novel ideas

Forget Twitter--who can limit themselves to 140-word posts? Twitter's for poets and graffiti vandals. Novelists need more.

And now they have it.

"You know, before we came up with Noveller, we had all these friends creating these great 75,000- to 300,000-word works of fiction, but there was no quick, easy, fun way to share them," cofounder Chuck Gregory said. "To be honest, we were stunned there wasn't already anything like it out there. It seemed so obvious."

wanted: editor, speechwriter

BILL O'REILLY: Do you believe that you are smart enough, incisive enough, intellectual enough to handle the most powerful job in the world?

SARAH PALIN: I believe that I am because I have common sense, and I have, I believe, the values that are reflective of so many other American values. And I believe that what Americans are seeking is not the elitism, the the kind of spineless... a spinelessness that perhaps is made up for that with some kind of elite Ivy League education and a fat resume that's based on anything but hard work and private sector, free enterprise principles. Americans could be seeking something like that in positive change in their leadership. I'm not saying that has to be me.

fahrenheit 451, or so

The NY Times book blog points us to www.rightwingwatch.com, which covered North Carolina's Amazing Grace Baptist Church Halloween 2009 Book Burning. You can read more about it at either of those two sites, but why not go right to the source?

From Amazing Grace Baptist Church's web site:

"Burning Perversions of God's Word... This event is not open to the public. Only our members and those by special invitation from the pastor are welcome. All others are trespassing, this includes the media."

All non-King James versions of the Bible were targeted, as Satan's Bibles.

Also? "Satan's music such as country , rap , rock , pop, heavy metal, western, soft and easy, southern gospel , contemporary Christian , jazz, soul, oldies but goldies, etc."

Also? "Satan's popular books written by heretics like Westcott & Hort , Bruce Metzger, Billy Graham , Rick Warren , Bill Hybels , John McArthur, James Dobson , Charles Swindoll , John Piper , Chuck Colson , Tony Evans, Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swagart , Mark Driskol, Franklin Graham , Bill Bright, Tim Lahaye, Paula White , T.D. Jakes, Benny Hinn , Joyce Myers , Brian McLaren , James White, Robert Schuller, Mother Teresa , The Pope , Rob Bell, Erwin McManus , Donald Miller, Shane Claiborne, Brennan Manning, William Young, Will Graham , and many more."

Note famous heretics Mother Teresa and the Pope on the list.

And because book burning is hungry-making work? "We will be serving fried chicken, and all the sides."

Where did they get the books? From their own private collections, of course. "If you have any books or music to donate, please call us for pick-up. If you like you can drop them off at our church door anytime. Thanks."

Just to be clear, I'm not knocking religion here--I'm knocking book burning, as it hits at my livelihood, and frankly, that kind of ignorance just pisses me off.

The best part? Due to a combination of rain and a North Carolina law against burning paper, the "book burning" was carried out by tearing pages out of these books and throwing them into a garbage can. There's video on the site, but it's not worth watching--instead, go read a book.

for hire

A friend points me to this link, a story about Nicolas Cage owing the IRS an "assload" of money and having ridiculously lavish spending habits. The reason it's of interest is this tidbit:

"While portraying an alcoholic in 'Leaving Las Vegas', his Oscar-winning role, in 1995, he hired an 'on set drinking-consultant-poet.'"

I'm always looking for new ways to ply my trade, and I teach an occasional course on writing for a living that tries to open students' eyes to writing markets other than magazines. But this? This one never occurred to me.

My friend also offered this rain-on-my-parade caveat:

"Something tells me that after he knocks a few back, you're more likely to end up with 'Peggy Sue Got Married' Nic Cage instead of 'Raising Arizona' Nic Cage."

Point taken.

breakfast of champions

Happy Birthday, Kurt Vonnegut, wherever you are.

this is where the magic happens

Some people are fascinated by how writers write--I mean, the actual process. Typewriter or computer? Paper and pen? Morning, noon or night? I can tell you this much: I very much doubt the people of which you might ask this question will tell you they sit at the local Starbucks.

At any rate, some of these responses are interesting and, to me at least, unexpected. The bathroom? Sure, I get that. But the shower?

one day

Action A: I buy a new box of pens (Pilot Precise rolling balls, v5, black).

Action B: I do a load of laundry with a pen somewhere in it, likely in a pocket.

Time between those two events? Two days. The best part? There were actually two pens. The ferocity of my idiocy knows no bounds.

single fish

Nov. 8, 2009: Happy birthday, Jonathan. Has it really been 12 years? I miss you every day—we all do.

man who would be king

What exactly does the “Literary Establishment” have against Stephen King? Now, I’m not a King fan—I can’t remember the last book of his I read, although I’ve read my share and I enjoy his short stories—but neither am I his detractor. The guy’s been more successful than nearly any other writer. It’s difficult to argue with that.

But a segment of would-be tastemakers persist in deriding King’s work as less-than-literary. Why? And so what? Does every book need to be brilliantly written prose, or can some of them be solidly paced-and-plotted page-turners? (Ideally, of course, they’ll be both.)

The ivory tower’s a lonely place to spend your time. And you’ll run out of things to read pretty fast.

The New Yorker, considered by some to be the tastemaker of tastemakers, is an exception, and publishes King from time to time, somewhat controversially. Another exception is the wonderful Paris Review, in which Christopher Lehmann-Haupt interviewed King for the “Art of Fiction” series. In addition, King was awarded the National Book Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

But just when you think he’s starting to get some respect, hello New York Times Sunday Book Review. This week James Parker, an editor at The Atlantic, reviews King’s new novel, “Under the Dome.” Parker says:

“As for the prose, it’s not all smooth sailing. Given King’s extraordinary career-long dominance, we might expect him at this point to be stylistically complete, turning perfect sentences, as breezily at home in his idiom as P.G. Wodehouse. But he isn’t, quite. ‘Then it came down on her again, like unpleasant presents raining from a poison piñata: the realization that Howie was dead.’ (It’s the accidental rhyme of ‘unpleasant’ and ‘presents’ that makes that one such a stinker.)”

So Parker decides the sentence is a stinker, and then tells us why it’s a stinker. If it’s such a stinker, should we need to be told, or shouldn’t it be immediately apparent? Moreover, Parker is making the assumption that the “unpleasant, presents” rhyme is accidental—why?

He tells us in the next paragraph: “But then, King has always produced at pulp speed... . We shouldn’t be too squeamish about the odd half-baked simile or lapse into B-movie dialogue, is my point.”

He gives King so little credit that he assumes King didn’t think through his sentences. The guy writes fast, yes—and prolifically. But can you remember the last book he wrote that wasn’t a success?

Can anyone? Is it really a fair assumption that he’s not in control of his own writing?

We shouldn’t be surprised that he treats King without respect. After all, by telling us what makes a sentence bad, he’s treating us with the same disrespect.

Writing is subjective. And personally, I like “unpleasant presents.”

Give it a rest, Parker. Please.

monkeyfist

Ask me about myself and I’m liable to tell you that I once bought a boat that broke down all three times I test-drove it. Three times I got towed back to port. Everything you need to know about me you can learn from that anecdote.

I was living in Southeast Alaska, trolling the classifieds of the newspaper I worked for, when I found a promising ad. “1970 Flybridge cabin cruiser, 27-foot Campion. Galley, head, sleeps six. Lots of TLC needed. Mechanic’s delight.” If you don't see the promise in that description, that’s because I didn’t include the price.

She was awkward and unwieldy, with a severe starboard list, leprous corrosion and a weight problem. The upholstery was striped in a rust color that hadn't been popular for three decades. Some things worked only sporadically, others not at all. A moldy smell permeated the cabin, overpowered from time to time by unburned gasoline fumes. Love at first sight. I named her Monkeyfist, after the mariners’ knot used for throwing tow lines.

My previous boat was a 19-foot aluminum Lund I'd bought from a guy who bought it from the writer Richard Nelson. Nelson had a writing studio overlooking Sitka Sound, and I visited him there one day in his old skiff. “Did you notice that ding in it?” he asked.

A ding? The bow had been crumpled and hammered back out, like a Tupperware container someone stepped on and then tried to pop back into shape. It's like asking Noah if he’d noticed any rain. Nelson repaired it the typically Alaskan way, which is to say half-assed, ridiculously functional, without concern for aesthetics, and using whatever materials lay at hand—in other words, he’d welded flattened beer cans over the holes and spray-painted them silver.

“Want to know how she got that ding?” he asked. “I hit a humpback.”

That’s right. He hit a whale.

I justified buying his skiff the same way I'd justify the Monkeyfist a couple years later—by quoting the film adaptation of The World According to Garp: “It's predisastered.”

I know what you’re thinking. Car, boat, lawnmower, blender, it doesn’t matter—once an engine breaks down it’s more likely to break down again, not less. And sure enough, in the few years I owned the Monkeyfist, I replaced nearly the entire engine, miles of wiring, and countless other bits and pieces. Still she gave me nothing but trouble. Minks ate through the hull, chewed up the cabin and crapped all over it. The galley caught fire. She leaked like a sieve. The lights flickered, the prop jammed and the steering had a mind of its own. Some mornings I’d wake up at anchor in a distant, remote bay, and she wouldn’t start.

Man, I loved that boat.

Bad things happen in life. Some of them make good stories. Garp’s theory of predisastering may be complete bullshit, but I’ll tell you one thing. I hit lots of things with Richard Nelson’s skiff. But I never hit a whale.

don't shoot yourself

Over at the Big Think, novelist and wrestling bear fetishist John Irving has profound advice for young novelists: “Don’t shoot yourself.”

Thanks, John.

Take that, Hemingway.

six-word autobiography

Cleans up nice, but only infrequently.

recession

Times are tight. The country's in a recession. Here at Bernard Central we've had to scale back too. Until further notice we're cutting out the use of unnecessary punctuation. Gone are commas semicolons screamers hyphens and double quotes. Single quotation marks remain useful as contractions save letters. We appreciate your understanding.

Thanks in advance. The management.

lucky

You know that old joke about the three legged dog with one eye and one ear that answers to "Lucky"? If there's a human equivalent of that dog, I sat next to him on a flight to New York for a reading a couple years ago. He had an endless supply of tragic stories that he unrolled like a carpet, and as a writer, of course, I wanted to hear every one of them. But as the guy stuck next to him on a plane for an hour, I didn’t want to hear any of them.

One such story involved the time he walked in on his best friend, who was about to kill himself. “I’m not good with words,” Lucky said, “and I didn’t think I could talk him out of it."

"So what did you do?"

"I tackled him.”

"How'd that work out for you?"

“Not well,” Lucky said. “I got shot.” Then he looked me in the eyes and said, “Sometimes you just have to do the best you can and hope it’s good enough.”

He paused. “So. What do you do?”

“I’m a writer,” I said, somewhat anticlimactically.

“Oh, cool, I love horses.”

“No, no, a writer. I tell stories.”

“Awesome. I have a ton of stories. How do you get to do something like that?”

I told him there was no qualifying exam, no board certification. You just did it. In fact, I said, you just have to do the best you can and hope it’s good enough.

“Yeah,” Lucky said, lowering his seatback to the reclining position. “But if you screw up, no one gets shot in the ass.”