Entrekin

If you came here from my homepage, you probably noticed the “media” link.

My interests have always ranged pretty much all over the place; being an English lit major with a second major in science was no accident. I chose a Jesuit college not just because they offered me the most money but also because their approach to education seemed so attractive; their liberal arts sounded intensely liberal, and not just in a “versus conservative” sense. My theology class was one of the most formative of my life, and one of the things it taught me was not only to be open to all ideas but also to explore them. I took that philosophy deeply to heart, and my background reflects that; I took a job in commercial production after I graduated, then became a personal trainer and a subsitute teacher, and then an editor for a clinical psychiatric nursing journal.

One of the things people most often note about my collection is that it’s very diverse. I entered Writer’s Digest‘s self-published book of the year contest last year, and one of the judges commented that the collection is basically all over the place (more on that later). He (or she) was right. I’ve never been happy with one genre, or one subject, or one anything, mostly.

And lately, I haven’t been satisfied with one medium to work with.

Which was why, when I created the account for this blog, I also created this one I decided to name Imagery. Because I’ve gotten, lately, into photography, and I think I also want to create short films (I never stopped being a commercial producer, really), not to mention commercials for my books. I did want to keep the two separate (I won’t post photography/videos here, for the most part, or at least not mine), but also concurrent.

So long story short, this will be my main blog, but I plan to post daily to either one or the other (if not both).

I posted the first picture today. You can click that link up above to check it out. It seemed a propos for this week, and resonant with my current mindset.

The other day, in “Because I want to,” I mentioned John Scalzi and his Whatever blog. Always cogent and frequently awesome, Scalzi covers all manner of things, plus, he’s won all sorts of awards and even initiated a successful write-in campaign for president of the Science Fiction Writers’ Association (by “successful,” I do not mean he won; rather, I mean that he did not but people still talk about it, and he certainly had a shot at winning. Unlike, say, Ralph Nader).

Today, after I got home from a long day that included a normative grading session and a class full of students fresh out of the linguistics lecture that takes place immediately before my class, I began to skim blogs. The first I check is always Neil Gaiman’s, because he’s been my favorite writer for many years. That he had a novel basically free on the Web for a month was enough to make me mention it straightaway. I didn’t pass go.

After I did pass go, I started to check out the other blogs. Scalzi’s is second in my bookmarks.

When I got to Scalzi’s, I got sad.

The first post I saw had to do with his cat. Or one of them. Scalzi has a few, and talks about them, and sometimes tapes bacon to them.

(that last sentence is fun. And true, on all clauses)

The second mentioned a feature he’s run for a while, called The Big Idea. Basically, he spotlights writers and their newly released books, specifically some big idea or other about it. Scalzi’s spotlight is bright, intense, and probably rather hot. Scalzi’s spotlight is arguably the kind of spotlight people on stage look up at and think, “Okay, I’m done on this side,” mainly because Whatever gets, like, 40,000 hits per day (and again, deservedly so, because, again, it’s frequently awesome).

So when he mentioned that he was looking for authors who weren’t specifically sci-fi/fantasy, I thought, hey, that’s pretty rad. Maybe I should drop Mr. Scalzi a line.

But his first guideline was simple. I’ll quote:

First, authors must not be self-published, or solely electronically published, or published by a publishing house that offers $1 advances and/or can’t get distribution into bookstores. Yes, I know. I suck. But this is the line in the sand. Deal with it.

His first guideline, of course, is what made me sad. I’ll be the first to admit it. To a degree, it offended me, and made me grumpy. So I took a nap, defiance in my head, but then realized that sometimes the things that offend us most are the things that strike closest to the truth (I’ll also note part of my first reaction was remembering the old Warner Brothers cartoons with my grandfather, because we all know what you do when you come to a line in the sand is, don’t we? That’s right: you cross it, because it’s a line in the sand. Ain’t like it’s a wall or something. Just step right over).

If you’re reading this, you probably know why it struck close to the truth, because you’ve probably seen my Lulu page; you may have even purchased, from it, my debut collection of fiction, essays, and poetry (and if you have, thank you. You’re awesome. I hope you loved it). Which means two things.

The first is that I am, technically, a self-published author. It’s not a label I prefer, but then, as my buddy once said, “fuckin’ labels’ll get you every time.” I say that because: who thinks in labels? When people ask Neil Gaiman or John Scalzi what they do for a living, I doubt either says “I’m a traditionally published author” or “I’m a commercially published author” or “I’m an author published by a major, conglomerated publishing company based in New York.” I’d wager both men, when asked what they do, would have a simple answer: “I’m a writer.”

No labels, no qualifications, no credentials. Simple.

When asked further, I’m sure they might reveal either who published them (when talking shop) or where someone might buy their books (to a new acquaintance interested), but how the stories and the words get out there is usually dead last among writers’ priorities. The big ones are truth and honesty in storytelling. The big ones are whether our characters are believable and this plot works and this ending is satisfying.

With them I share that in common, mostly. Actually, I must qualify that, because when people ask me what I do, I generally tell them I teach writing at the University of Southern California, where I’m finishing my master’s in writing. But still, I am a writer.

And the other thing that having a book on Lulu, available for sale, which people have bought, means is that I’m a professional writer, to boot. Does writing pay my rent? No, it doesn’t, but then, for how many writers does it, actually? I know of lots of writers (and am friends with several) who’ve published several novels who still haven’t given up their day jobs.

I generally understand the stigma against self-publishing; it is, by and large, an endeavour generally undertaken by amateurs, some of whom write decently but haven’t studied the finer points of actually publishing. Publishing is not just about putting a book in someone’s hands; it’s about carefully editing that book, designing it as a physical product people will read, and understanding subtle points of marketing. Companies like Lulu and PublishAmerica, to whom I think Scalzi is alluding when he mentions the $1 advances, mean just about anyone can publish; that just about anyone can doesn’t mean everyone should, of course, and self-publishing is full of a glut of crappy books.

But here’s the thing: publishing in general is full of a glut of crappy books. Theodore Sturgeon, a noted science fiction author in his own right, once coined the law that “90% of science fiction is crap, but 90% of everything is crap.” Which is probably true, but the inverse would seem to mean that 10% is not crap, and, moreover, that final 10% is subjective to the whims and predilections of the culture at large.

What I ultimately mean is that a lot of people think self-published novels are crap, but I know lots of people who think The DaVinci Code is crap. Rarely does everyone tend to agree on one book’s quality, and even when we manage, as a culture, to, we sometimes overlook flaws. The Great Gatsby is obviously a classic, and is, in fact, one of my favorite novels, but read it and try to figure out the chronology of it.

Scalzi’s feature is called The Big Idea, but I think a big idea is that distribution into bookstores, in the age of iPods/iPhones/Amazon, means very little. A big idea is that readers don’t care how they get their stories, so long as they get them. A big idea is that big news in publishing today is that one of my favorite author’s best novels is available online completely free. A big idea is that Steve Jobs thinks nobody is reading anymore, and so doesn’t really see the viability of an e-book reader, but still, somehow, despite that nobody’s reading and it’s not viable, still my collection became the first e-book on the iPhone just a week after the device came out.

I think a big idea is that in a few days I’m writing a check to the United Way New York City, to fulfill the promise that I’d donate $1 dollar from the sale of every copy, as well as every digital download of “What I saw that Day (September 11th, 2001).”

I think a big idea is that one day writing might be judged not by the means by which it is distributed but rather by the content of its ideas and the quality of its prose. That one day books might be judged not by where their covers appear but rather by what appears between them.

I’ve read a bit about Marie Philips’ Gods Behaving Badly (though not the book itself, I’ll admit). The premise, to quote its Amazon.com page, is:

the Greek gods and goddesses living in a tumbledown house in modern-day London and facing a very serious problem: their powers are waning, and immortality does not seem guaranteed. In between looking for work and keeping house, the ancient family is still up to its oldest pursuit: crossing and double-crossing each other. Apollo, who has been cosmically bored for centuries, has been appearing as a television psychic in a bid for stardom. His aunt Aphrodite, a phone-sex worker, sabotages him by having her son Eros shoot him with an arrow of love, making him fall for a very ordinary mortal-a cleaning woman named Alice, who happens to be in love with Neil, another nice, retiring mortal. When Artemis-the goddess of the moon, chastity and the hunt, who has been working as a dog walker-hires Alice to tidy up, the household is set to combust, and the fate of the world hangs in the balance.

And while this sounds intriguing, as such things go, the reason I haven’t already picked up the novel is that, reading that, I feel like I read the book back in 2001, when Neil Gaiman wrote it and called it American Gods.

American Gods is not my favorite Neil Gaiman novel (that’s Anansi Boys), nor do I think it’s his best (actually, I think that’s Anansi Boys, as well), but it’s certainly damned good enough to have won a whole mess of awards and slake quite well my thirst for novels about no-longer-employed gods. It’s long and meandering (in a very good way), with an extraordinarily likable protagonist matched up against extraordinarily likable antagonists.

I bring this up because, for the month of March, HarperCollins is basically giving the book away. Well. Close to, at any rate.

So here’s my part: I’m going to embed their code here, which you can click to follow and read the novel in its entirety.

If you like it, you can pick it up here.

And I think you will. Like it, I mean. It’s a great book.

Browse Inside this book Get this for your site

Truthfully, I’m rather surprised I don’t have much to say about the Obama/Clinton debate last night (I almost reversed those names, than backspaced over it. That’s probably telling. Though of what, I am unsure). I didn’t watch it (my headache prevented much in the way of coherence on my end), but I read most of it, and it seems like Hillary took an offensive strategy, spending most of the evening trying to create doubt in Obama.

Obama’s is, arguably, the position to be in, though that’s not to say that it’s easier. As someone who’s been in a rather enviable position and who has been repeatedly and personally attacked by people jockeying for that position, or better, I admire Obama’s reticence and restraint. It’s something I know I have to learn; I find it extraordinarily difficult to accept some of the slings and arrows that come with outrageous fortune, or sometimes to remain quiet. It’s not merely that success can breed contempt, but also that success is so very often so rarely something one believes one deserves.

Because, of course, success is not external. Success really comes from within, and has no direct correlation to anything either material or acquired; the most successful people in terms of business and wealth can also be the least successful in terms of life.

The more I learn of Obama, the more I feel I like him as a person, which is completely strange considering I’ve never seen the man. The more I see him speak, the more I see that smile, the more certain I become that I want to vote for him. The more I think he’d be good not just for our country but also for the world.

I think Edwards has a similar quality, to some degree, but without the same characteristic ease with which Obama carries it off. Edwards seemed to have to try, which is, I think, why he performed poorly; he was often fighting to gain ground, and sometimes it’s better to just be happy with the ground you’ve got and allow it to grow. Obama seems very happy with the plot of land he’s got, and I think people are realizing, more and more, just how large that plot is, because the deeper one goes, the more lush it appears. And I think I’ve extended that metaphor about as far as it can go, so I’ll leave it.

I think, last night, it became obvious that neither candidate would select the other as VP; the longer this process extends, the more I become certain that an Obama/Clinton ticket is simply completely out of the question.

But Obama/Edwards?

Yes we can.

Nothing substantive today, unfortunately. Tuesdays and Thursdays are my teaching days. In addition, I collected my students’ assignments, which means I got a hot stack of papers needs some gradin’. Plus, a headache the likes of which made me believe my eyes might ooze from my head because of the pressure.

So it goes.

Really, Oscar? Really?

I just watched the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men. It was ostensibly a Western based on the book of the same name by Cormac McCarthy, starring Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, and Tommy Lee Jones, about a man who happens across a drug-running deal gone awry and finds a satchel full of money. How much, you ask? Not sure, but it was a small satchel full of hundreds, so probably a million, tops. Not much more, certainly.

I’m very proud of myself for having written the above paragraph without saying anything actually negative about the film. My mother always said if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything, but I managed to say something without its being not-so-nice.

Though I could. Oh, boy how I could.

I’ve not seen A Simple Plan, with Billy Bob Thornton and Bill Paxton, but I’d wager the movies (and their books) had similar themes; you happen across money procured via ill-gotten ways, and you try to keep it, and Bad Stuff Happens. ™

Javier Bardem seems to have gotten a lot of press and respect for a bad haircut, but John Cusack played a much better, more layered hitman in Grosse Point Blank. I realize the movies are pretty much on opposite ends, but the only thing Bardem’s character lacked was a mustache he could twirl as the sociopathic villain sans sense of humor. Monomaniacal in his single-minded pursuit of the money. Hired by someone? I never caught that. He just shoots a lot of people, sometimes with a little attachment dohickey on the end of an oxygen tank. Which Tommy Lee Jones mentions completely non sequitur in a completely unrelated scene, because, as you know, Bob, this is how cattle ranches work.

Tommy Lee Jones was certainly the best part of the movie. There really weren’t any characters to care about. Josh Brolin, while certainly not unlikable, wasn’t all together sympathetic, either, and he wanted only one thing clearly; to survive with money. As motivations go, certainly, it’s what we all hope, but he does some fairly stupid things several times along the way (like chucking the briefcase over a border fence it’s not clear why he’s crossing, anyway).

I think what most disappoints me is the movies ignored. I mentioned both Zodiac and Gone Baby Gone in a post the the other day; as crime movies go (and No Country was, pretty much, a crime movie set in the Southwest), both were far superior in their own ways. Casey Affleck’s troubled detective fought hard to save the life of a young girl despite that her mother was not the most responsible person in the world; a definite motivational dilemma that sought but never found an easy answer. Even the den–denou–climax/resolution was layered and nuanced.

Zodiac was even better, and was the sort of movie Fincher should have been recognized for. Fincher is an easily recognized director, stylistically; watch Fight Club and Panic Room and there are telltale signs it was the same guy. In a good way. Even his lesser appreciated fare (Sean Penn: better in The Game than in anything since he was Spicoli? Discuss) has his fingerprints all over it.

Until Zodiac. He was completely invisible, like Scorsese was finally invisible in The Departed. Fincher finally gave his utmost attention to simply telling the story well, without tricks or gimmicks, and man did it ever work. Even Gyllenhaal gave the sort of performance that makes you forget your watching Gyllenhaal.

Zodiac was not my favorite movie, but it was certainly one of the most perfectly conceived and executed films I’ve ever had the distinct pleasure of watching.

And it should whooped No Country all over the place last night.

Which ultimately means that the only thing the Academy actually got right last night was the award it gave Once.

I’ve been reading John Scalzi’s blog for a while now, though not nearly as long as it has, apparently, existed. I first learned of it last year or so, in, I believe, an issue of Wired. Scalzi is a science fiction writer whose books I’ll admit I’ve not read; I really only know about (and enjoy) his blog.

Today, he posted about his thoughts on blogs and bookselling. Scalzi is a blogger who blogged before ‘blogging’ actually existed as a word (I believe the word dates back to around 2001. Neil Gaiman is another); which, coincidentally, was before Scalzi actually had anything to sell. Nowadays he’s a multiple nominee for multiple awards (and has won several, including one for best new writer), but I loved his last paragraph:

“Personally I think people think about all this crap too hard. The reason to do a blog is because you want to. If you do it for any other reason, people will be able to tell, and it’s probably going to fall on its ass. The reason I think Whatever does well is because I like doing it, and I’ve liked doing it all the time I’ve done it. Simple enough.”

That’s why you’re here, actually. I haven’t talked about it much, but by summer of last year, I’d basically had a MyMeltdown; blogging on MySpace had become akin to my years in corporate America, or perhaps more accurately, my years temping. The site seemed to have become about either bashing or the relentless pursuit of more popularity. When I got the letter accepting me into my lectureship, I realized that I needed to learn how to reconcile my teaching life with my writing life. I realized I’d be standing, soon, before a group of students and attempting to play a very particular role, and I wished not to deviate from it. I didn’t want them to think of me as pretty much anything besides their professor, because I never did until I was well out of college.

The other thing I’ve already alluded to; Rupert Murdoch’s already bulky pockets. For my second assignment last semester, I guided my students through a prompt on journalistic integrity; what does it mean, who has it and how did they earn it, and can blogging fill the same role. Many explored the idea of conglomeration; that having a certain company behind you can help your credibility, but it also creates problems if it’s the wrong company, or if said company is concerned almost solely with ratings, as many seemed to be. Most noted that they didn’t believe anything they saw on Fox News.

That assignment helped prompt my decision to start this up. I learned as much through that assignment as they did. And now, it’s good to be back. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t realized what I had until it was gone so much as I didn’t realize how much I missed it until I came back.

Thans for coming back with me. I missed you.

I found the image below when I started up Firefox to see the front-page MSNBC article on Ralph Nader’s declaration of his third run at presidential candidacy.

It irritated me for myriad reasons. The first came prompted from my years as a writer and editor; such a typo is just sloppy, and I think it says one of two things- either the journalist in question has such an extreme bias against Democrats that he or she felt the need to repeat the information twice, or that much of the article is simply cut-and-pasted from another source. The latter might well be the case; the bulk of the article probably came from a release from the Associated Press or somesuch, and it was just plopped in.

Which does, in fact, little to comfort me.

Someone somewhere wrote it. And two me, the repeated text is a direct swipe. I suppose I ultimately categorize as a Democrat; so far, this cycle, I favor an Obama/Edwards ticket (I’d've loved the reverse). But I have similar feelings for McCain as for Clinton; neither strikes me as a terrifying choice, and both strike me as adequate. In ’04, I cast for Kerry/Edwards.

I’m a little ashamed to admit I didn’t vote in ’00. I’m from Jersey, so I don’t think it made much of a difference either way.

But here’s the thing; I don’t know if Nader cost Gore the election in ’00. It’s entirely possible, I suppose. But you know what? I don’t think Gore would have handled the ’00-’04 well, either. I can’t imagine Gore having been president on 9/11. Perhaps it would have bucked him up and forced him to grow a backbone, but Gore always struck me as the most milquetoast of politicians. The only thing I knew about Dan Quayle as VP was that he couldn’t spell ‘potato,’ but I was, like, eight at the time; I knew less about Gore, and I was in college when he was VP, studying political science at one point, even.

It’s nice Gore won both the Oscar and the Peace prize for his environmental work, but I don’t recall much initiative toward the environment he took during his ’92-’00 terms. The current movement toward green (and that’s the environmental one, not Nader’s political party) is too little, too late, and I’m probably one of the few people with a scientific background who doesn’t believe in global warming, because what we’re facing is something a helluva lot bigger than that, and it’s called climate change (the change has been exacerbated and speeded by global warming, but global warming is just the start).

People blame Bush for not becoming involved enough in the environment and the Kyoto treaty, but the thing about the weather is that it didn’t just change. I remember being scared about holes in the ozone as early as 4th grade, which I think would’ve been around the mid-80s.

I don’t claim Nader’s candidacy siphoned votes away from Gore; if people were going to vote for him, they would have. If Gore had demonstrated more effectively he was a better candidate, people would have voted for him.

My feeling is that ’00 never should have been a Bush/Gore election in the first place. Bush smeared McCain six ways to Sunday, and before then, McCain had the better numbers. And if I could’ve chosen leadership in retrospect post-9/11, I’d want McCain in the role.

Nader can run. It won’t matter. To believe that McCain and Clinton are different candidates simply because one’s blue and the other’s red is folly. Obama is charismatic enough it’s not going to matter who he runs against if he wins the nom; he’ll win or lose depending on his campaign, not on his opponents.

I won’t be watching the show. I think it might be tomorrow night, though I’ve been hearing about it for ages. Between speculation about whether the WGA strike would allow it to be held in the first place to feverish coverage of Juno‘s screenwriter and Javier Bardem’s pageboy hairdo in No Country for Old Men, it’s been pretty impossible to miss.

I won’t be watching them because I have no real desire to see any of the nominations. I think Juno is really only this year’s version of Little Miss Sunshine, and the only reason I saw that one was because I went with my best buddy. I enjoyed the latter, certainly, and it was certainly well crafted, well written, and well structured, and it certainly had a lot of heart

–but.

(you knew there would be a ‘but’, of course). I don’t know; it was technically good, and enjoyable, but mostly– well, let’s just come right out and let me admit I like blowing shit up. My favorite movie is Shakespeare in Love, but my top ten is filled with the likes of V for Vendetta, Casino Royale, and Mission: Impossible III (also: The Sixth Sense). I’ve never been a huge fan of smaller indie movies (that last I mentioned because it comes about as close as I get). Grosse Point Blank is, I think, the closest I come to indie, and while it doesn’t blow anything up, there are silencers around.

So the full disclosure is that I’m not sure I’ve seen anything nominated, but when has lack of knowledge ever prevented anyone from writing about something, especially on the Internet? Tha Interwebs were invented for unfounded opinions from people who don’t know what they’re talking about, weren’t they?

In keeping with blowing shit up, how about some bullets?

-I’m tired of hearing about Diablo Cody, although I’ve begun to consider renaming myself The Jesus Casidy. With one ‘s’, because it’s cooler.

-The Coen brothers are interesting enough that I want to see No Country despite everything good I’ve read about it, but that’s because I like they’re stuff. I’ve always liked their stuff (though I think it’s a little too quirky just for the sake of being so). Intolerable Cruelty might be George Clooney’s best movie, and this from a guy who loves the entire Ocean’sfranchise (dear Mr. Soderbergh: you’re going backward. What we want is Ocean’s Five, with Damon, Pitt, Clooney, Cheadle, and Izzard, pulling off a low-tech heist of a low-tech casino, shot like Full Frontal. Get right on it, please).

-I’m more impressed that Daniel Day Lewis has cobbled shoes by any of his performances I’ve ever seen. Not that they were bad, mind, but he seems a poster child for the whole “Life’s too serious to be taken seriously,” as are work and craft. Dear Mr. Day Lewis: you’re an actor. Lighten up. Unless you want to do more cobbling of shoes, in which case, I wear an 8. Thank you.

***

I think one of the reasons I’m so disappointed is that two movies I loved were completely ignored. Zodiac is very nearly as close to perfect a movie as I’ve ever seen; it’s a lot like The Shawshank Redemption in that it manages to tell precisely the story it set out to in precisely the way it needed to, without gimmick or spectacle. A perfect example of a director really letting the story do the work. It’s the sort of movie someone who knows about how movies are made watches and thinks, wow, that’s well done, because the craft of it is just about invisible. It’s so subtle.

Also: Gone Baby Gone was robbed in just about every category. Best picture, best director, best actor, best supporting actor, best adapted screenplay . . . in a truly awesome world, Affleck would have won his second, third, and fourth Oscars for this movie, though it would have been a damned close race with Fincher.

But congratulations, Oscar, for nominating Casey. Just a shame you got the wrong movie.

Yes, I wrote that I’d begin blogging again, in earnest, the moment I finished my novel. And I am, just about.

I finished it last night around five in the evening. I saved it in, like, nine different places (one can never be too rich, too thin, or have their work saved in too many places), copied and pasted 80,000 words to fire off to my thesis advisor.

Which means I haven’t just finished my novel. I’ve also finished my thesis, which means I’ve finished my degree. All that’s left is the formality.

I remember two years ago. I remember how scared I was to do this, how I worried I was going to fall on my face, but I knew that I could no longer remain where I was.

It’s funny, the cycles in which life moves. Two years later, there’s something beautifully poetic about accomplishing exactly what I set out to do (and more), growing and changing and working, and then looking up and finding myself in exactly the same place I was in before. Scared about what I’m about to do in a few months, worried I’m going to fall on my face, but completely knowing that I can no longer remain where I am.

“And it was mom who showed that raging terror of where you’re headed is the surest sign you’re traveling in the right direction.” -Marty McConnell