"—I think it was. So I opened up his electrical panel for him and it was a nightmare. And I started telling him that there's a couple things that were very dangerous. I told him about it and I could just see his eyes getting bigger and bigger and bigger. I said, "Don't worry about it Dave. I've got a friend that's an electrician. I'll call him for you." And then he calmed down a little bit.

I really got to make an apology to him because I got a cruel streak in me. And Dave, you know as free of a thinker that he was, he was really a creature of habit. And when we'd go to the meeting he'd always sit in the same chair, same corner. So if I get there early, I'd go sit in his chair. And I'd do it because I knew it made him nervous. And he'd come in, he'd talk to me, and he'd fidget on one foot and the other, and then he'd go over and look at another chair and come back. And I'd say, "Dave, do you want me to move? Sorry, I know you like this chair." He says, "No, no you can stay there." So I'd really make him squirm for a few minutes before I'd get up and give him his chair.

S1:

I met Dave through all of you. I didn't know him well. But the thing that I remember the most is when we would be at a party or gathering or something, he would come into the room and there was just a light. He just had a lightness about him and I don't know if it was sense of humor or what. But he just made the room brighter. So I'm going to miss that.

J1:

I can't say that I'd known Dave that well. But I do have a lovely story of sitting in an airport, reading a book, and Dave comes over, sits down, and starts talking to me. And of course he poses the book so he can see the title and he says, "This is J's recommended reading, isn't it?" And it was Studs Lonigan. And, you know, he had a way of putting people at ease. You know—I don't know. I miss his voice. I loved to listen to him share in meetings. And the fact that it came from a different angle. And for those of us that come from a different angle, it's always nice to hear that. And I'll always be grateful for that. And I am so sorry for your loss.

N:

I remember when Dave first came to Bloomington and was coming to meetings at St. Matthews. And I shared something in a meeting and he came up to me after the meeting and said, "I think we're like minded." And when Dave would share in meetings, he and I would really connect. And we would talk about it after the meeting. And there seemed to be this—something symbiotic about it. But I would say, "You know you should come over for dinner sometime. K and I would love to have you." And I think that kind of intimacy was more difficult for him than the intimacy which was really our truth that we shared at meetings. But I loved him. And I know he loved me, I know he loved us. And I was so angry. I was so angry when he didn't call us and when he didn't know how loved he was. Because that light that S1 was talking about, it just emitted from him, it just beamed from him. But there was such a darkness in him, that he did so many things to relieve, to light up.

Dave shared a story once with—there was a newcomer in a meeting—no, I think somebody had come back from a relapse. And he shared this story about when he was in the halfway house. And he said they always had like these people that'd come in and they would kind of educate you about some life skills. And this person talked about the AIDS virus and how it lives in very dark places, dark, damp places. And that it's not airborne. And he made the relationship for the newcomer about alcoholism. And that once you talk about it, it loses its power over you. Once you talk about what's going on, it loses its power. And that person just lit up with this confidence that they could, you know, stay sober, they could do this. He was very generous with sharing his experience with people, his struggles, and—I don't know.

I don't know what his life was like in California. I only would hear stories from J every once in a while. And I think I dropped him a Christmas card. I don't know what was going on for him. But I know that when he was here, he was connected. He was connected. And he made a lot of effort to stay connected. And I'm just so sorry that he was in so much pain and that we weren't with him. That's all.

K:

I remember meeting David for the first time at the Lighthouse at the Sunday night meeting that I chaired. And David used to come all the time. And he was like one of the few people from the outside besides myself and N. And he was there every Sunday night. And one of the things I always liked was, like what J said, he stole my thunder a little bit because I really did like the way he shared things and the way that he was able to express himself and articulate in a way that I was able to relate to. And I didn't know anything about him, what he did for a living or anything, for like a year. I just knew that he seemed to be awfully bright. As time went on, I got to know him better. And I knew the intensity of him going to meetings on a regular basis. It'd give me a lot of hope. And it was a good example for me to continue to do what I was doing. And I'll miss him in a way that probably—you know, only in my own way. And I think everybody here will, you know. That's about it. Thanks.

B1:

I'm going to miss Dave. And I loved him. That's all.

D1:

[...] I think the one thing that I read of Dave's that I enjoyed the most was when he took the cruise and he was fishing off the back of the liner. And they thought that he was some kind of an inspector because he kept appearing in different spots in the ship, asking questions. And he was just gathering material. But then—some things that I have read of Dave's and there was an entirely different, if I could hear it. And C had a tape that she'd picked up somewhere. And to hear Dave read his own work was extremely moving, extremely moving. Now I couldn't get the same from just reading it. And I always loved to hear him talk. I miss him and love him.

B2:

I met Dave at St. Matt's also. And I always wondered—he would sit across the room from me and he'd always, whenever he got up to get coffee or go to the restroom, he'd have that case with him. He'd carry it. And I thought, "What the hell is he doing?" And that's when he was writing and he always hung onto it. [...]

T:

I met Dave even before I met AA. Some friends of mine had recommended that I go to this therapy group. And I was going to this group and I really didn't think that the group was listening to me and everything I said was attacked. And I was really feeling unsure of myself and really getting pretty hopeless. And there was this one guy in the group that when he spoke, everything he said made so much sense. And there was one day when I had gotten to the point where I wasn't going to open my mouth anymore. I was just going to sit and listen. And all of a sudden, he started talking in a very vague way, without naming names or giving any specific incidence, but he described exactly what I'd been experiencing in this group. And I sat there shell-shocked. Because this group had been telling me that I was wrong, I was dishonest, I was—all kinds of things that I didn't think were true. And here was this guy that I didn't know except his name was Dave. And he was speaking the truth about me and for me. It was in that moment that I fell in love with this guy.

And a little while later, I decided that I needed some help. I went to a psychiatrist to see if he could help me. And he sent me to AA. He thought drinking every day was a problem. And I start going to the St. Matt's noon meeting. And Dave was there. And so many times—it's like we all experience, so many times I would be sitting there listening to what people were sharing on the topic and all of a sudden, Dave would share and he would be sharing a lot of what I'd been thinking, only he always said it so much more eloquently and clearly than I could have ever organized it. And yet it never sounded organized when he said it. It was always so beautiful. And he always said the truth, which just amazed me. [...]

You know, and I am just in awe of the fact that Dave got to be part of my everyday life. That he was there for a lot of our Christmases. But it's going to be really hard to get out our Christmas box this year because we always put Dave's stocking on the mantle with everybody else's so that if he decided to come visit, his stocking would be there. [...]

J had asked me to read a poem that K2 had written:

Desiderium

Our Dave is dead; that youngish man
We ne'er shall see him more;
He used to wear his socks with holes,
And college sweatshirt torn.

His heart was open as the day,
His knees to feet quite lanky;
His hair was some inclined to gray,
He dressed it in a hankie.

The fairer sex he misconstrued,
So late in life he wedded;
In friendship he was brave and true,
His underpants were shredded.

He modest merit sought to find,
Yet craved and dodged regard;
Such countervailing plagued his mind,
And made the earthly hard.

His neighbors thought him far too left,
As he ran with hybrid mutts;
The mammals, they are so bereft
They howl each night at dusk.

His "Dave-ness," hid from scrutiny,
He did not bring to bare;
At home he watched some bad TV,
Whilst fondling curious hair.

His worldly goods were theoretic,
He shunned the ATM;
O! his hammering was pathetic,
Much nimbler 'twas he with pen.

Thus so disturbed by anxious doubt,
His peaceful moments scant;
That soft-voiced, lovely, whiskered lout
Has left us here to rant.

C:

I met Dave in 1996 and I picture him sitting in the corner. And a few weeks ago, a friend who hadn't come around for a while, came in expecting him to be in the corner—and cried for a solid hour. And I understood that. I love him very much. And I just—I'm a mom—I don't know what you say. Something T said about how he would say what we were thinking only did it so much better. And when I read his writing, I think how well he represents those of us who think differently but can't say it. He speaks for all of us that have that peculiar twist. You know when I heard, a friend called me—a friend called because a friend had called because a friend had called. And within a couple days, we were all—I don't know if I have ever been so sad. And my first thought was, I know what N said, "Dave, if only you could know how much we love you." [...]

But when—I know he struggled with the God thing because, you know, he liked to understand everything and it just defies understanding. So when he left, I found a quote from CJ Jung who is very important to our history. And it said, "Bidden or not, God is present." And I gave it to him. And I think he understood that. I understood that. It doesn't matter where I'm at today, God's there with me. It doesn't matter where he is, we're there with him. And with you.

I'm so grateful to get to meet you. You know, when we go to meetings and we're in pain, sometimes we talk about—we come and we bring our pain and then when we leave, it's kind of gone. But the reason it's gone is because everybody else took a little piece with them. And I hope we can do that for you today.

S2:

[...] I took him through the Firestone place out here. And I took C and her family through the Firestone place, they show you how to make tires and stuff. And I got her family and her mom and dad, all of them through in about a quarter of the time I got Dave through. He would stand there and watch every move somebody was making and then question, say, "Why do they do that first?" But anyway, he questioned every move. And I'm thinking, "He's going to write a book about making a tire. He's going to write a story about making a tire." [...]

Taking your own life, they say, is the most selfish thing in the world. I don't believe that. I don't believe that. I believe that the pain gets so unbearable, so unbearable, it can't go on anymore, you know. And I believe that's what happened.

He's one of the most generous people in the world. The way he'd come dressed to meetings in bandana and all that stuff, you just knew it. And he did the same thing to me what B did. We don't have chairs. We just sit in a certain area all the time, so people just think "that's S2's chair, that's B2's whatever." So he sat in mine, you know. And I went and stood in front of him and didn't say a word. He gets up and then I go sit in his. Just this little game. Just loved to have fun, you know.

[...] The world lost a man. And my family, if the person passes away, we're on the ground two days later. And you guys will keep going through this over and over and over. And sometime, someday, you'll get to rest. I hope this CD comes out. And that's all I got.

Sally Wallace (the author's mother):

I actually have a couple stories that might make people smile about David as a little boy. When he was about I'd say 2 1/2 or 3, you might imagine that David was not the most docile of little boys. He did not sit with his hands folded and tap his foot on a happy tune. So it had been quite a day. And I remember standing in front of him and leaning way over so I could look in his eyes. And I said, "Behave." He took a step back and looked up at me and said, "I am have."

And this one—T has heard these and I beg her indulgence. But here we go. When he was about 7, and Amy was about 5, they always had lunch on a school day. David would come home from second grade. And Amy would be all set to go to afternoon kindergarten. And we would usually read or talk or something. And David had been a little curious about the origins of life, particularly his. Asked some leading questions and I answered just enough to satisfy but not to over burden him.

But I knew, I knew, the big one was coming at some point. And I did my homework. I was ready for I thought anything. Well low and behold, one noon—and this might be relevant and it might not—we were having hotdogs, yeah relevant. I was standing at the sink and I heard David's voice behind me saying, "Well, how does the sperm get to the egg?" And I thought, "Oh here we go." So I turned around and I explained the whole thing, the physiology of the entire beautiful thing. I talked about how when people grow up, and they love each other very much, they want their bodies to be close. We had names for this, we had names for this, we had names for the act. And there, that was it.

And I looked at David and his eyes were this big. And he looked at me and said, "And you get upset when I put my finger in my nose?"

An Open Letter to the Googoo-Eyed Cashier who Mistook me for Dan Quayle

2010-11-29T12:44:00.003+01:00

Dear Googoo-Eyed Cashier who Mistook me for Dan Quayle:

When first I noticed you staring at me while I shopped for groceries in your little store I thought you were keeping an eye out for shoplifters. I didn't mind; if I'd wanted to shoplift something I'd have gone to Cartier, not Belinda's Breadbasket. Later I thought you were flirting, because you were staring at my face, not my hands, and there was an unmistakable glow in your eyes. The fine line between hero worship and horniness was, I confess, the reason I misinterpreted your gaze, and responded in kind.

I acknowledge that Dan Quayle had just delivered a speech on the town square, right around the corner. Thus there was a statistical likelihood he'd enter Belinda's Breadbasket for some mayonnaise and pretzels (the straight kind, not those curly things that look like experiments in n-dimensional topology). That's what people sometimes do after delivering a speech: enter Belinda's Breadbasket for mayonnaise and pretzels. Even Dan Quayle. So I'm not calling you dumb. On the contrary, I admire your grasp of the nearly impossible.

And by the way, Belinda (may I call you Belinda? Or just Ms. Breadbasket?), since Dan Quayle was quite good looking in his day, I accept your mistake as a compliment. After all, you didn't have an opportunity to scan my brain and determine there was no substantial resemblance between me and Dan Quayle.

Come to think of it, there was no superficial resemblance either. So why did you ask me for his autograph? Because I was wearing a suit? You think all men who wear suits are Dan Quayle?

No matter. I'm writing to inform you that the autograph you collected from me that day was not Dan Quayle's. I'm sorry if you feel cheated, and if you've misled your friends all these years ("He came into my store! He bought mayonnaise! And low-dimensional pretzels!"). But you see, I have my role to play in natural selection. It's illegal to shoot idiots, so I mock them to death.

Sincerely,

Steve

Midnight There, Morning Here

2010-11-28T09:21:00.002+01:00

I watch the sun come up and think about how my friends in North America will have to wait six hours or more to see it. Same sun, different view. While they sleep I remind myself how lucky I am to know them.

I'd love to change some of them, sculpt them to suit my fancy. But you can't change anyone but yourself. And even that's hard to do.

When I started participating in the social media thing (back then it was called "blogging") I confess it was for professional reasons. I'm an introvert at heart. As a teenager I sometimes went the entire day—school, track team, after-school job, six-member household—without uttering a single word. To this day I prefer to sit in the back of the room and listen. But my life followed paths that placed me increasingly at the front of the room, and often in front of a lectern. Now I'm spewing promotional electrons across cyberspace, like pollen.

For every twenty or thirty people you smile at as you walk down the sidewalk, only one will smile back. That's a poor return on investment, you say. I say you have a choice: you can report that everyone you encountered today ignored you, or you can report that a stranger smiled at you as she passed on the sidewalk. It doesn't really matter whose facial muscles stretched first, does it?

It isn't really me, spewed or spewing. It's electrons. I grew up in a time when friends occupying different points on Great Circles of the globe wrote letters to each other. By hand or typewriter. Sometimes the typewriter was "manual." If you don't know what that means, there's no point explaining. My mother could take dictation using shorthand. She wrote cursive, a forgotten art. She sent Christmas cards, via snail mail (we used to call it "mail"), to everyone she knew or had ever known.

The world gets smaller all the time, you say. What you mean is that information travels faster. I recently skyped with a friend in Texas I've never met, and probably won't ever meet. But at the risk of contradicting myself, he and I did in fact approach one another. I heard his voice, he heard mine. We shared opinions on a dozen subjects, we agreed to disagree about a few, it didn't matter. What mattered was that two people occupying different points on a Great Circle of the globe mingled electrons, and that's the modern way of saying We Met.

I originally set out to make connections, to network, to "brand" my name. For anyone in line behind me who wants to know whether it was worth the effort, my answer is yes. But not because I was "out there" like a billboard or neon sign, rather because I made influential friends like Erica Orloff and Mark Terry, people without whom I wouldn't be published. I had no idea the greatest benefit of blogging (excuse me, social networking) would be the people I'd meet, not the books I'd sell. The chance to write things that otherwise would stay in a drawer. The opportunity to express gratitude and affection in public.

We're zeroing in on it, aren't we? What it's all about?

I watch the sun come up and think about how my friends in North America will have to wait six hours or more to see it. Same sun, different view. While they sleep I remind myself how lucky I am to know them.

And each time we bury someone we bury a part of ourselves. Their voices once mingled with ours, but only ours remain. Their footprints become obliterated. We use words like love. Cherish. Remembrance. We visit their graves, pull weeds, mumble regrets. While they sleep we remind ourselves how lucky we were to have known them.

Judging Books by Their Covers: Guest Post by Alissa Grosso

2010-11-23T16:54:00.003+01:00

From her bio: Alissa Grosso’s first novel, POPULAR, will be published in May 2011 by Flux. At various points in her working life she has been a tavern wench, a term paper writer, a newspaper editor and a children’s librarian. She owns very few garments that aren’t covered with cat or dog hair. She lives in New Jersey.

The old cliche is that you can't judge a book by their cover, and while it's probably true, people do judge books by their covers, all the time. Even smart bookish types like librarians do it. I should know, I make a living getting librarians to judge books by their covers. How important is a good cover to selling a book? If the cover doesn't grab readers, they may never pick it up and find out that the book is brilliant, but before readers even get a chance to happen upon the cover the buyers at bookstores have to decide whether or not they will stock the book, and what the cover looks like can have a huge impact on their decision.

In my day job I work for a book distributor. I sell books to libraries. Most of what I sell are non-fiction books, but I also sell some fiction for children and young adults. My job involves visiting libraries and showing them the books we have available. I am sort of like a catalog with a human face. Only, when I say I show the librarians the books we have available, I'm not really showing them the actual books.

All I tote around with me are a bunch of color photocopies of the covers of the books we carry. The back of the photo copy has a short description and the pertinent details about the book like the publisher, the price and the number of pages. As my customers flip through the sheets of photocopied covers, they will occasionally pause to read the description on the back. Of course, they only do this if the cover intrigues them in some way. Many times they'll choose books to order without even looking at the description, based on the cover image alone.

That isn't to say that librarians buy all their books on a whim. Most librarians rely on review media and requests from library patrons to determine the books that will be added to the library collection. As it happens, the books I mainly sell are not items that often get reviewed or are often requested by title by library patrons because they are things like test prep books, home repair books and consumer health titles. So, don't assume that all library collections are built based upon what the cover looks like. However, I've often seen what were probably perfectly good books that didn't sell due to an unfortunate cover.

A little while back, when my own novel was being presented to the big bookstore chains by my publisher's sales representative both the original title and the cover turned out to be an issue. Both Borders and Barnes & Noble didn't like the title, and wouldn't buy it as a result. Borders also said they didn't care for the cover. The result was that my book wound up with a new title and a snazzy new cover that looks like this:

Will it be enough to grab the attention of book buyers? I hope so. I like the cover, but then I'm a bit biased in the matter. I've heard from others (some of whom also might be a bit biased) that they would definitely grab this book if they saw it in a bookstore. I'm hoping there are lot of folks out there who think like they do.

Of course, from what I can tell authors don't have a lot of say in what a cover looks like. Maybe that's for the best. That original cover, the one Borders didn't like? I had been the one that made some suggestions for the cover art on it. Maybe it's best to leave cover design to the professionals.

When my novel was accepted I asked for a particular cover designer, Kevin R. Brown, because I had seen his previous work and liked it. I was told I would get whoever was next in rotation—that Brown might be busy. I asked that he be told I wanted him. I got him. A cover can make or break a book.

Laugh

2010-11-18T11:44:00.003+01:00

I don't have a car, so I have to do my grocery shopping on foot. I have a pull cart, a kind of suitcase on wheels specifically designed for shoppers like me, and I'm lucky to live in a part of the world where all the stores I need are within walking distance. I don't mind that my fellow walky-pully shoppers are in their golden years. I'll be joining them before long.

You need one hand to pull the cart. Ordinarily, because you're efficient and trying to get as much shopping done as possible in one trip, your other hand is carrying a bag. Maybe (I do this all the time, and unshaven men waiting at bus stops make fun of me) you're also wearing a backpack full of canned goods, frozen vegetables, and stalks of celery poking out through the top. You feel like a mule. You look like one too. But it's worth it, because by shopping efficiently you can spend more time in front of your pooter.

And then, one day, it rains. You need a hand to pull the cart, you need another to carry the bag. An umbrella is out of the question. You worry that your groceries will be damaged. But you know what? The bread is protected by its plastic wrapper, the corn is safe in its cans, even the celery delights to be washed by a cold autumn shower.

So you laugh. You stomp rain puddles like a child. You raise your face to the sky and say "Give it to me." Your clothes get soaked. You skip like no one's watching. But people are watching. The crazy American. He'll get pneumonia. Which as everyone knows is caused by water on the head.

Your hair used to stand up better to rain. Maybe it's the rain, not your hair, that has changed. You pull your cart, lug your bag, and hunch under your backpack. Poetry requires that the heavens dump buckets on you just as you turn your key in the door.

Laugh. Laugh at every obstacle, every setback, every inconvenience. Laugh at rules that get in your way. Laugh at people who tell you to follow a beaten path. Laugh at agents who don't reply. Laugh at any notion whatsoever you were put on this Earth for a reason other than you should follow your bliss.

Laugh at the rain.

All I Can Handle: I'm No Mother Teresa

2010-11-16T10:17:00.010+01:00

My autographed copy is inscribed "Stephen, we did it!" Indeed we did. Four years ago this month Kim Stagliano left the very first comment on my blog. (Which disappeared when the blog was mysteriously deleted after I posted this friendly advice.) I had just written my first post, describing homesickness at Thanksgiving. I figured no one would read it because no one knew I existed. But like a kid who mails off for his x-ray vision glasses and checks the next day to see if they have arrived, I returned to my blog an hour later and found Kim's comment, a long description of a big, juicy turkey she had cooked for me, a total stranger.

Real men don't cry, but I do. A year later she sent a care package that included Stovetop Stuffing, sweet potatoes, and other stuff you can't get where I live. I celebrated Thanksgiving for the first time in years.

Back then we were both aspiring writers who hung around Miss Snark's place soaking up wisdom and making friends. Many of my best friends still date from the Snarkozoic Era. This year the two of us finally published our first books.

All I Can Handle: I'm No Mother Teresa is a "kimoir," a Kim Stagliano memoir. If you know Kim you'll recognize her in the pages: "We'd ripped through our savings like toilet paper on your first night in Mexico." The book chronicles what she and her husband Mark endured raising three daughters with autism amidst recurring unemployment and demoralizing setbacks. The story is eye-opening. It's also something you'd expect from Kim: entertaining.

I've "met" her daughters Mia, Gianna, and Bella via Skype, and beautiful though they are, they are also a handful. Kim coined a term, "crapisode," that requires no definition. There's a scene in the chapter titled "The Things We Do For Love" that characterizes the book: Kim's teenage daughter Mia has an "accident" in public and needs to change. But she has nothing fresh to change into. So Kim takes her into a bathroom stall and does what only a mom can do. Read the book and see for yourself.

As managing editor of ageofautism.com and a frequent contributor to The Huffington Post, Kim has long been at the center of an often heated controversy over whether vaccines cause autism. However she doesn't use her "kimoir" as a soapbox. She writes mainly to share obstacles, hardships, and occasional triumphs. Next time you think you're facing adversity as a parent you'll remind yourself how much worse it could have been.

All I Can Handle is more than an inspirational story about raising three girls with autism. In a way it's a story every parent can identify with: our current economic climate makes it challenging to raise any kind of child at all. It's also the story of a remarkable woman who, you will discover, can handle far more than most of us.

I have an extra copy to give to someone who promises to review it. Send me an email.

I've been holding onto this picture, which somehow didn't make it into the book, waiting for an opportunity to turn my blog into a tabloid. Kim: you can become insufferable now.

Other Stuff:

Erica Orloff and Jon VanZile have opened an editing service for authors.

Richard Levangie and Colleen Gareau have launched a public relations firm.

Natasha Fondren now offers an ebook hand-coding service.

Mark Terry's The Fallen won the Hottest New Thriller award from USA Book News.

Charisma

2010-10-20T08:26:00.002+02:00

It's hard word to define. Before I met Uwe Becker I thought of it as just another way of saying magnetism, the natural ability to attract people. Its etymology is "grace conferred by God." I'll go along with that.

Uwe could certainly attract people. Wherever he went he was surrounded by friends. Oddly enough, none of them ever felt part of a crowd.

I would always look for Uwe when attending a function, typically something to do with my daughter (he had a daughter the same age). He was as tall as me, so finding him was easy; I'd just scan the room, or playground, or whatever. Our eyes would meet, we'd navigate separate paths to a table, we'd talk.

He had a hundred friends who did just that. Yet it always seemed to me like I was the only one. That's how I figured out the meaning of charisma.

I'd recognized the trait once before, during a presentation, at the end of a four day conference. The conference had been an emotional experience, and as the presenter wrapped things up and said goodbye, he looked straight at me. Stared at me the whole time. Spoke directly to me, and only me. Later, talking to other attendees on the sidewalk outside, I discovered they'd had the same experience, had come to the same conclusion. Some of them from the opposite side of the room.

When I sat and talked with Uwe, I had his full attention, but the interaction went beyond that: I was the only person in the world. It's the kind of attention women often say they want from a man, especially when other (attractive) women are in his vicinity: look into my eyes, and only my eyes; that's how I know you really see me.

Uwe saw me. He saw everybody. His friends told me, at his funeral, they'd had the same relationship with him, some of them sharing the same auditoriums and playgrounds where I thought I was the only adult he spoke to. Somehow he made everyone feel that way.

The cemetery's chapel was designed to hold any and all who cared to attend a funeral. At Uwe's funeral the chapel filled to capacity, the standing space in the back overflowed, and people spilled onto the street outside. They huddled in the November chill, waiting in silent devotion through a ninety minute service, not a word of which they could hear. They just wanted to be present. Afterwards I told Uwe's daughter to remember the size of that crowd: one way to judge a man is to count his friends, and one way to count his friends is to count how many show up at the end. I told her to remember that at her dad's funeral service, fewer than half the number who attended could even fit inside.

Uwe died five years ago, at age 37, of a heart attack. I spoke to him hours before. In a sea of people. Yet all alone in his presence. He asked me to do him a favor. Then he said goodbye, went home to bed, and never woke up.

I visit him almost every day. I tell him how his daughter is doing. (I don't tell him her mother remarried.) I thank him for a priceless friendship.

If charisma is the natural ability to attract people, the ultimate charisma might be the natural ability to attract people from the grave. But I'll always think of it as the practice of making people feel they're the sole object of one's attention. No doubt scores of friends and family visit Uwe's grave like I do, but in all the times I've been there, I've never laid eyes on another soul.

A Parable

2010-10-18T10:07:00.007+02:00

And so it was in olden times, when buildings known as "libraries" were stocked floor to ceiling with printed books, and trees were felled for the paper to print them, that a novelist became discouraged because his writing failed to earn his livelihood. He trudged daily to his office in the accounting firm, and he did sorrowfully lament:

"If only my novels were better distributed, if only they were better marketed, if only they were better received by a fickle and indiscriminate public, I could quit my daily drudgery and devote myself to the craft of storytelling, to which I have been called."

So discouraged was the novelist, that after his third novel did fail to free him of his perceived slavery, he resolved not to write one again.

And so it happened after the sun set that evening and he retired to his chambers that a dream was visited upon him: If he should wait across the lane from the entrance to his community library, and be of a patient mind, he should come into great fortune.

The novelist dismissed the dream, for no fortune had ever been found in so unlikely a place.

The dream was visited upon him again the next night, and once more on the night that followed. And thus the novelist heeded the dream's exhortation, and upon departing his accounting office the next day, positioned himself across the lane from the entrance to his community library. And there he did wait with due patience.

But all he encountered was an old beggarman sharing the very same sidewalk, sitting on a blanket, an upturned hat before him, a few copper coins sprinkled within. The hoard fell far short of the fortune the dream had promised.

"What do you seek?" the old beggarman asked.

"Nothing, never mind," the novelist answered. He dropped a coin into the beggarman's hat and walked home.

The novelist returned the next day after work, despite the previous day's disappointment, for he sought to supplement his income, diminished as it now was for lack of writing. He trusted the dream that had been visited upon him not once, not twice, but three times in succession. And so he waited again, across the lane from the entrance to his community library, and he exercised due patience, as the dream had instructed.

But once again all he encountered was the old beggarman, sitting on a blanket, an upturned hat before him, a few copper coins sprinkled within.

"What do you seek?" the old beggarman asked.

"Nothing, never mind," the novelist answered. He dropped a coin into the beggarman's hat and walked home.

Yet a third time did the novelist wait across the lane from his community library, in the darkening hours after his workday was done, but this time with meager patience. His arms were crossed, his weight shifted from leg to leg, and an indignant expression did broaden on his face. Again the old beggarman asked:

"What do you seek?"

The novelist looked into the beggarman's eyes, which were watery and jaundiced. "A dream was visited upon me in my sleep," he answered. "Not once, not twice, but three times in succession. I dreamed that if I should wait across the lane from the entrance to my community library, and be of a patient mind, I should come into great fortune."

The old beggarman chuckled and broke into a coughing spell. He said, "I once had a dream. But it was never visited upon me in my sleep. I dreamed it all the waking days of my youth and manhood. In my dream I did practice the craft of storytelling, and became a novelist."

The novelist asked, "And did this dream come true?"

"No," answered the old beggarman. "Now I spend my days sitting before the institution that houses books written by others, not by me, and grieve that not one tree was ever felled for my efforts, nor did a solitary reader ever share in my work. For it was never fortune I sought, only the opportunity to express my visions, and go to my grave secure that they would live forever."

Whereupon the old beggarman lay down on his blanket and curled up for warmth. "Many are called," he continued. "The few that are chosen must surely appreciate their gift. Were the gift mine, it would never suffer from neglect, never want for exploitation, never be cuckolded by the mistresses of success."

He tightened his tattered coat about him. "I wouldn't expect you to understand." He closed his weary eyes. "Only a writer would understand."

The novelist dropped a coin into the beggarman's hat and walked home. There he sat down at his personal computer and keyboard—for such devices were still employed in olden times—and typed two words on the screen:

Chapter One

Episodes: My Life as I See It, by Blaze Ginsberg

2010-10-17T13:12:00.004+02:00

Episodes: My Life as I See It is a unique memoir. It chronicles the life of Blaze Ginsberg from his freshman year in high school through his first two years in college, and it does so as a sequence of television episodes staring the author, his family, and the people most influential in his life.

We see the world through the eyes of a teenager on the autism spectrum: how he relates to school, friends, romantic crushes, and the harsh realities of a first job. All to the tune of episode "soundtracks," the ubiquitous background music that scores every teenager's life. Blaze's mother Debra Ginsberg, herself an accomplished author, wrote in her sensitive introduction to the book: "Like all of us, Blaze has favorite episodes in his life and some that he wishes he could forget. To an extent, I believe this is something we all do. We're all the stars of our own shows."

Episodes will undoubtedly be classified as part of the literature on autism. Blaze's fascination with dates, bus numbers, chronological sequences, and even the whereabouts of the garbage truck all speak to the quiet genius that is apparently characteristic of "high functioning" children who adapt poorly in traditional classrooms. But I think the book goes beyond that. It illustrates the day-to-day challenges every teenager faces, with emphasis on the nuances that govern personal relationships. Blaze is refreshingly honest when describing losing his temper, misbehaving in class, and being in tears because he doesn't have a girlfriend. He evaluates his own conduct matter-of-factly and provides unique insight into the mind of a developing adolescent. Parents and other students of psychology would do well to read this book closely.

My favorite quote (during a pretend wedding): "I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may hug."

Does Episodes represent a new genre? Maybe. I'd like to see other young people follow suit with their own interpretations.

Buy the book from Amazon, Barnes and Nobel, or Borders, or patronize an independent bookseller near you. The author is also the subject of a biography: Raising Blaze: A Mother and Son's Long, Strange Journey into Autism.

Saying Goodbye

2010-10-12T11:55:00.005+02:00

No, I'm not leaving, I'm introducing a new book. Actually I'll let the series editor, Mike O'Mary, do that; here's an excerpt from his forward:

When my daughter was five, her great-grandfather died. At the funeral, I read a story about him, and his two sons-in-law each said a few heartfelt words. After the last person spoke, my daughter, who was sitting in the front row next to her grandmother, stood up in her chair, turned around to face the room full of mourners, and said, "Is that it?"

That moment sticks with me because it shows that in the midst of the most solemn of goodbyes, there is sadness, yes. But there is also irony and humor and in some strange way, a sense of continuity. So it is, I believe, with all goodbyes. Years later, Stephen Parrish, author of The Tavernier Stones, sent me a story called "Bridget." I had just launched Dream of Things with the intent of publishing anthologies of creative nonfiction that will fill the gap between popular anthologies that publish stories I regard as "short and sweet" (sometimes so saccharine-sweet they are hard to swallow), and the Best American Essays series, which I love, but which tend to be quite a bit longer. So the goal for Dream of Things anthologies is to be not short and sweet, but short and deep. With depth comes authenticity. The result is stories that are easier to swallow because they are authentic, and easier to digest because they average 1,250 words in length.

Stephen Parrish’s story fit the bill . . . short and deep . . . but it didn’t fit neatly into any of the anthology topics that were in the works. So we created a new anthology—a collection of stories about saying goodbye. The topic struck a chord, and the stories came pouring in from around the world . . . from the United States, Canada, Ireland, Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere. The result is this book—a remarkable collection of stories, and the first of what I hope will be many anthologies from Dream of Things.

Naturally I'm proud of Saying Goodbye because "Bridget" is its catalyst and lead story. But I've read the other thirty stories too, and there are some real gems among them. In fact, I had to pause after several of the pieces because they were so emotional. You won't be disappointed; there's something in here for everyone. I'm grateful to Mike and to editor Julie Rember for letting me be part of it.

To learn more about the book visit its website. You can order a copy there as well, or at Amazon.com.

Everything I Never Wanted to Be: Guest Post by Dina Kucera

2010-09-27T06:00:00.007+02:00

Everything I Never Wanted to Be by Dina Kucera is the true story of a family’s battle with alcoholism and drug addiction. Dina is stopping by to share some insights into her journey to publication.

Thank you Stephen for the opportunity to blog on your page. Nice place you have here! Is that a water bed? Wow. Okay.

It's interesting that it's so difficult for me to say I'm a "writer." I never hesitated when telling people I was a grocery store checker, waitress, maid or that I had a paper route. But now, I have actually published a book. An actual book that people might actually read. Insane, right?

That's the happy end to the story. There were three years before that, where I would steal an hour here, an hour there to write. I had a full time job, a family, I took care of my mother in my home and had my grandson much of the time. I juggled my fifteen-year-old heroin addicted daughter and that actually became the focus of my life. Upon completion of my book I had a year filled with "this just isn't for us" and "we going to pass on this" from agents all across the country.

I had the idea that if I wrote a really great book, I would have a line of literary agents pounding at my door. Publishers would print so many copies because of the demand, and my little book would take up half the bookstore. During this time is when I would daydream about what I would wear when selected for the Oprah Book Club. And I will say, I would've looked great.

My book, Everything I Never Wanted To Be, is about my youngest daughter becoming addicted to heroin by the age of fifteen. From the age of thirteen until she turned eighteen, I can bet I spent nothing short of several years trying to get her medical treatment. So if the facility I called said they wouldn't take her, it would be no exaggeration that she could die while waiting for help. But I still wrote, mostly out of sadness or fear or anger or all three. Time passed.

So I'm dreaming about if I should wear shoes or boots on Oprah. Meanwhile, I queried seventy-four agents and small publishing companies. Seventy-four.

Some would say, send this, or send that. And a few seemed a breath away from taking me on. For me, this process, while physically draining, didn't have an effect on how I felt about my book or my writing. I didn't stop. I queried one, then another, then another.

During that time, I had one experience with an insurance company where if the insurance company told me "no," my daughter could have overdosed and died by the time someone said "yes." So if an agent or publishing company told me "no," I kept it in perspective. No one was going to die if my book got rejected. It felt easy compared with trying to get a deal with a health insurance company for drug treatment for a teenager.

Along the way I had an amazing man in the publishing industry. Although he had stopped publishing, he encouraged and pushed me in the right direction. He continually told me that my book was great and I had to carry on. Or "query" on. Get it? Is that a lava lamp? Wow. Trippy.

I finally got a publisher. I would say it was a big day, but like most daydreams, it wasn't as instant as I had imagined. It took a month to actually GET the publisher. Contracts. Piles of paper with HUGE words.

And with the help of my literary angel, take this out, leave this in, and every sentence had a percentage attached to it. Twenty percent, sixty percent, forty percent. I understood five percent of this. In the end, I got a publisher. And a very cool, great guy he is!

By this point I had completely changed my idea of what I would wear on Oprah. Then my publisher drops another bombshell. I actually had to do rewrites on the book. Not one, or two, but about thirty. It was insane that I would have to rewrite my masterpiece! Does this guy not realize that I am a literary genius!? What happened to my goddamn dream! But, I did it. And, he was right, it was much better.

Now three years after I said "I think I'll sit down and write a book about this," I have published a book. So I'm done. Wrong. Now I have to actually sell the book because it turns out no one knows who I am. My publisher also works on his end to get the book out to the masses, but if you think for a second you are going to publish a book and then sit on a beach and wait for the checks to roll in, not going to happen.

I do not care what the old folks say, social media has been the way to every single thing I have accomplished. Facebook (which is where I met my publisher). Or MySpace. Or Twitter. You have to do it all. The more you nurture these pages, the more people you reach. It is an amazing advertising tool that every writer or artist of any kind should take complete advantage of. I understand, as a literary genius, that as artists this is uncomfortable. But if you want to buy the cheese, it has to happen.

Thanks Stephen, for allowing me into the inner circle of your amazing blog page. And yes, I did read something about the water bed coming back in style. He's a writer AND a trendsetter. Love it.

Read more about Dina and Everything I Never Wanted to Be at her website.

I Haven't Snogged on Myself in a While

2010-09-09T06:00:00.010+02:00

The Tavernier Stones was released yesterday in hardcover (large print). I didn't know the edition was available until a few days ago when I happened to check my home town library to see if they had the trade paperback on the shelf. They didn't, but they did have the new guy, new cover and all. I was faced with a choice between flying home, applying for a library card, and checking it out—or buying a copy from Amazon. After some reflection and budget analysis I opted for the latter.

If you buy it you'll receive your copy before I receive mine, because I'm overseas. You'll then have the opportunity to taunt me with a picture of yourself holding a book I wrote but do not own.

Go on, taunt me.

(Shhh. I'm putting this in parentheses so my publisher doesn't overhear. Now that I think about it, I should probably change the text color too. Hang on a second. There we go. I want them to release a Kindle edition of my book. If you click here you'll auto-generate a message informing them of your desire. (My desire, actually, but, you know, empathy and all that.) If enough people click, my publisher won't be able to ignore An Idea Whose Time Has Come. Join me in my quest, dear readers. Muggles too. All are welcome, even The Great Unwashed. Yearning to be clean! Together let's create a squall, a storm, a tempest. Dare the editors to stand upright in the winds that are about to blow!)

Back to regular blogging.

Today I enjoy the honor and privilege of being interviewed by Gregory Huffstutter on M. J. Rose's Buzz, Balls & Hype. The first half of the interview appears today, the second half will appear in two weeks. The second half is when I get all mavericky, so you might want to bookmark it. Mark Terry fixed me up with this.

I was author of the month during August at Drey's Library and enjoyed every minute of it. I'm grateful to Drey, and to Aerin Bender-Stone, who fixed me up.

Bookgasm reviewed Tavernier. Although I didn't read Dan Brown until after my manuscript was in submission, once I did I knew I'd be accused of imitating him. But what I don't understand is why people think Johannes Cellarius is an actual figure from history. One agent even argued with me about it: "Oh, no, Steve, he's real, I googled him." I made him up. "He disappeared in 1689, just like you said." He's a figment of my imagination.

It's time to give away a diamond. All of the clues to the armchair treasure hunt have been solved, just not by the same person. Next week I'll announce a plan to reveal the entire text of the puzzle and steer participants to the solution. The first person who finds the image of a diamond I've hidden somewhere on the web wins a genuine one carat stone. Stay tuned to this blog for more information.

Finally, Sarah Laurenson reviewed The Tavernier Stones and said everything I'd ever hoped to hear. These are for her:

If you'd like to host me, interview me, or review my book, email me at stephenparrish@hotmail.com and I'll send you a free copy. You might even get flowers.

Plum Blossoms Everywhere

2010-09-07T07:36:00.004+02:00

Plum Blossoms Goes Shopping
This is a portion of the Fußgängerzone, or pedestrian zone, in Bad Kreuznach, Germany. In the distance you can see the outskirts of the Altstadt, the old part of town. A kind woman watching me struggle to frame this picture and shoot with one hand offered to pose with the book. Unfortunately I would have had to change the title: "Plum Blossoms Being Held by Strange Woman in Fußgängerzone."

Plum Blossoms Among the Grape Vines
I live in Riesling country, and it is the only grape about which I claim superior knowledge over Richard Levangie. This vineyard is a short walk from my house. And before Richard pounces on me, yes, okay, the shape of the leaves identifies this vine as Müller-Thurgau, not Riesling. But it's all for a good cause.

Plum Blossoms Waiting for the Bus
It'll be a long wait, since there's no bus stop there, just a bench. Sometimes we must sell our souls to the devil for the sake of improvisation.

Plum Blossoms in Church
Speak of the devil. This church in Bad Kreuznach, the Pauluskirche, is the one in which Karl Marx married Jenny von Westphalen. In order to get these shots when no service was taking place I had to sneak through the minister's private residence! Sometimes it's the little things that fill us with pride.

Plum Blossoms to Music
This guy is a fixture in the Fußängerzone. He plays BEAUTIFULLY. Whenever I have spare coins I drop them into his guitar case. Asking him for permission to take this picture was the first time I'd ever spoken to him. And I learned he's unable to talk. What I'd give to know his story.

Plum Blossoms with Beer
The discerning viewer will note that it's nonalcoholic beer. No disrespect intended; I had to visit several stores before I found a suitable backdrop for the picture. Maybe other fans of the novel can come up with better shots. We'll start a sub-theme: "Plum Blossoms Gets Drunk."

Here's the deal. If you agree to review the novel, or interview or host the author, or post a picture of Plum Blossoms in an odd or exotic context, your copy of the book is free. Write to sarah.hina@gmail.com.

This might be the first post in which I discuss my undergarments, but rest assured it won't be the last

2010-09-01T06:00:00.001+02:00

I used to be a corporate executive who went on business trips. Actually the first part is a lie. I was never a corporate executive. But it's true I went on business trips. Actually, they were just trips. Come to think of it, they weren't even trips, I just went, sometimes in the bushes.

But I had to pack a suitcase! And that's what this post is about, despite its cheap, provocative title: No married man is allowed to pack a suitcase all by himself. Let me illustrate.

I bite my lip as I watch my wife reach into the closet. I know what's coming. The pink shirt. There is no occasion to wear it, no function I can attend in pink, no VIP to hobnob with who won't look at it and blink twice. Yet she makes me pack it for every trip. She'll bury me in that damn shirt if she has her way, and outlives me.

"You forgot to pack this," my wife says. She folds the pink shirt and lays it in the suitcase. "And the tie that goes with it."

"Thank you, dear." Oh, no, not the tie too . . .

I wonder how pilots and flight attendants get away with such small bags, even on flights to Europe with four-day layovers. They tug the things along behind them on those cute little wheels as they walk in tightly clustered packs to the gate. (The pilots have a bit more to tug, but we all know those charts and things are unnecessary, because the plane really flies itself.)

When I pack for a week-long trip, my stuff can't possibly fit in one of those microbags. First, there are the meeting clothes, the stuff I wear while sitting at conference tables, pretending to care about what ol' Silverback is shaking his jowls about. Or—if I tipped a few too many the night before—pretending to be awake. Next, the after-meeting clothes; I can't show up in the bar wearing the same wrinkled things I wore at the meetings, can I? People will recognize the wrinkles! And if I'm going to change, I might as well change everything, undergarments included.

Whereupon we arrive at the theme: wives who supervise the packing of their husbands' suitcases just don't understand business trip suitcase logistics:

"Why do you need so many socks and underwear?" my wife asks. "You'll only be gone for six days, yet you've packed three dozen. There's not enough room for all this stuff."

"Maybe if we remove the pink shirt."

"And you're only taking one pair of shoes? The ratty ones?"

I examine the shoes, which I judge will serve for both formal and casual wear. "Why would I need another?"

I often help other attendees with their luggage as they leave the airport, and there's always one, call her Pamela (because that's her real name), who doesn't have suitcases, she has trunks.

"What's in these things?" I grunt.

"In that one you're carrying now? Shoes." Then, staring at my pink shirt, blinking twice, "You're not actually wearing that at the conference, are you?"

And of course, there's always the attendee, call him Charles (because that's his real name), who dresses to the nines, changes twice a day, and fits it all in a suitcase the size of a laptop. I can't figure out how he does it. Hell, David Copperfield can't figure it out. Inevitably the two of us end up talking at the icebreaker:

"That's an interesting shirt," Charles says. "And tie."

"My wife packed them."

"Ah, that explains it." He looks down at my feet and blinks twice. "I see she packed your shoes too."

Review: Plum Blossoms in Paris

2010-07-28T06:00:00.001+02:00

My Amazon review: Plum Blossoms in Paris by Sarah Hina is an exquisitely written debut, told from the perspective of Daisy Lockhart, who treats herself to an open-ended vacation in Paris after her high school sweetheart dumps her. There she meets Mathieu, a writer, "the distractible type, who neglects to eat because there are other, less ridiculous, matters at hand." Mathieu too is looking for balance, having just lost his mother, a woman whose past makes Daisy an ironic choice of lover.

Yet lovers they become, and Daisy is treated to the feast that is Paris. The novel is rich in cultural references, especially literature and art. The city is viewed through eyes both reverent and critical, as Daisy allows her senses to be filled while at the same time checking her emotional responses against the American within her, an identity she holds close. Her relationship with Mathieu is a study in compatibility. The story gradually focuses on whether Daisy will choose to remain in Paris with him: the reader can't help making ever-refined predictions and vacillating on whether she should. The author does a splendid job of leaving the matter undecided until the end.

The strength of this novel is the writing. The prose is stylish, sensitive, and refined, the result of a natural born poet tackling a larger canvas. Plum Blossoms demands a second reading merely for the beauty of its language. The promise of the author's next novel, and writing career, is high.

Buy Plum Blossoms in Paris • Amazon • Barnes & Noble • Chapters • Borders • Your Local Independent Bookstore • Powell's Books • Books-A-Million

Sarah reading from her novel: press the forward arrow to begin.

My Annual "We're All Losers" Post

2010-07-26T06:00:00.000+02:00

When he was two years old his family moved to Knob Creek, Kentucky when their farm in Hogdenville failed to support them.

When he was seven his family lost its title to the Knob Creek farm and moved to Indiana.

His mother died when he was nine.

When he was 18 his sister died in childbirth.

At age 21 he followed his family to Illinois in an effort to improve their desperate financial circumstances. A year later they moved again.

At 22 he became part owner of a retail store in New Salem, Illinois. It failed.

He was subsequently appointed postmaster of New Salem, until the position was eliminated.

He was 23 when he first ran for the Illinois state legislature. He lost. Two years later he ran again and won.

The following year his girlfriend died.

When he was 29 he ran for speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives. He lost.

He became engaged to a woman he met at a dance. Her family convinced her to end the engagement because they disapproved of him. A year later the two reconciled and married.

His wife became, in the vernacular of the time, insane.

At age 33 he ran for his party's nomination to the U.S. House of Representatives. He lost. Two years later he won the nomination and was elected to congress.

At the end of his term, by prior arrangement, he did not receive his party's nomination for reelection.

He then sought appointment as commissioner of the U.S. General Land Office. He was not selected.

At 41 his three-year-old son died of tuberculosis. Ten years later another son, age 11, would die of typhoid fever.

When he was 46 he ran for the U.S. Senate. He withdrew from the race to prevent a split in his party.

Three years later he ran again. He lost.

His next bid for public office, at age 51, was for the Presidency of the United States. He won.

Thinking about quitting? Don't make me come over there and sit on you.

There's a New Novelist on the Block

2010-07-16T06:00:00.004+02:00

And we're throwing a party for her today, at Plum Blossoms Launch. Stop by to meet the launch girl and have a glass of wine. Chippendales have been hired for the occasion, and Peewee Herman is making a special appearance (Brendan Fraser wasn't available).

Sarah Hina is the debuting author of Plum Blossoms in Paris, just released by Medallion Press and on sale in stores nationwide. I first met Sarah back during the Miss Snark Era, but didn't get to know her well until my novel was also being considered by Medallion. For a while it looked like we were going to be publishing buddies.

Plum Blossoms is an exquisitely written story, told from the first-person perspective of Daisy Lockhart, who treats herself to an open-ended vacation in Paris after her high school sweetheart dumps her. In Paris she meets Mathieu, who—

Well, read it yourself.

Sarah is a past winner of Clarity of Night. Her poetry is the best kept secret in the Blogosphere. Her debut novel is an example of what happens when a poet tackles prose:

The organ is monumental, the biggest I've seen, so imposing that my ears instinctively cringe for the cacophony that must engulf this house of God during Sunday mass. How those unworldly notes ricocheting off the floating domes must storm the transept, before reverberating down, down into the smallest artery of the smallest worshiper's malleable tongue, commanding—like a father's grip—the rebellious blood flowing within to deliver the right words, with reverance.

Chippendales. Srsly. Click here to attend the book launch and leave a congratulatory comment for Sarah. And if you'd like to interview her, review her book, or invite her to guest post on your blog, email her at sarah.hina@gmail.com.

But don't bother approaching Nascar. I already have the inside track:

The Bog

2010-07-12T06:00:00.001+02:00

While doing background stuff for The Tavernier Stones I stomped some bogs vicinity Hamburg, Germany. Following are the notes I put in the first draft of the novel. Most of this was deleted later to make the story open faster.

The bogs of northern Europe had been disgorging bodies for as long as anyone could remember. Often mistaken for present-day murder victims, scientists had only in recent years been able to date them to much earlier times: most died between 800 B.C. and A.D. 400. Hundreds had surfaced in Germany alone, with many others appearing in Scandinavia, Great Britain, and Ireland.

The chemistry of the bog preserved the bodies. And victims they were: their own neighbors and kin had executed them, either as ritual sacrifices to Nerthus, a Bronze Age symbol of fecundity, or as punishments for crimes as heinous as adultery and cowardice. The bogs formed in moist lowlands that experienced little drainage. Subsequent anaerobic waterlogging retarded decay of the remains.

Humic acids in the peat acted as embalming fluids that stained hair and beards red and tanned skin black. Bones decalcified, turning the corpses into leathery bags filled loosely with internal organs and a menu of last suppers, typically barley and linseed gruel. Most strikingly, features were so well preserved that except for the tanning a modern-day public could see exactly what the victims looked like. Could stare them in the face.

They died with quiet dignity. Or cringing in horror, some of them. And the resignation or anguish or shock their expressions communicated at the moment of death, when a relative or friend weighted them down in watery graves, was preserved for the millennia.

Some died from an ear-to-ear slit to the throat. Others from the impact of blunt instruments, or the pelting of stones. Many swung at the end of a rope, and nooses were still tight around their necks two thousand years later when they floated up. It was easy to see how people would think they were recent murder victims and call the police.

The local farmers, who cut and dried peat for use as building material and fuel, believed the bogs to be cursed. The sedges and sphagnum mosses that characterized most of the vegetation actually quaked underfoot. And then there were those inexplicable lights, the wispy, almost floating shimmers that resembled distantly burning embers.

Armillaria mellea, a luminous fungus that made rotting wood look phosphorescent, accounted for the lights. The farmers, who preferred the Irish term "foxfire," had a different explanation.

Foxfire, they said, was a supernatural manifestation of the wicked dead, whose souls had been admitted neither to Heaven nor to Hell, but rather had been cast into the bog to spend an eternity frightening mortals with their ghostly luminescence. To battle loneliness, foxfire manifestations tried to lure travelers into the bog, but only the simple-minded could be so tempted.

Farmers protected themselves by carrying an iron knife—the universal antidote for evil—and plunging it into the ground whenever sighting the manifestation.

Craggy birches made the bog look all of its ancient age. Many of the birches had died upright; a simple bully-like nudge would tilt them over. They poised timidly, both the living and the dead, as though they knew they were mere tenants with temporary leases on the immortal soil. The soil was spongy, dark brown, and rich with humus, the result of eons of unwilling contributions to a reservoir of nourishment.

Few mammals made the bog home, perhaps because roving clouds of insects had found it first. In a way these were the modern-day dinosaurs, tiny though they were, for when banded together their collective bite could be voracious. The bog was also cradle to several animal-eating plant species.

With all that rotting wood, there was no escaping the fungus. It grew in colonies of parasol mushrooms on the surface of the peat. As bracket fungi jutting like pantry shelves from tree trunks. And as oyster mushrooms, with large, white caps resembling oyster shells, clustered on stumps and fallen trunks. Occasionally it grew as brightly colored ornaments that invited travelers to deviate from their paths to investigate, or as fairy rings that spooked them into hastily making the sign of the cross.

It was the fungus that gave rise to the fertile, musty smell. A classic bog bouquet consisted of a dead stump covered with bright green moss, sprinkled generously with cream-colored mushrooms.

No wonder the bogs were the source of so much legend. The locals one-upped each other with anecdotes about their simple-minded ancestors entering from one side, doing something stupid—such as losing an iron knife, or stepping inside a fairy ring—and never coming out the other.

I've been honored by Jason Evans with an invitation to co-judge the next Clarity of Night contest. The theme, prompted as always by a picture, is gemstones. The contest starts July 19. Jason is doubling the prize money and setting a bar. It's never too early to start freaking out.

Looted from Wendy Russ:

Sex on the Blog

2010-06-14T08:18:00.007+02:00

Betsy Dornbusch, better known to some as Sex Scenes at Starbucks, is my guest today with a piece titled "Start to Finish." She is one of the editors of Electric Spec, a quarterly journal of sci fi, fantasy, and the macabre.

Betsy has published short fiction in Spinetingler and elsewhere and has recently released her first novel, Quencher, under a pseudonym. She was one of the earliest readers of my blog.

Start to Finish
I hate to admit this because it makes me sound like one of those bitchy editors, but each submission gets about 30 seconds when I read slush. I maintain that a story has about the same amount of time to grab a readers' attention as YouTube video takes to upload on high speed internet. Something more interesting is always just a click away. That's the New Reality. We'll blow through the obvious strikes quickly: typos, formatting I'm going to have to undo (like indicating italics with _word_), misused and wasted words, telling, boring dialogue, cardboard protags, antags who laugh like mwahahaha. I could go on...

But really. Isn't this all stuff we know? I'd rather spend a our time on what does sell stories.

A friend of mine, a writer with dozens of short story credits, once said on a convention panel that the best writing advice he ever heard about short stories was this: Start stories on the first page and finish them on the last page.

Deceptively simple advice. Make a hell of a lot of sense. But what does it mean?

It means that your story premise should appear on Page One. By the time I've sucked down couple of hundred of your words, I'd like to know what your story is about. So would most regular readers, even if they don't realize it. Think of it as the dead body appearing in the first sequence on Law & Order or the nasty ghoulie dropping in on Sam and Dean in the first minute of Supernatural.

Most short stories that I reject do not do this. In fact, I'd say 80% of my slush have one overt flaw: they start too early, which leads to me having to read more than 200, or even 400, or sometimes 1000 words to figure out what the story is about. And most often, writers pussyfoot around their premise for one reason: it ain't solid enough. Writing circles around your premise won't hide the suck-factor. But I can tell you some tricks to build a decent premise, and ways to get it front and center, pronto.

Writers like to say they start with a what-if scenario. I call bullshit. Most writers, I'd venture to say, start with a character. Thing is, that's cool. Sometimes I do, too. But before you start writing, do yourself a favor and figure out what makes that character tick, what would devastate him, maybe her worst problem in the world. Here's some premises I've used that have sold, and most started with an idea for a character.

· A mystic who must serve his god and his god's enemy at the same time.
· A changeling torn between his old life as a human, his lover who would keep him that way, and his delicious new killer instincts.
· An FBI agent in love with his primary murder suspect.
· A woman torn between a marriage proposal and homosexual curiosity.
· A straight-laced detective finds out his beloved department can't handle a particular murder case, especially when the murderer goes after his girlfriend.
· Or, one I read recently about an Amish cartographer on a treasure hunt.

None of these are particularly stunning premises - except that last one - but they're all from stories that sold. I want you to notice a couple of things about what makes them work. First, they make a certain sense, don't they? There's symmetry, logic about the way a premise is attached to a particular character that inspires questions. (What could an Amish guy want with a ruby as big as his fist??) You can be sure I did my damnedest to get the reader to ask those questions by the end of the first page.

My advice: While drafting your story, or hopefully before, write your premise in one sentence. Figure out the scene that best illustrates it, that best forces questions in the reader's mind. Then, launch that scene on the first page. It can be as simple as a murder or, like in this first line from a story in this month's issue of Electric Spec:

It had all been good fun until Farncis heard a wizard's offhand comment: "Nasty fellow, the Emperor. If his mood's foul today, somebody's losing their head."

We know all kinds of things from just that line: it's a fantasy, there are wizards, Farncis is there to have fun, but there's danger he didn't realize. It inspires questions: Who is Farncis? Why didn't Farncis know about the emperor's penchant for the axe? What might make the emperor so crabby? How will Farncis get out of it? The writer keeps dropping hints, giving more information, and forcing more questions as the story goes on until we realize Farncis has been given an insurmountable, dilemma-ridden task with his head as the stakes.

Of course, all good stories must end. There's a lot of ways premises can be wrapped up and surprising me is not nearly as important as writers seem to think. Satisfying me, that's important. (No secret why it's called a climax.) Start with the symmetry and logic that links the character and events – that makes me suspend disbelief. Then make me squirm or sigh or laugh or cry. I once heard an editor put it this way, paraphrased: I don't care what you make me feel, just make me feel something, damn it. But however it goes down, the climax needs to answer the question the premise put forth. Will the FBI agent choose love or justice? Will the changeling choose his old life or his new one? Will the mystic choose his god or his prince? Whatever it is, as soon as it happens, don't waste too many more words. Wrap up the story, right at about the last page. Prologues and epilogues have no place in short fiction.

Or in essays. So to finish, I'll just repeat that best advice:

Start stories on the first page and finish them on the last page.

New Title for Novel

2010-06-12T14:18:00.004+02:00

It has been brought to my attention that my novel's title will change, starting with the next printing. Instead of The Tavernier Stones it will henceforth be known as The Incredible Tavernier Stones, or TITS for short.

TITS will continue to be softbound, so treat it gently.

With any luck you'll one day see TITS on the silver screen.

TITS will soon be translated into other languages. Such editions will be categorized as "TITS for Foreign Tongues."

When you're through enjoying TITS, please share it with others.

Unfortunately, TITS is useless on a bull.

Alan Orloff's Lessons Learned

2010-06-02T07:43:00.004+02:00

Alan Orloff is my guest today. He's a fellow Midnight Ink alumnus whose debut novel came out exactly one month before mine. Naturally I've been watching his progress, asking questions along the way. Alan is the author of DIAMONDS FOR THE DEAD. Here's what I had to say about it at Amazon:

Josh Handleman's search for his father's diamonds---and killer as well---is set against the backdrop of a homecoming. Author Alan Orloff deftly creates tension between characters who once were close friends, but haven't seen one another in years.

The protagonist is sympathetic and easy to identify with, the scenes are vivid, and conflicts abound. As in all good mysteries, the perpetrator is well integrated and doesn't reveal himself until the end. Orloff employs subtle cliffhangers to excellent effect.

I enjoyed the writing from the beginning, and after I'd sampled a couple of chapters I was unable to put the novel down.

Alan's next novel, KILLER ROUTINE, will be published in the spring of 2011. It's the first in a new "Last Laff Mystery" series featuring Channing Hayes, a stand-up comic with a tragic past.

Alan is here today to share lessons he learned on his blog tour:

During the month of April, I embarked on my DIAMONDS FOR THE DEAD WORLD BLOG TOUR. All from the comfort of my spare bedroom. Was it fun? Yes. Was it a fair amount of work? Yes. Was it successful? Hmmm.

Here are some observations. If you're planning your own blog tour, you might be interested.

My goals: To gain exposure for me and my debut mystery, DIAMONDS FOR THE DEAD, by guest blogging on a variety of other bloggers' blogs.

The plan: I aimed for three guest blogs per week, and I decided to link to these guest blogs from my blog. In other words, I wouldn't actually be blogging separately on my own blog. (I do like the word “blog.”)

The unwitting stooges: I asked my blogging friends if they'd like to host me and got a very nice response. I also put a note on my blog asking if others would like to host me. This generated a few additional invitations.

What worked well:

Writing blogs ahead of time. I tried to have the blogs done well in advance so my hosts would have plenty of time to get them posted. This also reduced my stress--no eleventh-hour frenzies!

Asking my friends who blog to host me. What are friends for?

Not writing separate posts for my own blog. If I had done this, I wouldn't have gotten much writing done. And, no matter how much promotion I'm doing, I need to keep my eye on the prize--getting my next manuscript written.

Including headshot, cover art, and bio. Everyone likes the visuals (thank goodness for Photoshop!).

Scheduling the tour, and posting it on my blog and my publisher's author page. Somehow it got transmitted to my Amazon author page and then to various other sites, all by cybermagic, which helped spread the word.

Using Twitter to publicize each stop on the tour. Of course, it would have been better if I had more Twitter followers!

Using Facebook to publicize each stop on the tour. Many peoples loves their Facebooks.

The duration. One month seemed to work well.

What could be improved next time:

My reach. Because I blogged at a lot of friends' blogs, I already knew many of the blog readers. So I think I'd try to blog at a wider range of blogs next time.

Variety. Many of my guest posts were on crime fiction blogs. Next time, I think I'd try to appear on a wider variety of blogs--different genres, not all writing-related, maybe more review sites, etc.

Creative promotions. I should have held a contest. I should have given away some books. I should have done some more, uh, creative things. Maybe given away a diamond (like my host the creative Mr. Parrish). Next go round, I'll have to think of something really good.

All in all, I was pretty pleased with my blog tour.

Hey, does Oprah have a blog?

Thanks, Alan. If there's one thing on this list I would emphasize, it's writing guest posts in advance; mine are all being written in the eleventh hour, and it's stressful. In a month or so I'll be posting my own lessons learned on Alan's blog. Meanwhile if you're looking for a fresh, entertaining read involving unique characters, pick up DIAMONDS FOR THE DEAD. Fellow writers looking for new blogging buddies would do well to drop Alan a line. He is, as I like to say, one of us.

The Fallen: Interview with Author Mark Terry

2010-04-08T06:00:00.002+02:00

Twenty world leaders meet for the G8 Summit at the beautiful Cheyenne Resort in Colorado Springs. But an ugly plot lurks beneath the surface: a terrorist group, The Fallen Angels, plans to wreak havoc on the summit. With the Secret Service, the FBI, Homeland Security, the military, and security from twenty different governments on hand, shouldn't the resort be the safest place in the world? Working undercover as a maintenance man, Derek Stillwater will wage war on the world's deadliest, most sophisticated terrorist organization, picking off the terrorists one by one—until he comes face-to-face with an evil force from his past, the Fallen Angel himself.

Steve: Damn, this book moves fast. It's a truism in thriller literature that "pacing is everything." Do you buy into that?

Mark: Hmmm. Not quite. The general dogma in fiction is that character is everything and plot is secondary. Sometimes you can have such a strong, fast-moving plot that it can sort of override character, at least to some extent. There are a lot of things going on in a discussion of pace. One is "incident." That is to say, there's a lot of things going on. That's definitely the case in The Fallen and in my books in general. Sometimes I read a thriller or any other kind of book and it will feel like there's a handful of incidents which in themselves take up maybe twenty or thirty pages, and then the rest of the book is made up of characters thinking about the incidents, talking about the incidents, responding to the incidents . . . not necessarily a bad thing and certainly leaning more toward mainstream/literary fiction than commercial fiction. I had the great opportunity to interview David Morrell (creator of Rambo, etc.) for a profile I did for the International Thriller Writers, and he said, (and I'm quoting, because I put it up over my desk), "Big books aren't made up of more words, they're made up of more incidents."

Second, I think some of it is related to efficiency. Does your story move along efficiently? Are you taking the forward momentum of a story and then slowing it down with unnecessary backstory or flashbacks? You and I have discussed this before and my feeling is that every story has a forward momentum (i.e., it moves from beginning to end) and you mess around with that momentum at your own peril. That doesn't mean you can't have backstory and even flashbacks, but it means you need to use craft and technique to keep the story moving forward while you're filling in backstory. And efficiency also can refer to your writing style, which in my case tends toward the lean and stripped down, which helps to make it read fast. I'm a believer that style serves story, so if I want a slower story, my style might have to change.

Third, I think structure is important. In my case, a lot of reviewers have mentioned the short chapters. I could certainly have just made 10 chapters and stuck all these short chapters in them, making them short scenes, sections, but I purposefully chose to make short chapters. That's not new to me, either. David Morrell has discussed that and how he experimented in many of his books with sections broken into short chapters; Clive Cussler's been using short chapters for 30 years or so, saying, I think accurately, that it's like eating potato chips—you can't eat just one. And with no slam to Tom Clancy—I enjoyed many of his books—it could seem pretty daunting to hit chapter 6 and find that it's 125 pages long with only three section breaks.

That's a long way of answering, I guess. I like fast-moving books. But I also like slow-moving books if there are interesting characters and topics, and everything in between. At the moment, my "brand," in as much as I have one, revolves around fast-paced stories.

Steve: You've been acquainted with your protagonist, Derek Stillwater, for several books now. How are the two of you getting along?

Mark: Mostly pretty well. The more I work with a single series character the more I understand why many writers branch out into multiples series, or occasional stand-alones, though. (Or for that matter, particularly with thrillers, just focus on one-off stand-alones. Dick Francis regularly wrote the same sort of book with the same sort of characters, but rarely re-used a main character). I can see it getting a little bit like Cabot Cove Syndrome, which is named after the town where the TV show "Murder, She Wrote" took place—because every relative and guest to this small town in Maine ended up murdered or accused of murder and you had to wonder why anyone would visit such a crime-ridden city for a vacation, let alone to visit their Aunt Jessica. I find that Derek can be a little stingy with personal information, so I have to be fairly persistent in order to get background information out of him. And I wonder if at some point he'll dig in his heels, announce his retirement for real and refuse to leave his cabin cruiser until the next crises passes.

Steve: You demonstrate a casual familiarity with weapons and tactics, intelligence agencies, and international intrigue. You're either a meticulous researcher or a former spook. Fess up.

Mark: I can neither confirm, nor deny . . . but I do a lot of research.

Steve: In the interests of national security, I'll have to let that one slide. Do you write for the movies? That is, do you see the scenes played out in your imagination, and record them, or is it words, words, words. From my perspective, your writing is very visual. It almost feels like I'm reading a script.

Mark: I really do think I see them play out in my imagination, more or less. It's significantly more complex than that, I think, but yes, basically writing is in many ways describing the scenes I see in my head. I've never quite understood that seeing-a-film-in-your-head thing, because I don't exactly, but when I'm writing everything becomes quite vivid in my imagination and I do think I'm a very visual writer. I'm also attentive to some standard scriptwriting techniques, like entering a scene late and leaving early, and the three-part story structure (beginning, middle, and end, at its most simple, but let's just say I'm aware of where the reversals should probably be).

Steve: A recurring theme on your blog seems to be that novelists should tame their expectations. Has your pie fallen out of the sky?

Mark: Mark Terry, buzzkill. Maybe. I don't think I'm unusual among aspiring novelists and newbie published novelists in simultaneously thinking I'm going to be a bestselling author showered in money AND being poor and living in a garret. I think most of us see a book on the shelf of a bookstore or grocery store and think, "Wow, they must be rich, they're so successful." And the reality of it—and I'm CONSTANTLY finding this out, over and over again—is that it ain't necessarily so. Being able to call yourself a "bestselling" author doesn't mean you've sold a million copies. I'm a "bestselling" author for Dancing in the Dark, which I published on the Kindle, but I got onto those lists with very few sales. I've even seen some royalty statements from authors whose paperbacks are in the top 15 of the New York Times Bestsellers List and was stunned to find how relatively little money they had coming in. That isn't to say they weren't making a decent living or that they weren't doubling or tripling their advances via foreign rights sales and audiobooks and e-rights and film options, etc. But there's a tendency to think that, "Gee, I'm published, I've got it made." So I do think it's probably a good thing to be realistic. Several friends of mine, Tobias S. Buckell and Jim Hines, have done surveys on their blogs about book advances and they found that the average first-novel book advance was $5000 or less. And once you get an agent's 15% and the government's 28% or so cut, there's not a lot left for the author. So don't quit your day job.

At the same time, my "day job" is as a freelance writer, and to my pleasant surprise it's been a more lucrative living than I expected. It's probably not for everyone, given the unreliability of when the money will actually show up in your mailbox, but I never thought I'd make more money than I did working in healthcare, but I have just about every year I've been a full-time writer. And who knows? One or both of us could get hit by lightning and our books could take off and they'll be saying, "Wow, Stephen King, Stephen Parrish, Mark Terry, Dan Brown, JK Rowling—these are some of the most successful novelists around!"

Steve: You employed a "hit by lightning" metaphor. Are bestsellers like Stephen and Dan and JK just lucky?

Mark: That's a question I'd like to ask them sometime. (Are you on a first-name basis with them, by the way?) I definitely think luck is a factor, but I wouldn't say "just lucky." If publishers knew what made a book a bestseller that's all they'd publish, and there seems to be a wide variety of factors that go into becoming a bestselling author, particularly when we're talking about Phenomenon type books, like The Da Vinci Code, the Harry Potter novels, Grisham's The Firm, Mitch Albom's Tuesdays With Morrie, John Berendt's Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil, or Robert James Waller's Bridges of Madison County. Those are something a little different than your typical bestselling book—they become cultural touchpoints and ride the bestseller lists for weeks and weeks and weeks. I don't think there are many people who would argue that Bridges of Madison County was a well-written book (over-written, perhaps), but it was very compelling, and I assume that most readers, women in particular, spent a lot of time wondering and discussing whether she should have left her husband and gone with the photographer, and what they would do in her situation. And I suspect that there was a similar thing going on with The Da Vinci Code, that it made several million people discuss the origins of the Catholic Church and whether or not Jesus and Mary Magdalene ever hooked up and because the artwork was so famous and accessible it made a lot of us go to the web and look for ourselves and debate the possible symbolism. I'm not sure you can manufacture that, it just happens.

I'm fairly confident that with a good book, a publisher behind you, good artwork, decent reviews, good distribution, some word of mouth, and a lot of work promoting—and then a little bit of luck—that most of us should be able to sell a fair number of copies of our books, particularly if a publisher sticks with us long enough to get several books out into the marketplace. But 50,000 copies of a trade paperback or hardcover or 200,000 copies of a mass market paperback, though absolutely fantastic sales, wouldn't necessarily get you onto the bestseller lists. But I bet both you and I would be happy with sales figures like that. Unfortunately, getting all those things together consistently is tough. Otherwise there's a definite right time, right place, right book, right cover art, right publisher, right story, etc., and that sort of falls into luck.

Steve: What does it feel like to hold a printed copy of your book in your hands? Does the magic diminish as the titles stack up?

Mark: It's probably hard to describe. It's a little exciting and very satisfying. For me—maybe because that's the kind of guy I am—it seems a little freighted with uncertainty and responsibility. I mean, the publishers have fairly high expectations of this thing and it's sort of out of your hands, but you do what you can. I suppose it's similar to when your kid grows up and goes out into the big bad world. You hope you did everything right ahead of time, but once it's out there . . .

As for does the magic diminish as the titles stack up? No, not really. I've found that it varies from title to title a bit based on how you feel about the individual book or what experiences I was going through when I wrote it or during the contract negotiations or the editing process. I really enjoyed the editing process for Dirty Deeds, my first novel, but ultimately didn't much care for the cover art or even the layout of the book. With The Devil's Pitchfork and The Serpent's Kiss the editing process was fine, I loved the covers, and was pretty happy with the overall feel of the books. And The Serpent's Kiss is sort of a favorite story of mine, but my publisher seemed to be a lot less behind that book than they had been for The Devil's Pitchfork. For The Fallen, it's my first novel in hardcover and they've done such a great job with the cover art, the layout, and they've been so supportive and aggressive about promotion and marketing that it just has a good feeling to it.

Steve: Suppose every aspiring writer in the country reads this interview. What would you say to them?

Mark: Well, first, go out and buy a copy of my damned book! But aside from the compulsory crass and commercial response, I would say, look, folks, I discovered I wanted to be a writer when I was about 21 or 22. I worked a job I really disliked for a very long time. Now I'm 46. It took a long time and The Fallen is my 5th book and 4th novel to be published. But I kept at it and now I'm a novelist and a full-time freelance writer. We keep saying it ad nauseum, but if you have any talent whatsoever, then it's all about persistence and hard work. It's not always fun and it's not always easy, but it's almost always rewarding. And the fact is, if you keep studying, reading, writing, submitting, listening to criticism with an open mind, write some more, submit some more, write and write and write, then yes, absolutely you're going to write something someone will publish. And although you'll probably know it long before then, you'll realize that "writer" is a big part of who you are.
***The Fallen is in stock at Amazon and other online retailers. Mark blogs at This Writing Life.

Last Week I Rescued a Snowwoman

2010-03-16T01:17:00.004+01:00

My brother Dan once owned a stuffed animal that would say, when its string was pulled, "Last week I rescued a snowman. I really did!"

This is Gladys; my daughter Sarah and I built her a few weeks ago:

What distinguishes Gladys as a snowwoman are her breasts; Sarah tends to make her snowpeople women, and she likes to plaster snowballs to their chests to clarify the distinction. I guess you could say Sarah is a snow sculpture feminist. Nevertheless we call all of our winter creations "snowmen," employing a chauvinistic expression that feels irrevocably embedded in the language. Even our snow animals are "snowmen."

I've heard arguments against referring to God as "He." Problem is, using "She" generally draws smiles, and falling back on "It" tends to have the opposite effect. Erica Orloff made God a She in Freudian Slip, and I plan to do so in a future project. My purposes, however, will be humor and agitation. If I were to write a serious piece on God, He would be a dude. The piece would come across as unserious otherwise.

I live in Germany, where the language deliberately distinguishes between the sexes. A male god is a Gott, a female god is a Göttin. The practice puts women in their place: if she drives an airplane she's not a Pilot, she's a Pilotin, and regardless of anyone's insistence that the distinction is only linguistic, I'm here to tell you, a Pilotin doesn't have the same social status as a Pilot. A Göttin is outranked by a Gott. Has been since Zeus strutted his stuff atop Mount Olympus. An Ärztin (female doctor) is held in slightly lower regard than an Arzt (male doctor). Chauvinism and even discrimination are built into the language. Airlines in the U.S. eradicated the word "stewardess" for exactly this reason.

So how did I rescue a snowwoman? I rebuilt her, using remnants of her original anatomy, after more snow had fallen. Her head had melted, but there was enough left of the rest of her to clone a new person:

I didn't give her breasts. As a grown man, with neighbors looking on, I didn't think it proper. But I let her keep her name. And I continue to think of her as a "snowman," if only to afford her the same career opportunities the male snowmen in my community naturally and linguistically enjoy.

Or maybe I've just been in Germany too long.

Recognize Anyone?

2010-03-13T21:38:00.014+01:00

Jelly beans to the first person who can identify the following authors (they're all household names):

I Wrote a Novel

2010-03-05T06:00:00.002+01:00

It wasn't any good. To be honest, most of it consisted of words hurled at the screen, merely to get the job done, to fill up all those blank 8.5 x 11 rectangles that stood in my way. The same blank rectangles that stand in the way of everyone who wants to be a novelist.

I rewrote the novel. It still wasn't very good, but I submitted it to a few agents anyway. They responded with form rejections.

I rewrote it again. I showed it to a freelance editor, who told me to throw most of it away and start over.

I rewrote it again. I sent partials to some more agents, one of whom requested a full. He eventually rejected it, but gave me some good advice.

I rewrote it again. I queried a few more agents, and got some more advice. I rewrote it again, and got yet more advice. And again, and again. In one three month period I rewrote it four times.

All at once, offers started coming in. I selected one. I had an agent.

He wanted changes to the manuscript.

I rewrote it again. My agent submitted it to some publishers who turned it down. He stopped taking my calls.

I rewrote it again. I submitted it directly to publishers. They ignored me.

I rewrote it again. Some publishers took interest in the project, but not enough to make an offer.

I rewrote it again. One editor asked for changes before he would consider making an offer.

I rewrote it again. I made the changes the editor requested. He responded with an offer. I was so surprised, I asked a couple of writer friends to look at the message, to make sure I wasn't crazy.

The editor wanted more changes to the manuscript.

I rewrote it again. The editor passed it to another editor, who wanted yet more changes.

Today, 5 March 2010, it goes to press.

Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever give up.
—Winston Churchhill

A Complete and Accurate Transcription of My Conversation with World Famous Figure Skater Denise Biellmann, Published Here for the First Time Ever

2010-02-28T06:00:00.001+01:00

This is Denise Biellmann. She's a former Swiss, European, and world figure skating champion. The "Biellmann Spin," the only spin officially named after a skater, is what she's doing in the picture—if the picture could spin.

I'm an Olympics junkie and a figure skating junkie. Which means every fourth February I put life on hold.

It's all about dance. Because, you see, I'm a dance junkie too. Whenever the human figure goes into motion for aesthetic reasons, it's dance. When the contact between the performers and the surface on which they perform is 4mm wide, and as slick as ice—because it is ice—the performance is all the more impressive.

Ironically, ice dancing isn't my favorite category, because the skaters don't make the jumps, don't take the risks. But this year my favorite skaters were the Canadian ice dance gold medalists Scott Moir and Tessa Virtue. Aren't they gorjus?

They're the reigning world champions too:

I would think winning any Olympic medal, or just participating at all, would be the highlight of an athlete's career. But how many times have you seen silver and bronze medalists slumped in dejection? I happened to be watching the ladies downhill when Italian skier Johanna Schnarf placed fourth at the end of her run—with other skiers yet to compete. Which meant, of course, no possibility of a medal. Nevertheless she grinned and bounced and pumped her arms as though she had won the gold. That's the experience I think everyone should have.

And I think the Olympics should be about athletes, not countries. Medal counts are pointless. Besides, shouldn't a country's medal count be more or less a function of its size and wealth? If so, the large, weathly countries might not have anything to brag about.

Compare the U.S to South Korea, for instance. As of this writing South Korea has won a total of 14 medals in the 2010 Winter Games. The U.S. has won 36, and NBC wants everyone to know. But the population of the U.S. is about six times that of South Korea. Shouldn't the U.S. have six times the number of medals? 84 instead of 36? According to one tally, the U.S. ranks 45th on the list of per capita Olympic medalists. You won't hear NBC bragging about that.

I'd like to see medals awarded to fourth and fifth place too. So often the difference between winning a medal and not winning a medal is a fraction of a second.

Okay, back to Denise Biellmann. I'm a figure skating junkie. I've seen many greats like Brian Boitano and Katarina Witt skate live. The live experience is very different from the television experience; when the skaters launch their jumps the audience holds its breath. You can hear the skates scraping the ice. In a way it's like watching ballet live; what you don't hear on TV is the sound of feet pattering the stage.

Anyway, at the end of a "Gala on Ice" in Frankfurt, Germany, Denise Biellmann graciously autographed programs, and I had the opportunity to converse with her. Here as promised is a complete and accurate transcription of our conversation, drawn from memory, made public for the first time:

"Thank you," I said, as she handed the program back to me.

"You're welcome."

Watch it Twice

2010-02-18T06:29:00.003+01:00

Snitched from Nancy Bond.

Pull My Finger: Fun Tricks to Play on Your Kids

2010-02-07T06:00:00.001+01:00

1. Pretend your kid is invisible. When she speaks, ask your spouse, "What was that? Did you hear something?" Your kid will get frustrated and eventually panic, thinking she's really invisible. She'll poke and jab you, even hit you, to get attention. But you just keep asking, "Where is she? Where did she go?" Eventually she'll learn to tickle you, and if you can't resist (I couldn't) you pretend at that moment that she's suddenly visible again. This trick works best on preschoolers, especially at dinnertime: "Looks like we're eating alone tonight!"

2. Any competent dad knows ketchup consists of crushed red bugs, and rice of dead baby worms. And he doesn't withhold the information, especially not as his kid's fork is entering her mouth.

3. "Santa Claus got killed in a midair collision last night. Sorry."

4. Sleepwalking and talking: again, the longer you can resist your kid poking and jabbing you, and eventually tickling you, the longer you can make her believe you really are asleep at the stove. Fun.

5. "Your teacher called; you have to go to school this weekend." Like #3, it only works once.

6. "Sarah is just your nickname, you know. Your real name is Cocklebur." Have a fake certificate ready in advance to prove it, and your kid will go screaming to her mother. Cool.

All right, shaddup, I never did #3.

The Job Interview

2010-01-27T06:00:00.002+01:00

Yesterday ol' What's-Her-Name opened a post with the following:

Applying for a job starts with a company getting scads of resumes. They immediately toss the ones with typos in the resume and that are poorly written into the circular file. Then they start digging in to find a "match" with the company's needs. For argument's sake, let's say 100 resumes come in, 30 get tossed immediately. Of the remaining 70, they narrow it to 20 reasonable candidates that "match" the company's needs. Of those, now there's more intense scrutiny. That's when they'll start noticing the little things. This one's schooling isn't quite a fit. That one has a five-year period of sketchy employment. Now they have 8 candidates. They get called for an interview—phone only. Right away, two just sound unqualified or not confident. One stammers, badly. Okay, they have five. They're all brought in for interviews. Three are eliminated—one because he bombs the interview, the other two because the "feel" isn't right . . . they don't seem like a match for the office. TWO candidates remain. Of those final two, the person interviewing says . . . "Why you? Tell me why I should hire you?"

In my last job I had the privilege of reviewing thousands of employment applications, conducting hundreds of interviews, and hiring dozens of people. I made some mistakes early on, all for the same reason: I listened to someone else rather than to my own gut instincts.

Erica is right about the percentage of candidates who effectively eliminate themselves: their resumes are sloppy, they haven't done their homework, or they behave inappropriately during the interview (scratching in the wrong places, putting their feet up, flirting). My all-time favorite interview was with a man who told me God had chosen him for the job. "Maybe so," I answered, "but He has said precious little to me about it."

Their resumes are sloppy. They haven't done their homework. They behave inappropriately. Is it just me, or does that sound an awful lot like the complaints we're hearing from blogging agents? Typos in query letters, genres the agent doesn't represent, purple stationary. Although the analogy fails at one point or another, querying an agent or editor is very much like applying for a job.

The lesson I learned about hiring was to trust my gut instincts. Sometimes my guts told me immediately who to pick. Sometimes my guts needed a few days, and I learned to be patient. Once while hiring a personal assistant I kept arguing back and forth with myself about the top two candidates. I couldn't make up my mind. Within a few days I figured out why: another candidate farther down the list, one who was less educated, less experienced, less qualified, kept nagging at my subconscious. When I finally acknowledged that my guts were speaking up, and that I needed to listen, I knew who to hire. That employee and I worked closely together for four years and remain friends to this day.

As Erica says, employers aren't generally looking for the best person, rather for the best match.

Are agents looking for the best match? Do they make decisions based on gut instinct? I think so. Anymore, I don't see how else it can be done.

Be-Do-Have

2010-01-19T06:00:00.002+01:00

The title comes from a seminar I attended a few years ago called the Landmark Forum. The Forum is a descendant of the 1970s "est" seminars made famous by John Denver and other celebrities. In Denver's time you were locked in a room all day and when you had to pee you did it in your pants. Nowadays they let you go to the bathroom, but not much else has changed.

I got a lot out of the experience and would recommend it to anyone, but with the warning that Landmark Education Corporation teeters on the brink of being a cult: its aggressive recruiting techniques make even the most prosthelytizing evangelicals swoon with admiration, and almost all of the work done on behalf of the company is done by rabidly loyal and fervent unpaid volunteers.

The genius behind Be-Do-Have is best illustrated by its mirror image: Have-Do-Be—the way most people evaluate their lives. They assess what they have (little or nothing), which in turn dictates what they do (what everyone else who has little or nothing happens to be doing), which ultimately reveals who they are (you guessed it: nobody). I attended the Landmark Forum in London where a very good case study was made out of a young actor (I'll call him Nigel) who was trying to break into West End theater. Nigel had done a couple of television commercials and gotten a couple of walk-on parts, but after years of mostly fruitless auditioning he had come to see himself as a failure.

Nigel looked at what he had: little or nothing. He used that to figure out what to do: complain a lot (at any rate, that's what he did in my presence). He drew a logical conclusion about what he was: a loser. Certainly not an actor.

Not far west of the West End is the Hammersmith Apollo, where pretty much every rock star from Alice Cooper to Frank Zappa has performed at one time or another. And it is just this group—rock stars, wannabe rock stars, even no-chance-in-Hell rock stars—that shows us how the formula works when manipulated in the right order: Be-Do-Have.

You've seen the wannabe rock stars in action, the kids who dress the part, grow the hair, act like they're stoned all the time, even if they aren't. You've seen them perform: jumping up and down like idiots, playing air guitar, making love to the microphone stand. These are kids who have never cut a record, never sold a ticket, yet they act like members of the club.

They decide to Be rock stars. Then they figure out what to Do: what rocks stars do, naturally. Then and only then do they assess what they Have, which is likely more than the other guy has, the one who says, "When I become a rock star, I'll act like one."

I decided to be a writer, and therefore do what writers do, and consequently have what writers get, which, although my roof now leaks and my socks are full of holes, I wouldn't trade for anything.

Watch your thoughts, for they become your words.
Watch your words, for they become your actions.
Watch your actions, for they become your habits.
Watch your habits, for they become your character.
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.

—authorship disputed

Always, Sometimes, or Never?

2010-01-17T12:47:00.002+01:00

I found this quiz in a psychology textbook and thought it interesting enough to pass along. Which of the following are true?

1. To change people's behavior toward members of ethnic minority groups, we must first change their attitudes.

2. Memory can be likened to a storage chest in the brain into which we deposit material and from which we can withdraw it later if needed. Occasionally, something gets lost from the "chest," and then we say we have forgotten.

3. The basis of the baby's love for its mother is the fact that the mother fulfills its physiological needs for food, etc.

4. The more highly motivated you are, the better you will do at solving a complex problem.

5. The best way to ensure that a desired behavior will persist after training is completed is to reward the behavior every single time it occurs throughout training (rather than intermittently).

6. A schizophrenic is someone with a split personality.

7. Fortunately for babies, human mothers have a strong maternal instinct.

8. Biologists study the body; psychologists study the mind.

9. Psychiatrists are defined as medical people who use psychoanalysis.

10. Children memorize much more easily than adults.

11. Boys and girls exhibit no behavioral differences until environmental influences begin to produce such differences.

12. Genius is closely akin to insanity.

13. The unstructured interview is the most valid method for assessing someone's personality.

14. Under hypnosis, people can perform feats of physical strength which they could never do otherwise.

15. Children's IQ scores have very little relationship with how well they do in school.

Pounding Ground

2010-01-11T06:02:00.002+01:00

The Tavernier Stones opens in a bog in northern Germany. When it came time to write the scene my wife and I spent a long weekend in Hamburg, she absorbing the museums, me sloshing around in peat bogs, my socks absorbing stagnant water the color of strongly brewed tea. I had to find the right bog, the perfect bog, the actual bog from which the dead body in the opening scene emerged.

The dead body is fiction, you say. It didn't emerge from anywhere but your own mind, you say.

Well, not so fast. In my own mind the distinction between fact and fiction is blurred. I think it's a result of having concluded early in life that perception is the better part of reality (your annual raise isn't based on how good you are, rather on how good your boss thinks you are). In my own mind, the seventeenth century cartographer Johannes Cellarius was indeed buried in the Holmmoor with a 57 carat ruby clenched in his fist.

You've all heard of Johannes Cellarius, right? He's probably best known to the general public for having penned the following, in 1689:

Pitty the Scrybe whose Yearne for Splendour
Tempteth him to quit his Harth and Home
For all Earthes Treasure be but Tinsell
And beyond his Realm do Dragones roame

Now do you recognize him? Maybe not. I made him up. And all his quotes that appear in the novel. At least I think I did; one agent told me she googled him and got hits. One editor told me he enjoyed reading about Cellarius, because it filled a gap in his knowledge of medieval history. Apparently to some readers he comes across as real. It's no accident; to me he's very real. I have to remind myself when talking about the story that the events I depicted did not, in fact, happen.

At least I think they didn't.

My setting are all real, I'm sure of that. The bog in the opening scene exists. The church in Idar-Oberstein stands just as I described it, except that I made up the secret chambers beneath, the ones in which the Black Mass was celebrated during the seventeenth century. Or did I?

The first version of the novel was 145,000 words long. Now it's 89,000. That early prototype had more characters, more settings; it told the true (or possibly imagined) story of an international race to find the Lost Tavernier Stones of popular European folklore. Scenes that took place in London, Greenwich, and Cambridge have all been cut. True to my dedication to reality (or perception) I traveled to London, Greenwich, and Cambridge to get the details right.

Some of my favorite scenes took place in Madrid and Salamanca. I pounded ground in those cities too. But you won't read about them.

A couple of exotic scenes took place in Cappadocia, in central Turkey. I spent four days criss-crossing the territory by bus and taxi. The memories are all I have to show for it.

I needed a small midwestern town, and after driving through one small midwestern town after another I chose Gibson City, Illinois, because it was perfect. Perfect because that's where certain events in my novel actually occurred. I'll be using Gibson City in another project, as it turns out.

I had never been to Philadelphia, yet several scenes were going to take place there. Excuse me: several scenes had taken place there, and I needed to write them. So I booked a flight and pounded some ground. In the middle of my visit I was subpoenaed to testify at a trial in Tampa, Florida. I flew to Tampa for a week, completed my testimony, then flew back to Philadelphia, completed my field research, then flew home to Germany. The cost of visiting this single location was greater than my advance would turn out to be. Fortunately the Philadelphia scenes remain in the book. Some of them.

I hope when you read The Tavernier Stones you experience a strong sense of "place." I worked hard to make it so. My editor told me blogging about cuts, even posting some of them, would make me feel better. It does, a little bit.

A Critter Code of Ethics

2010-01-07T07:36:00.003+01:00

Critiques are delicate, there's no way around it. In some ways they're like recommending deodorant to a friend: you don't want to hurt your friend's feelings, but neither do you want him to stink. I've traveled the complete route from "I don't need criticism" to "I won't even start the first chapter until my synopsis is sore from gang rape." So I think I have some perspective on the matter.

My first critique came from none other than Dan Lazar. I didn't ask him to evaluate the manuscript, I asked him to represent it, but I was touched by the time he took to give me advice. Of course I incorporated none of that advice (later I would incorporate it all), because like most writers first setting out to sell their work, I thought my work was ready to sell.

I was a virgin. I didn't know how to assume the position.

Gradually, as other agents were generous with their advice, and as I began to see patterns in the criticism, I realized my stuff wasn't ready for the marketplace after all. I returned to the keyboard.

But not for long. One agent who was famous for negotiating multi-million dollar advances offered to represent my novel if I would cut two secondary figures from the narrative. I said no to both her and her horse. (I was polite to the horse.) As you might now guess, those two figures eventually relocated anyway to the Island of Discarded Characters, where they wait in vain, Christmas after Christmas, for a loving, caring manuscript to adopt them.

I learned to listen to criticism. It's rare anymore that I don't incorporate the critter's advice, because if she thinks something's wrong with the story, well, there are any number of possible reasons, but one of them is, there's something wrong with the story.

James N. Frey, in How to Write a Damn Good Novel, addresses the question of why it's so hard to critique our own work:

If you have never written a novel, think of how hard it could be and then multiply it by a hundred. For some it is harder to write a novel than to row a bathtub across the North Atlantic.

Naw, you say. Not if you're a genius. Not if you've got talent.

If you're a genius or have talent, it's even harder.

How come? you say.

It's because a writer has a damn hard time evaluating what he has written, and unless he knows the strengths and weaknesses of a manuscript it will not be possible to turn a draft into a finished piece of work. So why is it so hard?

It has something to do with how the human mind works. When you read someone else's work, you see the faults, errors, and dead spots; poor characterizations, flawed metaphors, and so on, with no trouble at all. Read someone else's first draft; its faults will fly off the page at you. If a character is not well-motivated, you can sense it immediately—in someone else's book. You can tell when you're bored out of your mind—when you read someone else's book. Clichés abound in everyone else's work, but they will remain forever hidden in your own. And if you have a lot of talent, even if you are a genuine genius, it is even harder. Why is this? Only the Master of the Universe who made us knows, but it's true.

There are three kinds of writers: those who aren't interested in criticism; those who, when they ask for criticism, are really seeking validation; and those who incorporate criticism and improve their work. I make it clear ahead of time, when asked to read a manuscript, that I don't crit for writers of the second type. I say, if you want validation, let me know in advance; I'll praise your book and spare myself the bother of reading it. But they all answer, it's criticism I want, gosh darn it, not validation, truly. Then, if they're Type Two, they respond to the critique point-by-point, defending the flaws I pointed out, arguing that I just don't understand what they're trying to accomplish. They're right when they say "That's just your opinion, Steve." But I wonder then whose opinion they really wanted when they asked for mine.

The only proper response to a critique is "Thank you." You may also send cream-filled doughnuts. That's the quickest way to my heart. From the neck up, anyway. Pretentious, over-priced wine works in a pinch.

I've said elsewhere that no writer ever benefited from praise. Almost everyone disagreed with me. I haven't changed my mind. Praise is debilitating: tell me I have a gift, say, for dialogue (as many people have in fact told me), and how hard do you think I'll work to improve that part of my writing? Children need encouragement because their self-esteems are being built. Adults, if they need encouragement, are in the wrong business. Still, since pretty much everyone disagrees with me, I've adjusted the code accordingly.

The most valuable critiques are the ones that hurt the most. When Erica Orloff addresses me by my last name I know I'm about to get it you-know-where, without lubrication. Afterwards I go into the fetal position and suck my thumb. An hour or so later I snap out of it and direct my wrath at Erica herself. I picture scenes like this. The next day I recognize her honesty and courage, and I go about fixing the problems she pointed out. I write her a note. It contains two words: "Thank you."

Honesty and courage? Yes, because friendships are on the line. Tell me I stink and I'll get mad at first, but later I'll love you for it. Tell me I'm great and you'll give me a boner. For a while. Later I'll consider you inconsequential to my career.

Okay, enough talk, here's the code:

As a critter I will, to the best of my ability, help the writer improve his or her manuscript to publishable standards. This requires neither that I praise nor condemn, rather that I suggest alternate words, scenes, etc., when appropriate.

As a crittee I will listen to the suggestions of the critter, incorporate them to the extent I agree with them, and limit my response to "Thank you," accompanied, if international mail allows, by cream-filled doughnuts.

* * *
You gotta see this; I purloined it from Tena Russ:

Was it Worth all the Pain?

2010-01-03T04:58:00.005+01:00

I've just received my advance reader copy (ARC) of The Tavernier Stones:

It's helpful to visualize something when pursuing a goal. A marathon runner might envision herself crossing the finish line minutes ahead of everyone else, an architect might imagine riding an elevator to the top of his new skyscraper. All through the process of conceiving, writing, revising, and submitting this novel, I visualized holding a copy of it in my hands. Now I pick up my ARC a dozen times a day and literally feel my dream come true. It feels every bit as good as I'd hoped and expected.

The book is three-dimensional, just like any other!

On the left below is the cover of the publisher's May-August catalog. Notice any similarities? The Tavernier Stones is featured on page one.

Was it worth all the pain? Yes. Most certainly, yes.