#Henrystrong

When Jennifer Regan the school librarian texted me to ask if I would speak to a boy who had been  brutally assaulted in a middle school in South Elgin because The Pitcher was his favorite book and she felt if I would go see him in the ICU in the hospital it would lift his spirits... I said sure. I did not know about Henry but then of course I did and was shocked along with everyone else at what happened to this seventh grader. So I spoke with his mother who told me they had come home and would I come to the house. Absolutely.

I did some more research and saw that Anthony Rizzo among others had lent their support in fact it seemed the whole Cubs team was all about supporting Henry. #henrystrong was fast becoming a big twitter feed with people all over the country giving the middle school pitcher encouragement. This would be a first for me. Authors spend most of their time holed up over garages or in attics and then the rest of the time beating the promotion tom tom where you feel akin to an aluminum siding salesman hawking your wares. So this would be nice

Henry was just like any other boy, full of dreams, hopes. We talked baseball, pitching, cubs. I told him the story of how I came to write  The Pitcher which is the story of  a boy with a dream to make the high school baseball team. Henry is almost the same age as Ricky and will be facing that same challenge  soon. And then after signing a book and a poster it was time to go. Much too fast but the family has it's hands full with the many aspects of an event where normal life is put on  hold as media, lawyers, doctors move in.

Little did I know that when I wrote about a boy with everything against him with a single dream to become a pitcher for the Chicago Cubs one day,.. I would meet him in the flesh. Go Henry.
Go #henrystrong.

William Hazelgrove

The Last Frontier

When I was up in the Boundary Waters on the old logging roads on a motorcycle following the grey sandy roads through fallen trees and second growth forests I had the feeling that I was on the edge of the last frontier. It was summer and I had been away from the "Lower forty eight" for three weeks and one definitely felt there was this life and there was the modern life below.

You do not have to look for the reason people went West. They went West to find themselves. The frontier was declared closed in 1880 by Frederick Jackson Turner and this left people with the notion the Great Adventure was over. It was not. The million acres Teddy Roosevelt set aside on the top of the country that became the Boundary Waters was and is largely untouched.

When I was researching Jack Pine I was amazed to learn all the trees had been logged out and that all I was seeing was the Jack Pine. One can only imagine what the country looked like with the towering white pines all well over three hundred years. I haven't been back to The Boundary Waters since those years of research. But I will go back one day...if for nothing else than to see the Last Frontier one more time.

Jack Pine

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

The New Starbucks Era of the Office

When I go to Starbucks to work it is jammed. And not with the artists of old but the business people of new. People are obviously are working more and more from home and they don't want to work at home. I get that. Home is where the stress is. Home is where the quiet is. Home is where people aren't. The biggest thing people face working at home is there is no work buzz. There is no camaraderie. Starbucks solves these problems.

There is music. There are people. There is a buzz. And American business should think about this because offices have become morgues. The Internet killed the noise of the office. There used to be the ringing phones and people conversing, , meeting, talking. Not anymore. There is on the soft click of keyboards. People send emails to other people one cube over. This silence is not good for people who have to work.

I worked in an office once with a manager who could not stand noise. The office was a morgue. People hated coming in. People need noise. They need to feel like they are part of the whole or they feel like it is them against the world. Starbucks provides the buzz of old. People talk laugh cry yell work spill things. There is the sound of commerce. Corporate America should wake up and take a page out of Starbucks atmospherics.

Maybe they could even serve coffee. What a concept.

www.williamhazelgrove.com

Pricing Ebooks in Todays Market

The problem is nobody knows how to price an ebook. The publishers don't and neither do the authors because there is no floor and the market is in flux. Nobody knows where the threshold lies for a book without a physical presence. How do you price something that costs nothing to produce? And whats worse how do you price something that a lot of people are giving away for free?

That is the hell of todays publishing market. There is no way to set a market. In the print book arena there was always production costs so you had to cover that and make a little. This kept everyone from going too low too fast. But in the ebook market the race to the bottom is very quick. In fact some people start out at the bottom and go up from there. The inverse of a print book. The problem is you are trying to find where people will buy and the maximum price point.

It is this intersection that the rubics cube of ebooks can be solved. You cant set your price too high or you will kill the market. You cant set it too low or people will think your book is not worth anything and pass over it. You need to find the middle and this comes from experimenting. What will work with one book and one author will not necessarily work with another.

So really like the internet it is the Wild West. There will be a point where it settles down but don't look for that anytime soon. We are really just getting started.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

Harper Lee's Second To Kill A Mockingbird

Way back when I was trying to get a blurb from Harper Lee for my second novel, Tobacco Sticks. There was a man named Roy who answered the phone. I have put the book on Ms. Lee's beside table but I cant guarantee she will read it, he said. This went on for months. I would call and Roy would say. Well Ms. Lee is working her way through the stack. She never got to Tobacco Sticks. But of course I know now what she was doing. Writing another novel.

Go Set A Watchman. That is the title of Harper Lees second novel due out in July that predates her first To Kill A Mockingbird. Apparently this one didn't work out and the publisher prodded her into writing Mockingbird. The novel has now surfaced and coming our way in July. Who could  not be excited when the world had decided Harper Lee would be the ultimate one hit wonder along with JD Salinger and Margaret Mitchell. One smash masterpiece and game over.

But of course the world is complicated. Michael Jordan doesn't retire when he should. We live in a world of sequels and for whatever reason Miss. Lee has decided to put this very old manuscript. We have all loved Mockingbird and yes this book will not measure up. How could it? And then of course there is the old just be happy to have another Harper Lee book. I am good with that but then there are those Hemingway manuscripts.

Several books have followed his death and none of them have even been close to the books he put out when he was alive. Writers know which books are good and which ones don't work. Light in Africa and Islands in the Stream are poor substitutes for A Farewell To Arms and  For Whom The Bell Tolls. But again the manuscripts are there so why not bring them out.

So I will read it. Along with the millions. My only question is... did Harper Lee ever get to the bottom of her stack and read Tobacco Sticks?  Come to think of it, I wonder if Roy was lying to me.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
Tobacco Sticks
The Pitcher
 

Spam or Commercials? Selling Books Through Social Media

I just finished a library tour of twenty libraries and one of the most popular topics I covered was selling books through social media. The way I usually start this presentation is this: How many people here sit through five beer commercials during a football game and think nothing of it? Most people raise their hands. Or how about pickup commercials? Or Viagra commercials? We literally get hit with the same commercials back to back. And we think nothing of it.

But on the internet a curious word was created...spam. What does that even mean? Ok. Now why would companies put on so many commercials of the same product back to back? Because they know that humans pick up on things through REPETITION. Sales 101. You have to keep repeating the same message and then people start to pick up. Or IMPRESSIONS. You need to have X amount of impressions before someone buys.

Our new television is the internet. Sorry but it is. And we are marketed to in the same way. Repetition. Commercials. But people cry out they are being spammed. Really. No you are being advertised to in the same way you are getting smacked over the head during your football games. The price of the internet with all that free content is the advertising. It always has been. So to all you book marketers I say this: Spam is something you eat.

Get to work.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher
 

Everything We Love and Hate About The Superbowl

What a game. I mean what a game. Doesn't matter what side you are on be you a Patriot or Seahawk fan that was a game for the books. And in that way the Superbowl was exactly what it was supposed to be. A game between the two very best teams. And it was. And of course we had to endure everything else that is the Superbowl. Take the commercials. Was it me but what happened to the funny commercials. Even GoDaddy went serious instead of bawdy.

I mean I know the NFL is remaking their image but did we have to sit through all those bad novels? What was the dad commercial all about. Or dad commercials. Be a good dad and drive a Nissan. Or the moody music commercials that went on and on and then ended up being about a truck or Budweiser. Or what about the girl commercials. Well I guess the NFL does have a domestic abuse problem. But I really felt like I was being given moral lessons between watching grown men try and destroy each other.

Katy Perry. Well she did ride around on a rocket swing. That was different. Poor Lenny Kravitz. One song that wasn't even his and you couldn't hear his guitar. But who were the rappers? They came out and took over the middle of the show. Maybe that was to give Katy time to get on her swing and sing about Fireworks. After the beach number with the singing sharks it had to get better.

And of course the fight at the end between the football players. That sure took it down a notch. You have to wonder what the rest of the world thinks about the Superbowl. Maybe they are like us. Awed. Amazed. Disgusted. Confused. Entertained. Sex and pickups and beer and commercials that strive to be art when they are very much commerce. I cant wait until next year.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

The Difference Between a Screenplay and a Novel

Upon reading The Pitcher I like most writers was amazed at how different it is in the format of a screenplay. I don't write screenplays. I tried once but it just dried up on me and I realized I didn't care about fading in or fading out or exterior shots or breaking out dialogue into the middle of the page. A screenplay is shot from the outside and hopefully goes in. Novels are written from the inside and hopefully go out.

Saying that I did have some thoughts on the screenplay and I passed those on. Mostly they had to do with different elements of the script necessary to get the story across to the audience. Lets face it you have ninety minutes to get across a whole novel. That is not a lot of time. Imagine reading a novel that quickly. Your head would be spinning. So right there you know a lot of the book will not make it into the screenplay

Then there is the whole problem of voice. The Pitcher is told in first person so how do you get that voice across in a movie. Ricky's voice is very distinctive and carries the book but you cannot achieve this in a movie unless you have a narrator lording down from above. This was used in the first Great Gatsby and Tom Perrotta's Little Children. In both cases it was clumsy and overbearing.

I think this is why I prefer novels. There is one person controlling the story and I have all the weapons at my disposal to tell a story. Fading in and Fading out just doesn't apply.


The Pitcher
www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

WGN with Rick Kogan

On a Sunday night on the top of the Tribune is the WGN studio where Rick Kogan broadcasts his After Hours show. One of the remaining book shows in Chicago and you want to be on it. Because not only does Rick read your book he talks intelligently about it and you get to sit there and enjoy the company of the newspaper man with a literary nose and believe me when I say he is the last of the Mohicans because newspaper men belong to the last century.

And you have thirty minutes to talk about your book and writing. An eternity in radio time on a station the size of WGN (50KW) and you get to beam out across the state on a Sunday night in September while the city nurses its' first Bears defeat and everyone is pulling down the windows because those first cool nights have rolled in like an early messenger of the winter to come. But for now you concentrate on the task at hand.

And the red light flashes and Rick nods to the producer to cut the music and then you just roll. And he is a pro because he leads the interview and lets you ramble and then takes it over when you veer and you manage to get in all the information (website, signings, multiple books) and you chat off the air and you know some of the same people by now and then you are going back down the elevator past those marble quotes on the wall and you know the digital world is out there still...
but for a moment you saw something greater.

Something better.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher
Real Santa...Sometimes you just have to believe



 

Teaching Down in the South Side of Chicago

Your first thought is you are going to get shot.  Could GPS really have screwed up? No way. Turn around. But you don't you keep driving and looking for the school. And there it is between some run down homes and you park in the gated lot with razor wire along the top and go on in and face the room full of Latino men and women who have come to learn. And you are the only one who doesn't speak Spanish

So you trot out all your writer tricks. You have used them before with other students at more affluent schools and they worked but here not so much. The stakes are much higher and no one has time to lose. Everyone has children and everyone works several jobs. And it is a rough area and many live in even rougher areas. So you plow through looking for an alley to walk down where you can meet on neutral ground.

And they realize that you are not like the others. That you too are on the outside and the stories come out and the guards come down and they turn into students like any other students. And then they read their essays and you understand the odds. So you try harder and then it is over and you are driving back to the suburbs

Your wife asks you what it was like and you try and say how it was...but for once, words fail you.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

Jackie Robinson And The Best Years

Watching the Little League duel between Jackie Robinson and South Korea made me think of all the Little League games my son played and I managed to hang around as Assistant Coach. We had an amazing nine year run and now it seems almost amazing it has ended. Baseball is the ultimate kid sport. Something about swinging a bat and shagging balls in a dusty field makes you into a kid again and then of course the games are to die for.

Because in that moment nothing else matters but that game. And it is not just a Little League game anymore it is something between parents and their sons and daughters and it is a moment in time. Like the final game you just cant believe it will end and when it ends badly you don't really believe that either. You think you are immune to rooting for a bunch of kids in a life and death struggle but baseball doesn't put up with that. You are either in or out.

And when it does end you realize quite suddenly those were the best years. Parenting is a strange continuum of moments but doing something with  your kid that you can both participate in and both feel good about is a rare moment. And when it is over all you want to do is just have one more chance. One more game to capture all that youth again.

But of course the season is over and when they grow up all you can do is say...wow...those were the best years.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

Baseball Fields in the Dusk

Had to go over and drop off some stuff before the signing on Saturday at the Kane County Cougars Stadium. I found the office and dropped off the sign and some cards and then was walking back to my car when I saw the open gate. Yeah. I had to do it. The sun was slanting down and there was no one there. What the hell. So I walked in and up to the edge of the ball field.

And I just stared at the empty field with the breeze blowing over it. Minor League Feeder Team For The Cubs. But how many guys make it? How many dreams go on and never come back. And while I'm standing there a guy walks up behind me. Yeah. I do it too he says. I stare at him. I mean stare at the field when no one is around. I mean its my job to keep the skunks out. You know the animals. But when no one is here. I go out there and sometimes I stand on the mound you know. And I wind up and just pitch.

He laughs. I cant do it very well. I had bone cancer and they put cement in my back but what the hell I can stand there and see what they see you know. He looks at me then. What do you do? I tell him and he smiles. So you wrote that book...wow thats' great. I guess you love the game about as much as I do. And then we just stand there not talking and staring at the field.  He shakes his head.

All those dreams huh?
Yeah. All those dreams.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

About Last Night

You know that old movie set in the mid eighties with Demi Moore and Rob Lowe based on Mamets play Sexual Perversity in Chicago that catalogued that amazing time after college in Chicago when all you had to do was go to work party and find the love of your life. Well I watched it again and like all movies from that era I was amazed at the great times it brought back. My wife and I both lived in Chicago during those years and were actually coming out of a bar across form Mothers on Rush Street when they filmed the New Years Even scene complete with  movie snow.

And a girl I went to high school with appeared in one of the final scenes as her only moment of contextual fame...so close to Rob and Demi and Jim Belushi she could touch them but then she fell into obscurity as did the movie after years passed. But there are movies that bring back a moment in time with the crystal clarity of a clock striking the hour and About Last Night does this very well. Yes it is a brat pack eighties movie but Mamets script anchors the movie and it has moments where it takes flight.

And if you were in Chicago during the eighties. And if you had just graduated from college. And if you lived in old brownstones and went to the bars on Rush Street and if you stayed out all night and walked in the surf of Lake Michigan as dawn broke then you watch this movie as if someone had filmed your life and you end up with a hell of a nostalgia hangover when it ends.

And you wonder for the millionth time...where did all that go? Demi dumped by Ashton. Rob busted for peeping. Still...there was a moment. Ah well...Boats against the current....



www.williamhazelgrove.com

 

The Real End to The Natural

Just finished The Natural again. And there was that ending again. The Bernard Malamud ending that is not like Hollywood. The exact opposite in fact. Roy Hobbs takes the payoff and misses the final pitch and strikes out. He does tell the judge and Memo and the bookie to go where the sun doesn't shine but he is a broken man in the end with no future...just another drifter in Depression era America.

And the book is different in that it is really a treatment of baseball during The Great Depression. The Natural with Robert Redford is a much more upbeat tale of a pitcher who gets knocked off by a woman who shoots him early in his career. Years later he comes up but he is much older with only a few good seasons in him.

But the real difference lies in the ending. In the novel the natural does not pull it out. He simply cant get his mojo back and when he strikes out he is accused of being in on the fix and there are people who want to ban him from baseball. But Roy Hobbs has banned himself as he becomes just another person in Depression era America.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

Waffle Men

There is a picture of my dad in his twenties holding a spatula. He had three kids at the time and lived in a small house. He is in his robe and fixing the proverbial weekend breakfast of waffles. So I see this tradition of waffles  fixed by the dad of the house has deep roots. On vacations the waffle men appear and will do a victory run for the whole week of waffles. This is in celebration of the days of leisure.

And all over America this goes on. I don't know about other countries but here fathers fire up the griddle and mix the batter and make sure the syrup is out they start serving up the waffles. The waffle is a classic food because it is so simple. Once the griddle is hot all that is left is to mix up the batter and pour and wait. And while you wait you call out "WHO WANTS WAFFLES?"  Inevitably the sleepy eyes appear.

And then you cant give away enough waffles. You go through a couple bowls of batter and finally everyone is full of dough and syrup. And then the waffle man sits down with his cup of coffee and has his waffles. It is a meal well deserved and the waffle man only sees clear skies.

At least until Monday where cereal returns.

www.williamhazelgrove.com

The PItcher

The Writers Vacation

Writers don't really take vacations they just change where they work. But saying that a vacation is about the only place you give yourself permission to do the kind of work you like. Reading is work. Writing is work. Yet during the normal days you give yourself over to the work of making money. A different focus altogether. But on a vacation it is actually ok to read and write and think.

And you would think well this is what a writer does. But only a writer who is not under pressure and I don't know many of those. Pressure makes you constantly re evaluate what you are doing. Is this going to make a difference? Is this going to sell books? I should be doing more. Is this marketable? What am I not doing?

And these thoughts do not give you the permission to sit down and read a book for enjoyment. Or to write something that may not end up between two covers. You just don't. But on a vacation you are able to go back to when you first started and pick up a book that you really wanted to read or to write something that just hits you.

I guess that is why they call them vacations.

www.williamhazelgrove.com


 

Daisy Buchanan and The Longest Day of the Year

Daisy Buchanan complains she always misses the longest day of the year. It is momentous in the Great Gatsby. It shows her boredom, her spiritual vacuity as she longs for something she has missed. But of course we miss it too. It is here on this Solstice the year pivots back to the shorter days incredibly on the very day summer begins. A shadow on the moon once emerged.

And we know that another year is slipping along and that we have passed something even if we don't know what it was. The longest day of the year should be a milestone. It should be something that Daisy waits for like a child for Christmas. And yet it eludes her. We think that we can get it all in our digital age but we just cant stop time.

Our days go even quicker. One finding the other before we remembered what has even happened. And we look for some sort of  milestone. Something in between all those moments to give us our bearings like the longest day of the year. But of course by the time we know the day is here  it is too late.

We are already heading for the short days once again.

www.williamhazelgrove.com

The Pitcher is #1...How Books Are Sold Now

            The Pitcher is currently #1 in these categories.

• #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Contemporary Fiction > Urban
• #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Teen & Young Adult > Literature & Fiction > Sports
• #1 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Urban Life

 

The Pitcher is selling more right now than monster Bestsellers published by the largest publishers. Book selling has changed permanently. The fight between Amazon and traditional publishers is really the last Battle of the Bulge in a war that has been going on for some time. The fact is that books used to be sold very differently.

 

The stage was narrow because of the physicality of bookstores. Literally stores could only stock so many books and so the Big Authors or Bestsellers were put out where everyone could see them. These books were purchased first and behind them were some obscure midlist authors that were purchased occasionally. Finally was everyone else who never saw the light of day. There just wasn't room.

 

Now in the digital age authors are on equal footing. Of course the Bestsellers dominate the bookstores and always will but people are shopping with their computers and that is taking the lack of space out of the equation. Independent bookstores are still vital because they do bring forth the undiscovered but for the digital shopper the author can bring him or herself forth and have the same displaying power of even a giant like Grisham or a James Patterson.

 

Now a book must still be good for the digital world. No amount of behind the scenes pushing can make a bad book last.  It may sell but books especially in the digital world are sold by word of mouth and eventually the bad book falls. But if your book is good and you work hard then you at least have an equal chance as the big boys.

 

It is truly a different world out there.

 

www.williamhazelgrove.com

The Pitcher

 

Printers Row in Chicago 2014

In the digital age it is good see the literary world  of Algren, Bellow, and Terkel still lives. Billy Goats Tavern is not that far and the Cubs are to the north and the Sox are to the South and you are in the South Loop down among the buildings with the old water towers on top. You are selling books. And it is not glamorous. Lots of authors and bookstores and publishers and literati. The first day is hot and the second day is cold. That is Chicago.

And you smash into the people and let them know about your book. And they buy. These people are looking for a book and they don't haggle on price. If it is something they want to buy they buy it. Ebooks do not exist here. This is the land of pulp and lets face it this is Chicago where people push things and work hard and you cannot push bits and bytes.

And you eat every horrible thing under the sun to keep going. Eight hours you are there And you don't want to miss a minute. Talking with your readers is a great lift for any author. So eat the donuts and drink the coffee and inhale the hotdogs and cook and freeze and then before you know it it is time to pack up.

You count up the books you sold and count your money five times to make sure. You hit your car and drive home and wonder about all those people you talked too. Will Printers Row go on? Will books survive? It doesn't matter. For now people are reading your book. It doesn't get any better.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

 

 

The Changing Face of Literature

Chapters are getting shorter and shorter. At least mine are. I don't know if literature is changing or I am but the last two books have about sixty chapters with 220 pages. And people tell me this is the way books are going. Our shrinking attention span demands these shorter bursts. Of course flash fiction is the new kid on the block that may or may not be the future.  Hard to say.

But I cant help but wonder if the internet has done its dirty work and is starting to rewire all of us. It would make sense that something we spend hours and hours interacting with and reading would change all of us. At the very least we might rebel against longer discourses that tend to take a while to get to the point. The point in the internet world is usually in the first sentence. Don't bury the lead right.

But fiction is a building process. A river if you will that we have to get used to the water first. And this takes a little time and a little acclimating. Sometimes the water is cold and rough and we have to find our way across. Then we get out payoff. But maybe we don't have the patience for that. Maybe we want to jump in swimming or not at all.

Anyway. I will try for some longer chapters next time. Maybe to just prove I can still swim.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The PItcher...on Summer Sale