Grace Under Pressure in Ft Lauderdale

You want to be brave but gunfire gets you running. Hemingway's definition of courage rings in your ears as you run like hell. Fight or flight.  Grace under pressure. It should be a mantra that one can rely on but if you read  The Short Happy Life of Francis McComber or Red Badge of Courage then you know it does not always come the first time. In both of these stories the hero is found wanting in the first engagement with a lion or war. The fear is something you can taste and grace deserts you in that first flash.  

You tell yourself that the next time you will look and see what is going on. That you wont succumb to the numbing rush of adrenaline that gets you running like a star halfback. It is a very powerful drug. That you will somehow fight back and get control of yourself. In the Hemingway's short story and Red Badge of Courage both protagonists assert themselves in the second brush with death. One dies in the process and one makes it through but they have conquered their fear and grace is present under pressure. 

The problem is you don't know when that second challenge will come. It may never come and you want to think that you will be ready. But it is the very randomness of a shooting that is terrifying. You don't know. Nobody does. All you can do his hope that is doesn't and if it does you will be able to grab a little grace under pressure during  the primal fight to stay alive. 

Madam President The Secret Presidency of Edith Wilson

What the Torpedo in Eric Larson's Dead Wake Really Brought

Reading Eric Larson's Dead Wake is like reading about a wake. You are reading really about dead people. The sinking of the Lusitania took eleven hundred souls to the bottom of the Atlantic and that is really the nub of it. Now how that event took place and the aftermath of course is really what Dead Wake is all about. A dead wake by the way is what is left when a ship passes or a torpedo. So what I am looking for is a thesis to emerge. It is the historian in me.

Larson gives us the U Boat with Schweiger in command. This is really the fascinating part of the book. It must be something about submarines or about Germans in submarines. See Das Boot. But when they go to the bottom of the sea to have Christmas it is really hard to imagine. A UBoat literally sitting on the bottom of a bay where no one can detect it so they can hang a wreath and sing Christmas Carols. Fascinating.

And then we have all those passengers on the doomed Lusitania. These are the ones that survived mostly. And they are interesting and here is why. They are early century Victorians who may have seen themselves as modern but they know nothing about what is going on in the Western Front. They have no idea that the world has changed and so has warfare. They have no idea what the twentieth century has in store for them.

It takes the clear white translucent trail of a compressed air torpedo to be the harbinger of this new world. It crosses the Irish Channel like a meteor from another world and the passengers watch it in awe and fascination as something from a  New World. These people most of them had never seen a plane and to many the automobile was a marvel. So here is this strange missile bringing death from the sea and they watch in disbelief as it slams into the ship.

And so the thesis I draw and not Larson is that the silky trailing torpedo is really a messenger that Total War has arrived. And even as these people drown in the 55 degree water they don't really understand what has happened. They are in shock but they have no point or reference for the true barbarity the twentieth century will unleash. It is in their expressions in the numbered pictures Cunard took of a every victim.

Men, women, children, and infants.

www.williamhazelgrove.com

Why Hemingway Doesn't Appeal to Students Today

In my Lit Class at the private college it occurred to me that the Hemingway ideal is dead. It is not just that I have the class read the The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber and they don't get it but more than that they don't get the references or the world Hemingway painted. Now I wont say that he inhabited this world because Hemingway was consciously painting a world even then that was fantasy. It was a world of Big Game Hunters and the heroic ideal set in the Natural World.

But for students of 2015 this simply doesn't compute. The setting the mil yer the characters. They are not familiar with the Big White Hunter or Francis McComber a rich man who would hire a guide for a safari or his wife a socialite who has only contempt for McComber. More than all this they are not familiar with Africa as a wild place where men went to hunt animals as a badge of honor or at least a head mounted on a den wall.  Even when Hemingway was writing this he was writing a memory that most people in the thirties didn't possess as the way the world was.

Lets face it the whole Hemingway sell was one of looking back to a time or a world when men were men but for modern Americans then they could at least look back at he frontier that had been declared closed just thirty years before. But the fantasy like James Feinimore Cooper or Jack London painted a world of adventure that simply didn't exist for twentieth century Americans. But for twenty first century Americans that world doesn't even exist in Memory.

Consequently for the Dystopian set there is  no point of reference. Who the hell is this guy and why is he hunting a lion and why wouldn't you run from a lion? Hemingway was dated shortly after his death if not before. I don't think we can say he is dated now maybe simply not relevant even in the passing sense of being able to empathize or at least find the thread that allows the modern mind to participate in the fictional dream.

This would rankle Hemingway I am sure. He was the modernist smashing Victorian convention in his time. But sadly, not in ours.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

Fitzgeralds Last Laugh on Hemingway

The two titans of literature in the early twentieth century never really vied for the spot of Best Writer at all. Hemingway knocked out Fitzgerald right after he gave him a leg up by writing to Max Perkins and telling him about a young writer in Paris who is the real thing. The real thing then turned his back on Fitzgerald and pilloried him in print, disparaged him to his editor, and then left him in the dust with publications, movies, media, becoming the HE MAN writer while Scott hacked it out in a hotel room in Baltimore and then later died in Hollywood a broken man. The Great Gatsby and the rest of his work cooled in Scribner warehouses with little demand.

Now lets fast forward to 2013. The mannered Hemingway prose has not translated well. Still widely read as high school fare and universally admired but not modern nor could anyone see one of his books being made into a contemporary movie with Leo and the Toby. But maybe I'm wrong that someone could take another crack at For Whom The Bell Tolls or Old Man and Sea or Farewell To Arms but there is lacking that modern story. And that is what Fitzgerald gave us with Gatsby a modern story for the ages that has crashed back onto the bestseller list and beckons to  us from airports and drugstores. Revenge is a dish best served cold.

Because Hemingway did treat him like a drunken has been from the beginning. He set his sites on crushing Fitzgerald and anyone else got close to him. There was to be only one man in the ring and that was Ernest Hemingway but now with both men gone and the Hemingway megaphone long silence, Fitzgerald seems to be the one in the ring with both hands held high. Jay Gatz has been transported through the years and we can relate and that effable Fitzgerald prose has no equal. Even Hemingway cant touch it.

And so Fitz did have the last laugh. The ninety eight pound weakling came back stronger than ever and kicked the bully straight back on his ass.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

Hemingway Raising Hell

Reading Hemingway's Boat makes you cringe. Its about his years during the thirties hanging out in the Keys and Cuba and fishing and shooting sharks with a Tommy Gun and throwing grenades and drinking just about everything he can get his hands on. Its about the way he cheated on Pauline his second wife with Martha  his third wife and the way he argued with Pauline hours before she died and then dumped Martha for Mary his fourth wife. Then he really got going.

Mary took abuse that was almost on the level of a slave. Hemingway hit her. He called her a slut and just about anything else he could think of. He brought in whores and drank with her and her mother and then had sex with the whores. He brought a twenty one year old girl to stay at his house who he wanted to marry. He wrote letters threatening reviewers. He abused his publisher. He ignored his kids. He kept fishing and drinking and hanging out in Cuba, bragging about his fantastic Marlin catches. He got older.

And the older he got the worse he became. Paranoia nipping at the corners he saw enemies all around him. He continued drinking and abusing his wife and just about anybody else who was around him. He lived like a King with sycophants filling in and doing all the shit work while he wrote and fished and drank and cavorted and spewed. Really it is amazing because he had to be the supreme asshole of all time and this is what makes writers squirm because there is a little bit of Hemingway in every writer.

Maybe it is the pressure. Maybe it is the mind twisting contortion  of writing. Thinking you are never good enough or writing enough or successful enough. And these things plagued Hemingway with real psychosis that eventually drove him to kill himself. But before he did he raised hell in the way many writers before him have and still do.

Maybe he just did it a little better...or maybe he set the bar.

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/

No New Books under the Sun

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

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

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

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

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/

Authors and the Fight Between Amazon and Barnes and Noble

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

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

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

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

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

Why publishers won't buy your book

Mmmmm....this is a tough one. Why wont publishers buy your book. Well, let's break down publishers into it's component parts. We are not talking about Max Perkins. We are talking about someone, probably a twenty something someone or a thirty something someone who quite possibly is female and is working in an office in Manhattan with books flying at her all day long like leaves in a ferocious autumn wind. The books literally rain down and these are books from agents but the slush pile detritus is put into the mix as well. Now put that person in the year 2012

Publishing is on  it's proverbial ass. Mainstream publishing where the brick and mortar press cranks up like an old dinosaur still rules, but there is that comet rolling though space and the temperature is falling. Books still dominate and a publisher can put an author on the map, but at a million kindles a week, the times are a changing.  Let us be clear. This has everything to do with why your book is getting rejected and it has nothing to do with your book getting rejected.  Your book is getting rejected for reasons that mystify and convolute, creating more smoke than fire. Well...so what are they?

Not right for our list. Not right for us. Not right for the genre. Not right. Hmmm. Ok. Don't care for the characters. Could not get into their head. Don't like the voice. Don't reallly see a spot for this book. Too much action. Not enough action. Not enough character development. Too much dialogue. Not enough dialogue. Too Slow. Too long. Too short. Episodic. Been done. No one would care about your characters. Already have a novel like this. No brand. No platform. Just....NO!

Believe me I have heard it all. But here is thing. Do not take it personally. There are so many variables pressing down on this decision that you will hear maybe 1/8th of the truth and that is that they just dont know if they can sell it. And you know what, that is true. No one is sure what sells and what doesn't and throw in the Kindle factor and now you are off to the races. So really, it all comes down to what you think of your work and if you believe in yourself.

Listen to the advice, listen to the criticism, make the changes, don't make the changes, submit it again, write another book. Move on, but never take it personally. It's just business. 

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

The Best Guess of the Novelist

You know what your best guess is. It is the book you have not undertaken because it might be great or it might be a colossal failure of years and time and money. The modern novelist is stuck between selling and fame and artistic merit if not immortality. You could out Franzen Franzen but if you fail then you will have used up precious ideas not acted upon and the fact is you literally only have so much time to write so many novels before you earn yourself a slab in a cold dark cemetery.

These are the thoughts novelist deal with every day. Write something containable and marketable and safe or throw it all to the wind like that first novel you were never sure you could finish or even what the name of it was going to be. You settle down with novel two and three and four is the beginning of something new but you have not knocked the roofs off for a while if ever and you are wondering if your best guess as a novelist might really be your best.

And so there you stand at your crossroads. Take a shot at the prize or keep drinking the swill that might pay off with repetition and various ideas if not various genres. The stakes have become very high now. Only one novel gets the prize of the New York literary establishment lining up to ensure success. This years winner was The Art of Fielding. A wide ranging baseball novel that was pretty milk toast when it came to the end, but no matter, it had won the prize and publishing lined up and swung the big bat and the ball did sail out of the park.

So there you have it. The prize or settle into your comfortable mediocrity and produce good novels that hopefully lots and lots of people will read. Or take your best guess... and go for it.

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

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/

Getting Stupid

Whenever I finish a book I turn into a man of physical tasks and quit reading and writing and doing anything that smacks of literary life. I am a man cleaning his garage or his closet or fixing the smoke detectors or cutting the grass or raking leaves or shuttling kids or doing the million and one things that never get done. And then I start watching all the crappy television in the world. The Gold Rush. Every MSNBC show I can find, overdosing on hours of political melodrama. Then I swing to every old movie I can find and some not so old movies...How many times can a man watch Uncle Buck or Karate Kid? Too many times. Die Hard II comes in a close second.

And then I sit around and wait. Wait for the world to do something. It is this I find most boring. And yet I don't pick up a book but read the NY TIMES cover to cover and try and find authors writing about authors and take samples of Bukowski but don't finish them. I am at sea as all writers are between books. And so I float along and decide for the hundredth time to move and change my life. Or not to move and stay the same and isn't day light savings time strange the way it gets dark so early?

And then I pick up an old book. Something I would never read. I have The Marriage Plot on the Kindle but I want some relief from the mainstream fiction for a little bit and so I plunge into A.S. Byatts Passion of the Mind. That's when it happens. I realize I have become stupid again. The writing is dense and involved and I have to try and enter a world where Browning and Kipling and Russians and all those writers I should ahve read but didnt reside. I pu the book down and figure it is no longer relevant anyway. Who cares about essays on Dostoevsky or an essay on Proust or whatever A.S. Byatt decides is relevant to the world.

So I leave it and go do more physical tasks and go look for more smoke detectors without batteries or stuff more laundry into the washer or go buy salt for the softener or get the oil changed and get a brake job or  I can go read A.S. Byatt. I throw the book in my backpack...

Just in case I get tired of being stupid.

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/

Why does the Tea Party hate the Unions?

If you are populist party why pick on working people? I mean what did they do to you but work and try to get a little ahead and raise their families and own a home and maybe a couple of cars. What is wrong with people who want just a sliver of the pie that the rich gobble up like a feral cats? If the Bush tax cuts expired and the rich kicked in then half of the deficit would disappear tomorrow. Poof. So why does the Tea Party want to bust the unions and get rid of middle class entitlements if they are really the party of the people?

Or are they a shill for corporations that exploit the dark crevasses of the American psyche. Our secret xenophobia of the other that creates a birther movement because we have an African American President, then starts in on middle class entitlements like they are a Socialist plot. Could there be any bigger power play in America than dressing up a woman in Patriotism and folksy idiotic Alaska ditties, outfitting her with a great body and looks that can kill and then having her say every heinous thing about working people that gets fed to her by a network designed to break the backs of the working class?

So why does the Tea Party hate Unions? Are they an extension of the heinous government that offers Medicaid to the poor, Medicare to the elderly, tax deductions and Social Security for the middle class? Its like the woman from Wisconsin I talked too who said she hated the teacher unions, but whose husband was in a union. But that's different. They aren't radicals she said. Teachers are radicals? Oh I get it now. Those people in puffy jackets with a hats and scarves in Madison Wisconsin are radicals. My daughters first grade teacher a radical. Right.

But really. Mr. Hoffa calls the Tea Party a bunch of sonsofbitches and can you blame him? They are trying to eviscerate working class people. Wouldn't you call them a bunch of sonsofbitches. I'm not in union. I don't have a pension or retirement. I will will work (write) until the day I die. Should I bust the union because they are covered and I'm not? Thinking of it that way it does seem like class envy.

So that must be it. I think I will trade off my two degrees and years of doing what the hell I wanted to be in a Union and work my ass off. This must be the reason the Tea Party people hate them because they envy the unions for their jobs and their benefits. Wow. I guess things are pretty bad when we are envying a bunch of people working on assembly lines and in factories,warehouses and mills.  Or those rogue teachers in their cinder block luxury offices grading papers in schools without air conditioning.

 Sonsofbitches. All of them.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man First Chapter--The American Dream Gone Wrong

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/

The New Guy is going to have to Punch Back

When I moved from Baltimore to Chicago I was the new guy. I had a weird accent and I dressed weird and I had bad hair. And I had no friends. We had moved to a suburb of low tolerance for weird. We had moved into a town of Midwestern guys who wore checkered shirts and blue jeans and boots. I dressed like a refugee from the seventies and grew my hair to Afro length. A clash of cultures. My parents were Kennedy liberals and we had moved into a red enclave of button down Yankees. But I was a kid, what did I care?

So I walked into the lunchroom past a group of football players when one of them calls out. "Now there goes a real faggot." I stopped, dropped my lunch, and saw the blond haired blue eyed Captain of the football team. I didn't know he was the Captain, but I also knew from Baltimore days that you had one chance to set your line. So I threw my lunch on the ground and walked up and pinned "Randy" against the wall, not knowing I had just grabbed the most popular guy in the senior class. "Who are you calling a faggot?" I screamed.

Randy turned red and struggled against my grip. Hey...Hey! He finally got free with his face burning and told me to get my lunch, but his homeboys were in shock. Somebody had pinned the Captain against the wall. This is what the President has to do now when he gets back.  He has to pin anybody who tries to bully, extort, or blackmail him again against the wall. He has to set a line for these guys. A funny thing is once you take down the leader, then all the other guys slink away. But he has to do it now.

A week later I saw Randy in an empty hallway. I had not seen him since the lunchroom. We walked past each other and then he nodded to me. I nodded back.

Rocket Man Has Been Released

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Kindle Download of Rocket Man

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 Time

"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

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

The Lady Waiting for the Train

Mondays are cruel. I didn't know how cruel until I saw the lady waiting for the train. We were all waiting to go to Chicago with nowhere to go until the lady appeared. She gave us somewhere to go with our IPODS and phones and cold cold cold breath. Chicago had given up the ghost on spring and decided to torment all of us some more in our scarfs and synthetic leather jackets and no gloves. Gloves are for winter and it was March. So no gloves. That's the way I thought anyway.

So the lady waiting for the train was on the opposite platform. Trains come and go to Chicago. We were going. The other train was coming from. Usually we were on the opposite platform waiting for the train to Chicago. But not today on this cold grey windswept Monday that looked like snow. There had been an announcement. INBOUND TRAIN ARRIVING ON THE SOUTH PLATFORM TO CHICAGO. We all heard it and trudged across the crossing and stood with our backpacks and lunches and briefcases and handbags and purses old and young and middle alike. Except for the lady.

The lady stood on the opposite platform looking West away from Chicago. She smoked a cigarette and stared at all of us staring back at her. We had a group staring contest. The lady had a hood on and a scarf wrapped around her forehead and smoked a brown cigarette that might have been a cigarillo. Nobody knew. Nobody cared. We were all busy freezing and waiting for the train. So was the lady. But we knew. We knew she was on the wrong side. Somebody could have yelled across the tracks, HEY ARE YOU GOING TO CHICAGO? THE TRAIN IS COMING ON THE SOUTH SIDE OF THE TRACKS. We could have  done that, but nobody did.

Instead we took silent bets on how stupid was the lady. Was she really stupid or just a little stupid. She looked like she had already had children. The child years were over for this lady. She wore high boots a little out of fashion. She had on leopard something around her shoulders. Otherwise she looked Midwestern all browns and heavy makeup. She stared at us and smoked. We stared at her and waited. The lady looked down the tracks. We waited. Did she know? Maybe she wasn't even waiting for the train. Then the lady stubbed out her cigarette on the wall of the station and stepped inside a bar. She stood in the door like a pasty manikin. We waited. Maybe she wasn't going to Chicago. We heard the train.

The train came around the bend and got larger and larger. We watched the lady who watched us. We waited. We knew there was a point of no return for the lady. Once the train was in the station it would block the crosswalk. The lady would be stuck. Still, we weren't sure she was even going to Chicago. She looked very composed in her warm bar while we froze our asses off. But then she looked and saw the train rolling into the station and we knew the lady was going to Chicago.

She tried to get out of the door and run to the crossing. But the train rumbled ahead and screeched to a halt and became a wall between us and the station. We all got on the warm train and I found a seat and began eating my hot dog I had been saving. I looked out the window and saw the lady. She was staring at the train while it pulled out and it's too bad nobody told her the train was leaving on the South platform. But it was Monday and nobody cares about Mondays. 

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

Advocacy Advertising and the Writer

Got approached the other day for someone to advertise on billhazelgrove.com. It was a gaming site and they wanted to embed their link in some of my verbiage about the attic. I thought ok. Let's see. So basically the way they had it I would be rambling on about the attic and then suddenly veer and go and oh by the way here is a great poker site at www blah blah. And then I returned to my discourse about the attic. I considered it. I mean they were going to plunk money in my paypal account and times being what they are...

But then I started to think. Now wait a minute. People come to the site looking for a writer and they find a POKER SITE. And the way the verbiage read it seemed like I was way into online gaming sites. So I emailed back and said that I really couldn't go for that. They emailed back and said would I consider a banner add. I emailed back and said what kind of banner add and they said that it would have to be a large one and I said no. They emailed back and said lots of people do ADVOCACY ADVERTISING. I emailed back and said I couldn't and that was it.

So billhazelgrove.com has no ads and if you are looking for an online gaming site then you have come to the wrong place. But I can tell you about writing, novels, and Hemingway's attic. After that, you are on your own.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man is blasting off on April 26th