This one is quite different from the first—it’s a satire and written in an existential style. I’ve been working on it in various forms for several years, and have finally found the correct voice for the narrator, so I have recently been enthusiastic about moving ahead at last.

I don’t want to say too much more about it, but about a year ago I had an idea that as the main character, who is something of a loser, continues to gain power, he might also gain weight—a metaphor for his growth and the indulgences that come with it. Rather creative, I thought.

Well I guess I wasn’t the only one. Got my Wall Street Journal today, which included a section on books to watch for in 2010. Right at the top of the page is a blurb on Ian McEwan’s latest, titled Solar, a comedy about climate change. Here’s what they wrote: “Solar centers on a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who leads an initiative to pioneer a new source of clean energy. He also gets fatter as the novel unfolds.” So much for my creativity.

I suppose I should be flattered that a writer of the “weight” of Ian McEwan came up with the same idea. And maybe his treatment of the weight gain is not quite the same. But it sure is frustrating. His book is due out March 30. Guess who’ll be first in line to grab a copy and see how the fat man sings.

A couple of posts ago I commented on some published books with odd titles and subjects. Today a friend posted a link to a story about a new book that features dozens of awkward and confusing titles. It’s called Do-It-Yourself Brain Surgery and Other Implausibly Titled Books, and features 96 pages of winners like Fabulous Small Jews, Knitting with Dog Hair, The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories and I Was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen.

A book about bad books. How come I never get ideas like that?

Here’s a link: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2009/12/knitting-with-dog-hair-and-other-unfortunate-book-titles.html

I’m still at that first waiting point, so I often take notice of other books that are just coming out, and wonder about the decisions made in the publishing process, such as: Who will read this? Is the audience big enough to justify a print run? Why did the publisher choose this one?

To be honest, there are some books* I see whose allure for readers escapes me. Really, how many people are going to rush out to pick up a copy of Whose Fair?, the history of the St. Louis Exposition of 1904? Whoever those folks are, they may have to wait in line behind people clamoring for The North American Porcupine—second edition. Second edition? Are you telling me the first edition sold out?

I begin to have serious doubts. If this is what the public wants to read, what chance do I have with a novel about three American entertainers stranded in Paris on the eve of World War I who become involved in romantic and political intrigues?

Better I should go back to the keyboard and write something like Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World. I can see it now—first you take a 500-year-old onion… Or maybe I should try sports. Spartak Moscow, A History of the People’s Team in the Workers’ State made it to print; how about I take a couple of weeks and bang out a sports tome on…I’ve got it…The History of Hackeysack.

I suppose these titles should give me hope. If these volumes got published, perhaps there’s room on a bookstore shelf somewhere for mine.

*These are all actual books advertised in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books.

I’ve noticed that in some of these stories, the characters are made to sound something like hillbillies, or at least what the writer thinks hillbillies should sound like. All that reminded me of the stories of Breece D’J Pancake, who was from West Virginia and was known for his stories about the places in which he grew up. As you might imagine, the people in his stories sound not like hillbillies, but people.

Pancake was an extraordinarily tragic figure. As a graduate student at the University of Virginia, he never fit in with the kids from affluent families in his writing classes, and so began to deliberately style himself as an uncultured hillbilly. His stories were elegiac yet brutal portrayals of life in Appalachia. He had four of them published in The Atlantic. Several critics considered his work to be genius. Joyce Carol Oates said his stories were “as compactly and tightly written as prose poems and should be read (and reread) with extreme care.”

Why don’t we have more of his work? Pancake died in 1979, at the age of 26, probably from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

The Atlantic maintains links to the Pancake stories they published, and they are worth a read. One doesn’t see work of this depth much these days.

“Trilobites” “In the Dry” “The Honored Dead” “Hollow”

And here is a link to Oates’ essay on Pancake:

The New York Times Review of The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake by Joyce Carol Oates

The one thing writers like Margaret Atwood, Hilary Mantel, Kazuo Ishiguro and the others do have in common is that they revise what they’ve written—not just revise in the sense that most writers consider the term, where they write a draft and go over it a couple of times—but over and over. Orhan Pamuk says he writes the first line of his books 50 to 100 times. Others, like Diaz and Ishiguro cut and rewrite hundreds of pages. That’s rather amazing, considering what fabulous writers they are.

Not every writer, especially those new at the craft, believes this approach is necessary. I admit, I sure didn’t when I first started writing regularly. But as I practiced more, and took more time with my work, that changed drastically. In a novel I completed back in May, the first chapter took ten versions, and that’s not even counting the at least dozen additional rewrites that I didn’t bother to save as new versions. On average, I would say I revised each of the 17 chapters about 10-15 times.

The revising helps. With each version the continuity of what I am writing becomes stronger, the characterization deeper and clearer. The language is improved as well. My early drafts tend to be a bit wordy, so this is especially important for me.

Someone once said writing is revising, and whether you like to do it or not, it’s true. I haven’t gone so far as to grab a copy of a story and sit on the edge of the tub to edit it, but if it works for Junot Diaz, well, maybe it’s worth a try.

That fairy tale was then. This is now: http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2009/10/19/091019sh_shouts_weiner

The article is funny, but it’s also largely true. Today writers, especially new writers, are expected to handle the majority of their publicity efforts, even before they’ve been published. Personally, I spend two or more hours a day either blogging, commenting on others’ blogs (which theoretically increases traffic to my blog), working on book reviews to get my name out in the field, or other possibly platform-building efforts.

Unfortunately I’m one of those people who has to get the little tasks out of the way before I work on the big project (my latest novel), so I sometimes find the day is too far gone to get into the mood to write. Clearly, I need to reprioritize. I’m trying to learn to blog at night to clear the day for the creativity I need to write well. That didn’t happen today.

I can hardly wait until I get a book deal—I’ll be so busy publicizing, I may never write again!

The simple explanation is that these publications cost too much to operate and print, particularly in a world that is moving swiftly and continuously to digital content. If that’s true, expect many more to follow down the path of closure or digitalization.

This is especially bad news for many of the aging baby boomer generation, who grew up with printed books and magazine, and still prefer the look, feel and portability of printed matter over lugging an electronic device around just to read a story or chapter on a screen we can barely see, using keys we can barely operate. We are uncomfortable using technology to replace functional simplicity. It wasn’t broke—why did they have to fix it?

Most of us still have 20 to 30-plus years of reading (and spending on reading material) left in us, so the move to digital, and whether us older folks will fight it or acquiesce, will be interesting to watch. Personally, although I spend six to ten hours a day on the computer writing and researching (and other, far less productive tasks—I admit it), I still much prefer the feel of a book or magazine in my hands when I’m reading.

I’m still part of the online community of the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts, where I received my MFA, and much of our discussion centers on the future of publishing and how writers will have to adapt to changing modes of content delivery—even more important is what that means to our rate of pay, although we are fairly sure of one thing, that it will be less. The corporate world is all about reducing costs, and writers are one of them.

So if you’d like to see at least some of the better literary journals continue in their present form, there’s only one thing to do—subscribe to a few. As an assistant editor for one, Fifth Wednesday Journal, I’m amazed at the number of stories submitted by writers who’ve never bothered to read it. If half of the writers who submit to literary journals bought an issue, and if only a quarter took a subscription, I’ll bet most of these publications would be in no danger of failing. Pick your faves, and if you can afford it, send them a check for a year’s worth. If you’re one of the many missing out on the great stories, poetry and essays these publications contain, check a few out at your local library or bookstore.

How desperate to make money is the Detroit Opera House? My wife and I attended “Phantom of the Opera” last night, and while it was an excellent production, we were appalled that now, in addition to inconsiderate talkers, coughers and seat kickers, we have to deal with people eating and drinking during the performance, because the house now offers popcorn, pretzels, candy—and get this—beer, for sale and happily permitted in the theater. So now we get crunching, belching and my neighbor’s popcorn breath in addition to the other distractions.

Apparently in the never-ending quest to make a buck, no potential source of revenue is overlooked. But is this opera? For $200-plus for two seats, we shouldn’t have to put up with so much just to enjoy the show. It’s tough enough handling the people who don’t know the difference between the theater and their living rooms. It would help if we could believe that management is on our side. But by condoning a chow hall atmosphere in what should be a semi-reserved setting, it’s clear where the Opera’s priorities lay.

What’s next, hot dogs and pizza? Hey guys, this isn’t a football game. It’s the opera. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, we’ll spend our money somewhere else.

That’s me in the last instance. This afternoon I sent the box with the ms to another agent. That was only after I’d been rejected by the first agent and did another revision on the entire book after she made a somewhat disparaging comment about the writing. Although I’m optimistic this time, I’m already thinking about where to query next if she says no. There’s a friend of a friend who knows an agent, and there’s this agent I found in a magazine who doesn’t take historical fiction exactly, but he did sell a novel that had one of the same words in the title … that sort of thing.

Maybe that’s what keeps some writers going, the knowledge that there is always another possibility. It’s a bit of an obsession, a drug of sorts, that keeps us coming back for another shot at being published (read: vindicated, validated).

In a class on the Craft of Fiction for which I’m assisting the instructor (Kathleen Alcalá, an excellent historical novelist, by the way), we’re currently discussing Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write. She makes a case for writing not for monetary reward or recognition, but for the satisfaction that the art brings to the individual. If only it could work that way. Since we live in a market economy, our value as writers is dependent on our ability to be published (unless, of course, you’re independently wealthy). Even art has been turned into a competition, with thousands of hopeful writers vying to fill a few hundred or so places in lit journals, and a few dozen slots for novels. The best we can do is to try to separate ourselves from the business aspects of literature when we sit down at the keyboard, but that’s not always easy to do, since those business aspects are now so much a part of the writer’s life—so much more than when Ueland published her book in 1939.

It’s not until you undertake such a task that you begin to understand the mindset of people who are just beginning to write. An overwhelming percentage of stories appear to be written by people whose exposure to literature has been limited to bodice rippers, comic books and People magazine.

I kid you not. Here’s a smattering from today’s slush pile. The names have been withheld to protect the guilty.

“She smiled the first smile I’d seen on her face that wasn’t tinged with sadness.”

“Tom sat on a stool, leaning against the doorway of the alpaca house in a phantasmagoric, half-sleep haze.”

“Tom was no stranger to such hard-ons. Like the alpaca killer, those hard-ons usually struck at night.” (That’s from the same story as above, but I couldn’t resist.)

“He treated Oedipus the way a giant would a mosquito: small but threatening.”

Honest—I do not make these up. I couldn’t.

These examples are illustrations of work by writers who actually believe that such awkward, pretentious or absurd sentences are good writing. How do they get that idea? Simple—they read crap all their lives instead of good, thoughtful, creative writing, like maybe a National Book Award winner once in a while instead of books written on Twitter. There are many reasons for this, but I’ll discuss those in future blogs. For now, suffice it to say that the marketing oligarchs who dictate taste and what passes for intelligence in our society have a vested interest in keeping the bulk of the population stupid.

I’ve written before about how important and difficult it is to encourage beginning writers. No service is performed for the literary community by alienating potential readers (read: people who may someday pay to read our stuff) by telling them they are clueless about writing. This only makes them resentful non-readers who vegetate in front of the television and continue to believe they could have been writers except that they were misunderstood by a clique of snobbish eggheads.

They want to write, at least for the moment, and believe they have something to say. But how to be encouraging to someone who so obviously needs years more experience before anything s/he writes is worthy of publication. How do we get these kids to give writing another try, to make the next story a little better without ridiculing the last one? (Which I have done above, but at least I didn’t name names.)

Somewhere, somehow, we need to slip a good piece of writing onto their reading lists. I don’t mean force-feed them classics they wouldn’t understand (although reading the classics has many rewards for those who are ready for them). But find a way to get examples that will open their eyes to the possibilities of literature—something like a short story by Junot Diaz or Barry Yourgrau—in among the trash that has allowed them to believe that self-indulgent bombast is good writing.