The Ventilator of Publishing: A Mighty Blaze

The first thing you realized is that you are were all alone. The bookstores had closed. Your publisher had closed. The library had closed. Your agent was in shock. And you, you have a book coming out in the worst pandemic since the 1918 Spanish Flu. Now what? And you quickly realize that you will have to do everything your self. Publishing as you know it ceased to exist. When a book comes out you are dependent on a push from your publishers, libraries, bookstores, reviewers. That push is now non existent and it is down to you and your book.

So you are flailing. Enter A Mighty Blaze. This is essentially a Facebook site run by eighteen writers who volunteer their time to promote the new books coming out during the pandemic. It is a lifeline, but more than that at a time when publishing is on life support,  A Mighty Blaze is the ventilator of publishing. On the Tuesday of publication A Mighty Blaze blasts out posts and likes and tweets and retweets to let the world know that even in a pandemic books are still being published. Followed by bookstores, agents, publishers, the literati now  behind ZOOM screens; A Mighty Blaze gives a face to the author who has effectively been silenced by this pernicious virus.

Eventually the publishers will return, the bookstores will open, the libraries will begin again and hopefully A Mighty Blaze will still be here. But if it withers after the normalcy of publishing returns then we can only be thankful that in the worst of times we saw the best of some people who put the collective importance of publishing books first and gave of their time and their passion.

william hazelgrove

Authors Can Save Barnes and Noble

Authors can save Barnes and Noble. All they have to do is sell their books. Imagine if Barnes and Nobles had an author in every day. Not to sit behind a table but to sell their books. Not an author signing but an author selling. The author sells their book and then signs it. They will never beat Amazon at their game nor Starbucks or small cafes. But what Barnes and Noble does have is a physical presence and they have books and they have real live authors.

I sold 24k of my last book at a single Barnes and Noble last year. An unknown book. I did it all by talking to people coming in the front door. Most people are looking to discover a new story and guess what there is an author there to tell them all about a new story. Their own. And they can sign the book. It is a resource a sleeping sales force that Barnes and Noble can unleash right away because authors have a vested interest in selling their own books.

Look not everyone wants to talk to author when they walk into a Barnes and Noble but one in four  do. I counted it out and I sell a book about every fourth person. People are interested in the story the author has to tell and then they are interested in the author. The biggest advantage Barnes and Noble has is there are real people in those stores and real authors selling their books would cost them nothing. I impacted the bottom line of many Barnes and Nobles after four hours of selling my book and the managers were grateful. My sales swung the total revenue for the day.

This is a no brainer. The resource is there waiting to be tapped. An army of authors who just want people to read their books. Somebody just has to invite them in. The customer gets to hear about a new book, have an interesting conversation, and then get a signed book. And the author sells their book and now has an active role in controlling their royalties. It is a win for the author and more importantly the passive art of selling books will be gone for good, replaced by a motivated sales force of people going to the customers...authors.

Finally, yes it is a cyber world, but we are human beings. And humans like to talk to humans. An author can demolish any online sales model with this simple model. Give the author cards with a cover of his book. The customer walks in. "Can I give you this card? It is actually a book I wrote... "

www.williamhazelgrove.com william hazelgrove

Novels Are Changing

Novels are changing. Mine have changed. Is it the influence of computers...the Internet? Hard to say. But they have changed. Yes there are the big  novels still being published but the market seems to be moving toward the staccato chapters that tell a story in bursts. Short novels for people who are extremely busy. The cousin of flash fiction is surely the novels of sixty scenes crammed into two hundred pages.

That is not to say this is bad. I have moved along as a writer to the point where I want to tell a lot of stories versus just a few big ones. I would say I spend an inordinate amount on the net and maybe there is some spillover. I thought it was just me but I spoke with a writer in LA who said he sees the same thing. Novels are just shorter and the chapters are many.

Literary novels once upon a time were composed  of long scenes. But that was for people who did not have a phone beeping every few minutes or House of Cards or Game of Thrones cued up. But of course we reflect our environment and novelists should be of their time. So I will end this now. My phone just went off.


www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

 

The State of the Book in 2014

You could argue it both ways. Go to the Kindle boards and you will see the new frontier of publishing. Writers taking their work and bypassing the publishing and putting it out there to sell on the kindle. The ebook certainly broke the dam of writers who would never see print. And there are writers who sell in the millions who have never signed a publishing contract and conversely they have become millionaires. They are the one percent of one percent.

For the rest of the self publishers it is a brutal slog and many sell few downloads of their book. But of course you could argue this beats obscurity. And for the traditionally published writers it is the year of reckoning. You have to compete on all fronts and with the advent of the ebook the free download has changed the field of play. People literally give way their book while traditional publishers sit on their prices like trolls at the gate. You cant blame them they actually have invested money in their books and they need to hold the line.

Profit has become a word only for the big sellers for these publishers. Print on Demand books have allowed them to compete with the price to sell market of ebooks but these also bring a stigma that keeps most POD books out of the bookstores so essential to selling now. It will be the year of the Independent this we know. Barnes and Noble is taking water so fast we might just see her slip beneath the waves in the first quarter. The Nook truly was the anchor thrown over the side with no real plan to compete with the Amazon behemoth.

And Amazon will rule its domain yet she was stymied when the independents didn't take her books. So we have gone full circle. Books are still stubbornly selling and independent bookstores are the future of book selling and are gaining strength while the ebook morphs into the interactive beast it is destined to be. Community will make or break the art of book selling for the independents. And what of the author in all of this?

Writers have greater opportunities to fail or thrive than ever before. If there is one consistent mantra it is this for the modern author; If you don't do it no one will. This is the unassailable truth of publishing. Never before have authors had to have thicker ankles than right now. It is a peasants work this selling of our wares but the truth is you have only one responsibility in the end and that is to your talent. And that has never changed and never will.

Full speed ahead.

www.williamhazelgrove.com

The New Modern Author Who Doesn't Write Anymore

There was a piece in the New York Times about an Indie songwriter who has turned her back on the grind of promoting herself to become a writer. She was lucky enough to score a book deal and a newspaper gig and ends with saying that at least in the writing world the middle is still holding. Nothing could be further from the truth. The modern author today is in hell. Hell. The demise of the bookstores and the rise of the digital book have conspired to produce an environment where the lone author doesn't stand a chance. But he or she will die trying.

The schemata of the recent upheaval has broken into two distinct worlds. Indie and Traditional. These two worlds are separate but the have a common bond. No human can fulfill the expectations of either. What has happened? Well it is what has happened to everything. The digital age presses everyone down to the Lowest Common Denominator in the relentless drive to lessen cost. This has been horrible for the author. You are now competing with people literally giving their books away. But lets back up and figure out what happened to the traditionally published author first.

I was traditionally published. I had the contract, the advance, the dinner with the agent and publisher in lower Manhattan. I had traditional media. People. NY Times. NPR. USA Today. Radio and television and newspapers. The book came out and you promoted it with media and book signings. Simple. I still pushed a lot on my own. I was considered a self promoter when not many people were. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. Then I ended up with a long break. I could not get a book published while publishing imploded for ten years. When I returned with a small press the world  had changed. There were now Indie authors.

Shoot whoever came up with that term. People now self published like mad because all you had to do was upload your book. Social Media moved in. The Indie adopted a much different strategy than the traditional authors. They had no fan base. No readers. But they had the Internet and Amazon. Two swords. Give away your book. And publish all the time. I mean all the time. Like every two weeks. Gaming the Amazon algorithms was what it was all about. If you publish then you go up on the just released ranking. If you continue to publish you stay there. And if you give away your book you get readers enmasse who download your book for free. These are the twin pillars of the new Indie publisher. Quality is not an issue. Quantity is.

Take the traditional side. A book comes out. No support. No bookstores left standing. You are in with the Indie Authors. It really doesn't matter what you have done before because price is king. The Indies are dumping their books out there at .99. Or Permafree. And you have just had your book come out after waiting a good year or two and you cannot discount to their levels.  Now you are on social media all the time. You are constantly checking ranking. You are not selling. Why? Because the Indies have gone to the bottom of the market and flooded it.

Now you say well literature will win out. Not in the digital age my friend. Yes.  The mega sellers will still have their audience. But for mid list authors it is like you never published a thing. So all you can do is market until the cows come home which is like spitting into a hurricane. My Indie friends will say well that is because you are not doing it correctly. Newsletters are king. Blogging is king. Long lasting social media relationships are king. Build your brand. Find your audience and produce a series that the reader can go back to like the Rocky sequels. This is the strategy. And publish. Publish. Publish.

But literary writing is not write on demand. You need to take some time and time is what you do not have because you are on eternal promotion all the time. And I am considered to be very good at it and I do get the trade reviews. The Indies don't care about reviews. They don't really sell books. There are a hundred authors who make very good livings off of zombies, trolls, vampires. It is the market publishing never saw because it didn't exist. Siloed readers who like a certain brand no matter how obscure. But I am talking about the few.

Most authors cant find any readers now. Why? The noise of all those self published Indies megahoning every day drowns them out. Literary writers are not used to that. Even the Indies are drowning each other out. How many tweets can you read that say READ MY BOOK. After a while it becomes noise. You let the work be your megaphone. But this is not the case and so you go on combat footing and work twelve  or sixteen hour days looking of the elusive readers. You are literally online all the time. And for all your work your ranking might dip but then it goes right back up. And worse that translates to a few books sold. It is a soul deadening process.

So back to that musician who made the jump. She ends like I said saying she has found sanctuary in the literary world. I would say she did not find a safe harbor in the literary world. She found a Lilly pad in a millpond that even now is taking on water.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

How Paid Reviews Have Hurt Everyone

 I have a Publishers Weekly review coming out on Monday. All five of my books have been reviewed by PW. I never paid for one. Of course you really couldn't pay for any until recently. My career was built by a starred review for my second novel Tobacco Sticks. I was virtually unknown and then one starred review in PW and wham. Movie sale. Paperback auction with seventeen publishers. . Book of the Month Club. Foreign Rights. Two book deal with Bantam  with nice advances. So...what is the situation now with a PW review.

Well when I posted the advance PW review someone asked me if I had paid for the review. I took offence. Of course not! But when I received my Kirkus review the same question came from someone else. Again I was offended. I would never pay for any review. It is not in my DNA. But the point is a lot of people do and because of this the reviews themselves have been hurt. Publishers Weekly has PW Select and Kirkus has a  program as well. So people who want to shell out some coin can get some sort of review.

But the damage is done to everyone. Publishers Weekly was the gatekeeper before. If you received a review in PW and it was good then everyone took this as a nod that this was a special book. I can attest because it happened to me. But now some people question the review itself. Doesn't everyone pay for reviews now? No. They don't. But it doesn't matter. People are having a hard time believing that a book can actually carry its own weight.

So if you get a review in PW or Kirkus the old fashioned way then you should feel very good about it and if someone asks if you paid for the review. Push out your chest and scream HELL NO!!!That should leave no doubt.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher...sometimes a dream is all you have.

 

Writers with Writers

I don't often get together with other writers. But sometimes I go to events for writers with writers and it is always a bit disconcerting to see someone just like yourself saying the same things you say day after day. Being in the same room with a bunch of writers is like being in a space capsule with not enough air. All the oxygen gets sucked up. And that is because writers suck in a lot and put out very little. How would you like to be in a house of people looking out the windows with no one opening the door and saying come on  in. Matter of fact the door is locked.

And then add to that writers are insecure. Who wouldn't be? Countless days of toil by oneself with very little coming back. Taunted by an Internet that holds up fabulously successful writers hourly and makes scribbling that much harder. And now you emerge and bump into yourself. And you both talk about your books and your writing and you wonder if you sound that stupid. The answer is yes. But you plow on because there might be something to learn and and so you continue blathering reminding yourself to ask what the other person writes. They are a writer after all.

And then there are the moments where you have nothing to say and you both want to go back to your respective garrets and continue on with the real work. But you forge on and gradually after a few drinks the shields come down and slowly everyone becomes people again and the writer leans back and you actually have a good time and learn a few things. And that is about as good as it gets for writers with writers.

And then it is over and you are glad you came. What do you know you think walking for the train. Writers aren't really such bad people after all.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

The Authorial Spammer

Authors are between a rock and a hard place now. They either are called spammers or they are called nothing at all. I just had a man ask if I would please quit spamming. Sure. Point taken. Spam can be defined as advertising anything  and certainly advertising a book can be spam. But here is the new authors dilemma. Quietly publish your book and wait for reviews or the Gods to make sure people know about your book or let people know and be accused of laying spam all over the Internet. But first some history.

I came up through traditional publishing. I was given an advance with Bantam and went to New York and had dinner with  my agent and publisher and sat back to wait for the two books to come out. I never spammed  a thing. I never went online. Yes it was there I just didn't care. I depended on the Gods and publishing to do the work for me. Some would say that was stupid but that was the way it was. Well publishing has changed and if it is for the better remains to be seen but the days of sitting back are way over.

The author today has to all the work. All of it. They have to get out there and push and with the bookstores slowly disappearing there is only one place for this and that is the Internet. Now one might not be comfortable with this. I know I am not. But all you have to do is go online to see thousands of authors screaming from the rooftops; READ MY BOOK. And that would be spam but does it matter? I had a man say to me the other day he didn't know I wrote books. This after a hundred posts about my book on facebook.

So the authorial spammer is here to stay. Some would say no no go out and talk to people and that is the way to do it. Authors only have so much time to chat and so many end up just leaving a calling card as the authorial spammer. You always have a choice. Be the quiet literary author waiting for the Gods or start yelling from the rooftops. I did the first one for years and paid a price.

 It's time to get the megaphone out.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher
 

On Marketing Books: Bestsellers Dont Magically Happen Part I

Yeah. People still expect you to do it effortlessly. A man I know asked why I market my own books. I told him all authors have to market their own books. He said I must not be with a real publisher. But most people still think bestsellers just magically happen and authors are sitting on the left bank drinking absinthe and thinking about their next novel while it magically flies off the shelf. And everyone nods like yeah its an Indie world now but the powers that be are still shocked when authors market their own work. They are still stupefied to find writers acting like salesmen.

Because people want to believe that literary prowess is enough. They want to believe that cream rises to the top and that a good book will carry the day. It just aint true. Good books get buried all the time. Good books die a thousand deaths and no one even hears them.  Do we really believe a good book can make enough noise on its own against the titanic forces of mass culture. The internet?

But this belief persists. I run across it all the time. A lot of people just cant believe an author has to get down in the trenches and they are shocked when they realize there are no publicists and handlers and all those people that used to do all the work for authors. Well they are long gone and authors have to do it all.

Even when I was with Bantam I had to do it all. Even more. What is amazing is that the people  still just don't get it. They just see the bestseller.

Part II
Guerrilla marketing on the boards.

Printers Row Author Show

You get there and you are incognito. Wander Wander Wander. Who else is there you know. Absolutely no one. Signing in one hour. Make the most of your one hour. So many books and so many authors. How the hell can anyone sell anything? The thriller authors seem very organized. They have their palm cards and their publicist there. They wear a suit. They look like their books...clean, cheap, businesslike, rich. But of course they are not rich or they would not be at printers row hawking their books. It is the OK corral of the networking author and it is daunting.

A hotdog. A coke. You do bash into somebody you know and they offer you a beer in the poets tent. Salvation. Then you see someone you asked to blurb your book. He says he will do it from his table. Better. And now your hour is ticking down and you are hanging around your tent. This is where you will sit like a prisoner behind your books. This is where the authors who precede you are sitting with the look of a bored toll booth attendant. Almost done.

And then they are packing up and it is now or never. You walk around the table and are accosted by authors who think you are a book buyer never suspecting you are one of their own. You circle the tent and pop out the other side and now the table is clear and it is your turn. You pull the books out of your backpack and slink down. A woman to your right introduces herself. She is a radio personality and is immediately mobbed. You turn to the guy to your right who has his people talking to him. You are the only one who has no fans.

You look at your watch. Sigh. One hour and fifty five minutes to go. You sell a couple books and chat with the radio personality woman. She is on the backside of her career in radio and looking for publishing as salvation. The dude on the other side has a book about Camps. You talk between then and pass the time and exchange cards and pitch each other on future projects and then it is time to go. You have sold maybe half the books you bought. You are pitched out and networked out. But you did it.

You participated in the Printers Row Author Show and there is satisfaction in that. Humility is a badge after all.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

The Publishing Worm in Apple

Yeah. I get why the big publishers went to Apple and said you know what; lets fix a price we can all live with here. Amazon is a leaking ship on the good seas of Ebook commerce and the economics are devastating. Ebooks drop pricing to the floor and Amazon was intent on doing just that. I set my own prices on my ebooks (I happen to own the rights) and one thing I found out was that ebooks are priced low low low compared to regular books. You can see the IPOD nightmare of publishing over the next hill with .99 cent downloads.

But you still can't stack the deck. And whose to say what really happened at this point, but it sounds like the publishers tried to turn back the clock and stop the hemorrhage. And it is a hemorrhage. You are talking about a twenty five dollar hardcover versus a ten dollar ebook or worse. And once file sharing really kicks on ebooks that will be getting nothing for that old hardcover. So now what? Well...people still like to read books. And they like a quality ebook.

So instead of fixing the price with Apple for books on their IPADs, really the publishers should come up with their own hardware or high end ebooks. Look. There are a lot of people who do not like the Kindle but there isn't a lot of competition out there.  The Nook. The Sony Reader. They all still feel like a computer. Yeah. I have a Kindle but I still prefer a book. What I'm saying is we are not there yet and there is a lot of room for someone to get it right.

Old Steve Jobs knew that. The IPAD. The IPHONE. The IPOD. Even though he went along with the price fix, he knew it is really all in the delivery.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Publishing Old Manuscripts

Everybody has them. All those books that misfired and never took off or just blew up on the launch pad. They represent years and years of toil and you would like for something to come of them because they represent your heart and soul. So in the new environment of EBooks, you think, well maybe there is something there that escaped the publishers eyes and these books should have been published except for a short sighted editor who couldn't see the diamond in the rough. And so you start tracking them down on your computers.

Usually they are a couple of computers back that you dig out of a closet and there they are; floating around your desktop like space junk. They have weird file names you started giving them after the twenty third rewrite and you have to piece them together like cars in a junkyard. Lets see, I'll use this beginning with this middle and where is the end...ah here it is. There it's a book. So you start to read your old prose. Dammit. This was good! This should have been published! And so you continue, getting excited. Yes. Yes. Readers will finally be able to discover this great story that has been stopped because of some nimrod of a publisher.

And then...somewhere along page thirty two, the thing goes off the rails. Maybe it is the tired prose, the lackluster plot. Maybe it's just sort of hackneyed and old. But there is something missing. Some bit of modernity that gives the book spark. The prose just dries up on the page and is dated and dead and the book turns back into that old manuscript in a moldy box in a basement. And you want it to be good. You really do. You want it to be the book that it could have been, but it's just not.

So you try and resucitate some others, but they fall from the sky like satellites gliding out of orbit. There were problems. There was a reason these books never saw the light of day. And even the ubiquity of e-publishing won't save them. So you pull the plug, let the dust motes settle, and throw the computer back in the corner where it belongs.

And that book stays in darkness....where it belongs.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The old cars of the middle class

Old cars are making a come back. Or maybe it's just because I drive old cars. Used to have really nice cars with really nice payments. Five hundred. Four hundred. Big thirty thousand dollar monsters that broke down pretty quickly just the same. Amazing how that new car smell went away so quickly. I guess there is a spray out there you can get so you can keep it going. And those first dings. Rough man. And then that first time you don't get by the wash and your thirty five thousand dollar ripoff looks old.

That sucks.

So then you get rid of it or you pay it off and it becomes your old car. Ten years old with a one hundred and fifty thousand miles. You quit washing it years ago.  You just keep it going. You don't have any payments and you don't want any. Now you have two old cars and the air goes out or a window doesn't close or a door doesn't open and the upholstery smells like a junkyard with that sun baked smell of old clothes in a trunk. And the floor is covered in leaves and dirt and old junk food wrappers.

But it still runs.

And so you cruise around with your loud muffler and then some dude pulls up next to you in a Beamer. You look over and you feel the pang. Man I want that car. I want to get into a car that smells good and looks good and I want that new feeling man. Because if your car is new then you are new. You just feel better about everything. And that lasts about... a month. And then you are staring down those payments and you start thinking about the fact you are paying up to five hundred bucks a month just to get from point A to point B.

No thanks.

And so the Beamer dude pulls ahead and you get your jalopy up to speed. Throw in a CD of old songs you dig. And look for a McDonald's. Life aint so bad.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man...losing a house should not be this funny

Should a Writer Live in New York?

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

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

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

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

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

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Selling Fiction

You start off just wanting to get published. No small feat. This can go on for years. For me it went on seven years. Ridiculous you think. Seven years trying to break into print, but then you finally do and that first goal of just getting into print is quickly supplanted with the second goal: you want to sell. Why this should be when you were so satisfied, so happy to just see your name on a book cover that you should suddenly up your goal to this much heavier weight to bear. But you do.

And now the writer is confronted with the marketplace. Strange amorphous beast who seems to not give a damn about you or your book. You have in your mind a great populace passing on your book with a whispered, read this, it's great. But you have no proof this is occurring just your own faith in what you have written. Shouldn't that be enough? A man who self published a book never misses a chance to ask me if I have seen the reviews on Amazon. I assure him I have. In his mind those reviews will push his book along unit the world has seen the reviews and read his book.

But of course the other million books are also crying our with their reviews. And those dismal Amazon rankings tell the writer of fiction he must do more. And so you do. You tweet, write, post, talk, push, review, you do what you have to do to get the word out. If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it did it really fall? Probably not. And this comes to the writers basic fear: obscurity. That you will pass along and your books will not be read.

In nonfiction the hook is easier. You can tie it to what is happening right now. Fiction is trickier. The story has to be tied to something current and that is tough. Because the times are always changing, but your book is not. Your story is a constant. So you have to break it down to who will read your story. You hope everyone, but the truth is certain people will buy your books. Maybe women, maybe men, maybe kids. And you have to go find them.

Giant publishers confront this daunting task every day and only succeed with a few of their books. The rest of their titles are lottery tickets they hope will be a winner. But we know the odds on the lottery. So the best thing the writer of fiction can do at the end of the day is write a really great story. That you can control. Chasing the market is a futile gesture and bound to failure. But you can impact that basic law of selling fiction: books are still sold by word of mouth. To have someone say at the end, that was a great book! Is the ultimate marketing plan. 

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man 

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

That Old Cape Magic has none of the Russo magic

Harsh title for this review, but I did read Russo's Cape Magic recently and I am a huge fan but I just fell off the bus. Richard Russo gave all writers permission to write about middleaged life with broken down white males in the throes of crisis. Failed White Men novels let's call then and Russo was a pioneer with Straight Man, Nobodies Fool, and Empire Falls which were superb books of men who lost their way and find redemption through the familial relationships they had previously trashed. But more than that these books were funny and dead on.

When I first read Russo I felt like I had found a missing puzzle piece to the young writers I had grown up on, McInerny, Franzen, Wallace, and the older writers like Ford and McCormack. Then I read Russo and he was writing about men who did the wrong thing and could still be redeemed as characters and as people. And he was a very good writer during these comical journeys. So I read his earlier books Mohawk and The Risk Pool. Good, but he hadn't moved into what I considered the Russo vein of his Failed White Man novels.

I did not make it though Bridge of Sighs. To me the book just died with the flashbacks and at the same time the flashbacks had the only Russo magic. But the narrative seemed thin and not substantial. So I grabbed the paperback of That Old Cape Magic. It is a Failed White Man novel but unfortunately it is a retread. It is Grady Tripp of Straight Man and Sully of Nobodies Fool, but his main character Griffin doesn't hold a candle to those earlier characters in depth or complexity. Griffin is a man in trouble in his marriage attending his daughters weddings with the ashes of his parents in his trunk. All very Russoesque.

But there it ends. Griffins convolutions are told like a grandfather might tell a story. There is restraint and I understand why. Russo's daughters did get married and it seemed  the marriage problems and concommitent problems have been sanitized. There was something lacking and that is, strangely; originality. That Old Cape Magic it turns out is  just warmed over Russo.

I admire the writer and I will always reach for Russo's latest. But leftovers have never tasted as good as the original dish.

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

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 Writer in Winter

A natural time for the writer is winter. Writers live indoors by habit, squirreling away hours in rooms and closets, basements, attics, anywhere they can find where the world will not find them. During the summer this can be a little more challenging as sunshine plays outside the room where you work on that sentence that wont behave or that novel that just wont turn the corner. Staying inside during the warm months in the Midwest seems slightly insane when you have winters that last five months and wind chills of minus thirty. But of course the winter is the writers greatest friend.

You cocoon naturally when the snow wisps outside and the panes rattle. You find your breathing space when the radiators hiss and you pad down hallways of winter light dim and brittle as mottled ice. You are in your element now with those Russians that only make sense in the winter. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy just seem to read better when a winter storm is raging outside. Maybe it is the long brooding days or the sickness that comes with winter. I was able only to read James Joyce Ulysses in the winter. During the summer his prose seemed like the ramblings of a lunatic.

But of course the writing is what matters. Now you buckle down. Now you can really work because there is nothing to do but work in the winter. In the Midwest we live indoors until April and so you forget about the outside world and hunch over your computer with coffee at the ready and tap away while the world slowly freezes.

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

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