Afternoon of an Author

You do it Stopping by a library for the Wifi connection you take a stroll in the stacks with your Kindle. Irony upon irony. You float along eyes scanning and the the H's begin and you see the first cover and then the next. It is your hometown library and they have multiple copies of all your books. And so you thumb that first one that you agonized over for seven years. It is well thumbed and someone has scribbled in pencil on the first page. Some of the pages are bent. The library pocket has your birthday stamped and followed by a dash How long until that final date?

The second book has been brutally abused. A good sign of anxious readers. The pages are even more worn, some turned back to mark a spot. Someone has dumped a glob of coffee that stained the cover page brown. You slip through the pages that took another seven years to produce. It is quiet in it's plastic cover that the small publisher had created but had now dimmed and turned to a yellowed plastic. The third novel looks like it just came off the shelf and has not seen the same action of the others. It was a quieter novel though more violent. The publisher had gone all  out and the author photo looks like that of a very prominent successful man of the literary world.

The fourth novel, your most recent has truly been abused. The cover is dog eared and coffee seems to have been dumped on several pages in wholesale quantities. Maybe jelly stains on a few other pages. There were more local references in this one so maybe people thumbed through quickly. The book already looks older than others but it is of a cheaper quality, more modern, less heft.

So you slide the books back and wonder what testament there will be to a person reading now. With a kindle there is none. You read and download another Very convenient, fast, changing that physical interaction. None of these old battle hardened soldiers of the public library. You wonder how long they will last now that the digital age of books is here.

You walk on. Your afternoon is almost over and it is time to go back to work. Just a little less enthusiasm as you open your computer. You sigh as your Kindle warms up.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

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/

The Lady Waiting for the Train

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Down and Out of Writing

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Paying Thirty Four Bucks for Twain's Book

So do you pay the big number and have a tombstone square of paper that you can either read or beat off an intruder and probably be charged with reading a concealed weapon? Twain's  book is big and it is expensive. Yeah I know so and so has it for blah blah. Well I couldn't find it anywhere except the little independent bookstore that supported my book and that thirty four bucks is with a ten percent author discount!

And I vacillate. Christmas. Blowing lots of dough on gifts and everything else commensurate with making merry and what I am going to go plunk down thirty four bucks for a book when people are downloading for ten bucks? No. I'm not going to to do it! Even though I special ordered the thing and they got it in and gave me to Friday (today) to come in and pick it up or they would sell it to the next person in line who requested a copy and by the way the publisher is totally backlogged and so good luck finding it somewhere else. Still, I hesitate and sit in the coffee shop across the way telling myself in a very Scrooge like way that it is ridiculous to pay thirty four dollars for a book!

My brother said he would wait for the paperback. Sensible. Very sensible. Wait for the price to fall and of course it will and paying thirty four dollars now for the book is just plain stupid. Why times being what they are that thirty four dollars could go a long way in food or other necessities and of course you can't eat a book and you can't pay your electric bill or gas up your car with a book so it is utterly ridiculous to pay thirty four bucks for something clearly I could do without. I mean I am still trying to finish Jonathan Ferris second novel and it has slowed down and I am reading Dickens again and I am thinking about cracking Portis's True Grit which is in my backpack as well and so it is ridiculous to add this monstrous book to my list and pay thirty four Somalians!

So into the car. Yes, Yes. All done and go pick up the kids and get the tires changed on the car. There. You cant' put a book on your wheels. Tires. Practical. Practical. Keep driving. Yes, well, I'll just stop in and let them know I don't want the book. That is only fair. They close at five and it is four forty five. Yes. Ok. Park the car. Yes. Just let them know. Hello. Oh, you are here for your book....let me get it for you. Wow! Look at the size of that thing. Ha! Wow! Just let him know now that you don't want it. Jesus, it is huge. Just let him know. Now.Well, we had a lot of people who want this book but I held it. So, will that be cash or credit? I stare at him and my mouth moves in the proper direction and I nod and let him know that I will be making the sensible decision right now! Ah, I say, you know what? Yes? Ah, I really think I should....Yes? I should, I should...I should really....Yes? I should, should, should, should, should. Yes? Yes? I should, should should, should, should, should, shoooould... Yes? Yes? Yes? ...PUT IT ON CREDIT!

 Fine, I'll wrap it up.

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

A Book By a Dog

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mozart was broke...another struggling artist

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

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

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

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

Excuse my rant about the New York Times Book Review

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

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

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

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

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

When you know you have to leave your writing group

You come into your writing group full of great intentions and are delighted to find kindred souls, people who do this brain cracking work of writing and for a long time you glide along with your fellow scribes. You look forward to reading your work and getting the feedback and now you have a thick skin and are able to ferret out the good criticism from the bad and you all sort of move along at the same pace and then suddenly like high school, you graduate...you get published.

For me it wasn't such a draconian moment. My publisher was tiny and in Chicago. Still, I brought the galleys with me and showed them around and it was then I felt a sea change. Everyone nodded and murmured congratulations and then the group fell into its old routine. I was in the middle of editing the galleys so I hadn't really written anything new and  I read some of the novel.  The comments were muted, some were complimentary, but I felt I had brought a gun to a knife fight.

So I took a few weeks off and worked on my galleys. When I returned I was exhausted and hollow eyed  and only had my novel to read again. I sat and listened to the same works in progress, the bits of poetry, short stories, fragments of novels, then it came to Robert's piece. Robert wrote non fiction for a small magazine in the city. He tried to write fiction but it never worked. For years we had listened to Robert read these words that were like boxcars in a line but there was no ignition. We had all been in a secret conspiracy with Robert, who was a very nice guy, to give him a pass and not really criticize his work.

But this time I felt we were doing Robert a huge disservice. For two years I had been listening to Robert's bad fiction and for two years I had said nothing. He was a lifer. They existed in groups. People who came for the social aspect as much as the writing. And so you laid off. But l had changed. Something about working on those galleys with an editor had pushed me to the next level and I couldn't go back. So when it came to me, I blasphemed. I commented on Roberts work.

We are doing Robert a big disservice here. I looked around at the group. We haven't been honest with him...I paused. We haven't told him his fiction doesn't work. Someone dropped a pen. Someone coughed. I have violated a group taboo. A little man named Pee Wee who was also a lifer piped up. You have no right to judge Roberts fiction that way. I looked at him. Are you kidding? That's why we are here. No, Pee Wee persisted. You are assuming you know good fiction and Robert doesn't and you have no right to tell him he doesn't know how to write fiction.

And it was then I knew I was done. The group that I had been so much a part of for years was suddenly irrelevant. I couldn't stay if  I wanted too. So I sat through the rest of the readings and said nothing. There was no point. I never went back. It was much later I realized my crime wasn't that I had criticized Robert's writing, it was actually something much deeper and much more serious-- I had stumbled into becoming  a professional.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

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

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