In the ink well

At my brother’s house recently, I started talking books with my younger niece. “Have you read this?” “Oh yeah!” “And this?” “Certainly!” What was funny was a young girl looking at her 54-year old uncle, with three books to his credit, thousands read on his shelf, and even more in boxes, this whole incredulous bit when she found a book I haven’t read. Yes, there are some. Like Frankenstein. I’ve read another of Shelley’s works, The Last Man, and really liked it. And I thought I knew about the story of Frankenstein. But I hadn’t , not really. She gave […]

Flutter, flutter, went the flag, first to the right, then to the left. This was a childhood awakening moment for me, the point in true literature (not kiddy literature, aka whatever passed for Harry Potter back then) when I leaned that people could die in books. Quick. Fast. Unexpectedly. The line comes from HG Wells’ War of the Worlds. The flag is a white flag of truce. The people holding it aloft are scientists and peace-seekers. And the beings on the other end of the leveled heat ray? Martians, with intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic. A moment later, they […]

Hard to imagine, but its been a year. I was sorting through the knotted Christmas lights, wondering when they’d last been untangled. What, a year? No, wait. Last Christmas, we took a break from all that, spending the Christmas week in London. It was the year before. But as I teetered on the edge of the ladder, stringing the now-untangled lights, my thoughts went back to that last year. No, Christmas wasn’t a worry, nor the trip (we’ve done bunches of those). No, it was getting Early Retyrement between covers, as they say. If you’d have told be way back […]

I remember reading Three Cups of Tea and enjoying it – good book, and nice to know that good things occasionally happen. Except to people involved in this story. There came the allegations of fiction, that Mortenson, the adventurer whom the story centers on, had a “fluid sense of time” that “made pinning down the exact sequence of many events in this book almost impossible”. And class-action suits against him and his Central Asia Institute, with claims that he perhaps profited from his charity and that investors were swindled. And now the co-author (who parted with the hero in a […]

This always happens. It’s my birthday and I’m driving to Home Depot to pick up some caulk and tar to patch our roof (what a birthday!). NPR’s media show is talking about publishing and I’m getting more and more depressed. It’s all about how writers really need to market themselves, to find a niche and strategy, to come up with clever ways to gain notice, fans, and bandwidth. Shit, that’s marketing. It’s not writing. So trust me, I’m not going to make a comment that publishing should go back to the way it was, that as a writer, I should […]

It’s Thanksgiving, that day we all give thanks for what we have. As families, we can give thanks for those who can share our meals. As citizens of the Great Republic, we can be thankful that we still have peace and law and order and a working society. That the lights are still on and bullets aren’t plinking off the gutters is something to be so very thankful for. But as a writer, what can I be thankful for? Well, for one, I’m thankful for my lunch setup, that our workplace cafe has a patio that looks over a lake, […]

The wife and I had ridden our bikes to dinner, then to yogurt over at the village center of Baldwin Park. Understand that Baldwin is a neo-community, one built on a perfectly good naval training center. It’s smart and clever and cute and as plastic as, well, plastic. It’s fake from end to end. But they have the only yogurt shop within wife-cycling range, so there you go. While there, I saw a couple of Goths hanging out on the benches amid the manufactured quaintness, desperately seeking an identity. Like Illinois Nazis, it’s hard to take Baldwin Park Goths seriously. […]

You’ve carefully considered your hero, his background, driving factors and idiosyncrasies. You’ve come up with your world, be it an isolated Turkish village on a volatile border, the hold of a star-bound colony ship, or perhaps a Brooklyn slum of 1923. You’ve given it life, made it real. You’ve developed your plot, the twists, surprises and mysteries. And with all that, suddenly you decide that your antagonist can be cut out of cardboard and propped up. After all, what more do you need than some frothing villain shouting “Seize them!” or “Throw every resource into their downfall” or whatever? You’ve […]

I‘m reading The Merry Men by Robert Louis Stephenson. In it, a bible-thumping Christian stands on a high Scottish ledge in a gale, baying laughter as a poor schooner tries to tack out of a bay surrounded by murderous rocky reefs (the “Merry Men” of the title). And why is he doing this? Pride? Nationalism? Personal animosity? Salvage. When you think about it, it comes down to the fact that this weasel wants the ship’s cargo on the beach, where he can pick through it and make it his (he might even loot the bodies of the dead sailors should […]

We’ll assume you have a sharp cover letter, a synopsis and chapter samples at the ready (but if not, we’ll be discussing these in future). But the big question people ask a lot is “How do you find an agent?” The best method I’ve found is to trot down to your local bookstore (don’t buy online – you gotta do this “live”) and find the “Publishing” section – usually it’s in the back, just past “sexual help”. Ignore all the writing guide books – if you are ready to publish, you are beyond that. You need the thicker books – […]