All Those Book Starts

Yeah. The crappy writing is there under all those book starts. I run about three chapters and then I know if it is any good. How do I know. I go back and read it a few weeks later and if it sucks it sucks. And many of these book starts do. Its amazing novels get written at all. They start from such a humble place. A jumble of sentences and an idea and from that comes a chapter and then another and then the thing has to go on its own. Most of the time it dies.

I have many starts to my credits. Novels that just die from lack of oxygen. Lately my criteria has changed to I only work on something I get a contract on. So if a start is not commissioned then I don't pursue unless it really catches. And I have one start that is an orphan that I probably will pursue but it is one of those books that requires a big commitment and right now I cant do that. So back to the drawing board to fire up a few more starts.

The idea is good but the prose just lays there. Worse it feels like something I wrote before. This is enough to kill off the book start. There has to be a germ of something better. Something unseen to get the eye to move to move to the next sentence the next page.  But if the start just lays there then it dies never to returned too.

I have a lot of book starts and few books. Maybe I'll find another one that can make it all the way. Maybe not.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

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?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Falling off the Kindle Train

Uh oh. Fell off the kindle train. Burning the eyes. Yeah I know it is supposed to be like print but I found myself squinting all the time. Maybe its just a coincidence but reading from the little screen just stopped appealing to me. I will still use it I guess, but a book sure feels better. And I know you can make the type bigger and all that. I just think I'm tired of reading from devices.

We lived in ether world now and it's getting worse. Tech is robbing us of personal moments and I don't know this just felt like more tech to me. And I'm a tech freak so I think the burning eyes and the feeling of not holding a book just bothered me. Maybe the gadget thing wore off. You know, you get a new phone and its great for a bout a week and then it just becomes your phone. No big deal.

Anyway. I'm back to buying books. Whew. Expensive man. A hardcover is like twenty one bucks. What the hell. I could download it for half the price! But I dont' know. I read The Art of Fielding and The Help on my  kindle and when I see the book in the store I still want to own those books. I just own some bytes and yeah its cool to look at the cover and read the inside info of a real pulpy book.

I know with the color Kindle Fire it will get better. But old dog new trick. Maybe. Or maybe I just want to own something again. Like a book.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Points For Reading the Nutty Books

When I was learning to write fiction I felt I had to read all the books that made no sense. I started with Ulysses and then went to Finnegan's Wake and then finished with The Sound and the Fury and then to really confuse myself I read Infinite Jest. Quite certain I had completed my literary education by not understanding the prose of these very established writers I sat down and wrote my own very plain and simple novels. A bit like learning classical to play rock and roll.

And now I am reading the review of 1Q84, Murakamis's new novel and the review of the book makes no sense and I am quite sure the book makes less. Still I think, I should read this. And even the reviewer had a hard time getting over the fact that this nine hundred plus book made less sense than a mad hatter in a mad house still he felt it was a worthy book. And of course this begs the question of who is left to tackle these type of nutty books now.

Well writers  for one. They will read just about anything set in front of them that is deemed literary and cutting edge even if it make absolutely no sense. And of course this begs the question of does this type of reading help the writer. Yes and no. It did help me read Ulysses. It did not help me to read Finnegan's Wake. The Sound and the Fury maybe. Infinite Jest, sadly, no. I just didn't get the necessary kickback for me, but of course others might just find these books incredibly rewarding. And I am a slave to the dictum that writers should read the difficult books.

And what about the reading public. No. For the main these books will find few mainstream readers and maybe they shouldn't. They were not written for the mainstream anyway.  But then who is reading them and do you get points for attempting them? Saul Bellow once said there is no place in heaven for men who read boring books. Hmmm. I wouldn't say boring, but certainly nutty would fit Murakami's book that people will buy even if they don't understand it.

Maybe it is just that another human wrote something like Naked Lunch or Finnegan's Wake and you are really curious as to what the hell they are up too...even if you have no idea.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Between Books

Nothing prepares you for life between books. You are in a void. When writing a book you occupy the very pleasant world of that particular novel. You literally live in the book and life continues outside of it in a hazy distance. But then the books ends and you wait on your publisher or agent or whoever is involved in the process and you turn to all the things you have put off. For the first week you feel free and go after those tasks like the prisoner unleashed.

By the second week you hit the wall. You don't quite know what to do. You can't start another book because thee current one could come back with revisions. Some authors like to work on several books at once. I am not one of them. So you try and structure your day to make sense and get all those life things accomplished. But without the framework of the novel to order your day, you simply have lost your raison detre and you drift.

It is noon and you have cut the grass. Or spackled a hole. Or chalked the bathroom. That's it. Financial matters yawn before you that are immense. These require time and sitting in front of the computer. You go back to spackiling the hole in the ceiling. These tasks lose their manual labor appeal. A rodent is lose in the basement. You and the dog go down to hunt for the elusive chipmunk for several hours. The dog is interested but then finds old cookie crumbs and becomes sidetracked. The chipmunk is nowhere to be found. It is now late afternoon.

Dinner and the kids appear on the horizon. You should read something but reading has lost it's appeal without the novel to back it up. You don't feel like you will ever write again. Your mind just isn't there anymore. It's amazing you ever wrote anything. How did you do that? Tomorrow you will get a jump on the day. You will get up early and attack financial matters, clean the office, clean the garage, and then....then...

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The thousand and one things of rewriting

There has to be a thousand and one things you do in rewriting and more. Thank God you don't have to do them twice. But it is all those changes that comprise the final draft that hopefully will not come back to you again. And it is the tweeks that change the work. The big work is mostly done but then comes all the nuances that make a novel a novel. The minor changes of one word for another or the addition of a paragraph setting the stage or just the breaking down of dialogue and exposition all change the novel in ways that are immeasurable.

It is really at the end that the glaring moments taunt you. After rewriting something ten times or more you think you have caught the big inconsistencies or mistakes but of course they are the ones that are embedded in the text and your eye has become used to them. When they do make themselves known it is amazing because you have read that passage so many times and never have seen it.

Then you start back through swapping out words deleting sentences, breaking up chapters, combining chapters, fleshing out characters. It is amazing how some scenes stay so thin, so under imagined. So you go back at it and basically rewrite those scenes from the beginning to the end. And then of course you have to read it again to get out all the fat again. Fat is a big one. A paragraph bunches up and literally doesn't look right. Crowded. It looks crowded.

So you thin you fatten. The book is an accordion you expand and contract expand and contract. This goes on for months. This goes on for years. And finally you reach a point where you have completed the thousand and one things and you think that is it. No more. I am finished. Until you discover the one thousand and second.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man...the American Dream gone bad

Should a Writer Live in New York?

The conventional wisdom is that in the age of the Internet you can live anywhere. No longer do writers have to live in literary centers to be part of the world of publishing and agents and deals and other writers. It helps of course, but it really isn't necessary. Authors live all over the place and even the ones who live in New York have houses in other places. The successful ones that is.

Of course there is a nagging little caveat to all of this. Take Chad Harbachs novel The Art of Fielding. I read the Vanity Fair piece written by his buddy who started the literary magazine N1. He basically describes the process in which Harbachs novel was discovered by Michael Pietch. There is the usual rejected by many component and Harbach slaved away for ten years and people were beginning to worry. But then his friend from the lit magazine who had a book published, put the manuscript in front of the right agent and then the right publisher. Harbach was discovered.

And if you go down the literary heavyweight list of Jonathan Franzen type big novels it does seem a lot of these authors live in New York. Lets face it networking is part of life and being where publishing is centered (at least for now) is probably a good thing. People do business with people they know and if you are bouncing around New York you might bump into agents and publishers and authors who could help you. To say nothing of the wealth of material living in a large city like New York generates.

I...like a lot of writers, thought about moving to the Big Apple. Living in Chicago did seem at times like a second city, but I doubted my ability to find time to write in NY. Chicago just seemed friendlier. And sometimes I think I should have gone. You never know what can happen just by moving to a bigger pond. Probably this question has no answer except that you go where you can survive and write.

Still, living in New York as a writer.....city of dreams, right?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Would One Narrator Have Worked for The Help?

Finished The Help. Good book. Very interesting and enjoyable take on the 1960's South as all hell is breaking lose. The verisimilitude of the novel is very good and I like the way the author wove in the events of the time, JFK assassination, Medgar Evers killing, the advent of air conditioning, television shows. Very good. And of course the maids views points gave the story it's hook and really it's reason for being. It's what it was all about right?

So here is my question. Why the multiple narrators? Why not stick with Abileen who opens the novel instead of cutting away to everyone else? Minny is a strong narrator but she is too prejudiced in her views. Skeeter, our alternate protagonist does not have the voice. It is a failure of the novel that the main white character, our character, whom we are in sympathy with is probably the weakest. Besides evolving into a writer and leaving the South for NY at the end, she just doesn't really catch fire.

But Abileen, she is a character and it is her book. It is fitting she should have the first chapter and the last chapter. She is the voice heart and soul of the book and it is curious that the author should use multiple narrators when all it did was distract us and take away from the power of the novel. Multiple narrators are used for great effect when other viewpoints are essential but this is not the case in The Help. I would argue the power is diluted by not seeing it though Abileens eyes.

We could experience all the bigotry and cruelty of the ladies of Mississippi through Abileen. She could give us every blow by blow and she would pull the loose ends together. Put her against the Skeeter story of her failed relationship with the Senators son and her dying mother and her struggles to become who she is. This could all still be achieved with Abileen by having Skeeter tell her about it when they get together. The author has power in Abilbeen and Minny, but the other characters are weak and a bit stereotypical.

But all in all a good novel from a viewpoint we don't ofter hear. I just wanted to hear more of it.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Brutal Truth About Publishing

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

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

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

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

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

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Helps Point of View

Novelists use lots of different points of view. First person is preferred by many because it is close to the reader and comfortable for the writer. First person is very American. Ever since Huckleberry Finn came long with his Missouri patois of Mississippi river idioms a love affair was born with the down home insider who gives us the real low down as we navigate our way through the novel. Many first novels, mine included, are first person narration because a single point of view naturally coalesces around the main character

The Help uses multiple points of view. Mostly in the first person of the characters. Faulkner did this in Absalom Absalom and really became the benchmark for this type of narration. Multiple viewpoints gets around the restriction of first person which is you are stuck inside the head of one character. This can be tricky in a novel that moves around and we have to have insight into areas the main character might not necessarily be involved in. Authors use tricks like the ones I used in Tobacco Sticks of sneaking my character around, putting him outside doors and literally peering in keyholes

But in Katherine Stockett gets around this problem in The Help by using the view points of the  maids and one of the women who also it turns out to be a writer. This allows us to move around in the story and yet get the inside scoop which is the essential element of The Help which is the maids point of view. So in that regard it works very well. The risk of multiple narrators is that the author cannot pull it off or these switches are jarring to the reader. When I first started The Help I was sad to leave Abilene, but then along came Minny who picked up the slack with a more fiery blunt point of view.

Stockett gets in one jam and that is The League party where she goes omniscient or third person. She could not afford to be stuck in any ones head there because it moved around too much . But this chapter is by far the weakest and yet it is a center point of the novel. The third person is just too removed and we don't feel the pain or joy of the characters. She must have agonized over this decision and found it is the only thing that works. In a sense it is a violation of the POV, but I too cheated in Tobacco Sticks and went to third person for a brief chapter.

The novel dictates the point of view and so the only rule is that which works for the book,. Multiple narration clearly works for the bulk of The Help. Ultimately it is the authors call and demonstrates the basic maxim of all fiction. There are no rules.

http://www.billhazelgove.com/

Back to the Pony Express

Did you hear the Post Office could close this winter without funding from Congress? Five billion is due to fund retired health care costs and they don't have it. The volume of mail has dropped almost thirty percent and the layoffs will start commencing. They already have with 124000 on the chopping block, but the Union intends to fight it all the way. Saturday deliveries will be done away with in the new austerity program and even more heads will roll ,but lets face it, technology is kicking the postal service back to the days of the Pony Express. That is how low tech it has become.

And it is sad. The postman walking from door to door with our mail. It gives us a sense of community, something America is losing and desperately needs. What is in that mailbox? As a kid I walked down a long driveway to wait for my latest issue of Boys Life or the gadgets I sent away for with the order form from the back of comic books or cereal boxes. I remember vividly the time a crystal radio set came in the mail I had bought for two dollars. And then as an adult with all those rejection letters coming back in after bombing New York with hundreds of partial manuscripts. That one letter always was amazing, the one saying, sure send on the rest of the manuscript.

And not a lot has changed. My kids are the same way. They sent off for live turtles and checked the mailbox everyday. Did our turtles come? Did our turtles come? Not yet I said bringing up our diminishing mail since most of our bills come directly into our online banking account. Mail is certainly becoming as derivative and nonessential as a land line. We still have a land line, but I rarely use it and when it rings nobody answers it. Much like the mail. Yeah, there are things that still come as a surprise, but it is the assumption that whoever really wants to get hold of me will email is really the nail in the coffin of the perambulating postman.

Still, I hope the postal service can hang on. It still processes billions of pieces of mail and is vital, but technology has a nasty habit of making what is vital one day obsolete the next. But a real country should have a real postal service. We lose this one and you really have to wonder about the United States. Although, now that it is the hands of Congress to save the Post Office, maybe we better just start over and  post those signs: WANTED YOUNG MEN TO RIDE LONG HOURS OVER DESOLATE COUNTRY TO DELIVER THE MAIL. MUST HAVE OWN HORSE.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man ...The story of one mans search to find the new American Dream James Frey

From Scroll to Kodex to reading The New York Times in Wisconsin

Up in a cabin with nothing but my kindle I downloaded the NY Times and read Lev Grossmans piece on the limitations of the digital format versus what he called the the codex  (book) which evolved from the scroll. He says if anything we are not making enough of the change. He is right and he winds up his piece saying the constrictions of the digital format is it's undoing. He is right. You cannot go from the end to the beginning with the kind of ease of a book. You cannot find  a page you wanted and then shoot ahead and back again to the place you wanted to be. Ebooks are just harder to navigate and they do feel contained.

Saying that Grossman finishes up saying that he will stick with the book. It is everyones choice and I understand his frustration. Reading on the ereader is very different. You just don't have that physical book in your lap to tear to pieces and mark up and read and jump around in. It's almost like the story is caged and you can't quite get to it. But here is why the new medium trumps all. Convenience. Humans move to convenience like ships to water. I can think of no better example than sitting up in Wisconsin and reading Levs article and then the entire NY Times Sunday paper in a cabin in middle of the woods.

There was no way for me to do this at my in laws place before. The town five miles away had the Milwaukee Journal and if you drove further to a grocery store you could get the Chicago Tribune. But NY Times, no way. But I read Lev's piece and then Maureen Dowd and here was the big thing, I could drop it on the couch and then fall asleep and then pick up where I left off. I would have never read any of this without the ability to snatch the newspaper out of thin air.

And I have written about the limitation of reading the NY Times on the Kindle and I stand by preferring the paper over the digital. But there is no doubt that conveniencewill trump everything. We are only getting busier and more pressed for time. Going to a bookstore or to a grocery store will be a luxury we will pass on because it's just so much easier to sit in our cabin and start reading. The scroll gave way to the Codex for much the same reason. It was just so  much easier to read.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Writer and Facebook

The novelist Curtis Sittenfeld says she finally joined Facebook because she felt she was under a rock. She is a successful author to the point she did not have to dance with Facebook until now. The rest of us had to dance early and keep dancing. It is not that as a novelist you dislike Facebook or that you don't want to go on there, it is just necessary to keep yourself out there and Facebook along with Twitter and other social media is part of the novelists job now.

I write essays. That is how I interact as my readers know. Some people complain I do not go on Facebook and get personal. The truth is I find that strange and I'm not comfortable with the form and I do believe I can provide a greater service by doing what I do best and that is writing on literature, politics, and culture. And here is the real reason I do it: I enjoy writing on these subjects. If Facebook is  only a chore then you will not stay with it.

The novelist is a little different. The ogre on the back demands you sell books. So one does feel a bit like a huckster, but that is why the writer must make his or her separate peace with all social media. You can only do what you are comfortable doing. No amount of hubris will make up for feeling  awkward or embarrassed by posting personal things about yourself.  This poses a dilemma for writers who are shy retreating creatures usually.

The novelist in particular should have the thick ankles to endure the rigors of social networking. There are times you feel a bit used up and you fantasize about those million selling authors who sit up on the mountain in their splendid isolation. But they are the few nowadays. Even Hemingway had to make sure he kept his name in the media with safaris, wars, and good old catastrophes. We really just have to get on a computer and think and post.  Not so bad when you think about it.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Ebooks level the playing field for Authors

Mass market paperbacks are dying. This is due in large part to ebooks taking away the normal paperback buyer in airports, drugstores and those large racks that used to sit in front of department stores and every convenience store. My second novel came out in mass market and should have been trade. Tobacco Sticks went out the there as a literary courtroom drama set in the South in Virginia in 1946 and had to fight it out with spy novels, thrillers, slasher novels, mysteries and just about every mass genre out there. I had no choice in the matter and the publisher later admitted that trade would have been a better fit for the novel.

The beautiful thing about Ebooks is that the author is in control.  There is only one format and that levels the playing field. No longer is an author competing with hard covers, trade, or mass paperback. No longer is the author stuck in a format that doesn't fit because of publishing realities. The book goes out there as an Ebook and it is on the same footing as every other author. Bestseller or unknown, the reader will receive the same product without the stigma of mass versus trade versus hardcover.

And the book can stay out there. No publisher will remainder your title falling into the dreaded OUT OF PRINT STATUS. You book will not be pushed to the back of the store or worse not displayed at all. One copy will not be stocked while five hundred copies are stocked of other titles. Books will not be sent back to the publisher because they didn't sell out in the first month. The ebook revolution has put the author in the drivers seat finally.

So mass market paperbacks will disappear. Eventually hardcover will  probably go away. The big authors will dominate the ebook sites and will be pushed out there first, but the reader can search for the author he wants and there the book will be for all time in  electronic mass, trade, and hardcover glory. The authors best effort will be there without publisher interference. Can an author ask for anything more?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Rules of Fiction

There are no rules except the ones you make up. The rules knock down fiction. The dream has to be allowed to flow because without the flight of fancy you cannot go where you have to go. We see the rules of fiction in college and in high school. They are given to students who follow the road map and never know what real fiction is. In my sons writing classes they tear apart stories like building blocks and then assemble them like Legos. The problem is the teachers don't understand fiction so how can they teach it?

This is not confined to high school. I taught at a renowned college for fiction writing and there were clear rules. There was even a method copyrighted by the  head of the department. I wasn't allowed to teach the core fiction classes because I didn't use the method. In my classes I got the rejects who couldn't or wouldn't adapt .They complained bitterly about the constraints and then wrote like Gods when I told them to write about whatever they wanted. They eventually tossed me out as a nonconformist.

And of course we are taught to look for the rules. Art has none and so to instruct someone on how to produce art is impossible. When I was in college I received a D in composition because I could not follow the assignments. Every time my papers came back they had the same thing scrawled across the top. DID NOT FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS. I even had to take summer school to make up for my D. I was passed after one essay. The rules for one did not seem to apply to the other.

But even after many novels you still have to remind yourself there are no rules. Just the ones you know are right for what you are doing. These are the rules you must follow: your own and no one elses. Then you have a chance at fiction.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Reading on My Kindle...the Big Change is here

Yeah I have a library of books. Old yellowed dog-eared guys who taught me how to read and write when I was hacking it out in Chicago and starving above Thai restaurants in one room hovels that were sprayed by a maniac with a silver can like a gunfighter who shouted EXTERMINATOR and the roaches just laughed man. They just laughed and the exterminator never even saw the guy laying on his yellowed mattress with the book over his face reading  Kerouac, Joyce, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, Salinger...anybody he could get his hands on, tearing up those books with fingers smudged with coffee cake and staining pages with brown coffee and jelly and then they ended up in my shelf of books that are like touchstones next to my second Editions of Tales of the Jazz Age and Huckleberry Finn. Hard to believe that is all historical now.

But it is. Grabbed up the Kindle and have been reading it for about a week. Strange at first because I didn't have a book to mutilate and mark and scribble on and get eggs and coffee all over and throw in my backpack and then my car and then lose it under my bed or leave outside. Strange not to flip the pages and hear the sound and feel the texture and stare at the physical print. But reading THE HELP at a snails pace which is the way I read anyone I want to really see what they are doing, I started to forget about books. Which is weird because I never thought I would ever forget about my buddies I carried around on CTA buses and trains and plopped down on bakery floors and  security desks and shoved inside my leather coat.

But it is happening.

First of all I can always find the Kindle. It just sits on the kitchen counter and I pick it up and read in the morning before I write like I always do. And it just hangs around and I take it with me to the coffee shop and it is small in the backpack. I had been lugging Fitzgerald's uncollected stories around. A brick. I even carried around Twain's Autobiography for a while. A cannon ball. But the Kindle weighs nothing. And the book is there. I even downloaded music into it for when I get bored of reading.

But how is it really reading on this thing? It just is. You read and forget about it. The vehicle is here and the links are in the books and so reading will never be the same. I am a gadget freak and yeah I probably have rushed to judgement, but the brave new world of digitized books is here and aint no turning back. And the thing is you don't want too. It's all about the word right? The word is still there and even looks like the printed word. I just need to get a light which I skimped on so I can read in bed while the world sleeps.

And as for my friends in my library. They are still there and always will be. I will still read books. I might even lose the Kindle in the back of a bus or a taxi or maybe it will get rained on or just die. Who knows. But here is the deal, books are a part of you, be they digital or pulp. It's the story, right?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man Kindle  

On Downloading Books

The fear for writers is that their books will all be stolen now. That a mass download will steal away all copyrights. This is happening. People are ripping books the way they rip songs. You can't stop it. So what does it mean to writers. A couple things. One. You will get read by more people. Two. You will probably get less money. A bad thing. But there is no way around it. The digital revolution is here and just about any medium is fair game. Look at the way the studios are freaking out now.

Limewire and Napster used to be the pirate sites. Amazing. You could just log in and start downloading songs. Suddenly you were not paying fifteen dollars for a CD. You were paying nothing. And you could get a thousand songs if you wanted them. Then Napster was shut down. Then Limewire, but now there is YouTube and UTorrent and a hundred other sites for music and movies and now books. 

The one saving grace for writers is this. A lot of people still like books. In fact the boomers prefer books and there are a lot of boomers. Reading on a screen is reading on a screen no matter how good it looks or sounds or even smells like a book. Not to say people won;t migrate into Kindle land but there will be a group that just won't go for the download. They will plunk down their money and take their pulp and hit their hammock and read a book.

For the rest of the populace Ok with reading on their PDA or their IPAD or their computer or their Kindle or their Nook or their Sony reader, then it is every writer for himself. Maybe we can get a few nickels from those downloads. Some have gotten millions. So it comes back down to a basic question for the writer. Why did you write in the first place? For the money? Or to be read. If your answer is both, then it might still work out for you. If your answer is be read, then no worries.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man Kindle or Paperback

Jame's Freys Final Interview with Oprah

Flipping through the channels and there is James Frey with Oprah. Isn't he, yup, that's him. So I watch. Not an Oprah watcher except for salivating over Oprah authors who made the home run slam and hit it out of the park with the big mommas endorsement. Oprah called it scaling up a book. Authors call it hitting the mother lode and no more crappy jobs you don't care about and hello bestsellerdom. For a writer of fiction there can be nothing more precious when going against every celeb wantabe out there.

But here is Oprah looking very Grand Dame and James Frey looking much the same when A Million Little Pieces hit the streets. Oprah has her "you can make up to me anytime you want" eyes and the pained expression of experience. How did you feel when you came on the show? Ambushed. Yeah. And do you regret what you did? I take responsibility for it. Didn't you shop the book around as fiction first? Yes, but the publishers wanted a memoir. This all seems very quaint in the Fox News/Donald Blather era. She took him down because he said his book was a memoir when it was fiction? Really?

I did not see the famed take down. At the time I didn't really care. I have read A Million Little Pieces and it is a good book. Period. If a person is reading a book be it memoir or fiction for self help then they are barking up the wrong tree. That the book was not true mattered not at all to me. Suspension of disbelief. Maybe you have heard of it. When we are reading we do not say this really happened because it is happening. It is intellectual dishonesty to give more import to a story simply because an author says it is true. We do not read that way. We read in a dream. That is all good writing. The current fascination with did it really happen books or memoirs is ridiculous. People want to read a good story. If you think only good stories really happen then you should read Huckleberry Finn or The Great Gatsby.


In the end Oprah is making nice and it seems all is forgiven. Maybe time heals. Maybe good television requires she play the benefactor and forgive. Who knows? But if a good story is what she was after when she took Frey's book to her book club then she was on the right track. As Hemingway said many many times, "the only good stories are the made up ones."  

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off July 26th

Fitzgerald in Hollywood

A book came out thirty years ago about F. Scott Fitzgerald's time in Hollywood. We all know Fitzgerald as the novelist of Gatsby and his tragic story, but what is less known is what happened to him in Hollywood and why he went and really how far gone he was as a writer. Fitzgerald died in Hollywood in 1940 at the age of 44 and after reading of his years there it does seem to tie up this last sad act of his life. The novelist would have appreciated this story line.

But the book, Crazy Sundays, contention is that Fitzgerald just didn't go to Hollywood to get money to pay for his institutionalized wife and his daughter in private schools and his mountain of debt. It is Arnold Lathams contention that F. Scott Fitzgerald had lost all faith in his ability as a serious writer of novels and short stories and wanted to turn into nothing short of a David O' Selznick. It is a big contention and one that Latham backs up with Fitzgerald adventures and failures in his Hollywood years.

Many writers went to Hollywood in the thirties. Odgen Nash, Faulkner to name a few. The clear intention of these writers was to get paid. They did not want to become moguls. Not so with Fitzgerald. Latham argues, he really saw movies as all that was left to him. Barely functioning as an on again off again alcoholic, Fitzgerald bounces through Hollywood getting fired, messing up screenplays, writing very good scripts then having them torn apart by producers. While hobnobbing with every star of his time from Gable to Tracy to Crawford, Fitzgerald becomes increasinglypathetic as the washed up writer looking for the crumbs from the great and near greats.

It is hard to read this old book without losing some of the tarnish of the Fitzgerald legend. One even wonders if he didn't accidentally write Gatsby and maybe this man trying to learn how to write basic scenes in Hollywood was the real Fitzgerald. He just seemed so unliterary and yet you understand that he was truly at the end of his rope financially, spiritually, physically. When his old friend Hemingway comes to town Fitzgerald could not even face him. Clearly he had ceded the high ground long ago.

But of course Gatsby is a great novel, maybe one of the greatest and his short stories sparkle like gems. And that is what people remember him for and he is still read of course while the producers and directors who rewrote his scripts, treated him like little more than a hired auto mechanic and eventually fired him, are just dust. So, even if Arnold Latham's thesis is correct, history has a funny way of sifting out the truth. As a writer you go through times of your life you are not proud of where survival is paramount. Fitzgerald, one suspects, knew these were not great years and that what he was doing was certainly beneath him.

So it is fitting, that in the end, even Hollywood could not  outshine a literary legend.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Getting Harper Lee to Blurb my Novel

When I published my second novel, Tobacco Sticks, a friend said he thought Harper Lee might be amenable to giving me a blurb. He knew the man who took care of her, Roy, and said that I should just call up and see if she would read the book. So he gave me her number and I called and a  man with a deep Southern accent answered and said, yessssss. I introduced myself and told him I had sent a book to Ms. Lee and would she consider reading it. Roy said, well, I tell you, I will leave it on her nightstand when it arrives. Good enough.

Several weeks went by then several months. I called back and Roy answered. Yessss. I politely asked Roy if Ms. Lee had a chance to read my novel. Well, I tell you. Ms. Lee has been feeling a might poorly, but I have it by her bed on her nightstand and I will ask her if she has had a chance to read it yet. I thanked him and hung up. Another month passed and still no word. I sent another copy with a polite letter. Another month passed and I called again.


Yessssss. I asked Roy once more if Ms. Lee had a chance to read the book. Well, I tell you. She has just been so busy lately and is behind on her correspondence and letters. But I have put your other book on her nightstand and so she now has two copies of your novel there. I sat there in silence and then asked Roy if he thought she might ever read my book. Well, now, you never know do you? So I thanked him and hung up and my book went to press a month later without a Harper Lee quote.

I called Roy several months later. Oh yes. The books are still there and I think Ms. Lee will get to them soon. I hung up and wondered then if Roy ever put my book on Harper Lee's nightstand. But as Roy said, well now, you never know, do you?

www.billhazelgrove.com
Rocket Man will blast off this summer