What I Learned from NaNoWriMo 2011

The big take-away: I SUCK at this.

That may sound unduly harsh, but it's the truth, so I might as well put it out there. And it's nothing to be ashamed of, I guess. It's just that I now have empirical data proving that I'm not the kind of writer who can extrude 50,000 words of fiction in a 30-day period. Especially not a 30-day period that includes: a cross-country family vacation; the preparation of college applications by a stressed-out offspring; a national holiday that encourages, nay, demands time away from the keyboard; three-and-a-half  work weeks filled with International Auto Show goodness; multiple freelance deadlines; a suddenly unpredictable water heater that mocked my limited do-it-yourself skills (it's fixed now); and assorted annoyances and distractions too penny-ante to mention here.

Not to mention the pre-Yuletide funk that arrives with the realization that another year is ending and that, no, you're not going to write that 50,000-word piece of fiction.

Ah, well. It was worth a shot. I did accomplish some useful outlining, fleshed out some characters in my mind, got a handle on the setting. And I did post some nifty writing-related and/or inspirational links that I and others found interesting. Here are most of them, all in one place.

Write a novel in three days, the Michael Moorcock way
Write a novel in two months
Paradigm shifts in publishing
Practical writing tips from 23 "brilliant" authors
Brutal tips for breaking into comics
How to be a sideshow talker
Carny Dog
The Cult of Done Manifesto
Cut your word-count by 10%
Try something new for 30 days
Adventures in self-publishing
Why should anybody care about your novel?
Kurt Vonnegut is told "No, thanks" for early Dresden article
Research a novel the Greg Rucka Way

Why I'm Participating in NaNoWriMo 2011

Being the cynical cuss that I am, I generally look askance at online group activities such as National Novel Writing Month. I mean, c'mon. Who honestly thinks they can write a publishable 50,000-word novel in 30 days? I'm not some precious urban hipster who has the time to don his pork pie hat and clear-lensed horn-rimmed glasses and spend the day noodling around on his Apple Air at the local Starbucks. I'm a writing professional, man!

But I've had a change of heart this year, and I've signed up for NaNoWriMo (*shudder*), as it's known. Why?

1. Whatever I produce will most likely not be 50,000 words long or a novel or publishable. And I'm cool with that.
I'm trying to get over worrying about what kind of writer I'm "supposed" to be and instead just explore what kind of writer I actually am. I know -- how Zen of me. But I can see the value of charging through a first draft, letting the proverbial chips fall where they may, not stressing about where I'm heading but going as far as I can as fast as I can. Even if I only complete 5,000 words, that's more than I've got right now.

And if I do succeed in finishing a real manuscript at some unspecified point in time and I'm sufficiently pleased with it to send it off into the world, it will be published, even if only on the Kindle or the iPad or whatever device the cool kids are using in the future.

2. NaNoWriMo has a better track record than I do.
Number of years NaNoWriMo has been in business = 12
Number of novels I've produced in the past 12 years = 0

3. I have a workable idea for a short book.
What I have in mind isn't particularly innovative or grandiose. But it's intriguing and unusual and fits within the parameters of existing marketing categories. It's not like I'm striving to one-up Nabokov's "Pale Fire" over four consecutive weekends. Gotta have perspective.

4. I want to have some fun.
 Remember what it was like to roll a fresh sheet of 20-pound stock into a vibrating electric typewriter and let your imagination run free while your stubby little sausage-fingers struggled to keep up, so intense was the outpouring of sprightly prose? Yeah, neither do I. But there have been plenty of times when I've enjoyed the creative process, from the grubby mechanics of grammar to the endorphin high of watching plot points snap together with a satisfying 'Snik!' And I want some more of that, please.

5. The world could use a novel entitled "Squidface."
Need I say more?

So there you go, boys and girls, my plan for the month of November. It's not perfect. The month is short already, Thanksgiving is in there somewhere and I've got a kid applying to colleges right now. Whee!

But each day, I'll endeavor to post on Twitter and Facebook links to sites that I'm finding particularly inspirational or germane to the task at hand. You can follow along and imagine what I'm constructing, as well as read enticing synopses and excerpts (one hopes). I'll also post my running word-count, so that you can cheer/jeer as you see fit. Carpe deum. Que sera, sera. And all that.

Happy (*grits teeth*) NaNoWriMo!

Mommas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow up to Be Book Critics

I used to write a lot of fiction. I didn't publish a lot of fiction, but I wrote it. I even finished a horror novel in the late 1980s, one about voudoun in the San Francisco Bay Area. That's right, I was 20 years ahead of the Shambling Dead Curve, all you zombies-come-lately!

Too bad the novel wasn't very good. A couple editors and a handful of agents looked at it and politely passed. They knew what they were doing.

And then a funny thing happened. I started writing lots of book reviews and other non-fiction pieces and got paid for every single one of them. This was on top of my 9-to-5 job as a marketing copywriter, where I wrote in-paper ads, sales collateral and TV and radio spots, plus edited a weekly automotive section.

Then I had kids. The fiction output dwindled down to nothing and finally dried up entirely.

Correlation is not causality.

There are plenty of writers out there who manage to raise a family, work a day job and produce a steady tide of novels and short stories. I guess I just ain't one of them. This used to cause me a fair amount of distress, but not so much anymore.

I've come to the conclusion that the biggest drag on my fiction writing isn't the kids, isn't the day job, isn't the crippling ironies of a godless universe. It's just that, as I've become more confident in my critical abilities, I've become less sure of my talent as a storyteller.

Thanks to a quarter-century of reviewing, I now have a better grasp of what it takes to produce a good book or story. And how much more it takes to be noticed for having published said piece of fiction. I sit amid piles and piles of ARCs and finished books and know that I won't crack the spines of ten percent of them. And they aren't even a tenth of the other unread books stacked in the basement.

The book critic that lives in my own head asks, "Who the hell are you to think about writing  a novel? Do you know how much work that takes? Do you really think you have the chops for it? And if you do publish anything, why do you think anyone would notice?"

I'm making more of an effort these days to shut that guy up. He's become a bore, even to me. In recent months, I've completed a short story and a one-act play.

It's a start. I've got plans for more projects.

The great thing about the web is that there is such an abundance of good advice about storytelling to be found on it, if you know where to look. If you're interested in science fiction, fantasy, horror and fiction in general, you should check out Making Light. It's always worth a look and often features truly invaluable advice, such as this four-item formula for turning story into fiction.

Tharn

Tharn: Stupefied, distraught, hypnotized by fear. But can also, in certain contexts, mean "looking foolish," or again "heartbroken" or "forlorn." – Watership Down

Turning 50 didn't just kick my ass. It kicked my ass, hit it with a tire iron, dumped it into the trunk of a Chevy Impala, drove it out to the desert, made it get out and dig its own grave, then pulled a gun, grinned and said, "Hey, just screwin' wit' ya."

Maybe you could have deduced my midlife malaise from the utter lack of entries following my birthday in January. Wait, there was one, a rumination on the death of Kage Baker, one of my favorite writers, who died of a brain tumor in her mid-fifties. After that, I kind of threw in the towel, blogging-wise.

What was up? Well, the details don't really matter. Let's just say that I've worked nearly my entire adult life in an industry currently undergoing cataclysmic change. I've got aging parents and kids in college and high school. I've got gout and I've got a mortgage. Sometimes I feel like I've got plenty of nothing, but nothing is definitely not plenty for me.

It got to the point, almost exactly midway through the year, when I simply "went tharn," as Mr. Richard Adams might put it. Like a bunny caught in the headlights, I froze – creatively, emotionally and nearly physically. At least inside my own head, I couldn't move forward, and I definitely couldn't move backwards. I just stayed still and hoped that nothing would run me over or swoop down on me from a great height.

I started re-reading "Watership Down" this summer, partly spurred by Sawyer's fondness for it on "Lost" and partly because it was a book from a time when I pretty much only read for pleasure, when there were few deadlines, when I took the adventures of Hazel, Fiver and Bigwig at face value. I bought a used copy of the mass-market paperback, my preferred reading format, and reacquainted myself with the rabbits and their quest for a safe home.

Did you know that Richard Adams was 52 when "Watership Down" was published in 1972? He was civil servant for most of his private career and created the story as an entertainment for his daughters on long drives. The "Watership Down" manuscript was rejected by seven publishers before the small firm Rex Collings took it on, but it soon sold more than a million copies worldwide. It won the Carnegie Medal, and now its sales total more than 50 million copies.Adams went on to write "Shardik," "The Plague Dogs" and other well-regarded, best-selling books.

Adams turned 90 in May of 2010. He published a new story, "The Knife," just this year, in "Stories," edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio.

I haven't quite finished "Watership Down" this second time around. I don't particularly feel like rushing it. I can pick it up and put it down without losing the thread of the tale. In a lot of ways, it's simple story, but it says some important things: about perseverance, about friendship, about self-reliance.

I've begun to feel a lot better since this summer, and I've started to write more. It wasn't just Richard Adams and "Watership Down" that gave me a renewed sense of perspective about myself and my career at age 50. There were definitely other, more important factors. But the novel helped, not only through the wisdom of its story but by the example of its author.

Novelists can start their careers after 50. They can publish into their 90s. The Black Rabbit won't ever stop chasing you, but you can still give it a run for its money.

Move. Run blindly, if you have to. But move.
Don't go tharn.

Spilling Your Guts Online

I regard Penelope Trunk, author of "The Brazen Careerist," with nearly equal amounts of admiration and dumbfoundedness. Sometimes I find her advice useful and clear-eyed, and sometimes I regard what she writes as absolutely, well, nuts. A nod of agreement, a wince of embarrassment -- those are my two main reactions to her columns.

Take her latest post -- How to decide how much to reveal about yourself. Pretty powerful stuff. I could never be that forthright online. But given her history, perhaps Trunk has no other choice:

So what I’m telling you here is that I’m scared of secrets. I’m more scared of keeping things a secret than I am of letting people know that I’m having trouble. People can’t believe how I’m willing to write about my life here. But what I can’t believe is how much better my life could have been if it had not been full of secrets.

My life has been nowhere near as dramatic as Trunk's appears to have been, but I make a distinction between secrets, which are destructive, and private matters, which, with any luck, are not. Call me an uptight New Englander with a metaphorical stick up his fundament, but I keep a close watch on how much personal information I put online. Although I'm free with my opinions, I don't post pictures of my kids, complain about my parents and even acknowledge my birthday on Facebook. (You do know that it's fairly easy to predict a SSN given a place and date of birth, right?)

I don't delude myself into believing that anyone with sufficient interest (or a powerful resistance to tedium) could build a fairly thick dossier on me from public sources, but neither do I feel a compulsion to make the task easy on them.

Books You Oughta Read -- The Land of Laughs

It may be memory playing tricks on me after a quarter century, but I still consider Jonathan Carroll's "The Land of Laughs" to be one of the books that welcomed me to California. It may not have been the first paperback I purchased here, but I can't remember any others that preceded it.

I know I bought it at Dark Carnival, then located on Telegraph Avenue, where it intersects with Stuart Street. The store was within walking distance of my apartment, and when I arrived here in 1983 with no job, no car and few friends, I spent a lot of time checking out the local bookstores. I have a clear memory of reading "The Land of Laughs" while commuting on BART, so perhaps it was the promise of a steady paycheck that allowed me to feel sufficiently flush to unlimber my wallet.

In any case, it was the David B. Mattingly cover that attracted me to the book. It's weird and whimsical and menacing, from the George Boothian bull terriers to the shadowy figure glowering through the front door. But what instantly sold me on the book is its voice, the assured cadence of its first-person narration.

"The Land of Laughs" is the story of Thomas Abbey, slacker son of a fabled movie star, who decides to ditch his teaching job and write a biography of his favorite author, Marshall France. The reclusive France died young and left behind a magical series of children's books, including "The Land of Laughs." Abbey and his girlfriend Saxony Gardner travel to France's hometown, Galen, Missouri, and, having been told that they might not be welcome, find themselves unexpectedly embraced by France's daughter and the other townspeople.

Of course, nothing in Galen is as it first appears. To say much more would be to spoil the pleasurable twists and turns of a plot that combines elements of mystery, fantasy and horror. Everything builds to an inevitable, yet shocking conclusion. It's a very well-constructed first novel.

Jonathan Carroll is one of my very favorite writers. His books wrestle with the big questions about life, death, the imagination and the hereafter, but with an easy humor and a cockeyed perspective that's unmatched. I always find something of value in each of his books, but the ones I especially like include "After Silence," "Bones of the Moon," "Sleeping in Flame" and "The Wooden Sea."

I recommend them all, but if you're coming to Carroll fresh, why not start with "The Land of Laughs"? And then start following his Twitter feed, checking his blog and reading the assorted short stories at his site. You're not likely to be disappointed.

Precautionary Measures

So, I'm taking a course through SFSU, "Introduction to Internet Marketing," and part of the weekly assignment is to write a blog post every single day.

And that partly explains the sudden burst of activity here.

And the brevity of this note.

Hi-Def Printing: What It's Good For

After a lot of preparation, the San Francisco Chronicle has officially begun printing on new, state-of-art presses based in Fremont, CA. Some of the advantages were immediately obvious -- more color at higher resolution; fewer wrinkles; a smaller, more convenient width. Other changes will roll out over the coming months -- heatset glossies, different ad configurations, innovative marketing products. I've spent a lot of time over the past few months working on the marketing campaign announcing "Chronicle HD," as it's called.


For the purposes of this blog, though, I want to publicly state how pleased I was with the first Hi-Def Sunday edition. My article about recent comics and comix was the cover story in Books and ran as a double-page spread, illustrated with color panels by Jason, Darwyn Cooke, David Mazzucchelli and others. And it looked gorgeous! The colors were accurate, the registration was correct, the pictures "popped." For the first time in five or six years, I made an effort to track down hard copies. The archived Web page doesn't do it justice.


I'm not about to make any prognostications about the long-term health of the newspaper printing business. But in terms of my column, I'm really happy with this new development.

What I've Been Up to Since March

The past four months have not been particularly happy nor productive. No need to go into details. Those who know me can extrapolate why.

But having reached and passed the year's midpoint, it's probably time to reconnoiter and post links to some of the things I did manage to accomplish. So --

I did a couple of stand-alone crime fiction reviews for The Chronicle, Walter Mosley's "The Long Fall" and "The Way Home" by George Pelecanos. I liked both books, well enough.

Due to a shortage of editorial space and other factors, my science fiction column has appeared more irregularly than usual. However, in April, I covered horror/supernatural/urban fantasy novels by S.G. Browne ("Breathers"), Will Elliott ("The Pilo Family Circus") and Patricia Briggs ("Bone Crossed"). Later that month, I reviewed two YA post-apocalyptic novels, "Bones of Faerie" by Janni Lee Simner and Carrie Ryan's "The Forest of Hands and Teeth." In my most recent column, from back in May, the books selected were Michael Marshall's "Bad Things," Chris Roberson's "End of the Century," "The Best of Gene Wolfe," and the re-issue of Robert Silverberg's "Dying Inside."

I have at least two stories planned for July -- a big, double-spread review of recent comics/graphic novels in hardcover and trade editions and the return of my column, featuring work by Dean Koontz, John Connolly and others.

Announcing "Two-Fisted Freelancing Tales"

In an attempt to keep some of my resolutions for 2008, I've inaugurated a new writing blog, "Two-Fisted Freelancing Tales." It's up and running and ready for visitors, so won't you please drop on by?

Regular visitors to "Cheaper Ironies" will remember that I tried to do something similar back in July and that the results were somewhat... semi-posteriored. This time I've learned my lesson and not slapped the blog together a day before an extended vacation. There's content already written and waiting to be published throughout the month. I plan to discuss the art of the book review, sites of particular use to writers, lessons that can be learned from authors famous and otherwise and making money online.

The inspiration for the site's title comes, of course, from the EC Comics series edited by the inimitable Harvey Kurtzman. Freelance writing can be a tough gig. Not quite as bad as going one-on-one against a mean s.o.b. with a pointy hook for a hand, but close.

What the Heck I've Been Doing for the Past Three Weeks

Sorry for dropping out of sight so abruptly. I had my reasons.
1. Took a trip to New England
It had been more than a year since I last saw my parents in Portsmouth, NH, so we were overdue for a visit. All in all, it was a good trip, with plenty of opportunities for communing with family and friends. Managed to do most of the things that traditionally define a trip back home for me: swam at Wallis Sands beach, bought taffy at The Goldenrod, bought tax-free shoes from my pal Bert at George & Phillips, played skee-ball at York Beach's Fun O Rama (Nothing guarantees a good time like the syllables "O Rama."), ate seafood at Warren's Lobster House, ate lobster rolls prepared by my mother, ate Italian sandwiches from Moe's, played carpet golf in 90-degree heat (not really recommended) and strolled Portsmouth's scenic downtown.

2. Saw "The Simpsons Movie"
The rest of the world has made up its mind by now, but I thought it was perfectly fine. Not mind-blowingly brilliant, but solidly constructed and executed. For some reason, though, the folks at the CAP Movie Ministry don't agree with that opinion.

3. Spent way too much time fixing a glitch in my DVD drive
All I wanted to do was watch the third season of "Deadwood" without my kids having to hear profanity spewing out of the living room speakers. So I took the disc upstairs to the computer, only to begin spewing profanity myself when nothing would work as it should. Three days of posting frantic notes on the Dell tech forum and downloading various drivers and diagnostics finally did the trick. Cripes.

4. Suddenly realized that a new Chronicle book review was past due
But now it's done and submitted to my grateful editors. Look for coverage of "A Good and Happy Child," "Bad Monkeys" and "Crooked Little Vein" on August 19.

5. Was physically nauseated by the month-long Foob Wedding Flashback

Seriously, do any sexually functioning people in their twenties go romping around a country club and spout drippy declarations of mild affection like Granthony and Liz? No, usually there's some liquor involved, and reunited couples wind up thrashing around in the shrubbery in various states of undress to the horrified amusement of their less-drunk friends. Good thing Granthony already has a child. Now Liz can avoid the messy reality of reproduction and never have to sabotage her partner's birth control plans like her sister-in-law did.

More catch up later!

Old Dog, New Tricks

I've started a new blog, Old Dog, New Tricks, hosted on my private domain and devoted solely to the topic of freelance writing. No Stoppard. No Foobs. No Gossip Rag Bitch-Slap. I envision it as a kind of laboratory for experimenting with new ways of stringing words together and, maybe, making some money from them.

It's sparsely furnished at the moment, but please check it out if you're so inclined.

Eight Is More Than Enough

I've been infected with a meme by my pal and colleague Michael Ansaldo. In the interests of not being a spoilsport, I will play along and provide eight autobiographical facts and/or habits.

First, the rules, always with the rules:

1.We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
4. At the end of your blog post, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
5. Don’t forget to leave them each a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

FACT: I'm really good at learning to read and write foreign languages and absolute crap at speaking them. That's why I enjoyed classical Greek in college and grew so frustrated with French and German.

FACT: I'm left-handed (which is probably part of the reason why I'm crap at speaking foreign languages. Stupid right-brain dominance.)

FACT: As a child, I always managed to injure myself seriously on major vacations. In Hawaii, I stumbled off a cliff while hiking to a scenic waterfall. In Texas, I walked through a plate-glass door after throwing firecrackers from the balcony of my grandfather's apartment.

FACT: In my early teens, I was obsessed with the pulp novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Tarzan of the Apes. John Carter of Mars. Carson of Venus. My avid interest may have had something to do with the Frank Frazetta covers.

FACT: Four summers ago, I appeared as Mr. Bumble in the Vallejo Musical Theatre production of "Oliver!"

HABITS: I've pretty much eradicated my New England accent, but if tired and inattentive, I will do such things as refer to the singer of "What's Love Got to Do with It?" as "Teener Turna." My daughter gives me grief for calling the second day of the workweek "Tuesdee."

FACT: I can still kinda-sorta play the trumpet, but my chops are like day-old spaghetti.

FACT: Before I got married, I lived platonically with my wife's sister for four years.

I don't have many bloggy friends, but I will tag the following:

Yak
Patois
Marta

My 310th Chronicle Piece

In looking for the Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. interview I posted that week, I explored The Chronicle's database of published articles and discovered that, since March 29, 1987, I've contributed 310 articles, most of them book reviews. Yow.

So, I've been doing this for a little over 20 years now. In the early days, many of those reviews were for single books. Given the paucity of space, I now rarely do any stand-alones, instead covering three or four books at a time. Estimating conservatively, I've probably read 600-700 books for The Chronicle.

My latest review covers new books by Guy Gavriel Kaye, Jon Armstrong and Mike Carey and John Bolton.

Let's see if I've got another 310 reviews in me.

Seven Lessons Learned during a Midwestern Spring Break

1. When you check into the Country Inn in Northfield, Minnesota, the clerk will neglect to inform you that the train tracks run directly behind your suite and that you will be awakened at least four times in the night by the piercing shriek of a locomotive whistle.

2. Despite the presence of bumper cars and an indoor log flume ride, the Mall of America isn’t all that much fun; rather, it is exhausting, depressing and more than a little scary. I’m only glad that the connection between “Peanuts” and the amusement park has been severed. I could not have handled being accosted by someone in a seven-foot-tall Woodstock costume. (And why have they chosen to depict Paul Bunyan as the Brawny Paper Towel Dude?)

3. Minneapolis has a really cool museum devoted to the history of milling, usually not a topic that inspires great enthusiasm in jaded urban sophisticates such as myself. We learned about the Great Flour Dust Explosion of 1878, another of those undeniably-tragic-yet-somehow-laughably-ludicrous disasters like Boston’s Great Molasses Flood.

4. It is apparently impossible to get a decent breakfast in Springfield, Illinois. We looked high and low and honestly couldn’t find anything better than the Best Western’s continental breakfast (individual boxes of Froot Loops, high trans-fat pastries), served in the lobby in front of a TV tuned to Fox News.

5. The city’s Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum is awesome, though.

6. Richard Stark’s Parker novels are the Platonic Ideal of vacation reads. This time I carried “The Seventh,” a.k.a. “The Split,” with me. I also read Matt Ruff’s “Bad Monkeys” on the plane out. (Still making up my mind about that one.)

7. If you’re browsing in Subterranean Books in St. Louis and spot someone who looks exactly like editor and short-story writer Kelly Link, you should say hello, because it’s probably her.

You Don't Know Me

I am, by nature, a private person, not given to outrageous acts of self-revelation. I’m not a joiner, not someone comfortable with getting up and promoting myself. It’s probably partly the legacy of being an only child who lived inside his own head for much of the day. It’s also probably a result of the ol’ genetic crap shoot. My father is a man of few words, a close-mouthed Yankee if there ever was one.

I’ve come to realize that this tendency toward the antisocial doesn’t always serve me well. It can make me appear aloof, when, really, I just don’t have a pressing need to shoot my mouth off. I’m not good at waving my hands and saying, “Look at me! Look at me!” So it’s sometimes hard to get people to look in my direction at all.

This blog is a small exercise in revealing more about myself in a way that’s useful to me and to others. I’m making more of an effort to contact and thank the people whose work I especially enjoy online. I’m posting more messages on various boards. I’m exploring some of the social networking sites.

It’s a gradual process. Don’t expect any immediate gut-spilling. But there is somebody underneath those bandages.

A Clean Slate

Gradually, it will grow...