The Down and Out of Writing

As a writer you are used to being on the other side of the moon for most of your adult life. When people are at work you are at  home and when people are home you are at work. You are always where you shouldn't be and it is during these times when most people are engaged in the busy work of the day you find yourself floating in the boat of the left behind. Of course this has always been the case, but now writers have much more company. There are legions of the left behind now.

They come the same day and writers are creatures of habit too so you recognize your fellow craftsman. There is the man who stares out the window all day with a cup of coffee in his lap. He is maybe fifty. Maybe. He has been sitting in the same chair for years and knows others who come in and look for the same mirage coming down main street. They talk about places they have applied. They talk about coming to each others apartment. Neither notices the man in the corner surrounded by books and a laptop.

Then there is the man who yells. He yells about sports. He yells about politics. He rides a bicycle everyday and wears a cutoff jean jacket. He hangs around sniffing for conversation among the staff and finds a few nods and then eventually gets back on his bike and slips into the early twilight. Or the  twenty something in the hoody and Converse tennis shoes whose boyfriend sports a cowboy hat and Coke bottle glasses. They take the same chair and huddle over her laptop. Then the new guys who dress in business casual who read the paper and talk on their phones like business men. There are lots of these guys now.

And then there is the writer looking to cool off after a first draft. Trying to punch up the brain for a second run by cramming Franzen, Twain, Russo, Dickens--anything to fire up the well. He drinks coffee and munches on walnuts, then slinks away until tomorrow.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off in April

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

Those Rejection letters that Never Come Anymore

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

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

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

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

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

The Novels You Should Write

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

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

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

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

www.billhazelgrove.com
Rocket Man will be out in January

Suckered by Starbucks

Yeah alright I spend a lot of time in Starbucks because they have one in my town that occupies an old nail factory with stuffed chairs and lots of space to get lost in and winter drives you to find people to convince yourself the whole world didn't run away while the sun shines on the Southern half of the United States. But one of the hazards or causalities if you will of working in a public place is you are fair game for marketeers who carefully figure out who is scribbling away in the corners of the coffee house and would they be so inclined to buy something other than coffee?

So I am working along listening to this very interesting music and of course I bite the hook and ask the girl behind the counter, pardon me, who is this? Oh that's Josh Grobin. Hmm. Back to work but I continue listening and sure enough when I go up for the refill there is old Josh himself staring at me with a scarf wrapped around his neck looking very European and New York if that is possible. While I stare at him he continues crooning in a sort of updated Bocelli way for the hip crowd and I pick up the CD and note the price and feeling very adventurous I buy it. Sixteen buckos.

History. I haven't bought a CD for ten years. I download like everyone else into my metal plate in my pocket and carry around twelve hundred songs in my IPOD classic. So, it is not like I don't have new music, so why in the hell did I just plunk down sixteen bucks for a guy I have heard all of three songs? Same reason I should go ahead and buy the memoir staring at me in the face about the kid in Afghanistan. Confluence of moments. I have been caught in the Starbucks snare. Drinking their coffee, buzzing on their caffeine, listening to their kind of hip cool music I become the Starbucks man and must have communion with the coffee gods by owning Josh Grobin!

So I go home that night still smelling of freshly roasted coffee and spin up Josh and sit back and listen to the songs I recognize and then all the songs I don't recognize and with a sinking feeling I realize I'm not so crazy about old Josh Grobin and did I momentarily lose my mind in plunking down the seventeen bucks with tax for this guy who I could have just picked a couple of songs up for a few bucks?

With heavy heart I burned Josh Grobin into my IPOD to take his place among the thousand plus songs. Next time I go to Starbucks I will  not be so taken in...although that memoir did look kind of interesting. Maybe I'll just read a couple of pages tomorrow when I order another cup.

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

What the Internet has done for Writers

Obscurity. It is the nemesis of all scribblers. You want to be heard. You want someone to register that all those hours you have deposited in the bank account of art and dreams and vision and cracking the universe will matter. Does a tree fall in the forest if no one hears it? That is our horror, that you write for no one. That all those strange looks and mutterings about Jim or Stephanie or John wasting their time in their room in their office in the attic in the storage room have been vouchsafed as fact and their tombstone is a testament to the naysayers who will finish with a single epigram: they were just  kind of strange.

And it was a one in a million shot to be heard beyond friends family and neighbors who read your prose and smiled condescendingly, murmuring, well, it's sort of depressing. Depressing! Depressing! We are talking about the human condition, love, death, sex...Life! Oh, well, I just found it depressing, but that's just my opinion. Back to the writers group, back to the closet. Morons Morons. Bourgeois morons! They do not understand what I am doing and all I get back are rejection letters from my one conduit; New York City. We are sorry, it just doesn't fit out needs. Another publisher may feel different. Hundreds of those. The boxes of manuscripts in the basement grow and grow and you cannot get your heart and soul out to one damn person! Then came that silly network the defence department had built, the Internet.

Suddenly the stranglehold on publishing was broken. Just like that. The great wall of indifference that turned away ninety five percent of all writers had been tunneled under with a piece of fiber optic cable. Ethernet bound, your prose shot out into a blogosphere and voila! Published! Instantly! And you got instant credible feedback because it was no one you knew. The writers group had just gone global and anyone anywhere in the world could give you their two cents. But here is what really happened, the Internet validated millions of writers because they found an audience, the world.

So now a writer no longer toils in isolation. Before my first novel was published I had been writing for seven years with no portal for my work. Just grunting it out in storage rooms, apartments, basements, with no one but some trapped people in a writers group to give me feedback. And of course my girlfriend, then wife. Poor baby. But now you will read these words, and yes, I am a novelist, but more than that, I am a writer hacking it out every day. And I am heard.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man will be out in January

What Twain's Autobiography Has to Say to us.

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

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

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

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

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

My Nature Walk with Patrick Hemingway

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Book By a Dog

Well I just read The Art of Racing in the Rain. There are two things I would point to after reading this book with a dog narrator: one, there is value to the kindle, and two, always read the first few pages. Alright. The whole Kindle revolution brings up the same advantages of the IPOD. You don't have to buy the whole CD. Or you don't have plunk down eighteen dollars to read a book by a dog. It is not that The Art of Racing in the Rain was bad, it is just that by choosing to have the dog narrate we are limited to what he can interpret. He is a dog after all.

And saying that you have to wonder what the author was after. Well, why not have the dog narrate the book? It is new. It is different. And the dog was very Zen. He thought of the afterlife and then spoke to us from the afterlife and then he came back as a...well, I won't tell you. Needless to say the authors work was cut out for him when he made this decision. I will tell it form the perspective of a dog...now how can I get that dog into all the scenes?

Well  he doesn't. When I wrote Tobacco Sticks I used a thirteen year old I had to get in all the scenes. In courtroom scenes I became creative and used other people, newspaper articles, literally having my narrator peeking in keyholes. The problem with any first person narration is that you are stuck in the person (or the dog in this case) head and everything has to filter through the canine brain before it reaches ours. Now this dog got a lot of his information from the television, from his master, from hearing, from a Zen knowledge of the Universe and racing (auto racing).

There were a few scenes where the dog just claimed knowledge and we went with it. Fine. A literary first person can do this. Prior knowledge. Well, prior dog knowledge. Of course the rubber meets the road when the dog has to interpret sex scenes. Our dog did this by well, comparing human sex to dog sex with some knowledge of anatomy and then again, we just went with it. There were courtroom scenes as well our canine friend was able to give us the nuts and bolts declaring more than once humans just think dogs don't have a clue, but they do.

By the books end our dog narrator moved on to the great dog pound in the sky. I must admit after finishing the book I didn't look at my golden retriever the same. I stared into his brown eyes and said to him: do you really know what is going on? To which he stared back and essentially said: Woof! Now like the dog narrator he might be hiding knowledge from the oblivious human. I will say that I kicked him out of the bedroom.

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

A Clean Well Lighted Coffee House to Write In

Rewriting is mind numbing. The same thing over and over and over. Four hundred some plus pages you climb over like a runner who just keeps going around the same track trying to improve their time just a little. Each time you start again you hope this might be the final lap, but there is always that nagging suspicion that one more time might be the charm. To pull this off without losing your mind requires boat loads of coffee, sweets, and lots of company and spurious noise. You have to trick your mind into not wandering off and never coming back. So you haunt every coffee house you can find.

The first coffee house works for a while until the Internet dies. They complain that their  WIFI has been going in and out and of course when you are there it just up and dies. You need the Internet. Not for the rewriting but for the breaks to give your mind release. You need something to distract you between chapters and after eating lunch and caramel rolls and drinking coffee you feel it is time to go find somewhere with WIFI. You run down the street to a little dark coffee house run by a tough woman who gives you a hot chocolate. You plug in and start again. That's when you hear it.

You need background noise not the greatest hits of love songs from the Seventies.  Afternoon Delight gets you off the chair to hunt down the tough Chicago woman who is reading The Inquirer behind the counter. Pardon me. But could you put on some classical music or jazz? The flat expression. NO. She goes back to the Inquirer. You sit down again to Mandy, It Don't Matter to Me, Have you Ever Been Mellow. That's it. You can't wall it out. Olivia  Newton John doesn't belong in your novel. You unplug and give the tough broad from Chicago a dirty look and head out into the snow.

Starbucks. Ah, you know the menu. A good place to plug in. Consistent. You bust in, a man on a mission. Every table is taken. Worse the one table with an outlet is taken. You stare at the lone man drinking coffee by himself. You have an hour of battery time if only the sonofabitch would leave! No, you aren't ready to order yet thank you very much. You stand around and glare and glare. Nobody cares and nobody is giving up their table. Shite! You head back out and down the street. Desperate for a clean well lighted place to write in or at least a place with an open table.

You head into Cozi Cafe and find a corner table with an outlet.  You plug in, order some really bad coffee. Sit down and begin again. Wifi works. There are sweet rolls. There are no people. It's as cold as a morgue, but you can work here. At least for a little while.

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

Mozart was broke...another struggling artist

Mozart was deeply in debt at the time of his death and spent the last years of his life trying to make ends meet and pleading with aristocrats for money, so what else is new? Another struggling artist. Seems we can't get away from that starving artist thing when it comes to even our great artists. But he was an artist. He wasn't a celebrity dipping into the well of immortality at the end of his career with a book or a painting or a rock band to finish off megalomania fame to satisfy the craving that we will be remembered beyond our time. Mozart had no such worries, but he did worry about being broke.

Apparently scholars have connected the dots and found Mozart took a big loan and the payments were coming due and his music was in a slump. Sounds familiar to our 2010 ears. Slump. Loans. Payments due. Even musical geniuses get caught up in the boom and bust of capitalism. But artists seem perpetually in the economic dumps. We hear this frequently with big name stars and of course all the starving artists who never hit the radar scream and die in obscurity. It is just the nature of art that it does not produce a lot of money. From A Confederacy of Dunces to Van Gogh it just seems sometimes the public is not ready for what artists have to offer.

Of course Mozart was one of the few who was appreciated during his lifetime and celebrated. Of course he was brilliant and his music stands. But we strip away the gloss from Amadeus which does a good job of showing the squalor in which the last years of his life was lived and we see the artist lot in all it's glory. Maybe stability is just not in the cards. We know of all the musicians who produced great music right up to the moment they became successful. It seems struggle is wrapped up with being an artist, maybe it is the fuel that pushes on all great art. Certainly Mozart proved that magnificently.

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

Excuse my rant about the New York Times Book Review

Ok, Steve Martin wrote a novel. We are used to celebrities writing novels. It seems comics and actors and divas and old rockers all finish up their career with a literary jaunt into the world of fiction. When Keith Richards is writing memoirs covered in length by the NY Times then all bets are off. It is not that we don't understand why these people are covered in the media...they are celebrities and get all the goodies on the tree. I get that. But the NY Times  Book Review purports to be the last stop on high culture where there should be some merit to being covered...besides being a comedian.

But I think after Alec Baldwin got his book reviewed when he wrote about his divorce including rant at daughter then we saw that truly the bar was that if you are famous and you write something the NY Times Book Review will cover you. So much for a literary bar. Nora Ephrons latest book on female aging disguised as novel disguised as Nora Eprhon and Steve Martin headlined the Sunday Book Review. Ok Nora has written some books and is a bestselling author. Fine. Steve Martin is a funny man who plays the banjo. Ok. And he certainly deserves a book review of his novel about the art world because he is...Steve Martin a funny man with a banjo.

You see where I am going. In the same review section Morris's last segment of his Roosevelt Biography was reviewed. Very good. Well deserved. And there were reviews of novelists and memoirs and children authors. But the space is limited and most people dont' get their books reviewed in the NY Times Book Review. So why burn it over a guy with an arrow through his head? A wild and crazy guy who starred in Parenthood and who is genuinely a funny man but not a very literary man. And Steve Martin will not be impacted at all if his book is covered by the Times.

But the lone novelist. The unheard of writer who really needs a break loses out when the NY Times Review pads the section for the latest star dust. It does matter to the man or woman who cannot be heard. So I wind up my rant by saying, hey, stick to your guns. Let the funny man be funny. Let the writer be heard.

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

Readers and the Psychic Noise of the Holidays

You are outgunned on the holidays. Woe to the reader looking to dive into that novel or biography during the R and R of Turkey Fest. You will open your book against a wall of electronic sound. The new televisions are not only flat they have Surround Sound Dolby Sound Concert Levels and they literally can shake the house. During family Holiday Rama these televisions chase the reader from room to room in search of a moment of solitude. Our modern holidays have become hell on earth instead of peace on earth. There is no peace in the digital age.

Not only are the televisions chasing you down but computers weigh in with their beeps and boops and then throw in the talking kids toys and IPOD speakers and you really can't' hear yourself think. But it is the televisions that have changed our holidays for good. They rule us now. Our life is subservient to our Plasmas decked on the walls on the counters over our beds in our bathrooms and in our basements. They are literally everywhere and they run twenty four seven. Our televisions have become the extra guest we just cant get rid of and most of us don't want too.

So that leaves the lone reader with his book or kindle looking for a crevice to get a few pages under the belt. Not an easy task for the man or woman in a modern family. The modern family is wired and televised and part of Holiday Fest is Electronic Fest. Everyone is on their laptop or IPOD so you have to wonder how much real cheer is being spread between humans. It would seem the main holiday interaction is between human and cyberspace. The digital age has taken our fascination with bits and bytes to a new level where we wonder more about out next text or email than Uncle Buds Christmas toast.

So the reader has to work hard. He must stake out his territory and read quickly. I suggest the garage or the car. Maybe outside with a flashlight. A couple of pages is really a victory in this day and age.

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

Straight Pride at My Son's Highschool

Maybe you heard or didn't hear about Straight Pride. The T shirts worn at my son's High School has ignited a fire storm. It is strange when a controversy erupts that pulls you in as a parent and you really do have to take a side. The T shirt wearers (three initially) complete with a quote from the bible claiming punishment for being gay “If a man lay with a male as those who lay with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination and shall surely be put to death,” see their right of free speech infringed upon when the school administration asked them to take the shirts off or at least cover up the bible quote.


This all came about ironically during anti bullying week when students were supposed to be mindful of the student who killed himself over a YouTube video outing him as gay. I would like to see this as some sort of free speech issue for the students, but unfortunately this is just intolerance hiding under the same old free speech issues. Straight Pride White Pride it all neatly skews the Pride and goes right to the intolerance and intimidation. The truth is the students are not interested in expressing their right to have Straight Pride what they are all about is intimidating students who are gay. This everyone knows.

The real question is where does this come from? The high school resides in a conservative Republican town fifty miles west of Chicago. I moved here five years ago from Oak Park, a very progressive liberal Democratic town. I went from Oz to Kansas and I knew the minute I arrived I wasn't in Kansas anymore. Forget the Tea Party rally on main street. Forget the man who yelled at the Democratic Party marchers in a St Patricks day parade screaming Bums, Bums I really hate you guys. Forget the man who barged into the local Starbucks screaming we have to get rid of the Communists in the government. You could put that all down to a small town of rural white people in a down economy who feel under siege--but the school is an affluent High School of mostly Chicago suburbanites...so what is going on here?

The climate of the country is extremely intolerant. We are going through a real retro age now brought on by sustained hard times and if you don't believe me just look who was elected. But the real question is where were the parents of the these three students? Did they know their sons were coming to school with a bible verse saying it is alright to kill the gays? Of course they did. You know what your kid is wearing. So we have to assume they were alright with it. If there is one thing that is striking about today is the polarization but also the hatred of "the other." Theories might run from our black President with his Progressive agenda to the fact people are just plain scared now. Scared of losing their jobs. Scared of losing their homes. Scared of their future. Fear makes people look for scapegoats and intolerance blasts through the roof.

But these are kids in high school. Yes, they are us in our best years supposedly. They are mini versions of us with our prejudice, beliefs, dreams, aspirations intact. Somebody had sanctioned adolescent fear of the other and in this case gays and said sure it is OK to fear these people. They are different. The school does seem to be making an effort to foster tolerance by defusing the issue and making sure these T shirts are kept under wraps. Supporters of the T shirt wearers (the students themselves) scream their freedom of speech is being trampled. I'll say to them what I say to my own son when he screams about his freedom of speech. You're right, it is being trampled, now shut up and go to class.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
http://www.williamhazelgrove.blogspot.com/

The Citizen Book Reviewer

How many people read the New York Times Book Review? Raise your hands. Hmmm...small crowd. How many people go and buy the books after reading a NYT Book Review? Extremely small crowd.  I do read the New York Times Book Review. Religiously. Every Sunday. But I must confess to a feeling akin to reading short stories in The Saturday Evening Post and that is I am reading something that belongs to a different time. The books reviewed are of a certain staple: fiction, international fiction with protagonists who overcome incredible odds in war torn regions. Biographies of long lost literary figures or Teddy Roosevelt. Steve Martin's art novel. Up and coming novelists on the back pages. Literary lions no one has heard of outside the literary lion circles. Historical fiction.

Not that this is bad content, but it is no secret that book sections in the major newspapers are vanishing. The Chicago Tribune's book section was marginalized to the Saturday edition. The Washington Post Book World was eliminated. The New York Times Book Review is one of the last holdouts. So, the question is where are people going to find out about books now? An answer might be they are going nowhere to find out about books. Or we might believe what Steven Jobs said who proclaimed no one reads anymore--a self serving observation from Mr. IPOD. But the fact is people are still reading and reading a lot.

I have been to land over the rainbow and it is a bit like OZ. Strange new munchkins called Citizen Reviewers are reading and writing the reviews in cyber land and this is what people are reading. It is not only the big Book Blog sites that are claiming the attention of the reader, it is the ordinary posts of the ordinary reader. If books are still sold in the fundamental way of word of mouth then it makes perfect sense that the middleman paid reviewer would become antiquated in age of the Internet. We now have the direct links for readers to click on to find out to what the most relevant class of reviewers think--other readers.

 The obvious site for this well of reviews is Amazon.com where readers post directly to the book they just read. A book with fifty some reviews will give the reader a more balanced view of a book then the opinion of one Ivory Tower reader. Consensus is the word of the day in cyberland. Other sites like Library Thing, Shelfari, Goodreaders all work off consensus reviews. A hundred people read a book and rate it and then you get an average. The fringe reviewer who doesn't like anything and the over the top reviewer who loves everything are marginalized by a healthy discerning middle. No one is getting paid and yes you will have the author friends and enemies weighing in, but in there also will be people with honest opinions.

The result is much more democratic and that makes sense in a democracy. Art by the people and for the people and reviewed by the people. It doesn't matter really if we like it or not because it is here. The argument for a paid reviewer is one that he or she is trained to review. Maybe. But don't you get a skewed viewpoint by a single rarefied person reading books they prefer? Getting through the literary gates of most heavy hitter review publications is reserved for those who catch an editors whim who is literally deluged with books. We can't expect a fair and judicial process from harried overworked reviewers or editors who have even less staff today.

So, by default, we end up with a polyglot of books being reviewed by a polyglot of readers. The New York Times Book Review will always be the benchmark for the literary world and I think that is a good thing. But the Citizen Reviewer will certainly be a second opinion...something everyone should have.

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

Going back to High School for a Book Speech

He could feel the breath. He could feel the touch. It had not happened quickly. He had come to give a speech. A writers speech. Several writers speeches. He had been distant at first. The teachers had grayed. They had mellowed. Ceased. The rooms still were warm. It was November after all, almost Christmas. The RCA loudspeaker bellowed the announcements of seventeen years since. He watched a clock he had seen with unlined eyes.

The speech was automatic. He had already given enough. He went to the BOYS room. There were no men in this world. Just teachers and BOYS. He went into the tiled museum. Palace of his own pimple forays, kinky hair inspections. The mirror was the same. He looked better than then. He was uglier then. Uglier by comparison, but quite beautiful and gawky for sixteen. The stall was still small and he sat where he had sat for years. Graffiti had vanished of course. But it was his BOYS room and he became again. He had some time and crept around.

 He was able to leave and float back. He could feel him now. He could feel the sixteen year old heart pumping fresh ideas, wounds, voracious pride. He walked past a blue locker. He had pulled on the lock before. Moments of books long gone and papers wasted. Moments of mussed coats and gloves--a scarf. Maybe there was a picture. Maybe. He could feel him now.He walked past athletic pictures of his time. Black and white ghosts long ago. He was not among them he was sure of that. He was never that official, but he was among the faces. A stairwell dimly lit. It was dimly lit with the half light of his time also. He had run down it unthinkingly. He never thought then. He was an expert of emotion, of being. He was Zen master of his short destiny. He was contained.

Yellowed wood of a gymnasium peeked through a door. The smirks and squeaks of young feet and muscles stopping and starting with abandon. There were no warm ups. There was no warm downs. There was the moment of motion taken from other moments and replaced just as deftly. There was the fast breaths of hearts barely tested, barely creased. Still he walked on, floating down hallways of a biology class, a french class. They had sat in front of spring windows, dreaming of the outdoors. The sun had played beyond in the fields with real creatures just below. Crickets, cicadas, frogs.

The long light of heat played down the sweet dusty scent of books and papers, pencils and erasers. They held their chalk to the boards he daydreamed too. They held their chalk while he laughed, humoring, encouraging, they laughed too. He could smell the lunches. They were indescribably brown and warm. They were milk and brownies, potpies and carrots. Trays of them floated down the corridor. He waved through the food of lusty appetites. He waved through the scent of unspent inertia. It was the fuel of little Gods--American high school fare. And he was there too.

Passing on a cold morning across the courtyard. Full of confidence, worried about his hair, his face. To be preoccupied with one's looks again. Oh this would be a luxury. He was talking with friends, cracking jokes, laughing at nothing. Cold breath as he passed back into a corridor, passing pictures and trophies again. Dead matter of his time.Then suddenly he was back in the old wing again. Back to the window he began from. There were the uprights of the field. The snow fence was up and the field browned. A coach he met didn't remember him. He shook his hand and walked on. But he remembered him. He remembered him as a God of his time. He was a naysayer, a maker of destiny. He had told him once he looked like an All American. How could anyone forget that?

He would have to speak again soon. He would have to become who he was. He stared at the goal posts. They were tinged with cold again. They were tinged with his cold of days waiting for breaks. There would be a Christmas break and he would be free. There would be a spring break and he would be free. There would be a summer break and he would be free. Absolutist, all of them. Free from their luxurious drudgery.

Still the uprights gleamed and he lingered. He looked for him coming from the parking lot. He looked for him bouncing with abandon. He would bounce with a scant dearth of years lived. He could not have thought he would look again at forty eight. There are no such parallels. Sixteen year olds are not required. The bell rang and he braced himself. He touched the old wood of the windowsill. He touched the cold of the glass. He had touched these before he knew that. The field was fading with the day. He was leaving. A glance again--winters gold, youths maiden, life's opium, a necklace of unlined moments from his alma mater days.

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

The Delicate Dance of Agents and Authors

It is a marriage. You have a courtship then a honeymoon then a working marriage and then at some point a divorce. You never like to think of getting divorced when you are married but it happens. But lets back up to the courtship. You are a writer and they are an agent. You have something they want and they have something you want. It should be symbiotic and so you start out by courting them. You send out your manuscript until an agent accepts and you go on a date.

Usually the first phone call is all hugs and kisses. They love your work and you love them because they promise a way to the promised land. The phone calls are all feel good and you get off feeling like you could leap tall buildings. Then you enter the honeymoon. They are submitting your work to editors. This is unbelievable. You have just jumped ahead ninety percent of other authors. You have a conduit to that mysterious world of publishing. Now is when you have your first quarrel usually. The rejections start coming in and you question the agent. Why did you submit it to them/ How about this person? This is a minor quarrel and you roll on.

Now here is the first fork in the road. The agent does or does not hit pay dirt. If he does not find a home for your book then you are looking at a quickie divorce. You might drag on a while but lets face it the bloom is off the rose and agents are in business to make money and if they can't make money off you then those calls will not be returned and those emails will go un-answered. You simply fall out of love. It happens. But if the agent sells your book then you go to the next level.

Now your are in a thriving working marriage. You have made the agent money and you have made money. Everyone is happy. This could last a very long time especially if your book does well. Maybe a lifetime. But, unfortunately, a lot of times the contract is paid off and the royalties dwindle and the followup book might not pan and then you enter that declining era in the marriage where no one is happy. You feel like you are not getting enough attention and the agent doesn't want to wast time on projects that won't pan out. So you divorce.

As an author you have to be very attuned to this cycle in author/agent relations. You want it to all work out the best but you don't want to be delusional either. If it feels like a bad marriage it probably is and you best be on your way to divorce court. There is nothing worse than thinking someone is doing something on your behalf when they aren't. So go get a divorce, then jump right back in the saddle and start dating again.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Addicted to Literary Crack

Before there was nothing. You lived in isolation writing your stories or your novels and all you had was a rejection letter coming back from a nameless editor from a nameless publishing company who might comment on your latest chapters and synopsis. And that was it. You literally wrote for years with the only feedback coming from friends, enemies, the compressed air of writing groups. Real feedback, real anointment came only from the Big Apple in the form of the acceptance letter that just never seemed to come. So you toiled on in the loneliest profession in the world. Then came the Internet.

Suddenly everyone became a writer but you had been doing it for years in your secret agony. Ensconced in your Garrot you had been honing your skills, wiring your synapses, developing your craft. The Newbies spewed while you thundered. People marveled you were able to spin off an essay crackling with wit and insight and you kept it yourself that it took you all of five minutes. Because your isolation had been broken. You suddenly were being recognized and people actually commented on your work. They complimented you, they criticized you, but it didn't matter. Your isolation had been obliterated and suddenly you were talking to the world.

So writers became bloggers. And for novelists who need to cool down between books or want to try out different forms it became an easy place to get that instant feedback writers crave. Suddenly that novel you have been burning to write gets put to the side for that quick essay on Obamas squeamishness and you are writing for that literary crack. It comes buzzing into your phone with one comment after another. Brilliant. Love your writing. Excellent piece. Just great. Your day becomes a little brighter as the comments pile up and you create a small firestorm. Thirty four hundred hits in one day for one article.

So you tell yourself its time to get back to that novel, but you have spent your best capitol on a one page blog and you are already considering topics for your next one. You hate to admit it, but you have become  addicted to literary crack.

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

Waiting in the Green Room at WGN Radio

You have glimmers of something passing. Sometimes you just know that what you are seeing might not be around too long. Maybe it was the space reserved for the microphone from the Scopes monkey trial. Maybe it was the foundation of the Chicago Tribune building inscribed on Lower Michigan with Culled in 1920. The slight wisp of snow in the cold darkness as a guard buzzes you into the WGN studio in the bowels of the old Tribune building and you follow a man up to the green room, passing the cases where old microphones reside and black and white pictures of celebrities long passed.

Then you sit down and wait and there is no one there in the green room, just you and rows and rows of pictures of people who look curiously human. The celebrity quality is gone and they are just men and women with gray hair, getting old. A thirty minute radio interview on WGN in Chicago is something you want to hang on too. The man doing the interview is the son of a legendary newspaper man from the Chicago Sun Times. You can hear the footfalls and you shake hands and he tells you to relax and do whatever the *&%$ you want. All Chicago old school. Then you are on in front of the WGN microphone telling your story for thirty minutes.

You try and imagine people all over Chicago waking up and hearing your voice, but your mind doesn't work that way. All you think is that it is just the two of you talking and it doesn't go near long enough. There are a million things you want to say, but you just can't get it all in and then you are walking back through the silent building and down through the guard room and suddenly outside in the cold. It's barely eight o'clock on a Sunday morning. Chicago is empty and just waking up. You drive through the streets, knowing you have used up one of the moments of your life that will never come back. You hit the city limits, then slip into the past.


http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man will be out in January