The Funny State of Literature

The vapidity of winter probably is a good metaphor for what has happened to literature in the year 2015. It is cold out. Zero. The wind whips against the windows and nothing really moves. As I read Richard Fords Let Me Be Frank With You it is clear what has happened to serious writing in this early part of the twenty first century. It has gone the way the of the LP and the CD. It is simply not relevant to a large segment of the population.

Harper Lee is bringing out a rejected manuscript. Why would an old woman do that who has a secure place in literary history? But of course content is king and so the more the better. Amazing this modality should nibble at the stalwart of classic lit but there you have it. We don't know if she wanted it out there or someone else but it doesn't really matter. What matters is there has been a watershed and there is no going back.

We are writers brought up on filmic imagery. Our scenes are much more relevant to a Parenthood than a reader of E. M. Foresters A Passage to India. It happened to the music industry. The same juggernaut that has pumped out elevator vocalists from American Idol now pumps it out from Dystopian set pieces like Divergent or randy Army manuals like Fifty Shades of Gray.  It isn't so much that any of this is so bad its just that it is not so good.

Then you read Richard Ford and you remember again that literature was never about that. It was about cracking the existential moment. The wonder of being alive in the year 2015. And it is still there but people would have you believe it is not. There is much more money to be made in pulp than art. But like the winter that howls even now. There is that suspicion we are mortal.  And the great consolation is this.

Literature will live on despite our best intentions.

www.williamhazelgrove.com

The Pitcher...Library Guild Selection

 

How To Write A Novel

Start with an emotion. One that is close to your heart. Then dress it up with a character one that really moves. Then start with a sentence one that grabs you and doesn't let you go. Follow that with another sentence that sets a tone and allows the reader to gain confidence. Follow that with a paragraph that gives you a tempo and a rhythm. Follow that with a page that begins a world.

Now you are rolling. Writing that first chapter is the first shot across the bow of your story that has to be told. And of course one good thing begins another so you start the second chapter then a third then a fourth. No one can stop you now and you have created a ship that sailing along and taking the reader with you. Bail out all the nonessentials because it really is only the light touch that moves one into the chambers of the human heart.

Take the unexpected turn because no surprise for you is no surprise for the reader. Tears are expected and sweat and grime and grimace. Above all else make it live like a dancer on a brightly lit stage. Then run for the end like man whose life depends on it. Then when you are done circle around and begin again like the craftsman who will never be satisfied. Don't stop until you are sure nothing more can be done.

That is how you write a novel.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
Real Santa

Is Lit Dead?

Every time I begin teaching a Composition Class this question comes to me like a nagging pain. Is Lit Dead? And this comes from reading the opening to The Great Gatsby and having the students complain about the elevated language or the face that no one really reads literature anymore. And I don't teach Lit. I teach composition and so I am just skimming the surface but certainly my decision to bring blogging into Comp is based on the fact I blog quite a bit but also that Comp like so many other things has gone real time.

And Literature is anything but real time. The very opening of a novel lets us know that this story is happening somewhere in the hazy twilight of suspended time. Be it John Williams Stoner or Ishiguros Remains of the Day. The fact that old clocks are ticking somewhere in the room is evident in not only the pace but the viewpoint and of course the language. Literature is at heart a romantics language. There is something wonderfully tragic in the fact time has passed.

And yet in the year 2014 I wonder if this has a place. Certainly people still write literature but do they write it for those who expect literature to act like literature and what will happen when those people pass on. Will my bloggers rule the day with our real time commentary or will people year again for something not so in our reach?

Time will tell.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

When You Become a Professional Writer

You come into your writing group full of great intentions and are delighted to find kindred souls, people who do this brain cracking work of writing and for a long time you glide along with your fellow scribes. You look forward to reading your work and getting the feedback and now you have a thick skin and are able to ferret out the good criticism from the bad and you all sort of move along at the same pace and then suddenly like high school, you graduate...you get published.

For me it wasn't such a draconian moment. My publisher was tiny and in Chicago. Still, I brought the galleys with me and showed them around and it was then I felt a sea change. Everyone nodded and murmured congratulations and then the group fell into its old routine. I was in the middle of editing the galleys so I hadn't really written anything new and  I read some of the novel.  The comments were muted, some were complimentary, but I felt I had brought a gun to a knife fight.

So I took a few weeks off and worked on my galleys. When I returned I was exhausted and hollow eyed  and only had my novel to read again. I sat and listened to the same works in progress, the bits of poetry, short stories, fragments of novels, then it came to Robert's piece. Robert wrote non fiction for a small magazine in the city. He tried to write fiction but it never worked. For years we had listened to Robert read these words that were like boxcars in a line but there was no ignition. We had all been in a secret conspiracy with Robert, who was a very nice guy, to give him a pass and not really criticize his work.

But this time I felt we were doing Robert a huge disservice. For two years I had been listening to Robert's bad fiction and for two years I had said nothing. He was a lifer. They existed in groups. People who came for the social aspect as much as the writing. And so you laid off. But l had changed. Something about working on those galleys with an editor had pushed me to the next level and I couldn't go back. So when it came to me, I blasphemed. I commented on Roberts work.

We are doing Robert a big disservice here. I looked around at the group. We haven't been honest with him...I paused. We haven't told him his fiction doesn't work. Someone dropped a pen. Someone coughed. I have violated a group taboo. A little man named Pee Wee who was also a lifer piped up. You have no right to judge Roberts fiction that way. I looked at him. Are you kidding? That's why we are here. No, Pee Wee persisted. You are assuming you know good fiction and Robert doesn't and you have no right to tell him he doesn't know how to write fiction.

And it was then I knew I was done. The group that I had been so much a part of for years was suddenly irrelevant. I couldn't stay if  I wanted too. So I sat through the rest of the readings and said nothing. There was no point. I never went back. It was much later I realized my crime wasn't that I had criticized Robert's writing, it was actually something much deeper and much more serious-- I had stumbled into becoming  a professional.

www.williamhazelgrove.com

Can Writing Be Taught?

Something to wrestle with. The problem is teaching has nothing to do with writing. We were all taught to diagram sentences with grammar spelling and punctuation. This can be taught. We can be assigned papers. We can complete the papers but this is not teaching writing. John Gardner in the Art of Fiction basically says that you have to have the talent in the first place. That if this talent is not there then no amount of teaching will do  it.

I am teaching an advanced fiction class at a private college and it is a question that pops up. Can writing be taught? Even craft is a hard one to teach to someone because it is the experimentation of rewriting that is craft. Basically writers have to be wired up. Their brains have to figure out why one word works when another one does not.

And of course we are talking connotation and denotation. What does a word really do. And this is something instinctual that no amount of courses can give you. I would even argue writing courses hurt writers because they codify what should never have been codified in the beginning. Still one has to try and convey what one has learned.

And so maybe it is like the old nudge the horse to water scenario.
But the thirst must be there.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher..What if a dream was all you had

Cutting the First Forty Six Pages of a Novel

It happens every time. Every time I write a novel I end up cutting the first quarter of the book and I wonder why that is. When I wrote Tobacco Sticks I think I cut seventy five pages before I said that is where the novel begins. And you would think six books later I could stop this needless exercise but it happened again. I was rewriting and I realized the first forty six pages had to go. Now why is this?

Because it would seem the store is given away too early. Or maybe I cant find the characters for a while or maybe I just need to warm up for forty six pages before I can really find the book. Hard to say but there is no doubt these pages have to go. The consequence of not cutting the pages is a not only a slowed book but a flawed one. Truly less is more can be applied here.

But maybe it is just where the voice of the novel kicks in and this can take some time. Many times you start writing about one thing and end up writing about something else entirely and usually that one thing is in the first forty pages.  So you really have two different books and then it is an easy choice. If sixty thousand words are written one way and twenty thousand written another then it is very easy to know what is going under the chopping block.

The twenty thousand. 

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

Starting A New Book In Winter

Some people write in summer. Some write in fall...me...I write in winter. Something about the way the world slows down. At least in the Midwest it does. And the lack of light and the short days and everything dying. Time to grow a beard and sit by a fire and think about where you ended up and where you are going. And that's how books start. Some sort of reassessment of your whole life and hopefully you don't drink yourself to death or shoot yourself in the process.

But then a book starts. Kind of like a lawnmower that sat for a long time. Lots of smoke and cleaning out the pipes. Rough. Fitfully. Then it starts to turn over and you think that its been a long time since you used the thing. And you are amazed it still runs because every time you put it away you think maybe that is it and it wont start again. But it does.

And so the winter goes dark. And the world turns cold. And you figure what the hell. Might as well hide with the rest of the creatures and yeah you didn't get to where you wanted but maybe this time you might get it right. Who knows. So the snow falls and you wait and work and in the spring you will emerge again.

But for now... you're just gone.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher
 

Defining Literary Fiction in the Digital Age

Over on the Kindle boards an author asked if anyone could give a definition of Literary Fiction. The answers were varied. Some took a stab and some had no idea. So as an author I will take a shot and give some  meat to the poor old bones of Literary Fiction. Once upon a time there was pulp and then there was literary fiction. LF was what people read for enlightenment, information, entertainment, and yes something of the other. Pulp was straight up entertainment.

So lets approach it like this. The author makes the difference. The intent of the author. The Literary author has an idea or an emotion and in this moment there is something of the eternal. Not all that different from the painter. The eternal is the thing you cannot put your finger on that allows you to reread a novel over and over and still enjoy it.  Literary fiction has a duty to entertain but also to give us something we did not know until we read it. This is what makes people scream from the rooftops about a book.

It is why John Gardener said a novelist must be moral. He didn't mean it in the literal sense but that the writer of serious fiction cannot be amoral. They cannot have a flawed value system or the book will be flawed. Writers drink and do drugs and do all sorts of morally reproachable things but the point is they must be able to discern right from wrong at a very basic level. F. Scott Fitzgerald said two things that apply here.

One. Behind every novelist is a moralist. And two. All cheap entertainment is immoral. It is heroin of the soul. We can relate in the age of reality television. Entertainment has hit lows we thought not approachable but also we didn't think a democracy of 350 million people could empower people to have buying power on a such a scale. Lest we forget cheap entertainment is all about selling. Selling the product and just about everything else.

So in the digital age this is a bit of a conundrum where everything is on the cheap. In fact my fellow authors look at me sometimes with  a funny glaze of what the hell is he talking about. But this is because we operate on the assumption that selling at nanosecond speed trumps all. It doesn't but a lot of people have not been exposed to the other.

But when they hit it when they read. They shake their heads and say...how the hell did he do that?
That is Literary Fiction. Defining the undefinable. The refusal to be commodified or to have a value attached. It is the very essence of why we  live. Get that between two covers or on a Kindle and you have something for the ages.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher
 

The Validation of the Writer

Went to dinner with my father and the usual came up. Questions of writing and teaching and the related and of course the conversation went to a sort of end run with my father pronouncing me a great teacher but of course conveniently forgetting I had written five novels with the fourth do out in the spring and the fifth due out in the fall. I had to remind him that I had been well paid for some of those books with auctions and dinners with agents and publishers in New York and movie rights sold and awards and the books were with the largest publisher in the world and I had been in the New York Times, Chicago Tribunes, USA Today, LA Times, NBC, CBS, People magazine. I had to remind him I did an NPR interview with Robert Siegel and my books had been chosen as a Book of the Month selection and garnered starred reviews in PW with  foreign rights sold. And I had even hit the Best Seller list for a time. But all of this of course fell on deaf ears.

And this is because for most people in America and maybe the world you have not made it and become that other person until you have made it in the spectacular sense of getting a million dollars for your book and seeing it on the big screen. And even then I am not sure he would think I had become the novelist that I saw myself as. Something to do with not being able to really understand people whom we know might have actually done something different. This is a hard concept and probably harder for parents.

But lets just say validation can be bought. Clearly it has to be in the pages of a newspaper that someone has just received untold millions for their book for this is our bar now. The Harry Potter author is a billionaire and that is a writer! You think I jest but in actuality we have come to this. Unless someone can prove in some spectacular way they have crossed the line into the uber fame and fortune then we are now suspect and probably a fraud. For we all know that most people can not do anything that rises above the normal give and take of a normal nine to five life. The middle class is hopelessly dogmatic that way. Thou shall not try anything beyond the pale.

And so my father and I hashed it out and he apologized for not seeing me as the writer. And I know he will never see me as the writer no matter how many books I publish. True, if I can obtain bragging rights to the multi million dollar advance this might tilt him in my favor and then he can equate literary endeavour with that old lottery saw: I knew the boy could do it! But until then I will be what ever thing I am doing at the time that is more recognizable. I have worked a lot of jobs so it would go something like this.

There is my son the baker, waiter, construction worker, landlord, real estate agent, broker, professor, janitor, security guard, teacher, workshop leader, telemarketer, bouncer, DJ, busboy, teachers assistant, bartender. Oh....and he writes some too.

www.billhazelgrove.com
 

The Kamikaze writing the Big Book

My mother in law asked me what I was working on. Usually I just say something vague, but I told her I was working on a big book and that I was six hundred and sixty pages into it. She paused, then looked at me and said "who the hell wants to read a book that big?" Fair enough. It gets worse because I will probably break a thousand. But when writing the big book you are a bit like a kamikaze where you are not sure you are coming back from this one.

First of all no one wants a really big book anymore. They are expensive to publish. And there is that old thing that peoples attention span is getting shorter not longer. Look at Kindle singles. Look at what is selling. Look at twitter! And there you go, writing an opus along the lines of Gone With the Wind or War and Peace. Talk about insane. Your agent doesn't want you to do it and yet you persist. Why?

Maybe because you can. Maybe because you wont ever do it again. Maybe you just want to see if you can write the big book and take a swipe at the "whats it all about sweepstakes." Why not? You have written everything else. Why not throw in everything but the kitchen sink and go for it. You only live once right? And so you strap yourself in, start the motor, and fly toward your final destination. A human torpedo headed for total destruction or total nirvana.

That's the big book.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

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.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

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?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

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.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

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.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Back to Work

Back to work after the holidays. Writers like everyone else have to remember what they have been doing for the last month of the holidays but unlike other people there is no easy system to plug back into. Most people return to the office and slog around and talk about the long holidays and slowly get back to work. Writers return to their garage or their basement or their attic or the desk in the corner and sit down with their coffee to find the thread again. And if you have taken off a lot of time then that thread is elusive.

It is a different way of thinking. The system is created by you and only you enforce it. You are the taskmaster who must demand the work be done. No easy thing in the dog days of January where the sun only shines for a bit and we return to the darkness of a Northern Winter. But the writing must continue. So you open up and start typing, looking for that magic of about a month before. Maybe you wrote through the holidays, but most people have to put it down for a while to satisfy family and friends and themselves.

It is the routine that has been obliterated and for the working nine to fivers the routine starts again on the commute. But the writer has no armor and since routine is self imposed then it must be started again like an engine that has been cold and out of gas for a good month in the shed. Usually it takes about a week for the cobwebs to clear out and the engine to run again efficiently. The first few days are just blowing out the pipes with the promise it will get better. By Friday you should be back to where you were.

If not, maybe the next week. Or the week after that, but the  muse will return... probably just in time for Easter.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Hemingways Attic...a writers survival guide

Hemingway's Attic--Surviving As a Writer

"There are no classes for how to survive as a writer. It is usually the school of hard knocks. Writers mostly keep to themselves and flame out or end up in some gutter without telling anyone of their journey. There are lots of books on how to get published and make a bestseller and how to sell books. But to survive as a writer in a society that does not recognize writing as a viable way of life is very tricky. Most will not undertake it. Many will wait until retirement and then write their self-published novel. It is all very safe and not who Hemingways' Attic  is for.


This book is for the writer. This book is for the man woman or child who has no choice in the matter and who makes the decision to be a writer or die. It is like that. Once you know you are a writer then there is nothing you can do. So this book is for those who must survive in a world intent on crushing the writer. It is no coincidence all our great writers went to Paris in the twenties. America has never had much patience for artists of any kind. This is a can do country and it would seem artist are outside that charge.

So if you are still reading then this is a good thing. My history tells only my story. Yours may well be different. You may hit it early, later, or not at all. But here is the thing. I have been up and down many times, but through it all I have always had one goal…to keep on writing."
  Excerpted from Hemingways' Attic

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Hemingways' Attic (surviving as a writer)

My Best Writer Job

The best writer job I ever had was Gonella bread. I worked the night shift and took the bread orders . Everyone spoke Italian and yelled at each other all night long. Men covered in flour with aprons would scream obscenities then go back and work side by side wall night long. The long loaves and short bread would float around the bakery on a conveyor belts and fall all night long with a plopping sound I can still hear now. The bread that fell would be kicked to the side by the baggers.

The baggers all had red ink on their tennis shoes. That's because they would hold the Gonnella bags with the red ink against their shoes while they slipped the bread in. They stood all night long at the end of the conveyors bagging hundreds of loaves. They were different from the bakers who worked upstairs and were covered with flour. They walked around in their white t shirts and ignored the baggers. When it got really hot upstairs the bakers wore little white 1970s shorts and strutted around with their potbellies.

Why you read all them fuckin books jack? That's what I heard all night long. I told them I was a writer and they shook their heads. The bread orders died down at about two AM and I could read the rest of the night until the drivers came in for their routes. They asked the same question. Why all you read them fuckin books jack? After I while I didn't bother to answer.

At the end of the night I stuffed my leather jacket with warm bread and rode through the streets of Chicago in the early light. When I got home I took the bread out and my wife and I had some before she went to her job in an office building. That was a good job.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

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/

Second Novels Can be Hard--Review of Joshua Ferris The Unnamed

I don't know. Why is it you hit it with one novel and then lose it in the next? That might be harsh in describing Joshua Ferris second novel The Unnamed but I don't think so. It is a very big compliment to his first novel And Then We Came to the The End. Which I read several times. He really nailed the absurdity of the workaday world and more than that he nailed middle class working life with all its strangely disconnected moments that in the end of a career mean nothing. And after that it was just good writing. So I read The Unnamed even after reading a review that panned the book. I liked his first novel that much.

So. It is just different. Might have been a different writer. The Unnamed should have been his first novel and Then We Came To the End his second. The Unnamed is written by a writer telegraphing every sentence and then just laying it there like literature to order. It is not badly written of course, Ferris is much too good a writer to write badly, it is just not that level that made his first novel sing. And then we come to the plot. I am not a big man on plot,  but in the The Unnamed I really wanted something to plunk out of the darkness by the end so I could say, yeah, I get it.

A lawyer who starts walking and can't stop and a love affair. That does not do this book justice but it just never catches fire the way a plot or lack thereof has to at some point. And Then We Came To the End did not have a plot. Much less of a plot than this novel, but it kept you reading like a murder mystery. The real question is what happens to novelist from one book to another? The answer is it is part of being a novelist. I have boxes of novels that did not work. Sometimes books just misfire and by the end it is only through publication that we see the book just didn't work. It happens. I look forward to Ferris's next novel.

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

The Confessions of an Ex Cable News Junkie

Hello my name is Bill, I am a cable news junkie. Recovering. I fell off the wagon a year ago and started watching hours and hours of cable news beginning with Keith Olbermann, then Rachel Maddow, then Chris Matthews, then Lawrence O'Donnell. Some nights I watched three hours of straight talk with the same topics regurgitated on every show but I didn't care. Hell, I was such a junkie I switched to Fox and watched The Factor and Sean Hannity during commercial breaks. Talk about addicted.

But I am back on the wagon and I have gone cold turkey. I have to say it has not been hard this time around. I don't know what happened, but suddenly I just didnt' care. I just couldn't buy off on Rachel's impassioned carefully researched, fully felt, emphatically delivered diatribes on why don't ask don't tell should be abolished and why it wasnt' happening. Maybe it is because it did happen and when she announced it on her show in a town hall meeting everyone clapped FOR HER like she was the President who had just accomplished getting rid of the policy!

Or maybe it was Keith Olbermann who I really dug and would watch sometimes two or three times a night! I just couldnt' get enough. But then I started to realize there were never any guests from the other side. And how many times can he have Eugene on from the Washington Post in his super hip glasses? Or the little guy from The Nation who stands in for him? Or Howard from Newsweek then the Huffington Post in his scarf and hipster long hair? It just began to feel regurgitated with his question at the beginning: How many of these stories will you be talking about tomorrow? Um, really none of them.

Or  Chris Matthews yelling at everyone and letting no one finish. Or Lawrence O'Donnell with his quirky sense of humor and his government experience allowing himself to get the last word. Or even Anderson Cooper keeping them honest with his white hair and dwarfish good looks. Don't get me wrong. I could easily fall off the wagon and go back to my old ways of watching three straight hours a night, but I think what is different this time is I started to wonder what else I could be doing with that time! And that's what really got me. Forget that it is really entertainment, that there are millions of people watching the guys on the other side, that it doesn't really matter at all because these are talk show hosts. Forget all that, here is what really got me back on the wagon and why I will never return to the cable news wasteland.

I could have probably written another novel with all the time I wasted in front of the boob tube getting riled up all night. Ouch. Now that hurts.

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