Filling up the writing well

The well goes dry quickly. Maybe a couple hours. Those dudes who write all day are amazing. For most writers it is a few hours and the day is finished. All you can do is gas up for the next day. And you really cant cheat it. Internet has to be cut. Problems avoided. Reading increased. Early to bed and you better not drink or the well water slops all over the floor. You have to pull in your antenna and parcel out what little you have like a miser. Even writing this takes some, but this is after the fact.

Writers only have so much psychic energy. So much zap. So that is why it is best to write in the morning before making a living and life takes everything out of you. I used to like to write at dusk with the world quieting down and I could hide in my garret. But that was before wife and kids and mortgage and bills. Life was simpler then so I took to the mornings.

The well is precious and little things can drain it. Too much drama in your life. Lack of sleep. Not eating right. Sickness. Not reading well. Psychological hangups. A pestering friend, lover, wife, husband, who wont respect your right to disconnect from the world. All you are after is a little dance with the Gods for an hour or two and then a long slow period of resting up to do it all again.

Not so much to ask.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Novel Biker and other Writing Rituals

I am a novel biker. I ride fifteen miles a day weather permitting otherwise I am on the trainer. I ride alone. I write alone. There is a connection. When I first started writing I found out that jogging changed my brain chemistry to the point I could write much better after running. I didn't start jogging because of that. I just jogged and then I wrote. But I never stopped. My ritual became jogging and writing. Four novels later and a move to the edge of the country in a far west suburb of Chicago killed jogging. Too many cornfields. Too many open roads. I saw dudes on bikes.

Strange guys with martian helmets out on lonely roads. They intrigued me. I had an old Trek Mountain bike. It weighed about a hundred pounds. I started out on a road headed for the cornfields. I had on no biking clothes. Just an old hat and shorts and a T shirt. I nearly died. I realized then that I had no endurance. I made it to an old farm and hung on to a fence. I was like an old woman barely moving. My cadence was so slow I looked like someone who had taken Valium. This scene made it into Rocket Man, "I hung on waiting for a heart attack...years of bad food had taken it's toll." Yeah, I know, I was out of shape.

So I limped back but right then I gave up jogging. I had found a new sport. So everyday I went back to my farm and returned home. I didn't get a new bike until I had ground my old bike down to a commuter bike. I found the Great Western Trail, an old railroad line that used to be an old Stage Coach line. It shoots straight out into the country across old bridges and is limestone path into old America. Literally there are dead Prairie towns along the path. A perfect place for the lone rider. I started riding early in the morning. I got a new bike. A Trek Hybrid that still weighed a thousand pounds. But it was faster and tough. I began to shed my civilian gear.

I bought a helmet. No more salt crusted hats. I bought some gloves when I couldn't shift from sweat. I bought a shirt after I had run through T shirts that ended up drying in my bathroom on the towel rack. I bought biking shorts after my ass got sore. I got shoes with toe clips then with slots to click onto my pedals for more thrust. I went through water bottles then found the Camel Back, a backpack of water. I bought a fifty psi air horn. Then I bought biking shades after losing and breaking gas station shades for years. I went up to fifteen miles a day. I bought a trainer for the winter months. I started counting the months I could bike outside...seven. I became the novel biker, thinking of my next scene while shooting through the countryside at dawn.

We all have our rituals for writing.  Mine is riding like a demon through the dew tipped countryside. When I hit a real problem with a book I just mutter to myself: time to go biking.  Then I'm gone.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

When You Finish Your Novel

So for years you have been working on this thing. Every day your routine is  built around how much of the book you get finished. It is the structure that is your world. It  is your nine to five and you feel much like everyone else who trudges off to work and then returns exhausted at the end of the day. You trudge off to your desk your computer your office over the garage and your day is evaluated by the quality of work if not the amount that is completed on that amorphous jumble of words that grows everyday in your computer. And then one day, after many many rewrites and tweaks and cutting and expanding and reworking and re imagining, suddenly you are finished. You have just been fired from your job.

Because it no longer exists. The crucible that was your office is gone. Your desk has been cleaned and your name plate taken down and you  no longer go to the office. Your position has been eliminated and you have been handed your box of things and escorted by the security guard to your car. You say your goodbyes, get in and drive home. And then, like the newly unemployed, you wake the next day and have the vague feeling that somebody died. But you push that aside and attack all the things you have been putting off for months if not years.

That takes a few days and then you fill a few more days feeling good about your accomplishment. Then...then...you realize, you have nothing to do. Oh there are things to do, but the nucleus to your days is simply gone. Your raison det has vanished over the next hill and you become the stay at home daddy mom or you just stay at home or you go to work and become that person again. You have finished your novel and nothing will ever be as shocking as the realization that those days lived in that world are really over.

Until you begin again.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Those Rejection letters that Never Come Anymore

Notice how you just don’t get a response with email? The standard rejection letter for anything now is a no response. Once upon a time we used to get letters, responses from people saying, “no thank you, thank you for your query.” In the cyber world the universal rejection letter is the black void. No response. Not even an effort to deem our request worthy. The impersonality of the computer world is affecting every day life. Humans talk. Not anymore. How often do you talk on the phone now? How often do you chat? Not much I’ll bet.

Whole lives are now carried on through the medium of the cyber word. And that makes for a pretty dull life. We love and hate email. It is a barrier against those we don’t want to talk too and a moat against us when we want to talk to someone. You have to love corporations and the way they hide behind their websites. No longer do we have a human to complain too when the wheels fall off our car, no go to the website and register your complaint. It is the biggest firewall in the world.

The human voice carries emotion, our humanity, the cyber word carries only information that can be deleted in a nanosecond. Even these blogs our highly expendable. A newspaper carried weight, it cried out with its very existence that it be recognized. The blog or the cyber news page is just a button away from vanishing. It is the expendable quality, the absolute evanescence of the interaction that is most frightening. We are human and at some point we will really want to have a conversation again with another human. So what is the guilty secret of email…we are our own worst enemies. We are now afraid of being engaged in a conversation. We are afraid our precious time will be used up by some person we cannot get off the phone. We would rather have those few sentences convey our business and be on on our way. We have now become slaves to cyber time lest we miss even a single nanosecond.

Of course the backside of this is that when we do feel like talking to someone, there are few who will take our call. Those roads once closed are hard to reopen and we get an email a day later saying, “I saw that you called, sorry I was busy.” The strange thing is we have relationships with people where we never hear their voice. That’s weird. So our only chance is to break the cycle. The next time you get an email from a friend or colleague, freak them out and pick up the phone. They probably won’t answer, but you never know. If you get them on the phone, blow their mind and say, “I’m just calling to chat.” Stunned silence will probably greet you, but then again, they might say something. Humans are like that. Once they get talking, it’s hard to shut them up.

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

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.

The Novels You Should Write

There are always those novels you should write. They come creeping in while you are busy writing all those novels that come fully plotted and seem to be almost preordained. They are stronger plot wise and usually have a hook that intrigued you originally and so you take those and a year later you have a book somewhat close to what you imagined. Give or take a few  thousand words

But what haunts you are the novels you feel should be written. These are more around the Franzen type of books that will inform the world on the human condition and give you some sort of immortality beyond a google algorithm. These are the novels that are certainly more difficult to write because there is less of a road map and more of yourself is on the line. You are always in the novels somewhere but in the novels that you should write you are front and center because for it to be any good you have to take risks.

And those risks are that after years of toil no one will be interested in your opus on what it means to be alive in the year 2010 or beyond. This then is the fork in the road and many novelist don't take this road because it is fraught with hazards; the biggest one is that it is damn difficult and the second one being that publishers are generally not burning down your door for the novel of evocation of character or what's it all about. Whats the book about? Well its about everything, its about our time. Uh huh.

So you write the books that while are not a safe bet as there are no safe bets in fiction at least you can sum it up to an agent or editor and have them get it. And while you write these books you tell yourself that one day you will write that novel that will put it all together. One day...

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

The Writer in Winter

A natural time for the writer is winter. Writers live indoors by habit, squirreling away hours in rooms and closets, basements, attics, anywhere they can find where the world will not find them. During the summer this can be a little more challenging as sunshine plays outside the room where you work on that sentence that wont behave or that novel that just wont turn the corner. Staying inside during the warm months in the Midwest seems slightly insane when you have winters that last five months and wind chills of minus thirty. But of course the winter is the writers greatest friend.

You cocoon naturally when the snow wisps outside and the panes rattle. You find your breathing space when the radiators hiss and you pad down hallways of winter light dim and brittle as mottled ice. You are in your element now with those Russians that only make sense in the winter. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy just seem to read better when a winter storm is raging outside. Maybe it is the long brooding days or the sickness that comes with winter. I was able only to read James Joyce Ulysses in the winter. During the summer his prose seemed like the ramblings of a lunatic.

But of course the writing is what matters. Now you buckle down. Now you can really work because there is nothing to do but work in the winter. In the Midwest we live indoors until April and so you forget about the outside world and hunch over your computer with coffee at the ready and tap away while the world slowly freezes.

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

The Quiet Writer

There are not many quiet writers left in this day and age. Writers have to be heard and so they are very unquiet and blog and post and respond and twitter and facebook and write and write and write until someone hears them. Tis a sad fact of the author of today who must promote himself or herself to be heard above the white noise of our Internet driven factotum that tells us is in harsh terms where we rank on Amazon or if we even exist. Such is one school of thought.

Charles Portis the novelist of True Grit throws up the old ideal of the writer: the quiet writer. In fact most writers before the Internet were quiet writers. A few lucky ones could spout off in The New Yorker or less known literary rags bust mostly one had to speak through ones books and call it a day. In that way it was amazingly simple and sane and much less demanding. Sort of a long preparation before the big or not so big explosion of a book and then a return to the mine to get the next explosion ready.

The interview with Portis in the New York Times Magazine over his book being adopted once again for film is very interesting in that it is a last look at the way authors used to be. True the old writers such as Hemingway were very big promoters indeed. Ernest perfected the use of media and image and promoted himself through film, press, magazines, and of course his books. He built himself up in a way that any blogger tweeter author would salivate over today. Of course he largely had the field to himself and did not have to worry about millions of other voices. But most authors did not engage in this type of self promotion, most authors were like Portis.

In his interview he barely speaks. He meets the interviewer in a bar and hold s a five dollar bill in his hand and does not let go. He can barely wait to get out of there and only grudgingly consented to talk to the reporter when he agreed that he could not be directly quoted. The seventy six year old Portis hasn't published a book since 1991 and has stayed out of the public eye most of his life. He worked as a newspaper reporter while he published his early novels, one of which of course was True Grit and made into a movie with John Wayne.

I saw that movie as a boy in a small town theatre and later read his novel as an adult. Both times I was riveted  by the story and gave no thought to the author except that he was probably dead. Why? Because I had never heard of him and he had no presence that I was aware of. Of course that is the way literature should be. Let the book stand on it's own without a lot of noise from the author. But this would suppose the author has the guts to let the fates dictate his fortune or lack thereof. So therein lies the rub, most authors cannot afford to be so cavalier about their careers anymore.

So Portis leaves his interview without saying much still clutching his five dollar bill. We will never hear from him again. He is of a generation of writers who prefer to remain in the background and let their books speak for them. What a luxury.

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

What Twain's Autobiography Has to Say to us.

The fact that Mark Twain's autobiography is so popular I cannot get a copy through I have trudged through the snow to three bookstores only to be met by the stoical, we can order it for you but we cant guarantee when it will come in, is a very good thing. Also it is damn interesting that this raconteur from over a hundred years ago speaks to us from the grave and we want to listen. One would think with our twittering flittering Facebooking surfing brains we would have no interest  in the musings of a man from the nineteenth century, but apparently we do.

Which shows that for all our cyber fascination we still crave what is behind the curtain. Twain's keen sense of irony and play is what makes Huckleberry Finn  and the Adventures of Tom Sawyer beat along like a modern novel. If he had lived in our present day he might have been a vagabond or a street person, a rock star, a poet, or a famous author. Or he might have been the man in the coffee house who just wont shut up. He was into just about everything and failed many times in his life as a printer, inventor and real estate speculator. He was broke at the end and scrounging for money like many authors.

But of course you cannot take him out of his time. He lived when a man could travel west and start a fire and burn down thousands of acres around Lake Tahoe which is exactly what he did with a friend. They just wanted to see a big fire. But you could do that in a country of a million people with a great unsettled frontier. He puttered up and down the Mississippi as a river boat pilot and ran his ship aground not a few times. He was admittedly wanting, but of course his days along the Mississippi gave him his greatest material. His wife was sickly and spend much of her time secluded in Victorian gloom and he lost his daughter and that broke his heart.

But through it all Twain wrote and wrote and wrote and left behind his autobiography. I have only read is biography which unfortunately was sorely lacking on Twain's writing besides his novels. This man who smoked cigars like a fiend, drank whiskey, loved billiards, taveled the world, and said exactly what he thought to the point he had to leave several towns for offences he had given, can instruct the modern reader from afar on how the life not planned is a great tonic to our twenty first century obsession with getting it all done.

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

My Nature Walk with Patrick Hemingway

The day was raining but I didn't wear a raincoat. I figured the second son of Ernest Hemingway might not care about the weather and so I got very wet. Patrick wore a raincoat. The group was taking a river walk along the Des Plains River outside of Oak Park. The Des Plaines river had seen better days, but there was some thinking that Patrick would enjoy this and so I went along with out group that included a couple of journalists, park rangers, a few scholars, and myself.

Patrick was a small man with a big smile in a yellow slicker. Not the type of man you would expect who had run a Safari company in Africa and been on many many big game hunts. Some of the hunts were with his father of course. But this was a different time and we were walking through foliage with the rain pattering on the leaves as the Forest Service Rangers explained different plants and restoration plans. Several times Patrick stopped them to ask questions, but then we just plunged on down toward the river. The weather had given us a break and it wasn't cold for May in Chicago.

The man who walked ahead of me was the second son of Ernest Hemingway, born to Pauline Pfeiffer and led a life befitting the son of  Ernest. After running his safari company he worked for the United Nations for a while, had a farm in Africa where he lived for twenty five years. After his father died, he edited True At First Light and oversaw publication of his father's book and republished A Moveable Feast with some sections restored that had been omitted when Mary Hemingway edited the manuscript. He taught wildlife conservation in Tanzania and then returned to Idaho where he oversaw the literary estate of his father.

I knew none of this as I followed the small man down to the river. We reached the river and the smell of muck and decay cast a pall on our small party. The Des Plaines was mud brown and corrugated with rain drops. Trash had collected in the low parts along with logs and a ten gallon drum. The rangers talked about the cleanup effort that was underway and of course one could not help think back to a young Ernest Hemingway fishing the Des Plains in a time when the river had seen better days. But now of course there was only our small group in a city forest preserve down by a dirty river.

The rain turned heavy on the trees around us, drizzling down. One of the scholars held an umbrella over Patrick while the rangers rambled on. Patrick coughed several times and someone said we should head back.  The unsaid thought of course was that no one wanted the son of Ernest Hemingway to get sick on their watch. But he did me one favor and asked how the writing was in the attic and motioned to the journalist with his camera. It is there I had my picture taken with Patrick, a young writer who had tagged along to a much bigger life, in a much bigger time.

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

Twain Brings on my Kindle Epiphany

I mean I didn't physically buy it. Not yet. But I get it. I understand why someone would own this flat rectangle for reading. It is not that it is more convenient to carry around and that you don't have to lug books although that is attractive. Or that it holds a thousand books. That's cool too. Or that you can whip it out anywhere and read it for a few moments then flip it off and slip it back in your purse or briefcase. What got me finally to understand the appeal of this technology is Mark Twain's Autobiography.

Alright. I am out of books to read. For a writer, death. I need to find something after Franzen's brick and the dog narrator book. So I want to read Twain's Autobiography. Perfect. So I trudge around to some bookstores. Nope. Sorry we have them here on reserve for other people. How about letting me buy one of those? Nope. Sorry. Huh. So I end up at the coffee shop with nothing to read because stupidly I forgot to bring any kind of reading material. Burn through the NY Times and there is...what? So I started thinking. Man I would do anything to read that biography, hell I would even read it online.

But here is the real epiphany. I wouldnt' have to trudge to a bookstore and have another salesperson tell me they don't have the book but I could order it. No. I don't want to order the book. I want it NOW. I want to read the book right now! So sorry. Shite! So I sit here in the coffee shop and yes I would gladly have a Kindle right now to download Twain and starting reading. I don't care about the texture, the cool photos, the cover with Twain looking like he is hung over...I just want to read the book.

So there is my Kindle epiphany. Ultimately convenience trumps all. If you can sit in a corner and zap in a book well it is better than driving into some strip mall and getting bombarded by all those books you don't want to only find they don't have the book you do want. I have even considered taking the train to the city to buy the book from a bookstore I know has it. So that journey would be hours and expensive and make me question my sanity for the thousandth time. Or, I could just download the book and like the ad says start reading in seconds. Hmmm...Maybe I should buy one. You think?

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 my First Agent

I had been working a real job that took all my time and I felt my literary career slipping further and further away from any sort of reality. I was at a crossroads when I decided I had to do something or I would lose sight of my dream of being a novelist altogether. I had written several novels that continued to gather rejection letters from publishing houses and I became convinced my problem was that I didn't have an agent. I had sent my partials to many agents and received the same rejection letters that publishers were sending with just a different letter head. But sending out more manuscripts seemed futile. Somehow I had to break through the wall of New York publishing. There was only one thing to do, go to New York.

I arranged to stay with a friend in Brooklyn and gave myself two weeks. It was my vacation time and so I went to New York in the beginning of December. I brought forty partials of my two novels and and my thick WRITERS MARKET listing all the agents. I flew in and settled myself in my friends apartment and readied my attack. The next morning I took the subway into Manhattan. The day was cold and overcast. I got off the subway in lower Manhattan and began to walk with my heavy backpack. I went to the first address I had pulled out of WRITERS MARKET. A very harassed man answered the door in a small office. I explained who I was and handed him partials of my manuscript. He stared down at the pages like something strange and foreign. Well I've never had anyone come too my door and hand me a manuscript he said, staring at me.  He shrugged. Thank you. I'll look at it.

This then was my plan. To drop off my partial manuscripts and synopsis all over Manhattan. To literally walk to every agent I could find. That first day I hit ten agents and returned to Brooklyn with blisters on my ankles. The second day I headed out in tennis shoes and worked my way into Mid Town. The agents were in small office, large offices, apartments, high rises, bungalows, basement apartments. Some of them were nice and invited me in. Most of the agents just took my manuscripts and smiled for the doomed. One harassed man in a small office overflowing with manuscripts cried out, this isn't done this way. Another agent sold me a book he had written. Another agent working out of his apartment said he was getting out of the business because fiction was too hard to sell.

I ran out of manuscripts on the third day and ran off forty more copies. At the end of two weeks I had hit every agent I could find and had no more manuscripts. I flew back to Chicago to wait for the fruit of my labor. Kind letters came back from the big apple and silence. I never did get an agent from that trip to New York, but a month later I quit my job and started writing full time. I landed an agent later that year. He was one of the ones I had missed.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Kindle Download of Rocket Man

"Rocket Man is a hilarious, well written novel about one man's search for the New American Dream." - James Frey, author A Million Little Pieces and Bright Shiny Morning

The funniest serious novel since Richard Russo’s Straight Man, rich with the epic levity of John Irving and salted with the perversion of Updike." - Chicago Sun Times

Writer in Residence for the Ernest Hemingway Foundation William Hazelgrove's third novel is "a charming tale of fatherhood, family, and the American Dream." (Midwest Book Review).

"This critically insightful diatribe against conformity is recommended." - Library Journal

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

The Writer's Holiday

Writers never take a break. Always thinking, always coming up with the next plot story or novel. So when a holiday comes along it takes the writer out of their world and puts him in the larger world for at least a day and usually longer. The writer then turns on the side that faces the world  as the ritual of holiday rolls along. But like the bit player in the play they are no longer sure about, the writer is always just a little off center with one foot in and one foot out. The holidays can be a challenge.

Not that the holidays are not a challenge for a lot of people. Expectations are expectations. Ritual must be observed and for the liturgists it is their greatest revenge. All those people who exist on the periphery of society (artists, writers, street people) must come in for oxygen and partake. This is not a prison sentence it is just a change of hats and maybe it is a hat worn once a year. Holidays belong to the well adjusted, the balanced individual who can put themselves aside readily. Writers have a hard time with putting themselves aside generally speaking.

The problem is you are always in the third person. And at the very time you are watching your in laws or your parents or those cousins from Kansas make a Christmas toast you are thinking how really weird this all is. Of course the tape recorder is rolling and it is all stored for future use. Writers suck up the oxygen and after they have taken about as much as they can they are ready to go back to their world. But not so fast. The holidays are a season and for the first time the writer is trapped. And so you drink. You make merry. You enjoy the moment. Then you write that blistering story, poem, or novel burning it all down.

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