The Brutal Truth About Publishing

The brutal truth is that publishing is harder and easier now. Anyone can produce a book and put it out there on for a Kindle download. The time from conception to e-publication is measured now in nanoseconds. Literally someone can write a book one day and publish it the next. It might not be any good but they can tell friends and neighbors to look them up on Amazon. But here is the brutal truth: no one will buy it because it will be a speck of sand among millions of other specks.

And so publishing in a strange way has become more rarefied. More exclusive. The dunning of millions of authors cancels out the playing field. The noise from three million books reaches a critical mass where no one can get their message out. Except for the few. The few who are published by the mainstream large publishers who put the muscle behind the book to blow right past the Hoover Dam of published authors. And they do it the old fashioned way; with lots of money.

Start with the million dollar advance. This author has a huge advantage over his kindle published brethren. For one he or she can make a living as an author. Right there the stream is narrowed drastically. But the publisher now has to make that million dollars back and they do it by pumping money into pushing that book. While the kindle author tries to get his book reviewed, five thousand galleys go flying out to bookstores, reviewers, bloggers. Publicists and marketers follow up and the word shoots out that this is a big book. The noise of all the self published authors is drowned out by a single tidal wave of publishing muscle.

Then the buzz starts and the author and the book steadily climb onto the bestseller list. The self published author sells a few copies and then simply disappears. Now there are exceptions. There are now authors selling a million ebooks on Amazon. We have all heard these stories and they are inspiring. But for the majority of authors who decide that watching their Amazon rankings tick a few times down and seeing their name in print is worth more than the years of learning their craft, the fate is a dismal one. Utter obscurity.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said there is no greater difference than that between the amateur and the professional in the arts.  This is probably more true today where the amateur runs to immediate gratification while the professional labors on in pursuit of their craft. There still is no substitute for first rate work even in the age of the internet and the digital word.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Writers Factotum

When you are a writer you do anything. Anything. Bukowski's second novel, Factotum, proves the point beautifully and the movie does the same. You accept right away that every job you ever have is temporary. You accept that every job is just a means to an end and the end is writing. You evaluate the job in how much time it gives you to write. That's it. Nothing else matters. Not the money. Not the job itself. Just how much time it gives you to plow away at your craft.

Best factotum job I ever had was security guard. Pile up the books in the Wrigley building on Michigan Avenue and watch the hours dribble away. Midnight to eight AM. Nothing to do but make the rounds of the building from the coal chutes in the basement to the little room up in the clock tower. Scribble in the log. 1300 Saw a bug. 1400 Squashed a bug. 1500 No bugs. Sometimes they got on me about the log so I wrote more. 1300Saw a bug. Roach. Big. Moving south down the hallway. 1400 Followed roach into men's room. 1500 Smashed roach into a brown smear. That usually did the trick. Mostly I just read. Eight hours of reading literature. Great job.

Then there was the janitor job. Custodian. Stationary engineer. My boss laid it down for me. Just stay lost. Here is your broom. Just stay lost and make sure no one runs out of toilet paper. I read in the bathroom stalls. Stopped the freight elevator between floors and read whole novels. Kept the toilet paper up. Took rolls home for my own use. Pushed around the same dust for hours. Read Read and Read some more. Lost the job when they said someone was stealing rolls of toilet paper. How low can you go.

After that there was construction cleanup, the railroad, waitering, mortgages, renting apartments, teaching. Teaching was the worst factotum job. They wanted you to work and know the students name and read their work. I didn't know anybodies name and didn't read anybodies work. The bakery. Working the night shift at the bakery. Great factotum job. Take orders all night long until about two AM. Then just sit in the shipping office with the loaves going around conveyor belts all night long. The smell of the long loaves was amazing. The Italians with the flour all over their faces screaming what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck. Then I got to take hot bread home in my jacket on my motorcycle. Blasting through the streets of Chicago with a nights worth of literature and hot bread against my stomach.  Nothing better than the factotum life man.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off in April

The Down and Out of Writing

As a writer you are used to being on the other side of the moon for most of your adult life. When people are at work you are at  home and when people are home you are at work. You are always where you shouldn't be and it is during these times when most people are engaged in the busy work of the day you find yourself floating in the boat of the left behind. Of course this has always been the case, but now writers have much more company. There are legions of the left behind now.

They come the same day and writers are creatures of habit too so you recognize your fellow craftsman. There is the man who stares out the window all day with a cup of coffee in his lap. He is maybe fifty. Maybe. He has been sitting in the same chair for years and knows others who come in and look for the same mirage coming down main street. They talk about places they have applied. They talk about coming to each others apartment. Neither notices the man in the corner surrounded by books and a laptop.

Then there is the man who yells. He yells about sports. He yells about politics. He rides a bicycle everyday and wears a cutoff jean jacket. He hangs around sniffing for conversation among the staff and finds a few nods and then eventually gets back on his bike and slips into the early twilight. Or the  twenty something in the hoody and Converse tennis shoes whose boyfriend sports a cowboy hat and Coke bottle glasses. They take the same chair and huddle over her laptop. Then the new guys who dress in business casual who read the paper and talk on their phones like business men. There are lots of these guys now.

And then there is the writer looking to cool off after a first draft. Trying to punch up the brain for a second run by cramming Franzen, Twain, Russo, Dickens--anything to fire up the well. He drinks coffee and munches on walnuts, then slinks away until tomorrow.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off in April

Twains Response to Keillor review of his Autobiography

Long dead that I am I will take a moment to respond to a man who lives in a age where the majority of people watch Dancing with the Stars and ruminate on the misfortune of Snooki and most people can't read a book without running to their infernal computer to see if someone sent them a bit of mail that has not a damn thing to do with anything and people write blogs that pass for literature and are just a rambling bunch of horse manure and a  man of that time has the infernal audacity to say my autobiography is the ramblings of an old man. Well Mr. Keillor as one one old man to another, I am dead, what is your excuse?

Wouldn't lower myself to read your stories of small town life that was never that-a-way-anyhow. Couldn't care less if you do think my ramblings are of no interest to men of your time and ilk or women for that matter. I will note that I have survived a hundred years plus while I seriously doubt you will be yesterdays news when you join your brethren in hell or heaven whichever your choosing. I spent a life giving my left foot to people like you and I am glad to see the New York Times has survived as a testament to that all is wrong in that business or reviewing literature. And good to see they have the same low standards that allowed them to take on a man who would pass himself of as a writer of  contemporary hogwash.

I might point out that you cannot get my book such is the demand. For a man who has been dead for a hundred years and has no advertising budget I would say that is pretty damn good and speaks volumes to my veracity as a writer of fiction and satire while you sir are a hawker of all things trivial and sentimental and once you have slipped below the terrestrial ground you so mightily besmirch, you will be hard pressed to find one buyer of your ruminations on your short journey of hell on earth.

Now I put a stipulation of a hundred years to publish my autobiography, but I see that is still too short a time for mankind to stop producing jackasses such as yourself. I think I will stipulate next time, if there is a next time, two hundred and fifty years. That should be enough time for man to either kill himself off or at least bleed out men who claim to speak with authority when in fact they are the baboon of our origins. With no regards at all...Mark Twain.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January.

Paying Thirty Four Bucks for Twain's Book

So do you pay the big number and have a tombstone square of paper that you can either read or beat off an intruder and probably be charged with reading a concealed weapon? Twain's  book is big and it is expensive. Yeah I know so and so has it for blah blah. Well I couldn't find it anywhere except the little independent bookstore that supported my book and that thirty four bucks is with a ten percent author discount!

And I vacillate. Christmas. Blowing lots of dough on gifts and everything else commensurate with making merry and what I am going to go plunk down thirty four bucks for a book when people are downloading for ten bucks? No. I'm not going to to do it! Even though I special ordered the thing and they got it in and gave me to Friday (today) to come in and pick it up or they would sell it to the next person in line who requested a copy and by the way the publisher is totally backlogged and so good luck finding it somewhere else. Still, I hesitate and sit in the coffee shop across the way telling myself in a very Scrooge like way that it is ridiculous to pay thirty four dollars for a book!

My brother said he would wait for the paperback. Sensible. Very sensible. Wait for the price to fall and of course it will and paying thirty four dollars now for the book is just plain stupid. Why times being what they are that thirty four dollars could go a long way in food or other necessities and of course you can't eat a book and you can't pay your electric bill or gas up your car with a book so it is utterly ridiculous to pay thirty four bucks for something clearly I could do without. I mean I am still trying to finish Jonathan Ferris second novel and it has slowed down and I am reading Dickens again and I am thinking about cracking Portis's True Grit which is in my backpack as well and so it is ridiculous to add this monstrous book to my list and pay thirty four Somalians!

So into the car. Yes, Yes. All done and go pick up the kids and get the tires changed on the car. There. You cant' put a book on your wheels. Tires. Practical. Practical. Keep driving. Yes, well, I'll just stop in and let them know I don't want the book. That is only fair. They close at five and it is four forty five. Yes. Ok. Park the car. Yes. Just let them know. Hello. Oh, you are here for your book....let me get it for you. Wow! Look at the size of that thing. Ha! Wow! Just let him know now that you don't want it. Jesus, it is huge. Just let him know. Now.Well, we had a lot of people who want this book but I held it. So, will that be cash or credit? I stare at him and my mouth moves in the proper direction and I nod and let him know that I will be making the sensible decision right now! Ah, I say, you know what? Yes? Ah, I really think I should....Yes? I should, I should...I should really....Yes? I should, should, should, should, should. Yes? Yes? I should, should should, should, should, should, shoooould... Yes? Yes? Yes? ...PUT IT ON CREDIT!

 Fine, I'll wrap it up.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January

Choosing a Point of View

I'm going to start a new novel after Christmas and I have the plot squared away and I know what I have to research, but I haven't decided on a point of view. I assumed third person would allow me to do everything I wanted and had pretty much made up my mind, but then I started reading some old first person novels and thought about taking it straight first person. This would allow me to get cozy with the reader right away and also give me the latitude to throw in everything but the kitchen sink as a I muse along. I have written three first person novels and one third person and I like, as most Americans, having someone tell me a story as if they are sitting next to me. But there are drawbacks.

First person depends entirely on voice. If you don't have an  interesting narrator then first person will not work. The voice of the author should draw a reader in and there should be a melody, a musical quality to the narrator that is pleasing to the ear. I write from the sound of prose as most writers do. You can just tell when something is not right and so you play with the words or the voice until it flows with an unbroken cadence. Of course some first person narrators attack the reader and fight against cadence. But it is the way we like our stories told and there it is no coincidence that blogging with its first person narrator is so popular. It is the great "I" telling the story and we are there.

Now the problem is there are limits. We cannot be everywhere as a narrator and that limits our scope. So that brings in a strong authorial third person. Authors used to be much more assertive, talking to the reader and coming out from behind the curtain. Now a lot of our omniscient narrators hide behind the curtain and tell the story without getting in the way. A lot of people prefer this as they don't want some author getting in the way of  characters and action and giving his or her take on what is happening. We want the author to be essentially invisible, a voice from above.

Or you can get esoteric and use second person which is you. You take the train. You feel sick. You punch the man. You arrive at work and hang your hat and look at your watch. You know that it is a long time from lunch. I am using second person in this essay. I do it in most of my posts about writing and politics. It allows the reader to be part of the story...You. But you have to make a decision about what you want to use in your story.

So I will have to make up my mind soon. I am drifting toward third person because I just don't have a powerful voice nudging my authorial narrator aside. But if he does then I will go with it. And so should you.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January

What the Internet has done for Writers

Obscurity. It is the nemesis of all scribblers. You want to be heard. You want someone to register that all those hours you have deposited in the bank account of art and dreams and vision and cracking the universe will matter. Does a tree fall in the forest if no one hears it? That is our horror, that you write for no one. That all those strange looks and mutterings about Jim or Stephanie or John wasting their time in their room in their office in the attic in the storage room have been vouchsafed as fact and their tombstone is a testament to the naysayers who will finish with a single epigram: they were just  kind of strange.

And it was a one in a million shot to be heard beyond friends family and neighbors who read your prose and smiled condescendingly, murmuring, well, it's sort of depressing. Depressing! Depressing! We are talking about the human condition, love, death, sex...Life! Oh, well, I just found it depressing, but that's just my opinion. Back to the writers group, back to the closet. Morons Morons. Bourgeois morons! They do not understand what I am doing and all I get back are rejection letters from my one conduit; New York City. We are sorry, it just doesn't fit out needs. Another publisher may feel different. Hundreds of those. The boxes of manuscripts in the basement grow and grow and you cannot get your heart and soul out to one damn person! Then came that silly network the defence department had built, the Internet.

Suddenly the stranglehold on publishing was broken. Just like that. The great wall of indifference that turned away ninety five percent of all writers had been tunneled under with a piece of fiber optic cable. Ethernet bound, your prose shot out into a blogosphere and voila! Published! Instantly! And you got instant credible feedback because it was no one you knew. The writers group had just gone global and anyone anywhere in the world could give you their two cents. But here is what really happened, the Internet validated millions of writers because they found an audience, the world.

So now a writer no longer toils in isolation. Before my first novel was published I had been writing for seven years with no portal for my work. Just grunting it out in storage rooms, apartments, basements, with no one but some trapped people in a writers group to give me feedback. And of course my girlfriend, then wife. Poor baby. But now you will read these words, and yes, I am a novelist, but more than that, I am a writer hacking it out every day. And I am heard.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man will be out in January

A Book By a Dog

Well I just read The Art of Racing in the Rain. There are two things I would point to after reading this book with a dog narrator: one, there is value to the kindle, and two, always read the first few pages. Alright. The whole Kindle revolution brings up the same advantages of the IPOD. You don't have to buy the whole CD. Or you don't have plunk down eighteen dollars to read a book by a dog. It is not that The Art of Racing in the Rain was bad, it is just that by choosing to have the dog narrate we are limited to what he can interpret. He is a dog after all.

And saying that you have to wonder what the author was after. Well, why not have the dog narrate the book? It is new. It is different. And the dog was very Zen. He thought of the afterlife and then spoke to us from the afterlife and then he came back as a...well, I won't tell you. Needless to say the authors work was cut out for him when he made this decision. I will tell it form the perspective of a dog...now how can I get that dog into all the scenes?

Well  he doesn't. When I wrote Tobacco Sticks I used a thirteen year old I had to get in all the scenes. In courtroom scenes I became creative and used other people, newspaper articles, literally having my narrator peeking in keyholes. The problem with any first person narration is that you are stuck in the person (or the dog in this case) head and everything has to filter through the canine brain before it reaches ours. Now this dog got a lot of his information from the television, from his master, from hearing, from a Zen knowledge of the Universe and racing (auto racing).

There were a few scenes where the dog just claimed knowledge and we went with it. Fine. A literary first person can do this. Prior knowledge. Well, prior dog knowledge. Of course the rubber meets the road when the dog has to interpret sex scenes. Our dog did this by well, comparing human sex to dog sex with some knowledge of anatomy and then again, we just went with it. There were courtroom scenes as well our canine friend was able to give us the nuts and bolts declaring more than once humans just think dogs don't have a clue, but they do.

By the books end our dog narrator moved on to the great dog pound in the sky. I must admit after finishing the book I didn't look at my golden retriever the same. I stared into his brown eyes and said to him: do you really know what is going on? To which he stared back and essentially said: Woof! Now like the dog narrator he might be hiding knowledge from the oblivious human. I will say that I kicked him out of the bedroom.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January

Citizen Kane in our Time

Black and white spooling along in the darkness and my son shrugs when I tell him this is one of the great movies of all time. Sure it is. But you watch it and you see why. Wells was onto something with his spoof of the great media mogul William Randolph Hearst. Especially in our media age of conglomeration where Fox fronts for Murdock's agenda and those that cross him cross at their peril. Presidents beware, Hearst is alive and well. But Orson Wells is the boy genius who put it altogether.

That's what comes across when you watch the movie. Wells. He was laughing his way through having a studio give him the money and the means to make his movie. Having one hell of a time as he took over the Enquirer and made a name for himself and played Hearst through his demise. And of course Wells was playing with fire and paid the price. He found himself black listed after the movie. His later projects never had the lustre nor the backing. The Magnificent Ambersons was finished by the studio.

But genius shines through. And Wells original vision is there at a time when movie making was pretty dull. Along comes this man who breaks just about every rule with angle shots, lighting, montages, the whole structure thrown on its head . But Orson Wells is the star of Citizen Kane even in his bald mask getting wheeled around his estate as a broken down old Kane. And in that moment he is Kane. He had made his opus and would pay the same high price as his character: isolation, broken health, loneliness. Art and life imitating each other over and over again. 

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January

A Clean Well Lighted Coffee House to Write In

Rewriting is mind numbing. The same thing over and over and over. Four hundred some plus pages you climb over like a runner who just keeps going around the same track trying to improve their time just a little. Each time you start again you hope this might be the final lap, but there is always that nagging suspicion that one more time might be the charm. To pull this off without losing your mind requires boat loads of coffee, sweets, and lots of company and spurious noise. You have to trick your mind into not wandering off and never coming back. So you haunt every coffee house you can find.

The first coffee house works for a while until the Internet dies. They complain that their  WIFI has been going in and out and of course when you are there it just up and dies. You need the Internet. Not for the rewriting but for the breaks to give your mind release. You need something to distract you between chapters and after eating lunch and caramel rolls and drinking coffee you feel it is time to go find somewhere with WIFI. You run down the street to a little dark coffee house run by a tough woman who gives you a hot chocolate. You plug in and start again. That's when you hear it.

You need background noise not the greatest hits of love songs from the Seventies.  Afternoon Delight gets you off the chair to hunt down the tough Chicago woman who is reading The Inquirer behind the counter. Pardon me. But could you put on some classical music or jazz? The flat expression. NO. She goes back to the Inquirer. You sit down again to Mandy, It Don't Matter to Me, Have you Ever Been Mellow. That's it. You can't wall it out. Olivia  Newton John doesn't belong in your novel. You unplug and give the tough broad from Chicago a dirty look and head out into the snow.

Starbucks. Ah, you know the menu. A good place to plug in. Consistent. You bust in, a man on a mission. Every table is taken. Worse the one table with an outlet is taken. You stare at the lone man drinking coffee by himself. You have an hour of battery time if only the sonofabitch would leave! No, you aren't ready to order yet thank you very much. You stand around and glare and glare. Nobody cares and nobody is giving up their table. Shite! You head back out and down the street. Desperate for a clean well lighted place to write in or at least a place with an open table.

You head into Cozi Cafe and find a corner table with an outlet.  You plug in, order some really bad coffee. Sit down and begin again. Wifi works. There are sweet rolls. There are no people. It's as cold as a morgue, but you can work here. At least for a little while.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January

Getting Hemingway's Bed

He did sleep. Between hunting big game and fishing for swordfish and fighting in the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, WWII,  bullfighting and boxing and writing brilliant novels and winning Pulitzers and Nobel prizes and going through four wives and three homes and doing just about everything a writer can do to make a name of himself and still be taken seriously, after all that he did sleep. In a bed. I had walked past the room he had been born in a hundred times on my way to the attic. That room still held me in awe, but the more terrestrial part of his life, the one of waking up in a bed like anyone else intrigued me. That's why I said I would get his bed.

The Hemingway Foundation needed someone to drive up to Petsosky Michigan to get his boyhood bed. I voluteered. Why not? Petosky figured into many Hemingway stories and I wanted to see the cottage so central to his earlier stories. But more it seemed like I could get a little closer to the man. A bed is fairly personal and I thought bringing the bed back with me would give me more insight into the writer, the man, and might just be a great adventure. Of course it was during January and the biggest snow of the year. But who cares. Hemingway wouldn't have batted an eye.

So I headed up in my Ford for Petosky to the home of his great nephew who had the bed in a  storage shed. The trip up was long and lonely and snowy. But I hummed on the adrenalin of my mission. It was right in there with driving to New York to stomp around and look for agents. It ranked up there with getting my first novel published by a man who had never pulblished anything. It ranked right up there with deciding to write fiction when everyone I knew was taking a real job. It certainly ranked up there with the day I went up to his attic.

So I met his nephew. Jim. He was a nice man with a contagious smile. We made small talk and then he showed me the storage shed that contained the bed. We dug out the bed from under a bunch of junk. The springs were rusted and the white paint had flaked off. But it was his bed, his nephew assured me with a chuckle. One of the spindles fell off and I put it in my pocket as we loaded the bed in my Explorer. The great nephew bid me farewell and I headed back for Oak Park.

Writers like to embellish. If you were Hemingway you embellished like a God. But I really did run into a blizzard. The Midwest was hit with the worst snow storm in twenty years. The highway literally disappeared. I crept along with my strange cargo until I was forced off into a parking lot where a lone bar light burned through the whiteout conditions. I left my car and went into the bar to find other stranded travelers. Suddenly we became a club and we passed the night drinking and telling out stories. I said I was a writer and that I was bringing Ernest Hemingway's bed back from Petosky. People politely nodded and smiled and moved away.

The storm lifted and I got back on the road at dawn. I drove into Oak Park late in the afternoon and unloaded the bed in the Hemingway house where the Foundation repainted it and put a new mattress on and made it up like Ernest had just slept there. I'd like to say I glimmered something about the man from his bed or that my quest to bring the bed back gave me an idea of what he had gone through in some of his adventurers. But in the end it turned out to be just some rusted old steel springs and peeling wood that I brought back from a storage shed in the middle of nowhere. In that way, it was very Hemingway.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January

Mozart was broke...another struggling artist

Mozart was deeply in debt at the time of his death and spent the last years of his life trying to make ends meet and pleading with aristocrats for money, so what else is new? Another struggling artist. Seems we can't get away from that starving artist thing when it comes to even our great artists. But he was an artist. He wasn't a celebrity dipping into the well of immortality at the end of his career with a book or a painting or a rock band to finish off megalomania fame to satisfy the craving that we will be remembered beyond our time. Mozart had no such worries, but he did worry about being broke.

Apparently scholars have connected the dots and found Mozart took a big loan and the payments were coming due and his music was in a slump. Sounds familiar to our 2010 ears. Slump. Loans. Payments due. Even musical geniuses get caught up in the boom and bust of capitalism. But artists seem perpetually in the economic dumps. We hear this frequently with big name stars and of course all the starving artists who never hit the radar scream and die in obscurity. It is just the nature of art that it does not produce a lot of money. From A Confederacy of Dunces to Van Gogh it just seems sometimes the public is not ready for what artists have to offer.

Of course Mozart was one of the few who was appreciated during his lifetime and celebrated. Of course he was brilliant and his music stands. But we strip away the gloss from Amadeus which does a good job of showing the squalor in which the last years of his life was lived and we see the artist lot in all it's glory. Maybe stability is just not in the cards. We know of all the musicians who produced great music right up to the moment they became successful. It seems struggle is wrapped up with being an artist, maybe it is the fuel that pushes on all great art. Certainly Mozart proved that magnificently.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January

Excuse my rant about the New York Times Book Review

Ok, Steve Martin wrote a novel. We are used to celebrities writing novels. It seems comics and actors and divas and old rockers all finish up their career with a literary jaunt into the world of fiction. When Keith Richards is writing memoirs covered in length by the NY Times then all bets are off. It is not that we don't understand why these people are covered in the media...they are celebrities and get all the goodies on the tree. I get that. But the NY Times  Book Review purports to be the last stop on high culture where there should be some merit to being covered...besides being a comedian.

But I think after Alec Baldwin got his book reviewed when he wrote about his divorce including rant at daughter then we saw that truly the bar was that if you are famous and you write something the NY Times Book Review will cover you. So much for a literary bar. Nora Ephrons latest book on female aging disguised as novel disguised as Nora Eprhon and Steve Martin headlined the Sunday Book Review. Ok Nora has written some books and is a bestselling author. Fine. Steve Martin is a funny man who plays the banjo. Ok. And he certainly deserves a book review of his novel about the art world because he is...Steve Martin a funny man with a banjo.

You see where I am going. In the same review section Morris's last segment of his Roosevelt Biography was reviewed. Very good. Well deserved. And there were reviews of novelists and memoirs and children authors. But the space is limited and most people dont' get their books reviewed in the NY Times Book Review. So why burn it over a guy with an arrow through his head? A wild and crazy guy who starred in Parenthood and who is genuinely a funny man but not a very literary man. And Steve Martin will not be impacted at all if his book is covered by the Times.

But the lone novelist. The unheard of writer who really needs a break loses out when the NY Times Review pads the section for the latest star dust. It does matter to the man or woman who cannot be heard. So I wind up my rant by saying, hey, stick to your guns. Let the funny man be funny. Let the writer be heard.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January