Finding a Story--The Cop on the Roof

Sometimes a story just falls in your lap. I was sitting at my desk in my one room hole above a Thai restaurant with my window open to the curry and airy traffic and my neighbors not ten feet away in the next apartment building over right outside the clanking old fire escape when I heard police radios. I had been hacking away trying to find a story all morning that I thought would be worthy of one of the literary magazines or any magazine for that matter and was just about to give up when I heard the police radio again. Then I saw the cops.

There were two of them working their way cautiously up the fire engine red fire escape and they had paused to catch their breath outside my open window. I stuck my head  out and met two big mustaches  and cold eyes under shiny brims. Hello officers. They grunted and stared across at the apartment building window right across from mine. You seen any activity in that apartment? Nope. We had a call that someone isnt' responding to calls. Oh. I stared at the window with a curtain covering the  lower half. I climbed  out onto the fire escape with the cops and the three of us stared for any sign of life.

You know Joe. I think I can get a better angle if I head up to the roof. The other cop looked up and nodded. Go ahead. I'll wait here. So we both watched the one cop climb up the ladder to the roof and set himself. I still can't really see in he said still on the escape. I think I'm going to climb on the roof and see if I can look down. So we watched him climb on the roof and lean out. I still can't see he shouted down. The other building was less than five feet away from him now. The cop named Joe hollered up. Why don't you lean on the other building and see if you can get a view?

The cop nodded and then leaned across the two buildings like a bridge. Yeah, OK, I can see into the apartment. Nobodies there. Alright, Joe said. Come on back down. The cop stayed as a bridge against the sky. I can't get back. I'm stuck. Come up and help me. Joe shook his head. No can do. I'm afraid of heights. Now you tell me..Jesus! I can get him back I said to Joe. He shrugged. Go ahead. So I monkeyed up the fire escape and swung onto the roof.

The cop was leaning over with his hands extended to the other building. You going to pull me back?  Yeah. Don't fricking drop me. Alright. I grabbed onto his thick gun belt. You ready? Yeah. Don't drop me. I won't I promised. One two three! I pulled back on his belt and he fell back into me and we stumbled away from the roofs edge. He was sweating and took off his hat and looked at me. I'm getting way too old for this shit, he said shaking his head.

They made their way down the fire escape and I went back in through my window and sat back down at my computer. I banged my story out in less than an hour.

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

Maybe this is as good as it gets

As a writer you are used to hard times. You do not question those hard times and think well easy times are on the way. You just accept the hard times as the way things are and deal accordingly. This allows you to navigate the very hard existence that is the writers lot and get on with the business at hand. After you accept the situation then you are empowered because you are not waiting  anymore. This is the way it is. This is as good as it gets.

Our economy might be as good as it gets. If you turn off the crack cocaine of easy credit for the last twenty five years and accept we now live in a global economy with no lock down on markets, then you start to think well maybe this is really our economy  Take away that rocket fuel of stimulus credit and the good ship prosperity does not seem so close anymore. It is a sobering thought.

We are waiting though. We are waiting to uncork the champagne when the good times return. We envision a starting gun going off or damn being opened or a tidal wave of pent up  demand to sweep over the country and the good times will be back and we will all wipe our brow and say, wow, glad that's over. But what if the situation we are in right now is the real economy? If you take away the artificial stimulus of money for nothing and accept we must compete in world markets, then maybe this is what our revved down economy feels  like. Not a Mustang, but maybe a slow steady Buick.

This would mean millions of people are waiting for nothing. Millions of people are not taking bad jobs or menial jobs on the bet that the good ship prosperity is just over the horizon. I know twenty somethings who have come out of stellar Universities who have been out of work for years. They are waiting for their anointed jobs to return. But maybe the straight commission job of the insurance salesman, the door to door salesman, the Amway salesman, the copier salesman, the telemarketer, the fry cook, the MacDonald's position, the cable technician...maybe these are the real jobs of our economy and we better start going after them. Maybe, this is as good as it gets.

Bestselling author William Hazelgrove is the Hemingway writer in residence for the Ernest Hemingway Foundation. He has written four novels, reviews and features for USA TODAY and been the subject of stories in the NY Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, and NPR'S All Things Considered. His forthcoming novel is Rocket Man. More information can be gathered at www.billhazelgrove.com

The Atlantic Review of Freedom

Well somebody had to do it. The review in the Atlantic burns Mr. Franzen to the ground and calls him a bad writer, basically a blogger, and skewers the book as trivial. The basic argument is that there is nothing to the novel except a lot of everything but the kitchen sink. The review is extensive and really one should read it because it probably asks the question in a very basis sense...where's the beef?

Truly there is this aspect to Franzen fiction. Dazzled by the run of facts and plot twists and well just words and words and words,  his fiction does leave one thinking that maybe serious fiction took a turn in the road and you missed it. Writers are forever on the lookout for something new and with Franzen you think, well I will never do that...I simply don't know enough. But then does all that information lend itself to novels?

Novels are funny creatures. The perfect novel is elusive, so we settle on something that elevates and hopefully people can enjoy from all walks of life. Along comes Franzen and says no no no the novel is gigantic and sprawling and encompasses just about everything and you really don't have to dip too far into the well of character, just keep moving. I of course am pulling from his novel The Corrections (I have not read Freedom) and books of essays I have read. His style is not that different from nonfiction to fiction.

So I understand why The Atlantic went after him. There is something missing from his fiction. Maybe some sort of  humanism, but that is not it really, because in the final chapter of The Corrections we find a very human family falling apart.  Mr. Franzen writes about family extensively yet he has no children, no family of his own...not that you have to have children to write about families, but it does give you another dimension beyond the oh my God bourgeois family life is a dysfunctional horror theme.You don't want to fall into the old why do you write depressing books because fiction asks questions and gets under our skin if it is any good. But does Franzen skate on the surface while letting go with his staccato observations because  cold intellectualism ultimately gets in his way? Maybe he does know too much.



William Hazelgrove's latest novel is Rocket Man
www.billhazelgrove.com

Is our Literary American Dream Dead?

Maybe the President should stop the town hall meetings. It looked pretty bad when the African American woman said she was about to start eating hot dogs and beans. The President smiled, looked really prosperous, then spun into his answer. Or the guy who asked him point blank...tell me, is the American Dream Dead? He was sincere. And the President had no answer. I guess you have to decide what the American Dream really is.

Horatio Alger is our first stop on the trail of the American Dream; these books published in the late nineteenth early twentieth century were the poor boy who raises up to take over the company and become rich. Very much part of our culture. Anyone can become rich. Anyone can become President. We see this played out in our movies and books constantly. We constantly hold up the lowly outsider who rises to fame and fortune and achieves greatness.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's the Great Gatsby is the classic questioning of this economic nirvana. The price is just too high for Gatsby's dream and Nick Caraway returns to the Midwest looking for salvation in old traditional values in a world vanishing from twentieth century America. Then our dream was updated through television and questioned in novels such as Revolutionary Road. Our modern American dream is not so much the self made man, but the man or woman who plugs into a corporation and gets security and a job and a house that appreciates along with a 401K. That is the American dream that was destroyed in the crash.

So we still spin this question around. The classic economic model of the American Dream seems to be dead. Our happiness came from our gratification in the land of plenty. Maybe the American Dream needs to be revised. Maybe the American Dream will have to fall back to this is enough, because there might not be anymore for a long time to come.

William Hazelgrove's latest novel is Rocket Man. A story of the American dream in reverse
http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The 9/11 Essays in the Attic

Right after 9/11 I was gripped like everyone else and felt I had to do something. So I came up with the idea of getting responses on the tragedy from other authors. I contacted authors I knew and authors I didn't know and came up with quite a list. Everyone from Scott Turow to Rick Bragg to Dave Barry. I collected the essays and started about trying to find a publisher. We found several who were interested and my agent prepared to set up the deal.
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/2001-10-18-writers.htm


But in the chaotic days after September 11 everyone was struggling with how to get a handle on this tragedy. Some publishers said it was too soon. Others said they were being swamped with 9/11 projects. Some thought 9/11 would fall from the public consciousness. One publisher proposed to put it in a shoe box with other mementos. We were never quite sure how that would work.

Finally an editor wanted to take the project on. The day he was to make the deal he lost his job. The essays went into a folder and began to gather dust. I took them out today and read through some of them. What jumps out at you is the feeling of anything could happen. These are authors who make a living out of writing books and they wrote like men and women under fire.  The frantic quality of the writing is something you would expect out of someone who has lived through the Holocaust.

But that is the way it was then. You just didn't know what was next. One world vanished and another world began. Even our polarized country can be attributed to the politics of fear that began after 9/11. I suppose that is what these essays are all about. Fear. And it is a pity they never saw the light of day because they are as historical as any letters from World War II. I guess all wars are about fear. America  knows what that's all about now.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
William Hazelgrove's latest novel is Rocket Man.

Dirty Sexy Books

Meghan McCain is making all the stops with her celeb book Dirty Sexy Politics. You can almost see John McCain's daughter sitting in a room with the publisher trying to figure out a title for a book about nothing. Put her on the cover with an elephant. Sex sells. Dirty sex sells more. Dirty Sexy Politics. The perfect black to McCain's white. The renegade daughter telling all the dirty sexy secrets of John McCain's political campaign. After her horror over Sarah Palin, I ask you, does anybody really want to hear the dirty sexy secrets of John McCain's campaign?

Probably not. But the book of nothing is the rage. You merely have to be related to someone famous or do something outrageous for a book. But publishers know these books have no shelf life. The book of nothing is mind candy that gets old fast so the only chance is the talk show circuit, the title, and the cover. If the author is good looking, outspoken, media savvy, and sexy, then so much the better. Even Rachel Maddow bowed to the mechanics of celebrity publishing by asking no questions on substance. Or maybe there wasn't anything to ask.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "all cheap entertainment is immoral...it is heroin of the soul." Celebrity books give that heroin with the promise of nothing more than maybe a salacious secret. We hope for an inside scoop, some sort of peeping through the keyhole for the price of a hardcover. Meghan was horrified with her father's pick of Sarah Palin. We all were. But once we know the secret and have looked at the pictures, then the book is worthless. We have no more emotional attachment to it than the empty wrapper of a candy bar, proving the point that fame without talent is an empty wrapper.

So Meghan McCain will do the tour with her Dirty Sexy Politics book and then she will finish with that and the book will fall from view and it will be dead. There are no redeeming qualities for the book of nothing. Literature, while quiet in it's launch, does have staying power. Simply because we invest something of ourselves in the story and while it may not be sexy, and the cover may be staid, we put it on our shelf to be read again. Maybe, just to know that there is something more to the world than dirty sexy books.

William Hazelgrove's latest novel Rocket Man is due out in the fall
www.billhazelgrove.com

Writers Never Retire

Retirement. Where does that come from? Some sort of hangover from the World War II generation. Certainly the people who grew up in the last Great Depression never thought about retirement. Something companies and stock brokers came up with so people would invest their money. Whole generations working based on the dream or the promise that one day they could hang it up like Mr. Jet Blue and just say screw it, I'm done and now I am going to kick back. Asta La Vista baby. Then again, maybe not.

New York Times says people are really frightened now they won't be able to retire. The massive unemployment is draining savings and 401Ks and the houses aren't worth half their value anymore and the stock market crashed. Bottom line, people who assumed they were going to retire are thinking they may work until the day they die. Grim reality and very frightening for many, but for writers, it is something we have always known, because writers never retire.

It is write until you drop. That is the writer credo, if there is one. Once you commit to the road of the writer then security goes right out the window. You make peace early on with the fact you will never retire, in fact you don't even recognize the concept. What? Sit around and do nothing? If retirement is doing what you want then writers are already retired. The road of the writer is constant struggle. And if you aren't down with that in the beginning then pick something else.

So in a way the writer is recession proof. No one becomes a writer because they crave financial security. They crave something else. A walk on the wild side, a life less certain perhaps. But the promise of a nirvana at the end of years and years of writing. I don't think so. The only promise for the writer is that he will get up the next morning, sit down, and begin again.

William Hazelgrove's latest novel Rocket Man is due out this month.
http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Fiction and Politics

I was reading Frank Rich's editorial on Obama's speech on the end of the war in Iraq when he made an interesting connection. He basically said that Obama did not read Franzen's new novel because there is no way he would have made the speech he did if he had. Ahah. Well, obviously Frank Rich read his book because he then gave a mini description and said Franzen had defined freedom in a way that made Obama's speech look shallow and disingenuous. Boy, when the NY Times go for a book they really go for a book!

Invoking fiction is fine. It is even better now that fiction is under siege for relevancy in the digital age. So I applaud drawing a line between big themes and a current novel. Obviously Frank Rich felt in his piece that the President had been laying it on thick on a war that should have never been started in the first place and that Franzen's novel sums up this theme of Freedom, encompassing even our debacle in the Mid East as well.

Franzen might well have put his finger on something here. Presidents are influenced by literature. We all heard about Obama reading Lincoln's letters and that his favorite novel  BF (before Franzen) was For Whom the Bell Tolls and that he is a very accomplished writer himself. Now whether or not he squeezed in Franzen's novel on vacation is any one's guess. It is a long book and so maybe between wife and children and all those pesky duties of being President, he didn't finish the book.

Let's say he did finish the novel, would insights gained by reading Freedom had changed the President's speech on the end of our combat role in Iraq? Ah probably not. No offense to Jonathan Franzen, but the nuances of fiction are more subtle than the hard ball of geopolitics and let's face it...ah, it is fiction.

William Hazelgrove's latest novel is Rocket Man
http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Problem with the Kindle

So I have always taken the view that if anyone wants to read my novel on a screen that is fine. But then as I was reading from that dinosaur of pulp and ink...the book....it hit me. Reading fiction from a screen is different than reading it from paper. The message changes. I know this because when I edit novels I work for a long time on the screen, but then I have print it out to read it through. And it changes. I see a hundred things I didn't see before. Now why is that?

Simply put fiction takes a form on the page. The paragraph, sentence, dialogue have an actual shape that we pick up in our mind and transmute to an image. Let's say we read a dangling sentence that is something like, DIE! And lets say that is out there by itself. Our mind will rev up the that one exclamatory word until it becomes a statement with all sorts of connotations. Then let's say we slip into description of a goat cart starting down the road. "The goat cart jerked back as it pulled forward. " The words actually move. Jerked back collides with pulled forward. The sentence is alive and we see the goat cart jerk back and then pull forward.

This takes place on the page. In the world of kindle this takes place, but in a much different form. The glowing screen informs the work or changes the words and changes the image. Our brain interprets that image differently from the text on paper. It just does. Put aside the fact that in a lot of Ereaders text is rearranged with breaks in paragraphs and sentences routinely scrambled. Well this can be worked out, but the lack of physicality to the words existing on paper makes the world inhabited more of a phantom.

Hogwash the converted scream. Really? Take the digital revolution and the IPOD. Listening to digitized music on tiny ear plugs is immensely different than analog music on a stereo in a room with sound dampening furniture and wood floors. The music then comes alive. Compare that with the tinny little buzz that comes out of an IPOD. There is no comparison. Music changed once it became digitized and we weren't quite sure how for a long time, but it just does.

So in the Kindle revolution there will be something lost. I read text all the time on screens, my Blackberry, you name it. But when I settle in with a book in a chair in a library and I see those words on the page take shape, then I enter the world as the author saw it. And that is verisimilitude. Something quietly being lost in the digital age.

William Hazelgrove's latest novel is Rocket Man.
http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Mark Twain and blogging

The first thing you realized when you read Mark Twain's biography is there is nothing new under the sun. He wrote satire and lampooned politicians and just about anybody else. And he was attacked for it. People attacked him in the press, in letters, personally, physically. He literally had to leave California because of people he had offended in various editorials. Then he would give satiric speeches to huge audiences that were comedic and cutting.

Cut to the modern writer of today. If you write on the Internet at all then you lay yourself open to all sorts of criticism. Write some satire or something political and it can get downright nasty. But mostly you end up with people sniping at you though the great firewall of the Internet. When else in life can you insult someone without facing them?

Writing a book is a much safer bet. The book comes out and you get a few reviews but basically people have to accept it for what it is. The very give and take of the Internet is much closer to Twain's kind of writing where people reacted quickly and let him know it. So far the bloggiing has been one of putting a piece out there and then having people react to it with comments. I wonder when people will have to start leaving town to get away from their critics?

William Hazelgrove's latest novel is Rocket Man.
"Funniest novel since Russo's Straight Man."
                                                    Chicago Sun Times

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Insecurity of the Writer or that mysterious Writers Block

Writers are an insecure group of people. Even writers who have been published numerous times. There is something about the act of writing that seems to care not about your last book, story, article. The only question for the writer is can you do it again? A lot of people deal with this very real fear by just plowing right  back in and starting something new right away. For other writers they need a break for the vessel to refill. And some people don't start again.

I remember a writers group where someone asked if there was anyone who had not experienced writers block. I raised my hand and was met with expressions of oh come on. I had not experienced writers block at that point. I still haven't, but I have experienced bad writing. I have a theory that you have to write badly for a long time before you write well and I have the boxes of manuscripts to prove it.

Maybe writing is like firing a gun. A lot of times it just misfires. And then sometimes for no reason at all you are dead on target. If you are a novelist then this can be very gratifying because you are not wasting years of your life on bad novels. There is nothing worse that reading your own work and realizing it just doesn't have it and you are better off starting over. It happens more than you like to admit.

That is where the insecurity or fear comes in. Is this thing any good? Will I ever write something good again? Did I write something good before and if so how did I pull it off? Part of the mystery of writing is you are not quite sure how all the rusty wires work. In fact it is better not to look to closely, better to just say a quick prayer, jump off that cliff again, and hope for the best.

William Hazelgrove's latest novel Rocket Man is due out in September.
www.billhazelgrove.com

As Book Stores Close...

What is the writer to do as the book stores close? Not much. Keep on writing. One feels at times like you are writing through a war during this age of transition. Run out and buy a Kindle? They keep falling in price and now there is practically no excuse to not buy one. Before the price was prohibitive and they seemed a little weird and gimmicky and bulky. Not so anymore. Small, sleek, and cheap. $139 at the last check and they will surely come down more.

So then you have to think about reading from a screen. Reading a book is partly enjoyable because you are not reading from a screen. Something pleasing about holding the paper between your fingers and nothing flickering or whirring or dying from a weak battery. You can toss that book under your bed, smudge it with jelly or stain it with coffee. And it still works! But then there is that thing called the economies of scale in publishing running everyone down.

Brick and mortar book stores might become dinosaurial. All that paper sitting in a warehouse essentially. But then a blockbuster comes along and all that paper flies right out. A Kindle blockbuster would be much more muted. A ten million download bestseller! Wow! Did you see that server go! Something about it is just not as exciting as watching people line up to buy their favorite book from their favorite author.

But the times are a changing and publishing will bow to our version of the IPOD revolution. Hopefully it won't leave publishing as tattered as the music business. In the mean time, nothing to do but to keep on keeping on...imagine how those scribes felt when they saw that printing press.

William Hazelgrove's latest novel is Rocket Man due out in September
www.billhazelgrove.com

That Fifty Cent Second Novel

Ran into an old friend from high school the other day while I was typing away in a coffee house.
We hooked up and went to a bar and passed the time and that's when he told me had picked up my second novel at a library sale for fifty cents. He said the library was cleaning out some of their beat up paperbacks and mine was on a table.

He proceeded to then tell me how much he was enjoying the book. He wanted to know all about my research and had I really lived in the South. As we sat at the bar he started to bring up obscure scenes I had really forgotten all about. He described moments that were very touching for him and said there were moments of drama that made made him forget I had written it.

He then began to ask me how much I had been paid for the book and wanted to know if I got a royalty when  book was sold by a library for fifty cents. I told him no and when I told him how much I was initially paid he said he had no idea that someone paid that much for a book.  I told him that was a different time and I explained the seven years it took me to write the book and the research and the grind to find a publisher and all the hell every writer goes through trying to get their work out to the public .

Again, he said he had no idea. He made me promise not to tell him how the book ended. We sat drinking for a while longer and then traded phone numbers and that was it. I thought about it later as I went home on the train. A book you spend years and years writing someone picks up for fifty cents. It's a good thing writing is not about the money.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Writer in Hard Times

These are hard times. On this we can agree. The writer in hard times is actually better equipped for the deprivation that comes when the coins stop clinking. Apologies to all writers who laugh to the bank for the next sentence...Because writers are always having hard times. When someone decides to become a scribbler of literary fiction or any type of fiction then you make peace with the fact you will probably be broke a lot of your life. It comes with the territory, in fact hard times informs the work.

The obvious reference to Hemingway on the left bank stating hunger made his stories better is probably a little over the top, especially since he had his wife's trust fund to fall back on. But certainly the struggling writer (is there any other kind) produces his work out of a pressure that is exerted by his situation. If fiction is produced by incongruities in a persons psychological makeup then it is certainly ratcheted up by the tectonics of being unable to make a living. The struggling artist is not really a stereotype, artists do struggle, they struggle every damn day to produce their work and survive.

So when hard times hit then the struggling writer usually is fully armed. He or she may fall further down the economic totem pole, but the psychological armor is there. Writers never define themselves by bourgeois standards or at least they shouldn't. Writers define themselves by their work and most are happy to have the basics covered so the work can be accomplished. Whenever I took a job I always evaluated it not on how much I made, but how much I could write! This is not a normal evaluation and one thing writers find out before most people is that being broke is a state of mind and if you let it get you then it will.

So maybe art is for a man with a full belly, as EM. Forester said in Howards End, but  the artist writer survives through good times and bad and yes it is probably true you write better with your back against the wall. In that way, we should see a literary flowering any day now as the Great Recession drags on and on and on.

William Hazelgrove's latest novel Rocket Man is due out in September. www.billhazelgrove.com

Stuck in a Rewrite Again

Someone once said that you don't become a writer until you learn to rewrite. For most writers rewriting is drudgery. When I first started out I had a bad habit of writing first drafts and then leaving them to sit. Sometimes I went back and other times I didn't. The truth was I didn't want to go back after the thrill ride of the first draft. I felt in some sense I was finished with my novel and that it's merit would shine through to editors. Right.

A hundred rejection letters later I started to buckle down and rewrite. But of course I didn't really know what I was doing. F. Scott Fitzgerald said you don't rewrite to achieve a smooth surface, you rewrite to discover the inner truth of your characters. So I  bought a book called Revising Fiction  and went to work highlighting all the rules. This began a process that lasted for years. For most writers the rewrite is a long arduous process of cutting, condensing, revising, rewriting. The hard part is to re-imagine your book. In a sense you are starting over, but this time you have a road map.

The terror of the first draft is you have no map and have to hack one out through uncharted territory. The terror of the rewrite is there is a road and you are essentially stuck on it for possibly years. Boredom can become an enemy. In my second novel Tobacco Sticks I rewrote for seven years! Of course, I was learning as I went so it became a crazy process of reaching the end and then realizing the beginning now needed to be brought up to the level of the end. This went on for years.

But there does come a point where you know the book is basically finished. You could tweak your work  forever, but that is when you have to know that you are essentially rewriting for yourself. So you finish your rewrite and are free once again to pursue a new first draft. Of course then you will be stuck in another rewrite. 

William Hazelgrove's latest novel Rocket Man is due out in September. www.billhazelgrove.com

The Permanent Unemployed of the coffee houses

As a writer I am in a lot of coffee houses and man you see them everywhere. The unemployed men you pick them out in a second. They are a lot of white guys with beards and goatees. Grey haired. They meet people in the coffee shops and talk in hushed voices. They read with the paper hiding their face. They meet at park benches and walk up and down the street with other men. They are the displaced work force of the Great Recession who will probably never go back to work. Like cattle they have been marginalized early in the ungracious retirement that is a massive economic realignment.

Call it what you will but the economy will become something else. It will become a cyber based green based machine that will be global in scope. It will move away from brick and mortar and the jobs offered will be different than those that exist today. The upheaval of the economy is a massive displacement of people and skill sets that have experienced sudden obsolescence. This is not a pause, this is a metamorphosis that will shed older workers like leaves that have grown brittle.

The young workers will fill the funnel first and then there might be some filling in. But middle aged white men will not be called up. There has been a fundamental shift in the tectonic plates of our everyday life and the slushy credit market that allowed companies to carry people in bloated management does not exist and will not exist again. That great run started by the greatest generation fizzled with the rise of China and the implosion of the derivative market. The funny money of twenty years vanished into the Monopoly board and left only the players...but without a game or money or properties worthless, the game is shelved for the new reality of  Don't Wake Daddy...because daddy has nowhere to go.

William Hazelgrove's new novel Rocket Man is due out in September. The story of a man who moves to the suburbs and loses his mind. www.billhazelgrove.com

The Monday Morning Writer

Monday morning comes for the writer just like everybody else. Long ago I set my schedule to the five day work week and I rarely write on weekends. So like everyone else I have to find myself again after two days of not writing or even thinking about writing. Add a little partying in there and you have a foggy swamp you have to navigate through and you aren't even sure where you left the paddle.

Somewhere there is a novel that ended back on Friday. Amazing you can still track the thing after a few days of  doing just about everything else. But like every person in the country you are sitting down at your desk to find that other world again. It is the world that gives you the circles under your eyes and the death pallor. Conversations from dinners, parties, errant bits of trash float through your brain as you drink coffee and read and try and fire up the motor. It has become a little cranky after two days rest.

Like the rest of the world you wonder again at what the life of doing nothing would be like. Maybe you really don't have to work. Maybe there is a better way. You let that one go as your computer looks for that last file you were working on. Ah here it is. Stuck in a rewrite. Well at least it's not a first draft. Those are a real bitch after two days off...where did you leave that character and what the hell is he doing in a brothel?

But a rewrite is a path through the forest. Let's see, ah yes, this scene. Right. Another sip of coffee. What is wrong here. Only everything. Did I really stop here? Must have. Ok. Second time through, still loaded up with all the redundancy of the first draft. Start here. No. Cut that. Start here. Much better. Another sip of coffee. Right. Here we go. Sigh. Mondays....

William Hazelgrove's latest novel, Rocket Man due out in September. The story of a man who loses his mind after moving to the suburbs.
www.billhazelgrove.com

Talking movies but reading the book

Whenever I get together with friends inevitably we end up talking movies. Movies are the new books nothing new there. I enjoy talking movies and it is not that dissimilar from talking books. There are discussions of plot, setting, endings, denouement, dialogue, action, content.Obviously movies a lot of times fall simply into the is it any good category which gets a nod or a not so good. But even this gives one insight into a persons tastes. Then you tell them you read the book.

Now this is a thing of mine. I see a movie or hear of a movie and I will pick up the book. No Country for Old Men and Crazyheart come to mind. The people I was talking with loved both movies and after we talked about the merits of both films I said I had read the book for both films. There was polite interest and some discussion about the difference between the book and the movie. Then that was it. We were off to talking about other movies.

Its not that reading the book makes one more of an authority or gives a person a lock on the movie. But you do see the original vision for the story. If the book is the bible then the movie is merely a disciple. But of  course there are many times the movie is better than the book, in fact they are very different creatures. Sideways comes to mind. The movie was very good whereas the novel just didn't have the same punch. One can see the difference and of course the great example in reverse is The Great Gatsby which will remain the novel of the twentieth century and Coppola's attempt to bring the story to the screen an abysmal failure to render the magic of Fitzgerald's prose.

I do enjoy talking movies because for me it is not that far from a literary discussion. Reading the book might just be my hangup. I sure don't expect others to jump on that wagon when after all, they can see the movie.

William Hazelgrove's latest novel due out in September is Rocket Man. The story of a man moving to the suburbs and losing his mind.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Novelist on Time Magazine

Jonathan Franzen is on the cover of Time Magazine for his new novel Freedom. Time is thin gruel for news now but a novelist making it on the cover of any magazine is something to note. Rock stars, politicians, tyrants, terrorists...they have all been there but few writers. Franzen looks like a writer with a stubble and glasses and some kind of strange toning that makes it look like he just might be animated.

That Time decided to put a novelist on the front and declared him the next...what? Voice of all mankind, his generation...a strange bird still at large during the Internet...a literary writer, is very encouraging to all writers. Sure, everyone wants to be on the cover of a magazine but writers get such little play that it is good someone in the editorial offices of Time  took a flyer on that art of old...the fiction writer who might just put substance before money. It did stand out as something different.

The dentists office I discovered this magazine in was plastered in tabloid fair and wannabe People magazine ripoffs. I was alone in my reading of Franzen's life as a bird watcher, his lifestyle between New York and San Diego something to envy, and of course his new novel. They even broke out writers into three categories, literary guard, contemporary novelists (Franzen and a few others) and then the up and coming young Turks. The decisions on these writers is not necessarily books sales which makes it more interesting. Time previewed Franzen on the cover as saying he is not a rich writer. Or the richest. This alone would buck the trend of magazine covers. Superlatives aside, richest in America is usually game over. Most famous for whatever reason including quitting your airline job might be cause for getting on a cover. But to write a literary novel that does well and might sum up our time...well, that usually is found in Publishers Weekly or the New York Times book review.

So maybe it is the fact that Time magazine is on life support they decided to throw one for the gipper. Maybe Franzen really is a breed alone that deserves to be on the cover of Time. He did dish Oprah and sold even more books because of it. But then again, maybe someone, occasionally, puts art over commerce, and we see a man with a stubble and glasses, looking like, well, a writer.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Biking and Writing

In my latest novel Rocket Man the main character keeps his sanity from biking. He goes off on country roads to try and make sense of the world, riding at night and early morning while his life goes off the rails. It is a testament to him that he doesn't lose his mind as he loses his house and his wife. But it is biking that gives him his only glimmer of sanity. It is biking that allows him to carry on,

Writers must find some release. Something that will take them out of their world for a while and for me it is in the physical momentum of biking. Something about taking off at dawn and jetting out into the countryside with a back pack of water and blasting out the days carbo load that just seems to reset the clock. It isn't that the problems aren't still there, it is just that for an hour the world stands uniform as I concentrate on miles per hour and an average speed of sixteen point five.

Going fast is the thrill. A lot like writing. You just forget yourself and go for it. You don't plan it out, you just make sure you have all your gear on and then out into the cool of early dawn. Some days you ride like a God and other days you just cant seem to get a rhythm. Some days you know all the tricks and you amaze yourself with the speed and ease of the ride. Some days you just are glad to make it back. But like writing, you start over every day you ride...hoping for a personal best, trying to outdo yourself once again.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/