Reality Show for Long Beach Poly Football: Read the Book First

With ESPN touting "Fourth and Forever" and its upcoming debut, football fans and Friday Night Lights junkies may want to check out the book that got an inside look at the Long Beach Poly Jackrabbit program way back in 2001.

One Great Game: Two Teams, Two Dreams, in the First-Ever High School National Championship Football Game covered the build-up and season of the Jackrabbits, who've sent the most players on to the NFL of any high school, and that of the Concord De La Salle Spartans, arguably the best high school football program ever, holders of a 151-game win streak. The collision of the two teams, both ranked No 1 and No 2 by various polls, became a national event with live coverage by ESPN and Fox Sports, which broadcast the game. Its success as a game and as a media event launched the current widespread coverage of high school sports that has transformed the experience in ways both good and not so good.

I don't know much about "Fourth and Forever" -- they had their chances to talk to me, and didn't, though they did read the book. I hope they got it right. And I offer them my hedged congratulations.

Here's the link to "Fourth and Forever" -- congrats to all Polyites involved...

http://es.pn/kpHKZL

And here's a link to One Great Game:

http://amzn.to/kUBK1N

Kanye West First to be Raptured on May 21

Dateline Honolulu 10:42 AM -- Rapper Kayne West is the first person to officially take leave of Earth in the predicted May 21, 2011 Rapture, according to witnesses in Hawaii.

Persons familiar with West's neighborhood in the exclusive Diamond Head area of Honolulu were the first to notice he had been Raptured. West had rented a mansion there to escape the controversy over his behavior at the 2010 Video Music Awards, where he crashed the stage after Taylor Swift was given the Best Female Video award. His presence in Honolulu only became known when he allegedly crashed his $185,000 Porsche into a neighbor's garage at speeds estimated to be in excess of 50 mph. (See above photo of crashed Porsche.)West walked away from the accident and later reported the car had been stolen.

Neighbors professed ambivalence over West's disappearance, confirmed by a line of a dozen size 12 1/2 basketball shoes lined up on the sidewalk on Hibiscus Drive, all attested to have been worn only once by the rapper. Some claimed he tried on the pairs of shoes one by one until he found the best fit for take-off. Others said these were rejected after a fitting and that West chose to wear black Bally dress pumps.

"Excuse me, but after the s*** he's pulled, I think it's entirely appropriate for this sorry-a** excuse for a rapper to be Raptured," said one visitors to the yard sale hastily created to auction off West's Hawaiian possessions. Lines of buyers stopped traffic for hours as they fingered West's castoff colorful shirts, fancy baseball caps, and a selection of baggy pants.

P.S. I Love You (Self-Publishing)

A couple of weeks back, I wrote about self-publishing and using myself as a guinea pig took a manuscript all the way from file to "book". Here, below, is the next installment of the story: a P.S. that assesses what worked and what, if anything, didn't.

The entire blog has been run on the www.wewantedtobewriters.com site as a 5-part series this week. I'll run the fifth part to give a sense of flow as it reaches the P.S. The story itself can be found at www.smashwords.com/books/view/51969, or by title and author: The Skins of Our Ancestors by Don Wallace.


How to Publish a Book in 8 Hours #5

By Don Wallace

This is the final installment in a five-part series.


In the morning, my eight years of publishing drought had ended. There was more to do in terms of proofing and other tying up of loose ends, including downloading Kindle’s Mobi and Adobe’s Reader programs to make sure that The Skins of Our Ancestors would meet their standards. But the book was done. All that remained was to set a price.

The Skins of Our Ancestors is a 24-page story. It’s dense and a bit of a risk. It was meant to anchor a whole book on my upbringing in a half-Southern/half-Northern family in Southern California during the racially turbulent ‘60s. I decided it was worth more than free, more than a 99-cent download from iTunes. The Newbie guys, Barry and Joe, had talked about the importance of pricing an e-Book low enough for it to be an impulse purchase. But this was a major chunk of my life and my output. Yeah, that’s worth $2.99.

My royalty breakouts will vary. From Smashwords.com it’s possible to get a pure 70 percent. Retailers like Amazon and B&N and others take a bigger share, around 50 percent. But these are terms much, much better than legacy publishing offers authors on e-Books (around 14.5 percent after all their surcharges are applied).

In the coming days and months and years, we’ll see how it all plays out. But right now, the magic number is eight. As in eight hours from e-Book newbie to author.

My next step? This experience has me wanting more—now. I know that’s a danger with self-publishing; let’s call it THE danger. If you start ladling slop into your stream of books and publications, you’ll do yourself no favors.

Still, I’m not going to stop now. I think a story a month sounds right. Some will be free, some will be 99 cents. All will be from my archive of unpublished work—nothing just riffed off. I think it’s important to reserve a kind of writing for e-Book publication, writing that promises more than the shoot-from-the-hip stuff that fills the web today. Call it premium, or estate reserve, or private label.

Or call it literature.

I also think this may be the route I take with my six-novel series, The Log of Matthew Roving. So maybe that’s what I’ll be putting up six months from now, around September, the traditional fall season in publishing. I’ll need that much lead time, given that the 500 page novel is 25 times longer than The Skins of Our Ancestors and will require a lot of formatting and re-formatting . . .

# # #

Postscript: The initial experience of formatting and designing a book was such a head rush that it was surprisingly difficult to await the approvals that are normal in the publishing process. Smashwords is very clear about there being a time lag while your “published” work goes through both a computer-generated and a human vetting process. They mentioned two weeks as a possible time frame.

As soon as I pushed the final “Publish” button, however, I began to pace and rant. Two weeks? I wanted it NOW.

Funny how the Internet has made us into such babies. In the legacy print world I would’ve settled back and begun to write another novel while my manuscript was in preparation. In three months my editor might send me a set of notes, if he or she were so inclined. Six months later, I would’ve received a set of galleys and begun the proofing process. Nine months later, bound galleys. And after a year, with a fanfare of trumpets, the book would have been born.

E-Books come in a variety of formats. Print books only come in one, paper. Smashwords offers a thorough and, so far as I can tell, unique service in making the 10 most popular formats available. If your book makes it through all the protocols for all the formats, which include handheld mobile devices such as smartphones, you’ll have covered all the bases.

This is what makes Smashwords, in theory, a killer app in e-Publishing. It sure beats Lulu.com, which only sets your book up to be sold through the Apple iBookstore. At this time, it doesn’t look as if Apple will be able to reach an agreement with Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, Sony, and other distribution channels. While this could change (and undoubtedly will evolve), I think Lulu is aimed at Mac cultists. Macs are great, but the e-Book reading world is greater.

In the case of my “book,” The Skins of Our Ancestors was immediately available, in one digital format, if you were persistent and tek-savvy and could figure out which format was viable. I couldn’t. My pal Charlie could. He bought it, bless his heart. Nobody else could, or did, so sales remained at the loneliest number for two weeks while the Auto-Vetting program ground its mysterious gears.

But then, after two weeks, the approvals came through. Now all I had to do was assign new ISBNs to the book, which Smashwords offered to sell me at a no-markup rate. Then Smashwords would submit the book to Amazon and other outlets that required an ISBN. The ISBN would also get me a listing in Bowkers, the book catalog.

Today I will get those ISBNs, and in two more weeks the book will be as published as anything electronic can be these days.

This is both remarkable and sobering. We have witnessed the remarkable part. Sobering is the realization that, yes, if I can do it, anybody can. The spectre of a gazillion self-published books hovers like a horde of locusts in the sky. There are about to be more books than we know what to do with. People won’t be able to find us, quality won’t necessarily be distinguishable, in this mass.

My other worry is that Smashwords will become so successful that they’ll be overwhelmed. That’s always a problem with the free model. Book approval time might stretch out, distribution might crash. It happens in the digital age. These guys have created an amazing product with a brilliant, Facebook-style kind of crowd-sourced philosophy. They are doing no evil, that I can tell. Here’s hoping they have the backing to keep their servers running (or get some soon).

My immediate concern now is the same for any author: marketing. How to keep from getting lost in the mass of e-Books. E-Book authors are my new tribe, yet they are also my rivals. It seems as if we’ve created a monster, unless we as a tribe immediately set up our own system of filters and hierarchies and reviews and schools and clubs. This is already happening.

This is a good place to leave the topic of e-Publishing, with a cloud of locusts darkening the sky but a great shining city on a hill lying before us, where authors find readers and everybody gets a fair royalty.

How to Publish a Book in 8 Hours

What It Means to Be a Writer Today, Part 8

How To Publish a Book in 8 Hours

Yesterday it had been eight years since I published my last book, One Great Game.

Last night I published a book – an e-book – in eight hours. And therein lies a tale of gee-whiz, uh-huh, whadayawaitingfor and what-the-hell-I’m-going-for-it. Now I’m going to tell the story so you can go for it, too.

Like most writers who’ve been at it awhile, I have my frustrations with publishing. I didn’t grab the brass ring on my first go-round, nor my second. But drawing on my novelist superpowers, I kept at it. Because I became a magazine editor and a journalist, I was forced to encounter publishing reality on a daily basis. In other words, I learned to make sausage. Early on I vowed not to lose my connection to the purest kind of writing, which is also, duh, the least remunerative.

For the past year I’ve been reading everything I could find about the future of publishing, in particular anything to do with electronic publishing. My goal was and is to start my own e-Pub imprint. My reasons were grounded in glorious self-interest. I wanted to publish and be damned, as they used to say. For five years before the meltdown of 2008, I’d worked on a book that was to launch a six-part seafaring series having to do with the American Revolution, time travel, and the twelve-year-old boy who has to save our young democracy while wrestling with the whole slavery deal. I finished it just in time for my agent to take it out into the teeth of an economic gale, where The Log of Matthew Roving sank without a trace. (Although reports of its death were, it turned out, premature: you can check out the preliminary sketches for the project on my website, www.donwallacebooks.com.)

At the same time, my essays and short fiction weren’t going anywhere, or else advancing at a snail’s pace: one memoir in Harper’s every four years, one Op-Ed or essay in the New York Times every two years, and silence from everyone else. I didn’t like my odds of breaking through before having to switch to false teeth to chew my filet mignon.

Like most people my age, I like to think of myself as an original rock n’ roll surfer-rebel-voodoo chile. Time to prove I still had my mojo, I decided. Having worked inside magazines and started magazines, including a prototype for book-reading fools like me that was to have been published by Kirkus Reviews, I figured I knew as much as I needed to know.

I was wrong about that, actually. There was lots I didn’t know and still don’t. But I knew what the hedgehog knows: that my patch of grass was changing forever. The future was slipping away from the legacy print houses.

Yesterday’s adventure began with my finding a story on Twitter, which I only began using seriously a month ago. It linked me to Laura Miller’s article in Salon.com about e-Book publishing. (I’ll list her url and any others at the end of this piece: I don’t want to break up the flow here.) Miller put four links at the bottom of her story. One was this epic 13,000-word discussion of self-publishing between two guys I’d never heard of: Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath. There went my day. Their Newbie’s Guide to Self-Publishing is the Common Sense of this publishing revolution. Between Miller and Eisler/Konrath I found myself at the website of a free e-Pub site called Smashwords.com. It was 3 p.m., I’d just come back from a sweaty walk, I had the taxes to do and dinner to cook. You can guess what happened next.

During my walk I’d tried to think big. Should I take my 500-page seafaring YA novel and throw it up there? How about my mystery novel about a women’s college basketball team whose coach is murdered? How about the first novel in my poi-noir “Hawaiian Hell” series. How about…

Something shorter. A novella or long story. As a test run, but one I could stand behind. Yeah, and being shorter maybe I’d have a chance to see it published before the week was out. I registered with Smashwords and read their calm and matter-of-fact explanation of how they worked. I searched through my WordPerfect files for a story or memoir. It had to meaty, it had to be good. I didn’t want to come out with anything half-baked.

A title leaped out at me: The Skins of Our Ancestors. I was surprised: I thought I’d lost it during a computer meltdown a few years back. I hit the Publish button. There were steps, beginning with one rule that must not be broken: read Smashword’s Style Guide and follow its 25-step process to the letter.

I’ve written a couple of technical manuals in my time. This one gets an A. (Even though some gremlin seems to have messed up a few paragraphs, I could piece together what they meant to say.)

Smashwords only works in Word. I work in WordPerfect, which is a writer’s program but increasingly out of step. So my first step was to strip out any WordPerfect formatting, indents, italics, and so forth from the file that was The Skins of Our Ancestors. Even if you write in Word, though, you’ll have to do this, too. As Smashwords explains, they need your textfile to be utterly basic to be perfectly and easily converted so it works across the many e-reader platforms. Because my file began as WP5 and was saved as WP9 and WP10 before converting to Word, I knew it had to be incredibly dirty. So I chose the Nuclear Option, copying the text into a Microsoft Notepad file, which acts like hydrochloric acid. Then I copied that melted-down text into a new Word doc.

But I wasn’t through. There was still debris in my file, so I followed the Style Guide and cleaned the thing two more times. Then I had to learn to go into the Change Styles folder, make sure nothing was selected except a left indent option, and set that as my new Default. Again, the Style Guide was as intuitive a companion as I could’ve desired. I owe a major lobster to Smashmouth’s technical writer, Mark Coker.

All this reading and uploading and stripping took about two hours and a half. It was highly intensive, eyes-pressed-to-the-screen kind of work. But I was caffeinated and stoked. I could feel my words transforming themselves. Alchemy was in the air.

Smashwords requires two things of a writer: that you do it their way, and you read the damn Style manual. Their way means: no fancy fonts, no experimental spacing or text games. They do give advice on formatting text blocks, charts, images, etc, but all I could say after scanning those steps was, “Thank god I’m a fiction writer,” and “We’ll just stick to words, now, if you please.”

They do require you to do a basic cover, and in fact they give off a vibe that without a competent-looking one your book isn’t going to be placed in their Premium Services category, which is how you show up on Amazon, Barnes&Noble and Borders.
How to create a cover? I figured I’d just upload a picture and slap a title above it.

I’ve taken a lot of digital pictures since 2005, professionally and personally. I was glad I’d gotten into the habit of taking pictures without people in them. (It’s amazing how faces ruin a good landscape.) In this case, I found a shot I’d taken of the oceanfront in my hometown, Long Beach. Since my story was partially about my Long Beach roots, the shot had resonance.

As a magazine editor, I also knew the shot had room for cover lines. The best real estate on a magazine cover is upper right, and this shot had a clear channel all the way down the right.

But when I read in the style guide I’d need a single-image cover sized ideally at 500 pixels wide and 800 high, I knew I was in trouble. My laptop didn’t have any fancy design programs in it, although the Microsoft Office suite undoubtedly had tools. But I’m leery of these internal MS programs; they rarely work as advertised. Third-party programs are usually created by real people to solve read needs in real time, and sure enough, the Style Guide mentioned one, called Paint.net. I linked, downloaded the program, it opened without requiring me to reboot (I had so many files open at this point that would’ve probably sent me off to bed) and I figured out which button to click to put my image up as a background. (It’s called Layer.)

Then I accidentally closed the color palette function and never did find a way to open it. I hit the “T” for text in the toolbar (memories of making magazines late at night guided my fingers) and discovered I’d somehow selected pink. Oh well! To help make the pink pop I found a function that allowed black striping inside the letters. But the sunny ocean backdrop swallowed the title. I knew it would be rejected by Premium Services. And I needed Amazon, etc.

It was late, and I broke to dump some previously cooked chicken sausage into a pot with a can of tomatoes, then chopped some baby bok choy into it. While that was heating Mindy wandered downstairs and put on water for pasta and made a salad. I wandered back to the screen. There was a list of commands in a box on Paint.net, including one that said “Invert Image.” I hit it.

At the top of this blog I hope you’ll see my original photo, before I downloaded Paint.net. The “Invert Image” drained my photo of color and turned it into a negative image. It was noir, it was eerie, it was California’s bright shining myth turned inside-out. It was perfect for my story, which was about black-white relations during the Civil Rights crisis of the mid-1960s.

On the inverted image I happened to type in the first words in lower-case and immediately knew this was the way to go. Ditto for my line-break choices. Suddenly the pink looked real good. Subtle. For pink.

Mindy and I ate dinner with the preoccupied expressions and disjointed conversation common to writers on deadline. She went upstairs to finish her email blast, I went to my screen. Let the publishing begin!

I worked on into the night. A copyright page was required, in a certain style. An author page on Smashmouth’s site needed creating; I was prompted to get a PayPal account, another download which again didn’t require me to reboot. I was reeling a bit as I went through the extensive required formatting and proofreading pre-pub tests. It was 11:30 as I registered and edited and checked indents over and over.

Finally, I uploaded the clean document and pushed Publish.

And was rejected.

But the Style Guide was right with me. If my MS Word 2010 file ended in a “docx” then I had to re-save it in another , probably older Word file that ended with “doc.” Naturally Word doesn’t tell you what those file endings are when you’re doing a Save As, but I guessed Word 2003-2007 because somewhere in the guide the author, Mark Coker, had mentioned that this was his favorite conversion program.

Always pay attention to your tekkie. The file was accepted, uploaded to Smashmouth, and the “Meatgrinder” process, as they call it, began. I was number 323 in the queue and could just walk away, brush my teeth, and go to bed.

In the morning, my eight years of publishing drought had ended. There was more to do in terms of proofing and other tying up of loose ends, including downloading Kindle’s mobi and Adobe’s Reader programs to make sure that The Skins of Our Ancestors would meet their standards. But the book was done. All that remained was to set a price.

The Skins of Our Ancestors is a 24-page story. It’s dense and a bit of a risk. It was meant to anchor a whole book on my upbringing in a Southern/Northern family in Southern California during the racially turbulent ‘60s. I decided it was worth more than free, more than a 99-cent download from iTunes. The Newbie guys, Barry and Joe, had talked about the importance of pricing an e-Book low enough for it to be an impulse purchase. But this was a major chunk of my life and my output. Yeah, that’s worth $2.99.

My royalty breakouts will vary. From Smashmouth.com it’s possible to get a pure 70 percent. Retailers like Amazon and B&N and others take a bigger share, around 50 percent. But these are terms much, much better than legacy publishing offers authors on e-Books (around 14.5 percent after all their surcharges are applied).

In the coming days and months and years, we’ll see how it all plays out. But right now, the magic number is eight. As in eight hours from e-Book newbie to author.

My plans now? The e-Pub imprint I’ve dreamed of is already a reality, and I’ll have more news on that soon. But this experience has me wanting more, now. I know that’s a danger with self-publishing; let’s call it THE danger. If you start ladling slop into your stream of books and publications, you’ll do yourself no favors.

Still, I’m not going to stop now. I think a story a month sounds right. Some will be free, some will be 99-cents. All will be from my archive of unpublished work—nothing just riffed off, like this blog. I think it’s important to reserve a kind of writing for e-Book publication, writing that promises more than the shoot-from-the-hip stuff that fills the web today. Call it premium, or estate reserve, or private label.

Or call it literature.

I also think this may be the route I take with my six-novel series, The Log of Matthew Roving. So maybe that’s what I’ll be putting up six months from now, around September time, the traditional fall season in publishing. I’ll need that much lead time, given that the 500 page novel is 25 times longer than The Skins of Our Ancestors and will require a lot of formatting and re-formatting…

Thank you, Smashwords.

The Skins of Our Ancestors is at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51969

Thanks to Jane Friedman, whose Twitter RT started the ball rolling.

Thanks to Michael Maren for telling me to write this blog. To Laura Miller. Here’s her Salon piece, with great links at the bottom:

http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2011/03/29/writer_sell_thyself/index.html

Finally, here’s to Joe Konrath and Barry Eisler. You really have to read Joe’s blog with the 13,000 word Q&A:

http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/03/ebooks-and-self-publishing-dialog.html

What It Means to Be a Writer Today, Part 7: Who Wrote the Book You Loved?

Who Wrote the Book You Loved?

By Don Wallace

Who are the greatest writers of the 20th century? I nominate the following:

Constance Garnett, C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Francis Steegmuller, Gregory Rabassa and Edith Grossman, Edwin and Willa Muir (with Eithne Wilkins and Ernest Kaiser), Norman Thomas di Giovanni, Robert Bly and, I don’t know, maybe the three score guys from the Hampton Court Conference convened in 1604 by King James.

So, yes, I asked a trick question. But if you read in English, like me, then much of the literary greatness you drank so deeply from in youth was a potion filtered through the copper-coiled consciousness of a translator. And if you accept the greatness of the authors above—Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Turgenev and all the other Russians, Proust and Flaubert, Marquez and Fuentes and Llosa and the other Latin Americans, Kafka, Borges, Hamsun, and God—why not give credit to their translators? Because those are their words you’re reading.

As someone with more skin in the writing game than is wise or healthy, I’ve always found this disconcerting.

I remember first getting this sinking feeling when in college, reading Flaubert and Stendahl. Not having had a lick of French at that point, beyond pronouncing “escargot” once or twice (and “condom” a bit more often), I struggled with the archaic Victorian English until the thought hit me: what if these translations were like those 1950s movies with Maurice Chevalier, whose heavily accented English would be parodied in the later Pink Panther movies with Peter Sellers? Once I had the thought, the giggle would just not go away.

With my fragile literary consciousness at risk, I shelved the idea. But it has resurfaced over the years, particularly when I catch myself aiming for “the literary.” I get this fear that I’m simply writing in a style like those dubbed foreign movies where everyone, no matter what nationality, speaks in a tony BBC accent. Has the fear killed off a couple of stories? Yes, and good riddance to bad rubbish, as someone might say on Masterpiece Theatre.

Now, I love translators, generally. I wouldn’t be here without them—on the page, I mean. But leaving aside their indispensability and noble sacrifice on behalf of art, their ubiquity and their concealment in plain sight does bring up an inconvenient question:

Who wrote that book you loved?

The author, you say. Really? How can you tell? Do you read (French, Russian, Hebrew, etc.)? Okay, then. The translator. All foreign literature in translation is like these movies with which Hollywood is currently infatuated, the ones where James Franco or Matt Damon or Leo DiCaprio get themselves inserted into someone else’s body in another time zone. To save the world or get the girl, which amounts to the same thing.

Only, how do you know that when you’re reading Borges you’re not really kissing Matt Damon? Now there’s a thought. Hope you enjoyed it.

Anyway . . . just once I’d like us to admit that we’ve always accepted the greatness of these “great” books on faith. I understand the reasons. I mean, nobody goes to the rack and looks for books with a “Fair-to-Middling Foreign Classic” sticker on the cover. And yet, that’s what you could be getting, if the translator is a dodo or the editor ran out of money for adjectives. Or, as happened to most of the books in translation that I grew up on, the moral code of the times insisted on bowdlerizing all the good parts.

My beef here is that “greatness” which is actually mediocrity (in any case, but here specifically in translation) lures us away from finding our own soul’s path, our craft’s best practices and our own extra-authentic style. And, dude, falling in love with the “wrong” “great” literature can so spoil your groove. As Glen Beck might say, and hopefully will soon: reading foreign novels in English brings your babies ever closer to the clutches of that secret international puppet-master class.

Okay, so I sound paranoid. I hope it comes off in a fun way. And maybe this sounds a little hectoring, as if I’m now going to sniff and say that if you can’t read Nabokov in Russian then you really can’t claim to have read him at all. Well, nope, I’m not going there. Let me repeat: I love books in translation. It’s just that . . .

Come a little closer. Tell me something. Hmm? We’ve established that you wouldn’t have gone near these books unless they’d been certified “great” beforehand. In other words, it’s indisputable that you accepted a definition of “great” before you ever read a single transmuted sentence. Now, this surely influenced your reception of the work, did it not?

In science, that’s called a failure to control for bias. In literature, it’s called Norton Classics.

But we’re not here to deny the judgment of the jurists; our beef is with prose that takes the easy way out, by adopting the mannerisms, style and subject matter of the consensus great and famous. I’m not indicting the prose of the “greats” in translation, but of those writers who fall under their sway and never, ever emerge . . .

Hey, relax. I’m not prosecuting you—I’m interrogating my younger self.

I guess, more and more, the way imitation turns into something original fascinates me. When you’re young this is experimentation, right? Experimentation: the word that exonerates pot-smoking Presidential candidates and promiscuous young writers. I remember reading Joyce’s Dubliners and Borges’ Ficciones one rainy weekend and the next thing I knew, my characters spoke in Irish accents while dipping in and out of alternative universes—all in suburban Long Beach, California, ca. 1970.

After awhile, though, I was bothered by how easily my sincere flattery became impersonation. The infatuated writer turns creepy, like the stalker in “Single White Female” or Bergman’s “Persona.” The theme from “The Twilight Zone” begins to play in the background . . .

Time here to pause. Reflect. Become afraid. Very afraid. But don’t worry, I’ll be back. We’re not done here. Not by a long shot.

Because the question will not die: Who really wrote the book you loved? Raymond Carver—or Gordon Lish? Thomas Wolfe—or Maxwell Perkins? James Patterson—or a string of J. Walter Thompson vice-presidents?

What It Means to Be a Writer Today, Part 1: The Good News

Part I, The Good News

By Don Wallace

Sitting here in publishing limbo, bracing ourselves for waves of change and tidal surges of destruction, we may feel compelled to ask what exactly did we get ourselves into when we decided to be writers. After all, the consensus of media and other anointed commentators seems to be that the whole writing game is over. To give it a catchy, twitterable title: “Print is Dead, The Book is Toast, And William Shakespeare Were He Alive Today Would Be Writing For HBO and Doing Slam-Tweet Contests–LOL!!!” None of which is refutable.

As this new year dawns, Borders may already be in bankruptcy. E-books surpass print books in sales. And somewhere, in a rude straw-filled library carrel, another would-be writer slouches toward a coffee break. Another would-be writer pauses in making that latte (skim, extra espresso shot) to mentally jot a note about a story unfolding in her head. And in far-off Colombia, a coffee grower’s cocaine-addicted son is typing as fast as his fingers can fly, chasing a vision that nobody can deny and may even get him admitted to an MFA program in the U.S.A.

That’s the beauty of this thing of ours. Publishing may be going to hell, or heaven, who knows. But writing goes on. Writers stumble on their vocation every day.

In future posts, I’m going to try to stick to one topic: What it means to be a writer today. It takes chutzpah to call this first post “The Good News,” but what the hell, it’s a new year and the slate is clean and as I will soon point out, even the “bad” news is good.

As to where I’m coming from, always a valid question with writers on any subject, I figure that in my own way I’m in a perfect position to judge the current scene. I’ve been at the writing thing for my entire adult life, I’ve straddled the academic and “real” world, written for a living and for no reward except the rapture, been inside the beast called publishing, lived on both coasts and in the middle, and I’m not a big success.

I think that last is crucial: success ruins writers in terms of advice. Either they tell you stuff to discourage you (because they’re so unique, and you’re so jejune) or they make it seem so elementary that you feel you’ve been a slacker not to have written and published at least a trilogy by the time you’re twenty-five.

Now for the good news. First, location does not matter. Sure, all the media attention makes it seem so necessary, somehow, to get published before you’re twenty, acquire a quirky ethnic or foreign accent, pal around with the future famous, grow a scruffy beard, and move to Brooklyn or even better, Williamsburg. Well, no. Most of the so-called great writers didn’t come from New York or do their great work there; most still won’t.

If you drag yourself across the country because you think Brooklyn will water your roots, by all means, do it. Rude shocks make for better writing. But thanks to the creative destruction of the publishing mechanism, times were never better for getting your work out into the readersphere.

Second, the door is open. The above-referenced creative destruction is opening a million or more doors for those who, for the first time in history, can bypass the filters that publishing used to weed out the hordes of would-be writers. Not to knock the hard and ill-paid work of agents (the first filter) and editors (the second filter) and publishing executives (the third, hidden filter), but the world they made was never a meritocracy of literature or even storytelling. It was more like a bodyguard working the velvet rope at Club 54. The amount of slush pile submissions was simply overwhelming. And depressing. There was no way to sort it without adopting the most callous triage.

In the end, most books were published by word of mouth–a friend who knew a friend passed along a name, someone sighed and said, “Okay, I’ll take a look.” For those who had really powerful friends, the process was easier and the results often were meretricious: in the ’50s, white males in snap-brim hats apparently had a field day, effortlessly drinking martinis and smoking Chesterfields and single-finger typing huge novels; in the ’80s, any reasonably pretty daughter of a CEO who could put her hair up in a chignon and pout for a photographer could publish her slim volume of stories. (Not to be unfair to pretty daughters of the rich, but writing is a zero-sum game when it comes to reviews and column inches of press coverage, and Daddy’s empire also monopolized attention.) Today, you don’t need to be anybody’s daughter, or white, or male. You just digitize and self-publish and flog that blog of yours. It can happen to you.

Third, the field is clear. Nobody is stopping you. Because the value that the marketplace attaches to books is always much lower than the effort it takes to produce them, those with the drive, obsession, mania or serenity to keep writing and improving (and self-editing) can just motor along and watch the wrecks of wannabe writers pile up on the roadside.

If you start out writing at twenty, by the time you hit forty you’ll be among a very select group–those who kept going. Not that this promises any satisfaction other than that. But as an indicator of mental and psychic engagement in the world, chasing a dream is much better than sitting around wondering where it all went.

That’s enough good news for one day.

Am I a Genius? Are You?

It’s got to be the least useful question a writer can ever ask him- or herself, and yet—all right—it’s one we’ve all asked ourselves, even while suspecting we already know the answer (if you have to ask . . .) and thus guaranteeing a day of feeling absolutely wretched. So let’s get it over with:

Yes, you’re a genius.

And now you owe me, big-time. I want a big lobster and a gushing blurb when you’re famous.

The whole genius label, like the current passion for the word passion, makes me want to find my inner curmudgeon, take my walking stick off the wall and go hit something, like a cute puppy or the first daffodil of spring. To growl and say, Damn geniuses! Have to talk to the gardener again about letting them into the garden.

But it’s hopeless. We’re in the self-esteem business. And we live in an age when egos inflate and hover like Zeppelins over the Zuiderzee. To dare to raise a pen to paper, ego and self-regard and even a dose of early gushing praise are probably necessary. Still, a steady diet of fatuous self-appreciation can make you awfully unpleasant to be with and contribute to the most ridiculous, bloated, flatulent work. Unless you really are a genius.

The question of genius is a serious one, once we get over the junior high clique aspect. What makes someone really good? Really really good? The best? Can we quantify it? Graph it and fill in the squares? Turn the job over to Watson, the IBM supercomputer?

Well, we know the answer to that. Yes, of course. Maybe it’s Don Foster, the guy who can find a new Shakespeare sonnet in a shredded phone book using a software program. There’s just no question that someone somewhere is already doing it, pouring the relationship of fancy words, complex sentences and the occurrence of the semi-colon into an algorithm that will yield incontrovertible truth; every time.

We also know this, too, will pass and the question will remain: what is genius?

I first heard it applied to someone I knew when I was 19 and a singer in a rock n’ roll band. My best friend from childhood came up to Santa Cruz for a visit, heard us practice, and said later, in an awe-struck tone, “I’ve never met a real genius before.”

He was talking about our rhythm guitarist/songwriter. Boy, were my feelings hurt. Even if Peter wrote 90 percent of our material and could play an instrument. You see, I made really really good James Brown-like grunting sounds exactly where they were needed. For a white boy from Long Beach, that’s genius. Just not genius enough for Mike.

Mike is still my best childhood friend, but hurt feelings are why I’m going to dispense with the genius tag and replace it with something his mother, Trudi, once said of someone who was on a roll: “Why, his hair’s on fire!” I think this is a more useful appellation, because it connotes talent plus energy plus volatility plus combustion. You can just see Beethoven, sitting at the piano bench and his hair’s on fire. William Blake, you know the man’s hair is definitely on fire. And so forth. Frida Kahlo? Even her unibrow is on fire.

So we leave genius to the critics in the next century. Right now, in our lifetime, whose hair is on fire? That’s the question.

And now, quickly, I’m going to put myself in the jury box and answer the question, “Who among writers you’ve actually met was a—that word—you know. Whose hair was on fire?”

As an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz, I hit a pretty good era for writers. We had Jim Houston running the program, William Everson doing “Birth of a Poet” in a giant teepee, George Hitchcock publishing Kayak, a free weekly, Sundaz, that ran a short story a week thanks to fiction editor Lou Mathews, Gurney Norman writing a serialized novel in the margins of The Whole Earth Catalog, a large group of fine printers including my pal Tom Killion, a seriously literary bunch of professors up the Hill including my personal Virgil, Norman O. Brown, and a slew of young and old writers milling around the community and classrooms. As a fumbling apprentice, I soaked it all up indiscriminately.

There was plenty of talent in the room, all kinds. Many of us went on to publish. There are some real successes among us. But you know what? Nobody’s hair was on fire. (I think Norman O. Brown’s tonsure was singed, but his writing was academic and interpretative, even if Love’s Body and Life Against Death are among the few books I can think of that actually take you step by step into a different reality than where you started.) Once in awhile Gary Snyder came padding through the forest in roadkill moccasins and you knew greatness had passed. But Snyder kept away from scenes. He was like Obi-wan Kenobi, making himself invisible.

At one point I worked as a busboy-runner at the Oak Room on the Pacific Garden Mall, an outdoor café that was the center of the scene. One sunny day I served a table of writers, including my advisor, Jim Houston, and a handful of others, almost all of them in the UCSC-Stanford orbit, the heirs of Wallace Stegner. A fly on the wall, I hung around picking up elliptical gossip and collecting empty glasses and bringing fresh pitchers.

The talk turned to a guy they all knew, apparently. I gathered he was someone they cared about and had come up through the ranks with. And now, well, he’d hit the skids. He was going to be at the university to give a reading, but his drinking had become a terrible handicap and career-wise he was really blowing it. How? By writing too much, a couple of short stories a week, most of them undeveloped, sort of sketches. And publishing too much, too fast, in any little review that would take him. In places like The Chico Review, Humboldt Review, when he should be massaging one perfect story to showcase at The New Yorker or The Atlantic.

Yeah, poor Ray Carver. Now there was one guy whose hair was definitely not on fire.

See you next week, when I take the “hair on fire” roadshow to the Iowa Workshop.

Note: This post also appears on the We Wanted To Be Writers website and on my Bright City Writes blog -- because the book is gearing up for pub date and the Bright City blog will accompany the launch of our digital publishing house, Bright City Books.

The Serpent Has No Eyelids: a true story

The Serpent Has No Eyelids: a true story.

My other snake of September turns out to be not a snake at all. On this French island, Belle Ile, after the tourist horde leaves, the paths by the ocean fill up with fast and brilliant green lizards. Mindy and I always wait for their appearance because it means we've got the place to ourselves (along with our friends, the locals).

But last year I found a dried dead snake in a flower valley, and was mystified. Perhaps because Hawaii and Ireland are both sans-serpent, I assumed Belle Ile was, too. Then came this year, and a living version showed up, neatly curled, in the sandy path to the beach.

Only, our friends explained, it was really a lizard--the Orvet--and the only way you can tell is by looking into its eyes. Because it has eyelids, and snakes do not. (Reminding me of Will Smith confronting the agile alien in the opening scene of Men in Black.)

http://www.suite101.com/view_image.cfm/418774

Our Neighborhood Is Under Attack From Reality Show Zombies

Here's a slice of today's reality that might give you pause--or, rather, make you wonder if there is such a thing as a "pause" button on real life. Because yesterday the reality tribe invaded our neighborhood...

Evening walk down to the park. It's a nice quiet time. But the little park is packed, with a circus-style 3-ring hyperactive group of hooting, water-squirting, butt-sliding-on-grass 20-somethings. It's a little over the top, we think, trying to have a chat with a friend and check out the surf. But--wait--are those really human beings? Or are they...

Reality show people.

Yes, here in our little beach park. A quiet place, suddenly filled by professional reality show tryouts, beefy guys and bikini'd girls, bodies covered in vegetable oil (!), frantically "having fun" for evaluation purposes.

No cameras, just fake people faking fun at 110 percent.

Because there was no visible explanation of what was going on, an onlooker could be forgiven for thinking he'd wandered onto a Club Med For Robots. The scary part: until we realized what was going on, we were feeling vaguely sad because our "live" lives could never be this much fun. (Or oily.)

It's intriguing how closely the contestants could approximate human beings, like the replicants in Blade Runner. I suppose some might even pass the Turning test, with proper coaching. Mindy heard one girl getting some advice: "Show more commitment. Get into the spirit. You've got to try harder."

So here is what humanity looks like when they're simulating humanity: using that vegetable oil-covered slip-n-slide with a ramp to boost them into a doughnut pool, kicking soccer balls, throwing footballs, doing handstands, chasing each other screaming, smiling relentlessly, teeth bared, butt cracks showing, wardrobe malfunctions a la Janet Jackson (it takes practice to lose just half of your bikini top).

There's a bottom line to this. It's not for the squeamish. You can stop here and feel vaguely superior but also haunted, even threatened by these oily zombies from the fun factory. Or face the reality of reality show people:

They must be destroyed.

Because? They're the real zombies.

How can I tell? They eat brains.

Yours, mine, their own. They don't discriminate.

So we must.

Meet you in the park with torches and pitchforks at sunset. Bring some salad and French bread to sop up the oil.

And Then There Was None: Hawaii's Newspaper Merger Leaves a Big Black Hole, Perfect for Raising a Fetid State of Corruption

DATELINE HONOLULU -- SLUG: Collapse of journalism, Honolulu Star-Advertiser style

Today's 16-page A section of the newly merged newspaper, which included the editorial pages, had only 1 staff article, 2 signed columns, and an unsigned editorial. The main local contributions were letters. Everything else was off the newswires.

In the 2 weeks since laying off over 100 people and merging the two daily papers, this is what you get--a news vacuum big enough to swallow an entire state. Imagine the joy of the political-business class, who can do what they please without oversight...

But the other question is where are the 100 journalists who still work there? Or should we say "allegedly" work. I'd like to see their contracts.

When you consider that the four local TV network outlets consolidated into one about six months ago--not waiting for FCC approval--the bland smiley face/frowny face Island style of journalism is creepily omnipresent. As a preview of an all-entertainment state--or else a reversion to pre-journalistic 1853 Hawaii--it's undoubtedly a laboratory in how to mentally starve a democracy...

General McChrystal Loses His Head

"And so, General McChrystal, would you care to repeat what you said about me and Joe Biden? Hmmmmm? Cat got your tongue?"

Kayne West's Porsche Crashes Next-Door: A Cultural Appreciation

It's not a great picture, but you get what you can at 4 a.m., which is what time it was when Kayne West's black Porsche rammed our next-door neighbor's garage door. The impact nearly threw us out of bed. The street was filling with people as I came down the steps in my skivvies. Gas pouring out of the car, which didn't even brake, to judge from the lack of skid marks. A last second wrench of the wheel kept Kayne alive, if he was at the helm; though of course his spokespeople denied this. Said he wasn't even in Hawaii. And later, the car was reported stolen, after the fact. So much for all those anti-theft devices that render a modern luxury car secure.

The photo above is the only one in existence, but despite my call to TMZ, no takers. So my career as a paparazzi is on hold. Fortunately, Kayne rented the house a couple blocks away while he was here to make an album with Jack Johnson, whom he met through Ben Harper. You can see where this is going: Kayne West's Slack Key Hawaiian Throw-Down, a downlow expression of exotica, with lots of marimba action.

In the morning, the damage is apparent (second photo). The house in question used to be a modest classic Hawaiian 1940's style, then a defrocked Judge bought it and turned it into the Parthenon, then a candy heiress bought it and added a 7-fountain roofdeck pool. We call it The Bordello. It's a horrible eyesore, but for awhile on Saturday morning it had a certain architectural modishness, thanks to a certain black Porsche--which added $150,000 to the value of the house, if only until the towtruck arrived to haul it away.

Looking for Mister Fat Finger

"Operators of Drones Are Faulted in Afghan Deaths" -- NY Times headline, May 29, 2010

"The civilian deaths highlighted the hazards on relying on remotely piloted aircraft to track people suspected of being insurgents. In this case, as in many others where drones are employed by the military, the people steering and spotting the targets sat at a console in Creech Air Force Base in Nevada."

If you've ever wondered how the drone jockeys of Creech AFB, Nevada, spend their evenings after a day of remote control killing...

There's only one place to go in Creech, and that's the Bar at Indian Springs. Otherwise, a long couple hours drive to Las Vegas. So you get off your shift, stretch your back, step outside--not knowing if you'll find day or night, you're always surprised to have to squint in the sun--and with that feeling in the pit of your stomach that won't go away, you decide you need a drink. Get in the car and drive. Park in the dusty lot. You step into the bar. A bar named Bar--that's the ticket to amnesia. So you've only been out in the bright sunshine for 15 minutes and here you are, back in a dark shadowy cave. You order. Nobody bothers with small talk. Not near an AFB. Mind your own business. Which is to stare your hands and wonder why you didn't wait before pressing >Enter
Or, more likely, to order another cold one and say "F*** that, you did your job. Let God sort them out."

Hormone disruptor shampoo given to young girls at Alice in Wonderland premiere: HuffPo by Mindy Pennybacker

http://greenmangreenerpenny.blogspot.com/

The author of Do One Green Thing lands a post-Oscar punch: what were they thinking giving out falsely labeled organic shampoo at the Alice in Wonderland premiere? Do they want all the young girls to get smaller, smaller, smaller...?

Why Hawaii Won't Ever Get a Huge Tsunami: a contrarian view (with farewell video of evacuation orders via loudspeaker)

Here's the way it was on Saturday morning at 5 a.m. back in those innocent days when we still believed in Papa Tsunami. The very able fire dept truck goes by, broadcasting the evacuation. These are top-notch professionals. (Hawaii firefighters are unique in that they take part in a lot of water rescues, probably more than fire calls.) Next we see a pickup truck loaded with coolers of food and water and a longboard, driven by a local gal. Neighbors on the curb are beginning to draw up plans.

And now, here's something the Tsunami Center won't tell you, as a parting thought: the Hawaiian islands are the most isolated chain in the world, and as such are at a very far remove from the major earthquake fault subduction zones in the Pacific Rim. If you think of the Rim as a circle, Hawaii is in the center. Though there is an active volcanic earthquake scene on the Big Island, these kinds of earthquakes are shallow and unlikely to affect even the neighbor islands in any significant way. I'm from California, where earthquakes are a real threat. My grandfather wrote most of the first earthquake-resistant building code after the 1933 Long Beach quake. He consulted in Chile's reconstruction after the 1960 quake. We grew up talking, and reading about, and comparing experiences with earthquakes in our house.

And my point is this: Hawaii is too far away to ever receive a full on 20+ foot Indonesian-style tsunami except (note emphasis) in those fjords and harbors which funnel the wave force, such as at Hilo, which is the only major population area to suffer a serious loss of life and damage. While there will be tsunamis in the years to come, they will be in the 1 to 4 foot range unless an earthquake even stronger than the largest ever recorded--Chile 1960--strikes opposite those fjords and harbors. At 1 to 4 feet, there may be street flooding and beach erosion and major inconveniences and some loss of life--some dumb surfer is going to get it, one of these days--but nothing compared to what the East Coast goes through 3 or 4 times a year with Nor'easters.

This is the sort of prediction that can outrage people. It can weigh like an albatross if proved wrong, but I'm willing to make it in order to emphasize the kind of provincial and panic-based thinking that goes on, still, in the places that are funded to protect us. They need to keep that funding going, so the danger has to manifest frequently enough to keep the budget line alive.

The places where tsunamis do horrible damage are those closest to the Pacific Rim subduction and strike-fault zones. Japan. Indonesia. Chile. Alaska. The Pacific Northwest. California. They're at the outer circumference of the Rim, not at the center, as we are.

TSUNAMI WRAP-UP: it was all about the shopping, folks

Increasingly likely that the tsunami, while serious in Chile and in theory, was highjacked as an excuse for the media and hotel folks to cook up a huge one-day shopping event that would boost the sagging local economy, raise TV ratings (and hence ad rates), mention all the stores and gas stations (advertisers) where you could stock up, and virtually force the tourists to order room service food in the expectation they'd be marooned for a week.

To be clear: the threat was real, but the Pacific Center knew by 6 am it would not be a major event, yet they and the Hawaii powers let an entire day unfold at crisis tempo.

We know how media works: it's exactly what happened with The Weather Channel in the two years following Katrina. Expecting an increase in hurricanes and preparing to get bought out, TWC turned every weather event into a catastrophe. And then sat there mumbling while no hurricanes hit the US for the next two years.

The plantation mentality in Hawaii is to just say, "Thank God nobody was hurt," and ignore the flaws and scare-mongering. Unfortunately, the odds of a free press shedding any light on the subject just went down a lot, given the fact that the day before the Tsunami alert the two Honolulu papers, The Advertiser and the Star-Bulletin, merged. The latter paper buying out the former and closing it--and this six months after all four local TV news stations merged.

waiting for the Hawaii tsunami that wasn't

What we find is that rumors are their own kind of natural disaster. A siren at dawn. Loudspeakers on a truck. A sea of people moving this way and that, taking orders--buy 7 days of food and water, stay in your hotel... It's also true that this is a drill for The Next One. My problem with that? It's the third such drill this year in Hawaii. And I wonder what the experts knew and when they really knew it.

For instance, the local Star Bulletin led with a front page story on Tourism Returns to Hawaii, and buried the AP report on the tsunami on Page 5. This in Hawaii, where a similar Chile quake in 1960 devastated the islands? If it were truly news, and the Star Bulletin truly a newspaper, wouldn't that be on the cover?

My green author and blogging wife, Mindy Pennybacker, put some of these thoughts up on Huffington Post and drew a sharp series of "how dare you" comments. Yet we were in New York City on 9/11 and know people who lived that day because they disregarded those very pompous experts who like to believe they have the right to herd us like sheep.

running to higher ground TSUNAMI

Last view of Kapiolani Park in Honolulu empty as a police cruiser warns of a tsunami wave. Gotta run to high ground now. Aloha!~

TSUNAMI civil defense radar on Diamond Head

Back from a walk around Diamond Head. The civil defense mobile radar is in place. The sea has filled with boats, as owners and sailors are taking them out to be safe. An unusual sight, like Dunkirk on a sunny day. The farmers market at KCC was open, so I bought 3 papaya, choy sum, manoa lettuce and 3 organic chocolate bars. I credit my emergency ration response to Do One Green Thing, the new book by Mindy Pennybacker. And, yes, that's my plug for the day!

TSUNAMI VIDEO we go down to the sea to see

Here is our walk from the house to the beach this morning at 6:30. The sirens went off. The emergency trucks came by telling us it's a mandatory evac. We talk with neighbors about where to go (up the volcano on foot). Got water. Got Spam. Here comes the next siren, much louder.

With the wave now expected to arrive at 11 am we have a few hours. How to spend them? I think we may go for a walk around Diamond Head, stretch out. Cell phones are out, the evacuation zone maps online are crashed. Gonna see how long the Internet holds up.

This is when ham radio suddenly becomes relevant again.