Parcivillian -- Part 4 (a local color post)

Technically, I know the above photo does not qualify as a successful photo, but I really like how it looks, so it's the one you're getting. Well, and the one below, too.

The photos are from a recent performance by Parcivillian and, whereas I would love to talk about that performance and talk about the rehearsal session I sat in on (which was fascinating!), I need to finish up the interview. The part I skipped over. See, being a writer, I felt compelled to ask the guys about, well, what kinds of things they read. In relation to that, I found it really cool that the name of their band comes from a book (see last week's post).

Me: The next question I'm going to ask is going to seem, possibly, weird or offtrack because it has nothing to do with music.

Elliot: How many pets do you have?

Me: No... [And that did make me laugh.] I'm a writer, and a lot of the people who follow my blog are writers, so, as a writer, do you read and what do you read?

Someone, at that point, said, "Oh, boy!" but I can'd tell who it was.

Me: Or have there been any influential books you have read? Even if it's like The Monster at the End of the Book.

Delek: John Steinbeck is my all-time favorite writer. I've read every book he's written.

Me: What's your favorite Steinbeck?

Delek: Actually, Cannery Row. Or, no... I always forget the name. The one about the pirate. That's my favorite one. [There followed a discussion where we (Delek, Elliot, and I) tried to figure out the book, but none of us could come up with which one he meant. I'm still not sure, because I haven't read whichever one it is.] Bukowski, too. I love Bukowski. [I redirected back to Steinbeck through some questions about Steinbeck's King Arthur stuff, so the next comments are about Steinbeck.] Mainly the things about California. And people. How he writes about people. His knowledge of what makes people human is probably what attracts me to his writing.... He's probably my all time favorite writer, but I've read countless books, and I'm still reading countless books. Some stuff in science, some in history. I just read this incredible biography about Benjamin Franklin. It's like music; I read a lot of stuff. I used to read a lot of fantasy.

Me: I went through high school reading fantasy.

Delek: Do you know David Eddings?

Me: Oh, yeah! The Belgariad, after The Lord of the Rings, I think is the best fantasy series ever written.

Elliot: I read that, too.

Delek: I liked that. I liked that actually better than The Lord of the Rings. I liked his writing a lot.
[There was some more discussion about Eddings (during which I do entirely too much of the talking), after which Delek turned to Stav and said, "What do you read?"]

Stav: That's the weird thing; I actually don't read that much. And it's weird because I love writing lyrics to songs but, as far as books and novels, I just don't do it.

Me: They're completely different beasts.

Stav: Yeah, that's right. I did read the Harry Potter books when I was a kid, of course. Those, I loved. They were great. Read books for school. But I'm a very slow reader so, as far as school goes, I kind of struggled through the books, so that's kind of where I'm at. But I love poetry, even though I don't know many huge poets. In school, I loved analyzing and studying the poems. As far as literature, I love poetry, and that's what I try to do when I write songs.

Me: As a song writer, I'd be surprised if you didn't have some kind of attachment to poetry.
[There was a bit more general talk of poetry before we moved on to Elliot.]

Elliot: My all time favorite book is The Pastures of Heaven by Steinbeck.

Me: I haven't read that one.

Delek: That one's amazing.

Elliot: It is. It's the most incredible perspective I've ever seen on the human being. [There's some discussion about Pastures and what it's about.]

Me: Y'all are going to make me have to pick back up on Steinbeck after this.

Elliot: Lately, I've gotten into more novels. Actually, this is a funny story [points at Delek]; he taught me how to read.

Me: Yeah? That's cool!

Elliot: He gave me the first Harry Potter book and worked through about the first chapter with me, I think, and said, "You're on your own." Then I read the whole thing.

Delek: That is a funny story.

Elliot: Yeah... I got into David Eddings. I got into Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett...

Delek: Yeah!

Me: Good Omens.

Elliot: Exactly. [There followed a back and forth discussion of Gaiman and Pratchett.] Somewhere after eighth grade, I got really into Shakespeare, including the poetry. I love that stuff. [Then, there was a discussion of Hamlet.]

Interestingly enough, this all moved into a discussion of the book Parzival, which is the book they took they name from (which you know if you read last week's post (link above)), but they didn't mention the connection at that point. They (Elliot and Delek) just went on and on about how good it is. Stav will have to read it this year, so he hasn't had that experience of it, yet.

Elliot: Of course, I've read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Actually, I like The Hobbit better. I've read [it] three times.

There was some other discussion about The Hobbit during which I talked way too much, and that's where we left the discussion of reading and went back to music. It was great for me to talk to them about what they've read and what's influenced them, and, really, I may have to pick Steinbeck up again. It's actually something I've been meaning to do anyway, so...

And that's a look inside an up and coming band. I hope great things for these guys. They're music is great, and they were a pleasure to meet and hang out with. I'm sure you'll hear a bit more about them from me in the future. They have a concert coming up, so it's not too unlikely that there will be a post about that. Until, then, check out "Lonely Road."

There's Something About Mary (Doria Russell)

Earlier this year, Mary Doria Russell's latest book, Epitaph, was released. She was doing a book tour for it at the time and was scheduled to come through where I live...
But she got sick.
And cancelled her stop here.
And I really thought that was the end of it, because those kinds of things almost never get rescheduled especially when they're in smaller-ish cities and were free to begin with. But!
Being the cool person that she is, she rescheduled and showed up at our local book store earlier this month.

And that was pretty awesome because, now, I've met my top two favorite living traditionally published authors (the other being Neil Gaiman whom I met back in this post (and, yes, before I get any smart ass comments, I met him in that post; no, don't ask how that works; you wouldn't understand)).

Hmm... I'm not sure how I should refer to her. Mrs. Russell sounds too... I don't know. It's not that it sounds formal, exactly, but it sounds overly formal. But I can't just call her Mary. I mean, I'm pretty sure we're not on a first name basis. Well, anyway... She was a delight. Lively and exciting and an entertaining speaker. And you should all read her books.

Speaking of which, there were some interesting things about the event, things I don't really understand. First, my wife and I were almost the youngest people there (other than people who work at the book store), and that was really surprising to me. I mean, The Sparrow is science fiction (even if it's not shelved in the science fiction section of book stores (which, I guess, could be a problem)) so it, at least, ought to attract younger readers? I don't know. Maybe I just don't know how these things work.

Because, aside from the readers being on the older side, an awful lot of them seemed unfamiliar with Russell's work. Of the people that I spoke with, all of them were surprised that I've read all of Russell's books. To one woman I said, "There're only six," to which she seemed inordinately shocked. Like it was a huge deal that I had read six books. Of course, I speaking of that from a reading perspective, not a writing perspective. Six books is a lot to write, but I've read more than six books so far this summer, and the woman seemed to think six books should take, I don't know, years to read.

At any rate, it was an odd experience. When Gaiman was here, people I met and I talked about his various books and what we liked best, but I couldn't have that kind of conversation with the people at Russell's event because they were unfamiliar with the books. On the other hand, I got to tell them about what I like about her books and make recommendations about which ones to start with based on what they like.

Of course, The Sparrow is one of the three books on my list of books I think everyone should read.

My only regret about the event is that I couldn't remember where I'd put my first edition copy of Dreamers of the Day until afterward. You know, I put it away for "safekeeping," and I can never remember where anything I put away for safekeeping is when I need it. I did get my first edition of Epitaph signed along with my first edition paperback of Doc. Now, those are put away for "safekeeping," too. I hope that doesn't mean I'll never see them again. Of course, it doesn't! I did find Dreamers of the Day, after all; however, if there is ever any moment I want them, I won't remember where I've put them.

I've reviewed most of her books, so here are my links to the reviews:
The Sparrow
A Thread of Grace
Dreamers of the Day
Doc
Epitaph

Yes, I do know that I've left Children of God out, but I read it back before I was doing the whole blog thing, and I haven't re-read it since... a long time. Still, it's mentioned in some of the other reviews.

Look, if you consider yourself a serious reader, Mary Doria Russell is someone you should be reading. She does characters better than, maybe, any other author I've ever read (and, again, I read a lot). To try to put this in perspective, Dreamers of the Day is not my favorite of her books, but her depiction of T. E. Lawrence (you know, Lawrence of Arabia) is so strong and has hung with me so much that I'm reading his Seven Pillars of Wisdom. And Doc feels like you're walking down the dusty streets of Dodge City right along with Holliday and Earp.

Just sayin'.

The Influence of a Life

Terry Pratchett died.

I don't quite know what I think about this, because I haven't quite come to grips with how I feel about it. I mean, it's not like I was what you'd call a fan of Pratchett's writing in that I haven't read any of the Discworld books. The only thing by him that I've read is Good Omens, and I read that because of Neil Gaiman.

However, there is no denying the influence he's had, through Gaiman, on my writing "career." In fact, it would be safe to say that without Prachett, I would never have started writing. It was one of the first things I talked about way back in the time before time when I started this blog: 400 Words. So there it is, even without ever really reading anything Prachett wrote, I would never have decided to "sit down and do the writing" without him. He gave it a context for me as something that was possible.

Knowing that he's gone has left me with a... hollow feeling just below my sternum. You could say that I'm sad, and I am, but it's not exactly like sadness. It's just the feeling of something missing that ought to be there. It's left me feeling more than a bit out of sorts.

It's also made me think about "influence" and what that means. How we influence people. How often we are deliberate in our influence. What impact do we, do I, have on the people around me? All of that but, specifically, as a writer. What do I want my influence to be?

Of course, when writers talk about influence, they are usually talking about what influenced their style. Or their genre. If they are talking about the why, it's usually in some less practical way of "When I read Tolkien as a kid, I wanted to grow up and create worlds just like he did." And I have had unmistakable influences on the things I write about. There's a direct nod to Lewis in The House on the Corner and one to Tolkien in Christmas on the Corner and, when I needed to develop my villain for Shadow Spinner and was trying to think of the scariest thing I'd ever "encountered," it was a character of Gaiman's that came to mind.

But, still, none of that would have mattered if I had never sat down to do the writing, and I have no one else to look to for that influence other than Gaiman for telling the story about how Pratchett started out. Gaiman wouldn't have had the story to tell without Pratchett.

All of that to say that I feel a great sense of loss at Pratchett's passing. And, yes, while everyone knew it was coming (of course, death is coming for everyone, so we knew it was coming), this is one of those battles where knowing doesn't help anything. I knew my grandfather was going to die when I was 20, but it was still devastating when it happened, and we knew my mother-in-law was going to die, but that still rocked our family. I wish I could tell his family the impact that he had on me. Not that it really helps, except that it does.

Not to mention, if there's anyone out there that I may one day look like, it's probably Terry Pratchett.

According to my wife, I just need to make a shift to black.

And, yes, that really is how I go out. I had no idea about Pratchett and his signature black fedora until I was writing this post.

No Respecter of (Third) Persons: Part One -- How Does That Make You Feel? (an IWM post)

Somewhat recently, I was presented with the question of... okay, I don't remember, exactly, what the question was, but I'll say it like this: Why do you believe that third person perspective is superior to first person?
That's a really good question, especially since I don't exactly shy away from first person.
So, I suppose, the real question is more along the lines of "Why do I think you shouldn't use first person?"

Well, okay, it's not that I think you, the specific you sitting here reading this post, shouldn't use first person; it's that I think the general you out there shouldn't use first person. At least not until you have figured out how to write in third person. First person, especially for the beginning writer, has too many traps and short cuts; until you know how to get around them, you should write in third. And, actually, it's writing in third that will help you to learn to avoid the snares.

So let's start with descriptions...

* * *

Do you know the drill, yet? I feel like you ought to know the drill. Unless this is your first time here, in which case, here's the drill:

His name is Bit, and he's glad to meet you.

Seriously, though, hop right over to Indie Writers Monthly to find out why you ought to be writing in third person. Or, at lease, why you shouldn't be writing in first. No, they're not the same thing.

Part 2: Why Bother To Blog (That's Not a Question) (an IWSG post)

After a month of extremely low traffic (like February was for me (see part 1)) or a drop off in comments or a failure to generate sales from blogging or any number of other things, you might wonder, "What's the point? Why should I spend my time doing this thing; it doesn't seem to be getting me anywhere."
I can't say that's not a legitimate question.

So let me give you an example of why a blog can make a difference for even a well-known author.

John Scalzi is kind of a big deal in the science fiction world. His first (traditionally published) novel, Old Man's War, was nominated for a Hugo in 2006. Red Shirts won the Hugo for best novel in 2013. There have been many other nominations (which I'm not going to go try and figure out). He was also the president of SFWA for a while.

But, see, despite the fact that I read a lot of sci-fi/fantasy, I'd never heard of John Scalzi. Not as a writer. I discovered him through his... wait for it... blog! His blog is, in fact, great. I didn't find his blog until well after I'd started blogging myself, and I didn't realize, right at first, except in a very vague way, that he was a writer of books. I mean, he doesn't spend much time talking about the process of writing, so, just from his posts, it's not always apparent. Which is fine. I don't really need more author/writer advice, and I didn't go there looking for that stuff. Why would I when I didn't know about any of the books he'd written?

I went there because he has interesting posts about actual things and, more importantly, he has real things to say about those things, whatever those things happen to be, and we, evidently, have a very similar way of looking at those things. So far, I haven't disagreed with him about any of the things, at any rate. Though I'm not likely to wear a dress. (And you can just go check his blog to figure that one out.)

Eventually, though, he mentioned a thing he had coming out ("The B-Team," part 1 of his serialization of The Human Division), which caught my eye since I was serializing Shadow Spinner at the time, and I really took a look at his books and decided I wanted to read Old Man's War, which I haven't actually done, yet, but I will. And I also, now, want to read Red Shirts (which is going to be a TV show, so I really need to get on that). So, in me, he has a fan, and I haven't even read any of his books, but, see, I like him.

And all of that was because of his blog.

There's also Demetri and the Banana Flavored Rocketship, my favorite read of 2012, by Bryan Pedas, whom I found through his blog. And Briane Pagel and the very many things he's written (which, actually, includes his blog, which is like some vast, scrawling art form); do you want to guess how I discovered him? I bet you can't. No, seriously, just guess.
Okay, you got me. It was his blog.

I could go on.

Actually, I kind of will. If you have a blog and, for whatever reason, I go to it, and I see that the last post was November 27, 2011, guess what I'll do. If you're thinking that I'll explore it anyway, you'd be wrong. I'll close it up without bookmarking it and never bother to go back. I won't go poking around and I won't find out what you may or may not have written. Which is not to say that if you're an author you need to have a blog, but, if you do, you should keep it updated. If you're not going to do that, take it down. All the way down. Or archive it somewhere as a "look what I used to do" kind of thing.

Look:
Blogging may not be the thing anymore, but it is a thing, and it can be a big thing if you use it well. Most of my new reading (other than authors I already follow (like Gaiman, Lawhead, and Russell)) is coming from things I'm finding from blogs. That someone may be following along here and later decide to read one of my books makes me want to do a good job with the blog, which, granted, can mean a lot of different things and is a much longer conversation, but the intent is still there.

All of that to say, sure, blog traffic will dip and sway and be fickle and passive-aggressive or, even, aggressive-aggressive (I've had some of that, too) and it will come and it will go, but that doesn't mean that I should decide that it's just not worth it. How do I know when someone like me might come along and decide to check out one of my books? I don't, so I need to make sure that no one comes along sometime in 2016 and finds March 5, 2014 as the date of my last post.

This post has been brought to you in part by the IWSG.

Part 1: February Was Weird, What the Heck? (an IWSG post)

February was a weird month. Not that February isn't always weird, but this one was especially weird. Don't get me wrong, I like February. It's my birth month; I'm obliged to like it. And I like that it's weird. I like that it doesn't know how many days it ought to have and all of that. But none of this February's weirdness has to do with the number of days it contains.

To be fair, the weirdness sort of started in January. That was when I finally broke down and joined that whole twitter thing (that's a link to me on twitter, by the way, not just a link to twitter (like you'd need that)). Twitter, just by itself, is weird. Seriously, I fail to see the appeal of speaking with this arbitrary 140 character cutoff, especially when people then just tweetspam (Is that a thing? That should be a thing.) a dozen times so that they can say the 1500 characters they wanted to say to begin with. That's like making mini-cupcakes so that you will eat less but, then, eating all of them.
Because they're so tiny.
You know.
Anyway...

So I'm on twitter, but I don't really know if I'm doing it correctly, because no one tends to respond to anything I tweet unless it's, in and of itself, a response to a tweet. Am I the only one actually reading what other people say? I don't know. Plus, twitter adds this unexpected pressure on me of coming up with tweets that at least approach the 140 character cutoff. Because why use just 50 characters? And it feels like they, the tweets, should be profound in some way. But once I throw it out there, no one responds, so it feels like I'm one of those guys walking down a crowded street talking to himself that everyone stares at and moves away from.

Of course, most of those people these days are just on the phone, but that weirds me out, because I'm never quite sure if the person is on the phone or just talking to him/herself.
But I digress... really, way off target here.

The weirdness started when John Scalzi replied to a tweet. I mean, I was replying to one of his tweets, but he replied back, which was kind of a jaw dropping moment. I had to tell Rusty about it just so someone else would know and, well, make it real. If that makes sense. Still, it's not quite the same as Offutt having Neil Gaiman tweet at him (which has happened more than once, if I'm remembering correctly), but it is something.

That was at the end of January, and, for a while, the most exciting thing happening on twitter, unless you count Nathan Fillion announcing that he was learning to play Magic, was the push up competition going on between Briane Pagel, Rusty, and myself. Yeah, I know. I'm sure all of you were waiting with held breaths to see our tweets on that subject. But, then, one day, I sat down at the computer to find that Jim Butcher was following me. Wait, what? I know! What the heck?! Again, I tweeted Rusty about it. But what the heck?

As it turned out, the heck was that Butcher's account had been hacked and, for whatever reason, used to follow back about 1000 of his followers. When I got home later that night, he was no longer following me. For a few minutes, though, I thought I was one of the cool kids.

However, a real thing did happen: Howard Mackie, a longtime writer for Marvel Comics and the writer of one of the best runs on any comic ever, dropped by my blog and commented. That, in many ways, is an even bigger "what the heck?" moment than the thing with Butcher. I mean, I've mentioned Butcher here on the blog on numerous occasions, but I've never mentioned Mackie. At least, not by name. I only talked about Ghost Rider and, that, only in passing. So I'm still wondering how he ended up on that post. I'm sure there's a lesson here, somewhere...
Oh, but we'll get to that.

On top of everything else, February was my lowest blog traffic in a year. Way below my current average. Way below. Way more than can be accounted for by the loss of a couple of days from the month. It's one of those things that makes you stop and go, "Whoa... what the heck?" And without wanting to you're suddenly wondering if blogging is actually worth the time it takes. Or if you did something wrong and offended a bunch of people. Or... something. It doesn't matter that your head is telling you all sorts of rational things:

• It's just a fluctuation.
• Blog traffic in general is slowing.
• It's not about you.

Because your head is also telling you all sorts of irrational things, and you can't help hearing those things.
So... why blog?

And that's what we'll talk about next time. See you on Wednesday for "Part 2: Why Bother To Blog (That's Not a Question)"

This post has been brought to you in part by the Insecure Writers Support Group.

Existentially Cranky (an IWSG post)

Some time ago, my wife referred to me as "existenially cranky." I, um, well, I couldn't argue with her. In fact, I just kind of looked at her, shrugged, and said, "Yeah, I guess so." It's hard to argue with the truth.

I suppose most people would take that statement as an insult, but she didn't mean it that way, and I didn't take it that way. The truth is, that is kind of how I experience existence. Not that I'm cranky, not really; it's more that I approach almost everything from a standpoint of being dissatisfied. And not really being dissatisfied, just seeing the flaws in things, which is not really about seeing the flaws but about seeing how things could be made better.

Unfortunately, that extends to human behavior as well, a thing which is often the root of my crankiness. And, actually, when it's about human behavior, it may well be crankiness.

So here's a short example:
Many years ago, I worked as a youth pastor. At some event or other, one of the kids (one of the girls, actually) got in trouble for something (no, I don't remember). Her father got upset that she got in trouble and complained to the pastor and, thus, there had to be a meeting. You know, because how dare I discipline his daughter for something that was clearly unacceptable behavior. During the meeting, I explained how the behavioral expectations had been very plainly (multiple times) laid out and how she had been aware of the behavioral expectations. His response to that was to say to me something along the lines of, "Well, you can't expect teenagers to follow those kinds of rules."

I have to say, his attitude made me mad. And I expressed it. Very matter-of-factly, I said, "Yes, I can. I certainly can. Every other teenager there was able to follow the rules [which, really, were very simple], so I certainly can expect them to follow the rules."

His response? "Yes, but..." blah blah blah about how his kid was "special" and shouldn't have to follow the rules. Those rules were there for all of the other kids. I shouldn't have those same expectations of his daughter. At which point I had to explain that, yes, with that attitude, there is no way to expect better behavior from his daughter, because it is only through expecting better behavior that we get better behavior. He left unconvinced. I didn't apologize.

This attitude, the attitude of being "special," is one of the reasons that it annoys me so much when people disobey traffic laws. Did you know that studies show that that is the #1 reason people speed and break traffic laws? It's because they feel "special." No, seriously. Studies show that people who, say, speed believe that the speed limit was established for other people, people that don't drive as well as they do (and no one drives as well as they do). Therefore, they have a special exception to not have to follow the speed limit.

The problem is that being a good driver is like having a good sense of humor: Everyone believes they have one. Or being smart, because everyone thinks they're smart. It's all those other people that are just of average intelligence.

Yeah, this kind of stuff really does make me cranky, because so much of it is founded on the ways we lie to ourselves. I suppose that's how a lot of people are able to live with themselves, but I'm often struck by how much of the bad behavior that exists exists only because we don't expect better of ourselves.

Lately, I've been very struck by this same kind of attitude in relation to blogging. In this other forum that I'm involved with, there is the frequent question by people of "how do I get more traffic to my blog?" 1. Because, yes, someone can ask the question one day and two days later someone else will ask the same question (pay attention, maybe?). 2. It doesn't matter how many times you say "be involved and visit other blogs," etc, the response is inevitably "I don't have time for that." Well, you know, I don't have time for it, either, but I do it.

[And in this particular corner of the blog world, it also extends to "buy my book," "review my book," "support my book" frequently by people who never do the same for anyone else. Never.]

Basically, there's this attitude of "I should get to be the 'special' one and have everyone else do for me without doing anything back, and, man, that attitude does just make me cranky. I'm sorry, but, if you're not Neil Gaiman, you don't get to have thousands of followers of your blog without being involved. Or, maybe, John Scalzi, but Scalzi is involved. I don't know if he visits blogs, but he supports authors in a lot of ways he doesn't have to.

So what I'm saying is this: if you want people to support you, quit asking; go support some other people. I can guarantee you, if you do it sincerely and consistently, people will notice. I mean, I notice when someone has reviewed (or even rated) something of mine, and those people get more of my time when I'm doing something to support other bloggers/writers. If you put a new book out, I'll probably buy it (unless I just can't afford to at that moment); that doesn't take any time or much effort. If you've reviewed something of mine, your stuff gets higher on my list of things to do, not because of trading favors or anything like that, but, if you've supported me, I want to support you. [Which does not mean a "good" review, but it does mean an honest review.] If I had more time to read, I'd review more stuff, but I do always have something "indie" that I'm reading, and I review everything I read.

I'm not saying that visiting blogs and commenting and reading and reviewing are miracle cures to traffic woes, but it's where you start. I mean, I don't care how brilliant your blog is, if I stop by there consistently and comment and you never visit me back, I'm probably going to quit coming around. Unless you're just that brilliant. Or Neil Gaiman. Or John Scalzi. Because, and let's just face it, you're not that special. Neither am I. But, then, that's why you see me visiting and commenting.

Oh, I almost forgot. I'm insecure that my existential crankiness drives people away. Actually, my demand (because it is kind of a demand) that people do better, be better, think better (think at all) that stems from existential crankiness drives people away. It does drive people away, which makes me more cranky. But someone has to expect better behavior, right?

This post has been brought to you in part by Alex Cavanaugh and the IWSG.

Neil Gaiman's Bottle of Milk

Depending upon how you look at things, my kids are either very fortunate or dismally unfortunate. They get great stories all the time about, well, everything. So there is the story about the Troll Bridge and Goblin Town and, now, there is an excavation into Goblin Town going on that I haven't remembered to go take pictures of, yet, but I need to so that I can do a post on that, and, of course, DRAGONS! Sometimes, especially my daughter, the kids get exasperated with me because they have such a difficult time getting merely mundane answers from me. Sometimes, I almost feel bad about that.

Sometimes.

I mean, no one has ever just gone to the store or gone outside to play or, even, just gone to the bathroom. He's been abducted by aliens. And, when he comes back, he's been replaced by a robot duplicate or, possibly, a clone. We're never just having chicken for dinner; we're having dinosaur or, depending upon how many times I've been asked that question, one of the children.

And I might would feel bad about it except I hear my children, delightedly, repeating those stories to their friends.

All of that to say that I loved Neil Gaiman's new book, Fortunately, the Milk, about a father who has to go to the corner store to get milk for his kids' breakfast cereal (because, otherwise, they would have to use orange juice, which is not okay on cereal) and get abducted by aliens on the way home. This was a story after my own heart. It also has dinosaurs.

My own stories don't have enough dinosaurs, I don't think.

It's an illustrated book but not, really, a picture book. The one I have, the American version, is illustrated by Skottie Young. His art is whimsical and funky and fits well with the tone of the book. That does not stop me from also wanting the UK version of the book, illustrated by Chris Riddell, which is not so funky but looks no less interesting. Not that I will be getting a copy of the UK version, because I don't want to pay the shipping on it.

So, yes, the story is whimsical and funky and just a lot of fun, taking off at weird tangents. It has everything you could possibly want from a story like this: aliens, dinosaurs, pirates, time travel... okay, well, it doesn't have cowboys, so I guess it doesn't have everything, but it has an awful lot. If you have young kids (or, even, if you don't), this is a great book to pick up. I'm sure it would make an excellent bedtime reading book. Even though I don't have young kids, I may make mine sit down and listen to it anyway.

Maybe, that way they'll know I'm not the only one that does this.

The Hand of Neil

Let me just start out by saying, Neil Gaiman owns his very own copy of Shadow Spinner.

"What?!" you may be asking, "How is that possible? And, if it was, how would you even know?"
Well, give me a moment, and I'll get there.

Gaiman has, perhaps, been more influential on me as a writer than anyone else, but it's not his writing that did it. Which is not to say that it wasn't something he wrote; it just wasn't any of his stories. As I mentioned waaay back in my post 400 Words, it was something Gaiman said about Terry Pratchett that finally convinced me to put my pen to paper and stick with it. If not for that one thing, that thing that gave me my "ah-ha!" moment, I'm not sure The House on the Corner would ever have been written. For that reason alone, Gaiman is important to me.

More specifically, though, and I talk about this more extensively in the author's note for "Part Five: The Police Car," Gaiman's character, Corinthian, was one of the primary sources of inspiration for The Man with No Eyes. When I got to the point that I needed a villain for Tib, I sat down (figuratively speaking, since I'm sure I was already sitting) and went mentally through the images that have most freaked me out in my life. The Corinthian is one of those images. So Shadow Spinner was directly influenced by Gaiman and his work.

All of that to say, when I found out that Neil was actually coming to my little town on his Ocean tour (the last signing tour he says he's ever going to do), I was very excited. In my normally subdued way. Meaning, you'd never be able to tell. Sometimes, that particular attribute of mine frustrates my wife. I'm sure it's related to why caffeine doesn't affect me. Or alcohol, apparently. The fact that I don't ever even get tipsy also frustrates my wife. Anyway...

I went to see Neil Gaiman. He read a bit from The Ocean at The End of the Lane, he answered questions, he read a bit from Fortunately, the Milk (which is not yet out), and, then, he spent the next four hours or so signing autographs. I know, because I was in the last batch of people.

By the way, Shirley MacLaine once pulled his hair. That was a funny story. And Gaiman thinks that everyone should have a hobby that could kill them. His is keeping bees. I'm not sure I quite agree with that, the killing potential of your hobby, but I think it's cool that he keeps bees. I like having bees around, especially when there are enough of them that you can hear their buzz in the trees. Or rosebushes. Or whatever. But I'm not thinking I'm going to take up skydiving or bungee jumping or, even, bee keeping, at the moment.

Yes, Mr. Gaiman was as entertaining as you might imagine. His stories were funny as were his answers, including the one to the question of whether he wears a hair piece, to which he responded with something along the lines of, "If I wore a hair piece, it wouldn't look like this." He was also polite and gracious, even at 12:30am, after he'd been signing for all of those many hours.

Other than The Ocean at The End of the Lane, I got my (1st Edition) copy of The Graveyard Book signed for my son. Neil drew a cute, little picture for him:

And I got the first two issues of The Sandman signed.

No, I did not go out and buy them special for this event, as I was asked by more than one person; I've owned those copies since they were the price on the cover. [I wanted to get my platinum edition of Death: The High Cost of Living #1 signed, but I'm not really sure what box it's in, and, once I had my Sandman issues, I figured that was good enough.]

The other thing I did was hand a copy, signed to Neil, of Shadow Spinner to him, which may be presumptuous, but I did lead off with, "...this is not a request for you to read this." Which it wasn't. Not that I would be upset if he reads it, but who knows if he will ever pick the book up again. What I did want to do is give him something back that would not exist if not for him. The House on the Corner might also not exist, but, maybe, it would; I don't know. Spinner, at least as it is, would not. So I thanked him for his stories and the stories they inspire and gave him the book.

He looked a bit surprised and, then, genuinely thankful. He began to look at it, but someone came and took it away from him and put it in a box with all of the other things he'd been given during the evening, none of which were books. Then, he shook my hand very firmly while looking me in the eyes and told me "Thank you." It was... nice. But, yes, I have washed my hands since then.

So there you go. Neil Gaiman owns his very own copy of Shadow Spinner with his name in it and everything. Not that he couldn't just write his name in it if he wanted to, but... well, I'm sure you get it. At any rate, it's nice to get the chance to say "thank you" and show your appreciation to someone that has meant a lot to you, so, even if it was presumptuous, I took my opportunity to show my appreciation.

And, well, at the least, I hope he loves Rusty's cover, because it's awesome.

The Ocean at The End of the Lane (and The Light of Knowledge)

There are things when you are a kid that you cannot understand. Things beyond your control. Things you are powerless to prevent or to change. Sometimes these are singular, sudden things, and sometimes they are... life. The ongoing patterns of how things are. The problem is that growing up and coming to understand those things doesn't change the experience of  them. It doesn't change what you felt, then, when you were a child and small and powerless.

The Ocean at The End of the Lane is a different kind of book from Neil Gaiman. He has called it his most personal work ever, and I think that shows in that it's written in first person, the first of his novels to be written that way. There are probably some of his short stories written in first person (the one about the cat in Smoke and Mirrors is poking at the back of my mind), but it's been long enough since I've read any of those to actually remember. It gives the story a very personal feel in a way that most first person projects do not. Also, and this could be because I have listened to him reading (I especially like February's) more than a few of his stories, I could just hear it in his actual voice in my head.

There are many things about the way he presents the story that I really like. There are few descriptions. The things that are are just the things that are. The sister is just the sister. We know that she's younger. The mom and dad are the mom and the dad. His father's face gets red when he's angry. It's the kind of thing a child would notice while the other things, the rest of everything, just is. There is no teenage girl staring into a mirror admiring her hair and thinking about her chocolate-brown eyes, and, for that, I was especially thankful. The things that are described are the kinds of things a child would notice, that would stick in his head. The car stuck in the mud. The face of  the opal miner. His bent comic book. It really allows the reader to just travel along with the boy, experiencing as he experiences. Feeling the events that happen much more than seeing them.

The novel centers around one of these events. A moment when a child finds out that he is, indeed, a small thing and powerless to withstand the force of an adult. This event is not the inciting incident nor is it the climax; it lies somewhere in-between, but it is the event upon which the story revolves. The thing that changed the life and perspective of the child. A moment where, after it has happened, you just want to go back to before it happened. But you can't go back.

It's also about the negligence of adults. How they can dismiss as unimportant something that is the world for a child. Or how they can think things are replaceable when they're not. A cat is not just a cat, not any cat, and a dog is not just a dog. No more than a child is just a child. Or, even, a toy--or a washbasin, just his size--is just a toy. Things can't always be solved with, "I'll buy you a new one" or "I'll get you something better."

And, then, there's the whole question of memory and what's real. Something we, I suppose, can never be quite sure of.
"Is it true?"
"What you remembered? Probably. More or less."

This is a pretty great book. I didn't enjoy it quite as much as I did The Graveyard Book or Neverwhere, but I think this one is going to linger much longer. Ask more questions. Give fewer answers. But that's okay. I like books that hang around in my head and make me think about them.

In other news:

Today is the FREE! release of Part Twenty-five: The Light of Knowledge in the ongoing Shadow Spinner serialization. Remember, if you want the whole story RIGHT NOW!, you can get it at that link I just left.

Also, be on the lookout for very special Shadow Spinner news coming up next week (I think). Here is the list of today's FREE! offerings (and, no, I have not managed to get the first few chapters collected, yet, so, hopefully, that will be next time):
"Part Twenty-five: The Light of Knowledge" (also available for FREE! tomorrow, Tuesday, July 9)
"Part Twenty-four: The Serpent"
"Part Twenty-three: The Harlot"
"Part Twenty-two: The Undying"
"Part Eighteen: The Angel"
"Part Seventeen: The Tree of Light"
"Part Sixteen: The Dark Tree"
"Part Fifteen: Food of the Garden"
"Part Fourteen: Anger and Laughter"
"Part Twelve: The Gash in the Floor"
"Part Eleven: The Kiss"
"Part Ten: The Broken Window"
"Part Nine: The Shadow of the Tree"
"Part Eight: The Cold and The Dark"
"Part Six: The Man with No Eyes"
"Part Five: The Police Car"
"Part Four: The Cop"
"Part Three: The Bedroom"
"Part Two: The Kitchen Table"
So... there you go. 19 of the 25 chapters. I should point out that "Part One: The Tunnel" is not free this week and won't be offered as a free promo ever again. In fact, it won't be available in this current format for much longer.

Breaking the Blogging Bubble (an IWSG post)

I think blogging is somewhat essential for a writer these days. Well, non-literary, non-bestselling writers, anyway. I'm sure Stephen King has no need whatsoever of any kind of blogging or anything else. But it is probably especially essential for new writers. That's the theory, anyway. And it's what publishers and agents seem to be saying to writers. Get online. Okay, so maybe not necessarily a blog, but some form of online presence, and, as far as I can tell, a blog, tied with twitter or facebook or whatever, seems to be the best way of doing that.

But blogging seems to also create a... bubble... around the blogger. Not a soap bubble, either; a hard, impenetrable, survive-out-in-space kind of bubble. Initially, this bubble is a good thing, because it does allow the blogger to survive out in space, which is what it feels like when you start blogging. Like you're out in space and no one can hear you scream. Or talk. Or type. Or whatever. But, after awhile, if you do it correctly (check my "What Your Blog Says About You" series), you'll actually wrap yourself in a bubble of other bloggers. A nice, comfortable, safe bubble.

Now, if you're just a blogger, this bubble is kind of cool. You have friends. People that know you. People you can count on to comment when you post. Whatever, you know. It's all good. As they say. However, if you're a writer, this bubble can be kind of dangerous, because, basically, whatever it is you're writing will just stay confined to your own personal blogging bubble. However big that happens to be.

For me, at this moment, that's not really all that big. For most of us, it's probably really not all that big. Also, it's not gauged on how many "followers" you have but on how much interaction you have going on. If you have 700 followers but no one ever comments, you probably don't really have 700 followers, just 700 people who, at one time or another for one reason or another, clicked your follow button. If you have 700 followers, but your only getting a couple of dozen page views a day, you don't really have 700 followers. Your bubble isn't as big as you think it is.

But that's not really the point. The point is, as a writer, if you're just depending upon your "followers" to support you and your book (or whatever it is you write), then you're not going to get very far. The truth is is that most people that read books do not also read blogs. But it's those readers you need to get to. Those readers you need to make aware of your existence. And, somehow, you have to break out of your blogging bubble to get to them.

I do know what this is like as it's happened once or twice, like I talked about back in this post when I got listed on a site that suggests books to readers. Readers who are not bloggers and who do not read blogs. It's a hard thing to do, though, to get past the confines of your bubble and make other people aware of you.

I think some people are satisfied with their bubbles, but I'm really not. Nothing against you guys that stop by here and read and my stuff and comment and all of that, but my real goal is to burst my bubble. To get past it. Out of it. To get to the point where Neil Gaiman was at when he said "my job had become answering email, and I had to stop doing that." Not that I want to not have interaction with people or to say "well, I don't have time for you guys anymore," but, if you want to be successful as an author, that's the place you have to get to. And I want to be successful as an author, not as a blogger.

So, yeah, I love all of you guys, but my plan is to... go beyond. Break my bubble.
As soon as I figure out how.

Visual Evidence

For those of you that wanted visual evidence of yesterday's post, here you go:

That's really all I have for today.
Come back tomorrow where you'll hear me talk about how I want to be an amusement park.

For One Brief Moment...

Last Monday was the release of "Part Seventeen: The Tree of Light" in my Shadow Spinner serialization.

Maybe some of you picked it up? I think you must have, because it was the best release day I've had for any of the parts so far. But not only that, I had the biggest download day I've ever had. By far.

"Part Two: The Kitchen Table" lead the downloads and peaked at #14 on Amazon's list of free downloads on the science fiction, fantasy, and magic list (unless it went higher at some point that I didn't notice). I had 6 of the top 20 spots. But...
That's not the best part!
See, it wasn't just my best day for free downloads, it was my best day for paid downloads. By far. I mean, I got months' worth of paid downloads last week, and something happened that I would never have suspected.

"Part Six: The Man with No Eyes"

which was not free last week, kept climbing the charts. The paid charts. My stuff spikes up into the top 100,000 fairly frequently, but I'm more used to them hovering in the 500,000 range. At any rate, I noticed when it was in the top 100,000, but I didn't think much of it. It stayed that way for a long time, too, because Amazon didn't update their stats in a timely manner, last week. Generally, it's every hour or so, but, last Monday, it took them 6-8 hours to do an update. I was watching the downloads climb, but, still, I hadn't given any thought to the ranking. Until it finally updated, that is, and it shot onto the paid sci-fi, fantasy, and magic chart at #96. I was in the top 3000 on the sales chart. And the downloads kept happening. And, then, I was in the top 2000 and, later, just over 1000. I landed at #72 on the paid s/f/m list. That was pretty cool!

But, see, right above me on  the chart, at #69, was The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. I just sort of blinked. Because, well, see, I was right there on the chart with him. What? It was pretty unbelievable.

And that's how I left it when I went to bed.

But that's not the best part!

Because, when I got up on Tuesday morning, I found that there had been more downloads, and "The Man with No Eyes" was sitting at #68 on the list, just above The Graveyard Book, which was still at #69. That! THAT was unbelievable. Surreal. I wanted a screen shot of it, but, see, I'd tried that when I was below Gaiman on the list, and I couldn't get it to work. Well, the computer was saying it was happening, but, when I tried to open the screen shots, I just got a page with the Amazon logo at the top; the rest was blank, so I knew that wasn't going to happen.

When I told my wife about the list, she said, "Take a screen shot!" And I told her I couldn't get it to work. I'm blaming Windows 8. My wife, though, was able to do some kind of screen capture from work and sent it to me... but my computer won't open it. Of course.

However! She did print it out, so, next to me here at my computer, I have the printed page of where, for one brief moment, I was higher on the chart than Neil Gaiman.

Yeah, I still don't believe it, either.

"If you decide not to make things..." (an IWSG post)

"If you decide not to make things, all you've done is deprive the world of all the stuff you could have brought to it."
--Neil Gaiman

This is a great quote by Neil and not something that I haven't said before, but I've never said it like that, and I love the way he put it: "...all you've done is deprive the world..." That's just fantastic.

Often, people will feel great conflict over creating. It can be debilitating.
"Is it good enough?"
"Am I good enough?"
"What if it's no good?"
"Am I just wasting my time?"
Oh, it goes on and on and on, and, if you visit enough blogs of pre-published writers or, even, some post-published writers, you will run into all of it and more.

I think, maybe, we're asking ourselves the wrong question. Oh, I get it. "Is it good enough?" is an important question if you're trying to get traditionally published and all of that, despite the evidence that plenty of stuff that isn't really "good enough" gets traditionally published all the time. Some of that stuff that isn't "good enough" even becomes incredibly popular. But that question, that question about being good enough, isn't so important in a digital age of self-publishing. If it was ever important at all.

I think the better question to be asking is, "Is it me enough?" Is it the story that you want to tell? Is it the story that only you can tell? Are you bringing to the world that thing that only you can bring to it?

Of course, that circles back around to "am I good enough?" and "what if no one likes me?" Questions, really, about self worth and esteem, and those can be... well, those can be hard to ignore. But we need to ignore them. We need to ignore them so that we can focus on that story that can only come from us.

So... some examples:

George Lucas made a short film while he was in college called "THX-1138" which is supposed to be brilliant. When he graduated, he wanted to make a movie called American Graffiti, but he couldn't get anyone to be interested in that. What he found was people that wanted him to make a full length feature out of THX. He said THX wasn't a full length kind of thing, but that's what they wanted, so that ended up being his first movie. It didn't do as well as everyone else thought it would. Once he was able to make Graffiti, which he did for almost no money because THX had flopped, it became the most successful film ever made up to that point and held that title for something like 30 years.

Lucas was under contract with Universal for two movies, and the next movie he wanted to make was this thing called Star Wars which Universal wouldn't back. They wanted a sequel to Graffiti. Lucas said that story was finished and didn't want to make a sequel. Eventually, he got 20th Century Fox to take Star Wars, and Universal got American Graffiti 2. How many of you knew there was a sequel?

Tolkien wrote this whole history of this place called Middle Earth, but he couldn't get anyone interested in what he called The Silmarillion. He ended up getting an unrelated novel, The Hobbit, published. The publisher wanted a sequel, but Tolkien didn't have a sequel in mind for it nor did he want to write one. They insisted. He did try, but what came out of that attempt was more Middle Earth, The Lord of the Rings, which the publisher didn't want. They ended up taking it anyway, probably realizing they just weren't going to get what they wanted out of Tolkien. And, in the end, The Hobbit became part of Middle Earth.

Heck, even Twilight was something that came straight out of Stephanie Meyer, because, before that book, if you had asked anyone if they would have thought that sparkly vampires would be a good idea, I don't think you would have found a single person that would have said "yes."

I could go on and on with these examples and go one to debate the success or lack there of when artists strayed from what the story that was coming from them into other areas. For instance, the thing most criticized about Return of the Jedi is the ewoks, a thing which Lucas did not envision but fell back on because he didn't feel like he could realize his vision of an epic battle of wookies against the Empire. There's Kevin Smith and his decline in success as he tried to move toward making movies he thought people wanted rather than making the movies he wanted to make. And more and more and more.

The thing is, though, when you try to make what you think people want, everyone is disappointed, because you can't meet the expectations of everyone and, then, you haven't even made something you're happy with, so no one is happy. Make the thing that only you can make -- the book, the movie, the painting -- and don't worry about the rest. Don't deprive the world of that thing that only you can bring to it.

I'll leave you with this:


[This post has been brought to you by the Insecure Writer's Support Group.]

Going Neverwhere

Once upon a time, I wrote a post about commas and what they're for and what they're not for. It's a good post and one that's absolutely true. The fact that people are constantly starting sentences with a conjunction and, then, throwing a comma after it to show me that they are pausing after they say it drives me crazy. I don't care if you're saying, "So," and taking a breath; that comma doesn't go after it. For instance:
It is not:
"So, do you want a piece of pie or not?"
It is:
"So do you want a piece of pie or not?"
If you want to indicate the pause to the reader, use, "So... Do you want a piece of pie or not?"
The point being that the way we say this culturally, right now, is just that: it's the way we say it right now. Five years from now, we may not throw those pauses in all over the place while we speak, and I don't need you to show me how you're saying it. I just need you to convey the correct meaning.

Anyway... The post about the commas coupled with this more recent post about following the rules when you write serve as the backdrop to this review.

Neverwhere was the last book by Neil Gaiman that I hadn't read. I'm not sure why I hadn't read it; I just missed it somehow and, then, kept not getting around to it. But, finally, I did get around to it. It has displaced, surprisingly, The Graveyard Book as my favorite Gaiman novel. I say surprisingly because, at first, I was a bit confused by it. Not the story. I was confused by Gaiman's sudden inadequacy with the comma. They were all over the place and in places they didn't (and shouldn't) need to be. What the heck? None of Gaiman's other books have comma issues; why would this one?

Have you ever heard Neil Gaiman read one of his stories? Well, I have, and he has a particular cadence when he reads, when he's doing any public speaking (heck, for all I know, he always talks like that), and I realized by the time I had finished the prologue that the extra commas were there because Gaiman was, in fact, telling me how to breathe. Where to pause. When to go on. In effect, he was creating a particular atmosphere, a rhythm, that was just as if I was sitting here letting him read it to me. And it was awesome.

But, see, that's what you can do when you know what you're doing with the rules. It's knowing the rules and taking them and bending them to your purpose. Sure, probably more than half of the commas (actually, I'd bet more like 2/3 of the commas) don't belong. They're in places where they shouldn't be. But, then, you'd read too quickly and lose the atmosphere, the creepy, of the story. Gaiman wrote it to give you the effect of being underground, in tunnels, lost, confused. Of not knowing what's going on, whether your sane, or, even, if you are who you think you are.

I loved it.

And, now, I've flipped. I've gone from having his most recent novel as my favorite to having his first novel as my favorite. I don't think, either, that it's just because it's the one I've most recently read. I don't remember ever reading anything where the author paid so much attention to the atmosphere he was creating through his use of punctuation. Not that he necessarily did it on purpose, of that I have no idea, but he did do it.

And we haven't even started talking about the story yet. Which is great. Disconcerting. Full of interesting characters. The marquis. Croup. Vandemar. Things are rarely what they seem. Even when they are. "I've saved  his life four times today already." [Or something like that. I couldn't actually find the quote in what I felt was a reasonable amount of time.]

Best of all, though, it doesn't end the way you expect these kinds of stories to end. The way they usually end. And I would talk about that, but I don't want to talk about the ending, so I'm not going to. All I can say is that you should go read it. I'm fairly sure I'll have to read it again one of these days, and I really don't do that rereading thing, so that's saying quite a bit.

"...if this is all there is, then I don't want to be sane."

[If, by chance, you do want to listen to Neil read, you can go to here. I've only listen to the first two so far, but they're worth it. (The January one reminds me of something Briane Pagel would write.)]

Douglas' Last Salmon

If you ever want to know exactly how popular something is, step into a middle school classroom and ask them if they know what X is (X being the thing you want to know is popular or not). Well, maybe a high school class would be better, I'm not sure as I haven't spent any time in a high school classroom in a while. I am, however, in middle school classes several days a week. It is always interesting to find out what they have and (mostly) have not heard of. It's kind of bubble popping at times.

Things the middle schoolers I work with know about:

• Star Wars -- They've all heard about it and know the gist of the story, but a surprising number have never seen it (interestingly enough, this is not true of the kids my daughter's age, who have almost all seen it (and love it (all of them))).
• Harry Potter -- They all know what Harry Potter is, but, mostly, they have not read the books. Most of them have not seen all of the movies, either.
• Lord of the Rings -- Ask them who Tolkien is, and you'll get blank looks, but say "Lord of the Rings" and the response is "oh! I love Lord of the Rings!"
• Hunger Games -- They're all over that. All of them.
• Twilight -- Mostly, they despise it. They all know what it is, and a few like it, but the voices of those that hate it drown out any people that might speak up in its favor.
• Dr. Who -- Of popular things, this has the most ardent adherents. If they've seen it, they love it. If they haven't seen it, they want to.
• Buffy, the Vampire Slayer -- Who?
• Joss Whedon -- Who?
• The Avengers -- Oh, that was awesome!

There are a couple of book series that a lot of them really like that I need to write down the names of so that I can check them out. Not surprisingly, though, they have no clue about some of the classics, books I think of as fundamental. Even things like Frankenstein and Jekyll & Hyde and Dracula that you would think middle schoolers would know about will cause blank looks and comments like, "I think my dad mentioned that once." They've heard of Dickens, but that's about it.

Yeah, it can be difficult to have a discussion about literature when the students don't know anything about it.

The thing about all of this is that it can really be humbling in a certain sense. It reminds me that some of the things, some of the names, I think of as essential are, from any realistic standpoint, almost unheard of to the rest of the world. Names like Neil Gaiman. Although, now, I have several of them interested in The Graveyard Book. And names like Douglas Adams. A few had heard of Hitchhikers', but Douglas Adams was another of those vacant look names.

But it's not just them. It's everyone. It takes a lot to break into cultural awareness, and, really, people like Gaiman and Adams and Martin stop shy of being names that any random person off the street is likely to know.

All of that being said, I just finished The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time by Douglas Adams. I really enjoyed the book, but, honestly, if you're not a fan of Adams, you don't need to and probably shouldn't read this book. That means that most people have no business giving it a second glance. That's kind of a weird feeling knowing that.

On top of everything else, it's not even a complete work. Salmon was the last project Adams was working on when he died, and he hadn't even decided what kind of story it was yet. What that means is that he'd started it as his next Dirk Gently novel, but, as he wrote it, he decided it was really a Hitchhiker book, and he's never gotten around to figuring out what he was going to do with it. The parts with Gently flow well and are interesting, but they have these other bits thrown it that make you feel like you're reading more than one work, which, in fact, you are.

But it's not really the Salmon stuff that's so great about this book. It's full of essays, articles, and speeches he gave, and that stuff is immensely interesting. The book is worth it for that stuff. IF you are a fan of Adams. If you're not, I have a hard time thinking you'd care.

The one thing it did do is make me want to go find my Dirk Gently novels and finally get around to reading them. I'm gonna have to do that soon... if I can ever get caught up on this teetering pile of books by my bed.

Now to get back to expanding the horizons of these kids...

The Cat Came Back (part 3): The Cat Reader (and the Dog Writer)

I wish I had a picture of the cat with a book for this post, but the cat has proven to be very troublesome

when it comes to pictures. Anytime he hears the camera turn on, he immediately stops what he's doing. Just before the above picture, he was "hugging" the arm of the couch, but, as soon as the camera made a noise, he sat up like, "What? I wasn't doing anything."

Which brings me to my point. Readers are like cats.

Seriously, ask someone what they're reading, which is likely to be something "trashy," and they'll start making excuses as to why they're reading it. "It's for my reading group." "Someone gave it to me." "My best friend said I had to read it." "I don't really like this, but it's so popular I had to read it." Whatever. It's like people have to make excuses because they're not reading something "better." Sort of like the cat when I try to take a picture of it doing something insane. "What? No. That wasn't me. You have the wrong cat. That cat just ran out of the room."

But it's more than that. As I said in my last cat post, science believes that cats adopt their owners, not the other way around. That is certainly true of readers. As a reader, I've done this myself. When I was in middle school, I adopted Piers Anthony as "my writer" and kept him around for six or seven years at least. Right now, I have two that I've adopted: Neil Gaiman and Mary Doria Russel.Gaiman is good in a way that Anthony never was in that he doesn't always write the same old stuff over and over again. Russel is good in another way in that her writing is just so magnificent. And deeply human. As a writer, the best thing we can hope for is get adopted by a reader and, hopefully, a lot of readers.

But the thing is, cats are finicky. It might be a cliche, but it's a cliche because it's true. You can feed a cat something one day, something the cat barely stops to breathe for while choking it down, but give that same thing to the cat the next day, and it's "blech! Why are giving me that crap? I hate that!" Actually, that sounds kind of like my daughter, too. At any rate, it's hard to know what a reader will want at any given time. Yesterday, it was vampires, today it might be zombies, and who knows what it might be tomorrow: anthropomorphic frogs, maybe.

To make it worse, they're demanding. "We don't know what we want, but we want it right now!" Okay, sometimes readers do know what they want, but it often goes like this:
The cat demands food. The cat demands food again. The cat demands food very loudly. The cat demands food loudly and constantly. You finally get up and give the cat some food, which may or may not be what you gave the cat the day before. The cat looks at the food, takes a bite, and turns his tail on it while giving you that look. If you've never been given that look by a cat, you won't know what I'm talking about, but it loosely translates into "You suck. I hope you choke on a hairball. How could you give me this crap?"

I haven't read The Casual Vacancy yet, but I kind of think Rowling is going through this right now from what I've read of reader reaction to the book. Finicky.

On the other hand, I think young readers tend to be more like dogs; they'll eat anything you throw at them.

Cats also want to get all up in your personal space, but not in a friendly way like a dog does. I mean, a dog just wants to cuddle and be with you, but a cat... well, the cat wants the space. You are no longer you, you are just a pillow. They pop out those claws and start kneading you and molding you and trying to get you to move around into a shape they want. Who cares about whether that's comfortable for you or not, right? And, even when a reader likes what you've written, many of them will tell you how you could have changed it to make it better for them. With those little claws, working you over. Of course, the reader next to that one has completely different suggestions, and that one is working you over with his claws, too.

But writers are much more like dogs. Have you ever been to the animal shelter and seen the little doggies just waiting for someone to love them? Really, they'll take anyone. They're back there like Donkey (from Shrek), jumping up and down and yelling, "Me! Me! Pick me! Pick me!" And, even though readers are cats, writers are still back there saying, "Read me! Read me! Like me! Like me!" There may be less jumping up and down, but, then again, there may not be. And, really, writers will just take anyone. The only thought in a writer's head at that moment is, "Someone to love me!"

Of course, then, you don't want to make writers mad or mistreat them on an ongoing basis, because, then, they become that grumpy, old dog down the street that doesn't like anyone and just growls at anyone that gets near, "I don't care if you like my stuff! Get away from me before I bite your hand off!" I'm not sure if that's any less literal with a writer than with that dog.

But, mostly, dogs are just lovable and want to be loved. They want someone to play catch with and to scratch them behind the ears. They want someone to tell them "good dog." Yeah, that's writer equivalent of buying your book and leaving a positive review.

And, honestly, dogs are so much easier to feed than cats. They'll eat almost anything.
Except my dog, of course; she's picky. Unless the cat is around, then she'll eat anything.

And don't forget: Go sign up for the Oh, How I Miss You blogfest! It's this Friday; that's just two days away. Go now! Don't miss out!

How To Breed a Better Writer

First of all, realize that it's very hard and that writing is a grueling and lonely business and, unless you are extremely lucky, badly paid as well. You had better really, really, really want to do it. Next, you have to write something. -- Douglas Adams

 I love that quote by Adams. I don't love it because of what it says about writing; I love it because of his relationship with writing, that being that he was sometimes locked up by his publisher to make him, you know, actually write. Writing was almost always the last thing he did even though he seems to have spent his time bursting with ideas.

Adams is, in my mind,  the only good reason for NaNoWriMo. That's how he wrote. Tied to a desk with the command, "Write this now. No, right now!" I think it was The Restaurant at the End of the Universe that he wrote in about two weeks because he'd been locked in a hotel room with someone to make sure that he did things like eat.

If you like Douglas Adams and you like Neil Gaiman, you should certainly read the book Don't Panic by Gaiman about Adams. What better pairing could you have?

But all of that is kind of beside the point... but not really.

The results of a joint study between Yale and Moscow State University (yeah, in Russia) were released last week that shows that there is "a modest but statistically significant familiality and heritability element to creative writing." (the whole article is here) Basically, if you want to be a writer, have parents that are writers.

That explains why my kids are so good, I suppose. At writing, I mean.

But I actually want to jump back up to what Adams said: "Next, you have to write something."

See, that's the important part. It doesn't matter how "good" you are if you never do it. So, in that case, the person that didn't get any special helpings of talent from his/her gene pool but sits down and determines to write and, then, does is way better off than the person that has the best "writing genes" in  the world but never picks up a pen. It's like the potential energy of a ball held in your hand but never thrown. What does it matter?

Going back to Adams: he had such vast stores of potential energy, but most of it went unused. In the end, he only wrote a handful of books, brilliant books but a very few nonetheless, because he couldn't make himself sit down and do the work. Maybe, if NaNoWriMo had existed then, and he'd only spent that one month a year writing, we'd have more books from him.

Speaking of NaNoWriMo, my wife has decided to do it this year. She's hoping that having two writers in the family will genetically and environmentally spur our children on to further writing. Especially our younger son who has started this brilliant story (you can find "The Language of Nythos" in Charter Shorts) that he is reluctant to carry forward. My wife is a good writer, too, and writes in a way I wish I could: quickly. Words seem to flow out of her, and I have to pull each and every word out of my head like grass burrs out of socks (or the bottom of a bare foot). But there will be more on all of that later.

My other thought about this study, which focused on the actual writing, is what it has to do with story telling in general. Like oral story telling. I think there must be a link at some point, but they weren't looking at that, so they have no data on it. It makes me wonder, though.

At any rate, if you want to be a best selling author, it does help to be related to one (as the study seemed to indicate) but not because that means you're good; that just means you have an easy in. As Adams said, for it to be anything other than badly paid, you have to be extremely lucky. I'll add: or work extremely hard. I suppose, in the end, that's why Adams didn't have to write more. He hit on the "extremely lucky" with his first real project, but he had lots of experience with the "badly paid" before that. Maybe, if Hitchhiker's had only done moderately well at first instead of what it became right away, we would have had more from him.

NEWS!

The House on the Corner is being featured today over at Author Andrea Pearson. You should go check it out.

And the news I know you've all just been dying for!
Today only!
Parts 1 through 5 of Shadow Spinner will be available for FREE! today, Monday, October 15. What a jackpot! If you've missed any of the parts, today is the day to pick them up! Well, except for "Part Six: The Man with No Eyes," but that one will be free later in the week. At any rate, follow the links below and pick up your FREE! goodies! Make sure you tell all your friends about it. Really, do that. I'd really like to break into the top 20 on the contemporary fantasy list, so send everyone you know. Oh, and, yeah, because I have to say it: be sure to click the "like" button if you haven't done it already!

"Part One: The Tunnel"
"Part Two: The Kitchen Table"
"Part Three: The Bedroom"
"Part Four: The Cop"
"Part Five: The Police Car"