A clean well lit 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 white 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.

www.billhazelgrove.com/

Twains Response to Keillor review of his Autobiography

Long dead that I am I will take a moment to respond to a man who lives in a age where the majority of people watch Dancing with the Stars and ruminate on the misfortune of Snooki and most people can't read a book without running to their infernal computer to see if someone sent them a bit of mail that has not a damn thing to do with anything and people write blogs that pass for literature and are just a rambling bunch of horse manure and a  man of that time has the infernal audacity to say my autobiography is the ramblings of an old man. Well Mr. Keillor as one one old man to another, I am dead, what is your excuse?

Wouldn't lower myself to read your stories of small town life that was never that-a-way-anyhow. Couldn't care less if you do think my ramblings are of no interest to men of your time and ilk or women for that matter. I will note that I have survived a hundred years plus while I seriously doubt you will be yesterdays news when you join your brethren in hell or heaven whichever your choosing. I spent a life giving my left foot to people like you and I am glad to see the New York Times has survived as a testament to that all is wrong in that business or reviewing literature. And good to see they have the same low standards that allowed them to take on a man who would pass himself of as a writer of  contemporary hogwash.

I might point out that you cannot get my book such is the demand. For a man who has been dead for a hundred years and has no advertising budget I would say that is pretty damn good and speaks volumes to my veracity as a writer of fiction and satire while you sir are a hawker of all things trivial and sentimental and once you have slipped below the terrestrial ground you so mightily besmirch, you will be hard pressed to find one buyer of your ruminations on your short journey of hell on earth.

Now I put a stipulation of a hundred years to publish my autobiography, but I see that is still too short a time for mankind to stop producing jackasses such as yourself. I think I will stipulate next time, if there is a next time, two hundred and fifty years. That should be enough time for man to either kill himself off or at least bleed out men who claim to speak with authority when in fact they are the baboon of our origins. With no regards at all...Mark Twain.

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

Publishing that First Novel

Publishing your first novel is like having a baby. It is very very hard. Of course the first novel is an experiment and you have no idea what you are doing. Apologies to all those writers who knew what they were doing because I did  not. I had just graduated college and decided against the advice of parents and friends to take a summer and write a novel. Now I had a Masters in History and a minor in English and I did like to read and I had published a few editorials in the college newspaper. But after that it was all uncharted territory.

So I sat down and began pecking away. I had just learned to type so I thought if I could just write five pages a day I would hit my goal of three hundred and fifty pages by the end of the summer. I had nothing to write about except my youth and so I wrote down things that had happened to me and hastily constructed a diary of my life. By summers end I had my three hundred and fifty pages and gave it to a friend of mine who said it read like a diary. Armed with his critique I moved in with my parents and started sending out the manuscript. Rejection letters rained down.

Meanwhile I began a process of rewriting. Again, I had no idea what I was doing but as I stumbled from apartment to apartment I carried the manuscript along. Years passed and the rejection letters grew friendlier but there were  no takers for a man with a first novel. Five years passed and my novel, (Ripples) still had not found a home. I was probably on my twentieth rewrite and I began to despair that my nights after my sales job were not bearing fruity as I sat and rewrote and rewrote and rewrote.  I had already covered two of my walls with the proverbial rejection letters in my apartment.

I went up on a camping trip up in Michigan and was standing around a camp fire with a friend of my wife who said to me, I hear you are a writer. I muttered something about yes I was a writer. I hear you wrote a novel he continued. I'm a printer, I should publish your book. Magic words. Years of rejection came down to his wife who read my manuscript and liked it. The man published my book a year later, his first book and my first novel. Three years later Bantam bought the rights. That's how I published my first novel.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man is due out in January