Writing the Big Novel

Hmmm...about 571 pages into the Big Novel. Probably end up around a thousand. The interesting thing about the Big Novel is that it keeps growing out like an atomic mushroom cloud and instead of retracting as most novels do when you pass the halfway point, it just keeps growing. That is because the Big Novel does not play by the usual rules. Most novels just start and have a middle and an end. Very egg like. And you usually roll in around four hundred pages or so. And you can almost feel the arc and where it will end. The Big Novel follows none of these rules.

And so you are constantly stoking the fire and you have to put all your fears aside that naturally kick in. What if this thing just keeps going? Much like fission the fear is not that it will go off but that it won't stop going off. Then the second fear hits you which is: who the hell is going to want to read something this big? But of course that is ridiculous because predicting reading tastes has never been the purview of novelists.

So you roll along and watch the Big Novel grow. Eventually you figure it will run out of steam and start to close down. Because really, what goes up, must, eventually, come down. At least you hope it works that way.

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Publishing Old Manuscripts

Everybody has them. All those books that misfired and never took off or just blew up on the launch pad. They represent years and years of toil and you would like for something to come of them because they represent your heart and soul. So in the new environment of EBooks, you think, well maybe there is something there that escaped the publishers eyes and these books should have been published except for a short sighted editor who couldn't see the diamond in the rough. And so you start tracking them down on your computers.

Usually they are a couple of computers back that you dig out of a closet and there they are; floating around your desktop like space junk. They have weird file names you started giving them after the twenty third rewrite and you have to piece them together like cars in a junkyard. Lets see, I'll use this beginning with this middle and where is the end...ah here it is. There it's a book. So you start to read your old prose. Dammit. This was good! This should have been published! And so you continue, getting excited. Yes. Yes. Readers will finally be able to discover this great story that has been stopped because of some nimrod of a publisher.

And then...somewhere along page thirty two, the thing goes off the rails. Maybe it is the tired prose, the lackluster plot. Maybe it's just sort of hackneyed and old. But there is something missing. Some bit of modernity that gives the book spark. The prose just dries up on the page and is dated and dead and the book turns back into that old manuscript in a moldy box in a basement. And you want it to be good. You really do. You want it to be the book that it could have been, but it's just not.

So you try and resucitate some others, but they fall from the sky like satellites gliding out of orbit. There were problems. There was a reason these books never saw the light of day. And even the ubiquity of e-publishing won't save them. So you pull the plug, let the dust motes settle, and throw the computer back in the corner where it belongs.

And that book stays in darkness....where it belongs.

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Kiddie Novelists

 There are now kiddie novelists. Parents who publish their kids book for three grand or whatever POD (print on demand) cost now. And yes there is a publisher specializing in kidpress. Why shouldn't there be? With the advent of helicopter parents and Spockian reward systems (the childs world most important) of course parents will get in the act. Yes you can be a novelist. Yes you can be a rock star. Here I will burn you your CD complete with graphics for your cover. Yes you can be a filmmaker and here is your high definition video to film camera to do it with. Just upload to Youtube and you might get a million hits.

Art for the masses or everybody gets to be a star. Sure. Give little John or Jane their book and as the parents in the New York Times article pointed out ,it is just like sports. Some people give their kids five thousand dollar travel teams and we give ours a book. Right. The problem is that little Johnnie or Janie don't really deserve a book the same way they don't deserve a five thousand dollar travel team complete with major league uniforms. Life and art are not that easy.

Novelists spend years honing their craft. Musicians bust their ass to little notoriety. Film makers agonize over edits and toil mostly in obscurity. People kill themselves in jobs for little money. That is the real world even more so now that the pie is so much smaller. Yes. You are doing your kids a disservice by telling them they are good enough to publish their book. They are not. And it is better they learn that hard work brings the reward, not just being alive. The school of hard knocks will let them know sooner or later.

Better they know it now.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Women Writing Big Books

A piece in the New York Times Book Review lamented that women are not taken seriously in the Big Book arena. That men are given preferential treatment for the literary heavyweight title and that women are relegated to relationship novels. I can see why some people may think this way but certainly as a male writer of literary fiction I sometimes wish I were a woman. Why? Because women read fiction and it would seem a natural fit for editors to choose a book by a woman over a man.

I get the top of the mountain stuff for the Big Book. I think it is probably given over to men in some way. Can a woman bring the world view into the Big Book that is required for someone to say...now there is a great literary novel that sums it all up. I would say yes, but that is sort of esoteric coin of the realm stuff. Most of us just want to keep getting published and read and let me tell you as a white male writer you feel sometimes you just cant get a fair shake.

Of course it is the work that matters. And so maybe all of this is frivolous talk about who gets preferential treatment in the grand sweepstakes of literary glory. I suppose women see men as still dominant in the Franzen top of the mountain epics...but for this writer, I sure wouldn't mind being the gender that loves to read fiction.

Being a man, I think I'm stuck.

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Hunger Games for Authors

Hmmm...young adult his hot right now. Very hot. If you can write a YA novel that gets on board the Hunger Game juggernaut then you are set. The problem of course is that young adult novels were dead for a very long time until they wern't. The genre became inflamed with Harry Potter and it has been a red hot hand for YA authors ever since. You think writing a YA novel would be easier than writing an adult one but this is not true. Walking the line between what entices teens and adults is a strange blend of writing for different worlds.

You take the old books like Catcher in the Rye or To Kill a Mockingbird. Adult YA I would call them. Take Harry Potter. YA that adults can read too. The problem is that if you read YA novels a lot of them just aren't that good. They are written down for kids and read like army manuals. Many of these books are series if not all of them and they get progressively worse. So why is it that something like Hunger Games would catch? Well, kid gladiators. High concept plot maybe. Or just that strange weird thing called mystical kid appeal.

You cannot write for this market and not be in it. You have to live through your character and so you must find a portal into the young adult world. My first novel was YA but it was more traditional and did not ignite the minds of young adults the way later mystical dystopia novels would. Harry Potter books are wizards and magic and well written for their genre. To take aim at this market with the intent to make money brings on failure and disaster. You simply can't slot a book, though many try.

And so we watch over the fence as Hunger Games tears up the book selling world and now with the smash movie. Hey man. More power to that author. You never know what is going to hit and you never will.

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Is The Big Book Dead?

On vacation with the inlaws in Florida and stumble over Don DeLillos Underworld in the library of a gated community center where some white guy is singing Louis Armstrong's What a Wonderful World and the Greatest Generation is applauding like mad and there is DeLillos monster novel among all the John LeCarre/Grisham debris and my thought is well at least it is some literature with a capital L among the slickies and the mystery novels the Greatest Generation prefers along with their Phantom of the Opera (which is what the one man show is ending up with) and so I grab it and head out into the warm night.

I had read White Noise a while back and couldn't stay with it. It felt dated and sort of turgid like a heavy car trying to get up a hill. But I wanted to take a crack at Underworld because I was writing a Big Novel myself and this was a Big Novel and my thought was there should be something here for one Big Novel man to instruct another Big Novel man fifteen years later. So I read the first chapter and it was entertaining and sprawling and big and had everything but the kitchen sink and of course DeLillo is a good writer and this is a big swipe at American life...but it felt, ultimately, like a big old building that had seen better days and better times.

And part of this is I am not a fan of post modern fiction ala DeLillo. It is just too big. Too... look how much I can write and how well I can write. I don't find this with Franzen novels. They are big but they don't feel like they take up a city block. Don DeLillo is the appointed great writer so you can see him writing like a great writer and building these monstrous novels, but I guess my question is do we care about Big Novels anymore? I mean do we really want to invest all this time in this Titanic that lumbers across the sea when in fact we could probably get across in a smaller sleeker boat?

I like to think the Big Novel is still relevant and Franzen gives me heart because his novels don't feel like a big lumbering whale although they are long. But there is something very immediate and and that saves them from the DeLillo big novel fate. And maybe this is unfair because Don's novel  is fifteen years old and it does feel like one of those books you find in the attic and you stare at the wall of prose like...wow...people read this...all of this! Or maybe it is  just the Mailer big foot white male writer time has passed.

I dunno...but I think I'm going to put Don back in the Community Center because I am only here a week and that is not enough for a Big Novel. Maybe Louis will be playing again and maybe I can find something shorter among the literature of the Greatest Generation. Probably not.

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Novels as Commercials

Just read a novel that should have been a commercial. There were so many gang banger mainstream idioms that I surely could have been watching a commercial for Vans(which were probably mentioned twenty times as well as Timberlands) and maybe that is what it was. A very long YA commerical for hip hop gang banging dudes and dudesses who really could walk off the page and hawk some product with a yo  inference and then slink back into the book in their hoodies and Vans and cruise away sucking on jungle juice, giving us all "daps" and slouching into the fade away sunset.  CUT...that's a wrap.

The director was the only dude missing in the novel. But he or she was there in the editing looking for a hook. The bi-racial hook was the one used in this novel and one can see the plot slither away under the pressure of this editing. I don't think we need this...maybe a little more angst about being half black and half white...and so the author lays it on, but there is a fault line that gets violated. What was the authors original intent? What engine drove the story.

Books are written from the inside out and not the other way around. The problem with the publishing environment of today is that a lot of editors will tinker around and ignore the core of the novel and try and hang "popular" ornaments on the novel tree, but like a tree that is over decorated the book sags and eventually falls from the weight. These ornaments slow the book down and destroy the focus and worse they stand out as bogus...someone elses design other than the sculptor. And it happens all the time.

The author wants to get published. I get that. What is sad,  is that the original intent of the author , the thing that got he or she  to write the book in the first place is really the only chance for a book to take off.  Originality with a big O. You cannot fake it....though some try.

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No New Books under the Sun

Just had a friend tell me there is a book out very similar to the one I just finished. Whoa! You mean that book I just spent two years writing... someone else wrote? That is your first thought. So you scurry and download the sucker onto your Kindle because you want to find out if somehow somewhere somebody busted out your book before you could. Yeah the plot is similar. Heart pounding now you read along and the main character does seem like yours and now you are into the thick of the reviews and synopsis and yes there are more similarities and you might even think this book influenced yours, because the character and the plot and the action are all similar....but....it's not your book.

Not by a long shot. You didn't write it. This is not Hollywood. You did not just come up with the Horse Whisperer ala high concept plot that someone else can steal and then produce and you are out half a million on that screenplay that would have been produced. This is a novel.. And novels are individual. Period. When I wrote Tobacco Sticks everyone said it had been done. To Kill A Mockingbird. Trial.Twelve year old narrator. South. Racism. Nope. Been done. So the publishers kept saying right up to the auction with ten publishers bidding.

Why? Because there is nothing new under the sun in terms of plot, but there is everything new with every book. It is simply you. A book is your view, your voice, your breath. It is everything about you and somebody might write the same book, same plot, same characters, but it really doesn't matter. The reader doesn't care about that. Look at sequels. People know a sequel is the exact same story just done a little differently and they pay to see it again. Why? Because people are always up for a good story.

So when someone tells you, hey I just read a book like the one you just wrote. Say, yeah. I know. But it wasn't my book.

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The Advantages or Reading and Writing Fiction

The New York Times Sunday Review just had an article about the neuroscience of reading novels or fiction. The upshot is that reading fiction is good for your brain. Apparently all those neurons like the connotation of metaphors and description. Your brain lights up like its on crack from reading fiction and goes dark like a dead bulb watching television. But there is more. People who read fiction have more social intelligence and pick up on social cues faster. They seem able to decipher human relationships and understand people more quickly  as opposed to their nonfiction reading breathen. To those of us who have been reading and writing fiction for years there is nothing new here.

You always knew that your ability to finish other peoples sentences, pick the word for them while they said,..what that's word...I know it...was related somehow to all those books you read that no one else cared about. Or the way you could know somebody from a single sentence, gesture, nuance. It just happens like that. Reading fiction is probably the most intelligent thing anyone can do because as the NY Times article points out more of your brain is used in the process than sucking in information via digital land.This makes perfect sense.

You quickly saw your ability to speak when reading fiction shoot up. Reading a novel or a poem allows you to simply think faster. There is something totally engaging about a great story that probably allows your brain to play in a way it cannot when stuck in some turgid nonfiction task. Great fiction really gets you going because it engages your humanity and probably touches your soul. Now you are really getting a great bang for your buck from that novel...it is simply teaching you how to be.

And if you want to knock it down to a more utilitarian sense...fiction blows out your vocabulary and allows you to connect the dots quicker and understand situations faster that your non novel reading friends. So you can make the sale, get the friend, win the girl, and appear witty, conversant, and more than all that, well read.

What more can you ask of a book? Or a Kindle?

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Writing in summer

The Russian winter is gone  in Chicago and for writers this is a jolt. Happily ensconced in coffee houses you go about your business and assume the winter will drag on for at least another couple of months as we don't have spring in Chicago. We have wet soggy snow and dreary cold windy days that drag into June and then it gets hot. But now because of some kind of strange weather pattern we are in summer! And all those winter rhythms so conducive to writing the big Russian novels that require plodding and fires and lots and lots of coffee has been replaced by the airy days of summer. Bizarre.

And so you emerge bleary eyed after months of hacking away in your garret. Winter is enforced isolation as summer is enforced expulsion into the great outdoors of sunshine and air, peering strangely at the sky you have not seen except as a glaring cold ball of fire low on the horizon where night comes early and you pass the night in front of the television or the computer or with a book and rise to cold dark days that put you back in the coffee house and it is very good for the work. Summer...not so much.

You want to be outside man! Work. What work? Time to frolic. You are the school kid staring out the window and longing for the sunshine except you are now your own master and go on outside because the only taskmaster is yourself and he can be bribed very easily with promises of a bike ride or ice cream or just sitting on the porch with the laptop. The work moves into the background as all that Vitamin D pumps through your poor sun starved body and you find yourself waking up after a long hibernation. Could you really be that white and fat?YES!

So this lasts for the first week of the warm weather and that epic novel sits. Yeah you work on it but it is different. One foot in and one foot out the door at the Dairy Queen or throwing a football with the kids or wandering around the yard or garage and feeling like you should be doing something very active outside, but you have no idea what. Best to make some notes and tuck the novel while you lose your mind to the summer sun. At least until it rains.

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The Athletics of Writing

You start out by trying to wake up and get the brain going so you go for a run or a bike or something to flood the neurons with blood and get the connections going that make writing writing. The best plots laid while shooting down country roads or jogging paths or pumping under a big iron dumbbell. And then there is the shower to further get you into the world and getting dressed and then  it is time to fuel up. An article in the New York Times says that your brain is depleted by exercising, that the glycemic index plummets and then when you eat it ramps up sixty percent higher than before. Rocket fuel.

So now you are finishing up your eggs and toast and coffee. Two cups while you read your latest jumpstarter novel or short story to prime the pump. Pop the vitamins and read a little more and now you are buzzing. A lot of psychic steam is in play from thinking, exercise, food and caffeine. Close the book and walk upstairs to your garret. During all this prep you talk to no one. You watch nothing. Maybe a little low classical music to further wake up the brain. And now you are shutting the doors and drawing the blinds and sitting down at the chair in the darkened room.

Kick off the shoes and put your feet up on the legs of the chair and position the notebook with your latest notes and maybe some sugary cereal for an extra buzz and in go the ear plugs and you look at the page and go for two hours straight. You blast along like a madman letting all that psychic steam out and by the end you need the cereal and you finish your ten or fifteen pages and it is game over for the day. Now you spend the rest of the day reading and thinking and doing life things until you start all over and wake up the next day and wonder if you ever will write again.

But you do.

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Why Watching the Oscars Is Hard

Watching the Oscars is hard. Take Chris Rock. He had to let everyone know that he got a million bucks for just doing his lines in an animated movie. Must be rough. At a time when most writers are eating beans or not eating at all the Oscars is a night of those at the very tippy top of the very tippy top. They are people who through luck, talent, ingenuity, the fates, have hit the mother lode and we can all watch them accept these awards thanking everyone from God to mom.

And you have to wonder if there is a chance to hit that mountain through hard work. Maybe so. Maybe hard work and talent could put you there. Maybe it is something else, something people don't like to think about and that is the odds. Lets take a hundred thousand writers. Fifty thousand of them are good. Twenty five thousand are very good. Five thousand are extraordinary. One thousand are genius level. One hundred of those one thousand produce screenplays or novels.  Ten of those left over get a movie made. One gets to the Oscars.

Now take that pool and double it. Now you are talking about a group of people who are good  but there are only so many slots. So now you roll the dice. Luck. You need luck. Maybe luck is not yours to be had no matter how many times you try. It is just not your lot. The cards didn't fall your way and that's even worse than not having the talent to be up there.

So you watch the Oscars. You watch the people who have passed. You are on a clock that will only run so long. You watch those people thank everyone they know. Hell yes. Wouldn't you?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Book Downloading by Google Inc.

Good luck stopping the illegal downloading of books.  I have seen my titles popping up here and there and I requested that Google not scan my books. Mostly they disappeared after that but I just saw Tobacco Sticks my second novel out there on a Google site. The whole book just sitting there for whoever wanted to read it. Sure. Why not? Can you really stop people from downloading books? No. You can't. Think of a ship taking water with a million holes in it...no way. The era of the contained paper book ended with the digital age. Everyone is going to have to get used to it and start thinking along the lines of Steve Jobs

The IPOD did a huge favor for the music business. It produced a paraydyme where downloads could be corralled and paid for by the end user. The Napster world was scary, a universe of people shooting music all over with sharing engines.And  of course that goes on but what Jobs did was he made paying for music sexy. The same way the Kindle is making paying for books sexy. And we better hope those Kindle users stick with the program and don't go rogue and start shooting in files from Google.

The reality is this. The people who are honest and feel the need to pay for a service provided will pay for their books and music. The people who feel they are entitled to take what they can will do so and nobody will be able to stop them. The same people that speed or blow tolls or cheat or don't put their shopping cart back or steal a case of water in the bottom of their cart will swipe books and music files. Nobody will ever change that.

But fortunately, a lot of people will follow the rules and still pay for their books be they paper or digital. The rest will steal until they publish a book or write a song. Then they will scream bloody murder.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Quest for Writing Privacy

It is getting increasingly harder to isolate yourself for sustained writing which is writing a novel. I have no phone or Internet connection in my office but the day to day life of kids and work and logistics chases me like the long the tail of a kite. It is just harder and harder to disconnect. I use earplugs and a laptop with the Internet connection turned off. My one office is outside the home (Hemingway house) but a lot of times I just go up to the office over my garage. There is no entrance from the house and no phone. I sit down and close the blinds and put in my ear plugs and you would think that is enough. It isn't.

The UPS truck pulls up. Ding dong.  Hmmm...I wonder what that is? No matter back to the writing. Intense. Amazing. My neighbor rolls past with her trashcan then stops and talks with another neighbor. Incredibly I can hear them. I redouble my effort. Now I am really going. Very good. In the zone. Thump thump thump. I hear the steps like an executioner, the door opens and my wife faces a man in agony....WHAT? I need that phone number I asked you about earlier? NOW the man in obvious pain screams. Yes.

I get the number and the steps recede. Now...where was I. Yes.Yes. Moving again. Moving along. DO YOU WANT TO UPDATE YOUR MCAFEE VIRUS CONTROL? What? Where the hell did that come from I have no connection, some  cyber bomb built in by the software gurus...I know even if somebody goes off line we will hawk our product. I respond. NO! And the spy ware slips under the screen like a mole. Now...where was I. Oh yes....yes...yes...I am in the zone....yes...flowing again...perfection.

Dad?

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A Great Recession Story

Saw my neighbor and some friends hurriedly throwing wood into a pickup truck. I hadn't seen him since he divorced his wife and we all speculated that Ron might have just left the house. They couldn't sell of course and so they squatted like two Indians waiting for the next one to blink. Rons business had gone down the tubes when municipalities quit paying their bills and his wife didn't want him sopping up all of her money trying to save it. So they divorced and remained in the same house.

But one day two squads pulled up and we  never saw Ron again. He was just gone. We speculated that maybe he was still in the house but Ann only kept a few lights on and Ron used to light up the house like Christmas. So we figured the police meant Ron had been kicked out and we forgot all about it until I saw him out there by his woodpile with three women and two men. They moved like lightning throwing the cord wood into the back of Ron's white pickup. I used to help Ron cut that wood. It was sort of a fall ritual.

They finished throwing the wood in the truck and sure enough a squad pulls up. I see Ron talking to the cop, gesturing to his wood and the cop shaking his head. Finally Ron left and then the cops left. I stared at where the wood used to be. Ron loved chopping that wood. It was a ritual and now it was just gone. We would all be gone eventually. Ron was just the first.

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Television and Books

Bill O'Reilly is bringing out a sequel to Killing Lincoln aptly named Killing Kennedy. Henry Holt the publisher says that due to vigorous sales the second book should be well received. Billy uses a co writer and I would bet he is the writer seeing the big mans schedule. Popular history requires some research and this takes time and the writing takes time and thought and Billy (pardon to all O'reilly disciples) does not seem like the kind of guy who sits around and writes historical books. What Holt really loves of course is having his name on the book, they could care less if he pens one word.

Television has become the instrument of book selling. Every cable pundit has multiple books. Chris Matthews even hawks his own book on his show in a third person commercial "And it would make an excellent Christmas gift" You  could just see the publishers asking him for that plug. So it doesn't matter really who writes these books as long as the television personality can say it is theirs and plug it on their show. With publishing undergoing the equivalent of the Titanic going down (unsinkable) you cannot blame them for grabbing onto any piece of flotsam in the e-market sea.

Glenn Beck is a novelist and he sells well. Many Beck followers will plunk down the price of a hardcover and so we can expect a long line of Beck fiction. What does this say? Just that advertising is expensive and doesn't work and if you can use a television personality who is on the air night after night then there is a lot more bang for the book. To the victor belongs the spoils and certainly for the modern author one sure road to bestsellerdom is to have your own show.

Or at least stick your name on someones book who has a show. You will probably be doing the writing, but there are worse ways  to get on a bestseller list. I just don't know what they are.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Even writers have to throw a punch

Ebooks are all the rage but ubiquity should not be a cover for getting free downloads. The Internet enjoys free reign because it is new and this has allowed it to keep one step ahead of the great fist of restraint. But authors and everyone else with a book knows that what happened to the music business is happening to publishing. Just because you can get a book on the Internet does not mean we should just go oh well anybody can download anything they want now. They can't.

The IPOD motif of books has not arrived. The Kindle while  very good is a poor substitute for the book. It just isnt the same. Sorry. But reading from a screen is reading from a screen. Now as an author who wants exposure I don't particularly mind the free downloads. The writers first goal after getting published is to get read and availability is a big deal. But right behind that you wouldn't mind getting paid either. This is hard stuff for writers who are used to existing on nothing. Average income for writers...nine grand. Och.

So you have these creatures who are used to getting screwed over  and making very little. Now they are going to have to stand up and say don't download my book for free! Thank God for the Authors Guild. They do most of the heavy lifting but individual writers have to decide if they want their books disseminated for free or not. Again you are torn between getting read and getting paid. The big hitters not so much.

But when you come down to it, getting paid legitimizes the work. You have to give value to your work first and hopefully the public will follow. These are changing times, but writers are used to that. The difference now is that people who are used to working alone will have to stand up for themselves and their work and get involved  or risk being pushed around yet again.

Even writers have to learn to throw a punch.
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The Help Needs help

Watched half hour of The Help and turned it off. I committed the cardinal sin of watching a movie that I READ THE BOOK. The movie was just so over the top and so obviously slanted toward women and so Mad Men esq and so Southern The View/Devil Wears Prada/Dont We Look Great in sixties garb that it was nauseating with the overplayed saccharine accents that woman in Jackie Kennedy garb just cant help themselves doing and  beating us over the head with AREN'T WE THE PRETTIEST RACIST WOMEN YOU HAVE EVER SEEN. They needed some homely women at least to balance it out.

But it really was Hollywood. Hollywood ruined their own movie. Mary Steamburgen(sic) was ridiculous in her portrayal of the Jewish Editor sitting on her desk talking to someone who had never published anything like she had all the time in the world for budding writers who want to write radical books about racial relations in Mississippi. Sissy Spacek should have just kept drinking or playing bridge or whatever she was doing. Hattie McDaniels was rolling in her grave at the short distance Hollywood has traveled for black actresses. Mammy was more authentic in every way than the maids.

It turned into a Nora Ephron vehicle about Skeeters empowerment. Skeeter who screeched along under her mothers fierce eye and finally blows the whistle. She was about as believable as my left foot. So wide eyed so surprised, so obtuse at the revelations of racial mores in the society she had grown up in as a privileged white girl provided. The book did not suffer this way because the book could float into the readers mind and we could edit out the fluff and the dribble that did not pertain. Hollywood lives in fluff and drivel.

And it will sweep the Oscars. No doubt about it. I could see that in the twenty minutes I watched. Take women and put them in a racist time and give them kicking dresses and have them pee every five minutes (it seemed everyone was on the toilet) then you have a winner. I dunno. Maybe I'm jaded against Magnolia and lace and urine.

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The Sword of Age

In this country it is all about those two numbers that correspond to that weird date on your birth certificate where you left the cosmos and started your life on the planet earth. And from that day on the bastards started tracking you. They  just had to know how many years had passed since the day that nurse spanked you on the ass and you screamed out in protest because you had just left this nice warm dark place and you intuited that from here on out it was every man or woman for him or herself.

And so you tooled along and went along with the birthday parties where they made this big deal about this number and gave you presents and cake and ice cream and you were down with it because it all worked in your favor and who cared about a little number anyway? Then the little number started to grow and the birthdays changed. Not so many presents or cake and ice cream ,but still everyone wanted to always know what that number was. In fact it was the first question out of a lot of peoples mouth a lot of time.

And then somewhere it started to become this thing around your neck. People didn't seem to care about your birthday at all anymore, just the little number. And you noticed people used the little number against you especially if their number was smaller. And the weird thing was that people always guessed your number about ten years off. Thinking your number was ten years light. But they always persisted and had to know...really what is your number...how old are you really?

And then you realized at at point that number was a sword. They couldn't get you any way else. People a lot dumber than you, slower, uglier, still wanted to know that number. And so you start to lie to them. Just to piss them off. And they would look dismayed. But i thought you were...nope. Not that number, this number. Really? Oh yeah. My number is less than yours. And you leave them there wondering, staring at you and you think to yourself, fuck em.

I mean, what's in a number, really?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man...funniest novel since Straight Man...Chicago Sun Tiimes

Authors and the Fight Between Amazon and Barnes and Noble

There is a big fight going on between Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Basically Amazon is trying to squash traditional book publishing with the Kindle and Barnes and Noble is fighting back and saying they are Custers last stand between traditional publishing and the cold windy streets of Ebooks. Authors are in the middle but according to the NY Times article we will suffer if BN goes down because people will quit buying books and we will be left with our little downloads to make a living. That would suppose authors are making a living now.

The one percent rule applies here. About one percent of the authors make all the money and the rest scramble for the crumbs. Shelf space is the dividing line and if you cannot get shelf space in a store then you do not exist. You may be one great writer but there are only so many slots or so much space in a store and your book might not make the cut. So you have effectively disappeared. Or you never got up to bat in the first place. Getting a book of fiction published has never been easy and now it is something like winning the lotto (except for the money of course)

So where does that leave authors. Wellllll (as Ron Paul would say) you know having an ebook out there might not be like having a real book but it beats the alternative: oblivion. And I don't mean you are not still writing oblivion, I mean you are still writing very good books that you simply cannot get published or get onto the shelves. So you really don't exist. And that is a very real fate for most authors in the old paradyme. Not to say we all don't want the book published route, but if presented with some water verus no water in a desert, I will take the few drops offered.

So who knows if BN will win. The big authors do have a lot to lose. They are making real money. The literary mid list fiction writing authors probably will do better in an Amazon dominated world. At the very least they will get their books out there and if they hustle and word of mouth gets going, they might even sell. And they can have all the shelf space they want.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man...one word...plastics