BEDA

As you might know (if you pay any attention to the badges in the right sidebar anyway), last month, I signed on for a project requiring daily blogposts for April. Why not? I post fairly often anyway and why pass up the opportunity to put your work in front of new eyes? It sounds easier than it is. Blog Every Day in April (BEDA) was the brainchild of YA author Maureen Johnson as a means to get herself to blog more often and provide greater accessibility to her fans. Gone are the days of JD Salinger and his peers hiding from their readers, the modern author steps out there and participates in an active discussion of their work. And MJ's status in the young adult community has prompted an amazing amount of young people to take to their keyboards (I almost said "Take up the pen". I am so 20th Century sometimes...) and write about themselves, their lives, their loves and their personal travails. April 2009 has passed into history and as of this moment, there are 6,682 posts on the rolls and more spread across the internet on personal blogs and even in video posts. Anyone who thinks the written word is dead or that kids don't know how to express themselves anymore is wrong. Those of us who learned to type on actual typewriters can often place too great an emphasis on the old forms to the exclusion of the volumes and value of what is happening in the digital realm. Working at the writing center, I could've told you that young people write all the time above and beyond their schoolwork. Often, they are writing under, around and in spite of the way in which they were taught to do so. Theater and film are thriving on YouTube. Poetry is alive and admirably suited to Twitter. And young adult fiction has never been a stronger medium. Just because Harold Bloom doesn't like Harry Potter, there is no reason to believe that the young people are any less literate than those who preceded them. Quite the contrary in my opinion. The formats change, the topics expand and evolve, but the printed word is far from dead. The breadth of subjects and depth of thought that have been made manifest in this project is breathtaking: book reviews, modern cultural shifts (such as Amazonfail), college choices, lifestyle choices of all stripes and a lively community of very literate young people. Like too many others before me, I once said I could never write for the Young Adult market because I didn't want to have to 'dumb down' my stories for 'kids'. How wrong I was. And how wrong those who came before me were to believe that. To the point that I think I might be daunting writing up to the level expected by a new and demanding audience of literate readers. It has been at times surprising and hilarious to watch BEDA unfold. At times it has been predictable, filled with the banality of daily life: school, dates, crushes and cetera. But frequently it jumped into another sphere and became something completely other... like unmaking an exquisite piece of origami to find it was folded from a collage of Roald Dahl short stories, Shakespeare, JD Salinger and a social studies textbook. It was an honor to participate and be invited to read your thoughts these past thirty days. See you next April! --- Cross Posted at Maureen Johnson on the Ning.

Is It Censorship Season?

To recap: It is not the responsibility of your librarians to parent your children. To protect the speech we like it is imperative that we protect all speech. Ban one ideology and yours is next. Peel back the protections of the authors you hate and the authors you like will be unprotected. No one wins these fights. I invite you to support the "West Bend Four". Because censorship hurts everyone.

Wordless Wednesday: Elemental Dance

(Guest Photographer: Kristin Perkins)

Walk softly and carry...

The Justice Dept has announced that it will be looking into the Google Books deal that they struck as a settlement with the Author's Guild. I'm not sure who this is good or bad news for, but it bears watching. Keep in mind that WIRED Magazine reports that this appears to be one front of the ongoing war between Google and Microsoft's lobbyist armies. Read from the Associated Press and Yahoo Newsfeed. Someone Google "Proxy War" for me...

Reflections (In Memoriam)

There's an unwritten contract between writer and reader: The author is there to challenge you, to hold up a mirror and show you what they see, a new viewpoint different from your own.

It is in the nature of any reflection that we will not always see what we expect to see. At its worst it is merely titillating. At its best this is the beginning of a conversation, the juxtaposition of different viewpoints, one set beside the next, interlocking reflections of life in our times (or past times in some cases) because no single image can be the entire picture. In the words of the oft-censored author Douglas Adams: "The function of art is to hold the mirror up to nature, and there simply isn’t a mirror big enough..."

Without that conversation, without viewing the entire picture, all the reflections available to you, you cannot hope to have a fully-realized picture of our culture. Pull the mirror off the wall and the reflection will go away but it will not change what it showed. Only by taking all the images available -- even those we disagree with -- and overlaying them can we begin to see the whole interconnected collage of overlapping lives and loves and wonder that surrounds us. The whole of creation laid out before us in the stacks of the world library.

While I was touring the east coast, uberLibrarian Judith Krug passed away.  In the tradition of Voltaire's "I may not agree with what you say, but I will die for your right to say it", Ms. Krug founded the notion of a "Banned Books Week" at the American Library Association. She was a fearless fighter against censorship and the expulsion of challenging literature from American libraries. Soon thereafter, the ALA released their annual list of "Challenged Books".

Books are supposed to be challenging, folks. Rest in peace, Ms. Krug. I never had the pleasure of meeting you, but I will never forget you.

Brokeback Bookseller...

Catching up on booknews I missed during my travels and you may have missed too...

Just when we though that the final chapter in the bizarro "Amazonfail" controversy had been written... Amazon needs to get their crap together. If they're making thier site "Family Safe" and categorizing items by impenetrable fiat, then at least have the integrity to own up to it. And if it really was a glitch, please explain the letters some authors received telling them their work had been moved into an unlisted "Adult" category and the criteria utilized to make that decision. Or they could just blame this guy. He seems eager to accept credit whether he did it or not.

Seriously, I think it was a glitch, but not the computer kind. The schizophrenic cultural kind that infects so many of these discussions between the far right hand and the far left one.

This is your brain on coffee...

A barista and a neuroscientist walk into a coffeeshop... Sounds like the beginning of a really esoteric joke? Actually, it's the nub of a collaboration between two people at Cornell University: Neuroscientist Linda Nowak and award-winning barista Chris Ganger on what coffee is and how it does that voodoo that it does do so well. Light in the Winter The perfect blend of science and art.

A Bard By Any Other Name...

In case you have not heard, Justice John Paul Stevens is making noises about the identity of Shakespeare.

Again.

We'll ignore for the moment that the US constitution doesn't present Supreme Court justices with any special powers to decide questions of historical merit and focus on the question at hand. Nor does sitting on the federal bench give one any special insight into matters of history or theater. Neither does being a blogger, for that matter.

"It is a great comfort that so little is known concerning the poet. The life of William Shakespeare is a fine mystery and I tremble every day lest something should turn up." ~ Charles Dickens

So, did Shakespeare write Shakespeare? Do we care? Why do we care? Does it make a difference?

I care, but I'm not entirely sure why... mostly just annoyed by the seeming endless nature of this debate and the preposterous nature of many of the claims. So here's my contribution to the perpetual debate... alas.

Get three fairly well-educated people in a room. People cognizant of the lurking darkness behind the greatest works of English Literature and ask them who wrote Shakespeare’s plays. For all intents and purposes, the major camps are split thrice: Bacon, Oxford, and Marlowe (with smaller camps devoted to Elizabeth I, William Stanley and a consortium of playwrights who assumed the name of a waiter at the Mermaid Tavern and wrote highly-successful plays using this pseudonym). Behind the arras we will convey ourselves to listen to what passes within…

Our first contender is convinced that Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford, ghostwrote the plays and acquired the identity of an actual provincial actor to conceal his identity.

In my experience, our Oxfordian will spend the first thirty minutes of their spiel telling you the long list of names that appear on the roles of their camp: Mark Twain, Supreme Court Justices, et al… When you persuade them to move on from their guestlist and get down to the reasoning (if you can) it usually has to do with education and knowledge of the court and his (often inaccurate) knowledge of the continent.

The second contender for the Bardic crown is the Elizabethan scholar, Sir Francis Bacon.

He was a pioneer of the Scientific method and his mind was sharp enough, certainly, and his pen was certainly prolific. We have thousands of documents attributed to him under his name. The nut of their argument revolves around complicated word puzzles, anagrams and secret messages hidden in the plays, most of which appear to the unbeliever to be a logical stretch at best.

The third fellow in our little triumvirate is devoted to the dark knight of the Elizabethan stage: Christopher Marlowe.

It becomes clear fairly earluy that he is devoted to Kit's camp basically because it’s the only theory more preposterous than crowd at the Mermaid co-writing the plays and there’s a certain romance to the doomed Marlowe escaping the fate that Shakespeare referred to as “a great reckoning in a little room”. That he rose above the uniformly maudlin and darkly scholarly works of his early career under a new eponym and went on to write history’s greatest comedies, histories and tragedies… it harkens to a certain character trait in people.

Never mind that no one can explain why any of those men would want to conceal their identities for writing plays and poems that were universally popular in their time, successful with the masses and thought-provoking without resorting to true subversion of the dominant paradigm. Why, when other noblemen wrote and published under their own names, when other scholars and poets and playwrights were undercutting the Powers That Be in their own names, why would any of these distinguished members of the intellectual elite disown the acclaim that became attached to the name William Shakespeare during his lifetime?

The bulk of words devoted to this subject, in all three of the major camps and all of the lesser camps as well (the possibilities seem endless) focus rather more on why the Glover of Stratford couldn’t have written them than on presenting evidence as to why their champion did. Geographical knowledge of Europe, knowledge of the law, knowledge of the mores of the Elizabethan (and subsequently Jacobian) courts, are the three main focuses of the anti-Stratfordian arguments.

At this point, allow me to intrude into our little confab because what we really need is a healthy cut from Occam’s Razor.

By sheer dint of my refusal to accept theories in place of evidence, I am branded a "Stratfordian" which means I'm siding with the orthodoxy and saying Billy boy wrote his own plays unless you can prove otherwise. What is the simplest answer? What answer requires the least number of assumptions? That Edward Devere wrote the plays even though the best part of latter half of the First Folio didn't debut until well after his death? That the dispassionate and always-analytical Francis Bacon wrote the most passionate lovescenes in all of English literature just because he once fancied himself in a letter to a friend as a "Hidden Poet"? That Kit Marlowe faked his death and changed his writing style completely and no one in the theatre scene noticed and made comment? Or did Will Shakespeare, son of the disgraced mayor of Stratford write the plays attributed to him?

Do we attribute the plays to the man we know existed or do we discount him becuase he didn't leave a library and a pile of letters lying around? He didn’t attend college, he had no higher education to form the intellect and knowledge of court life and law obviously at work in the plays. So I'm given to wonder why do we so-freely assume that Shakespeare could not have been a prodigy? Mozart wrote symphonies at the age of seven. He didn’t need a college or even a teacher to get him started. He listened, he observed, he made mistakes and didn’t repeat them.

Aguments of the unalloyed prodigy aside, what a man in Elizabethan England would really need to become Shakespeare - aside from mere genius - was a mind that could observe, remember, and distill all that he saw into works of fiction, often in an echo or reaction to other works of the same time period such as Marlowe's Tamburlaine. The knowledge of courtiers, English Law, of the landscape of Europe... could the son of a burgher of Stratford have known these things? Sure, why not? Were they state secrets? Did they not appear in other plays and each playwright feed off the other in much the same way (and with the same accuracy in many cases) as modern detective novels and legal thrillers?

In Elizabethan England, literacy was the only requirement for being a notary, and thereby exposed to all matter of legal dealings from marriages to wills. As for courtiers; his take was just as fanciful as it was accurate. England had become fairly cosmopolitan by the advent of Will Shakespeare and The Book of the Courtier by Castiglione was widely available, peeling back some of the mystique of the court. Much of the noble shenanigans in the Histories are not such a far leap from the pages of Catiglione's books.

It's been noted for centuries that the English People are a legalistic race. A complicated web of personal rights follow a thread back to Magna Carta, telling each villien where he or she stands in direct relation to the person next to them. The legal records still on file at the Old Bailey are full of quite complex legal complaints filed by and against the very meanest of the mean. Knowledge of the law was not isolated in the colleges of Oxford.

Nor was literacy or the reading of the classics in a world with a thriving book trade. Almost all of Shakespeare's histories can - in fact - be traced directly to Holinshed's Chronicles, one of the most influential and widely-read history books of its time.

He spelled his name differently every time he wrote it. So what? So did Sir Walter Raleigh (Ralegh?) and we don't doubt his existence. (Thank God he had his portrait painted, or we'd think some sap from Avon was really the one sailing all over the world looking for El Dorado!) The rules of spelling and syntax were quite malleable at this point in history and making too much of it is pure huxterism.

I hate to throw water on the party, but this much we know is true... We know that a player, theater-owner, land-speculator, and gentleman existed in London at the time of Shakespeare’s glory days in the latter part of the 16th and early part of the 17th centuries. We know all of that from primary documentary evidence. We have his will, we have his receipts from his properties, and there are contemporary allusions to him as an unlettered upstart ("Shakescene"). He was sued, he held a coat of arms by right of his mother and father and much comment was made on it because he essentially bought it and held it by sidewise means.

Why do we doubt he existed? Moreover, why should we doubt that this man wrote the plays attributed to him?

I know the "Snob" argument is frequently refuted by those so branded. Fair enough, you know your own mind and I'm not telling you what to think, I'm telling you what I think and I think that at the core, there's something in some people who cannot accept that a nobody from nowhere set the world on fire with his genius at a time when that sort of thing wasn’t supposed to be allowed. He illuminated his time with the light of his imagination, he brought to the stage everything that could or might be true in his time and cast a shadow over all times to come.

I'm well read on the issues, but I'm not an expert. Nevertheless, I think the sheer Byzantine levels-within-levels-protected-by-lies-within-lies nature of the theory is its Achilles heel. No one can keep a secret that well that long, certainly not the entire theatrical scene of London. People who - in the period - seemed perfectly at-ease with Shakespeare the Glover of Avon being the author of the plays which bore his name.

Considering the entire city of London burned to the ground in 1666 to the detriment of written documents and books caught in the conflagration makes the lack of a library or pile of correspondence a thin argument at best.

Truly this is the original conspiracy theory, well-nigh Area 51 and the Kennedy assassination all rolled up in one big intellectual enchilada in a tortilla made of arguments from silence. Everyone with the chops to make an argument has an opinion. (A lot of people who lack the chops have an opinion too, mostly borrowed from the books written by those who think they have them.) Occam’s razor cuts it all to ribbands... barring something new and concrete, Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare until proven otherwise.

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For an examination of how the son of a glover could become the "Shakespeare that wrote Shakespeare" I recommend Stephen Greenblatt's book Will In the World. I commend it to you because despite his occasional flight of fancy (such as the legendary sojourn in the Catholic North) the book is extensively footnoted and has a pretty darn sound basis in documentary evidence. If you have reading recommendations for me that sit contrary to my opinions, I'm happy to hear them. Leave them in the comments.

One last post on the lawn tangent...

Hello, my name is Scott Perkins and I basically hate lawns. I know that sounds irrational, but it's true. I hate them. Green swaths of stuff that makes me sneeze but I have to mow it anyway. Water it, feed it, de-mossify it... and all the while I'm riding the Benedryl dragon. Today I am proud to say that I have approximately 25% less lawn to annoy me than I did on Monday. A minor victory but only one battle in the larger war on the American lawn. Getting rid of your lawn isn't easy, but as it happens, I have a twelve-step plan to help you get through it...

1. Convince yourself that you don't need a lawn.
2. Convince your spouse that you don't really need a lawn.
3. Realize that you need to decide what to do with all this bare ground you'll create (trip to garden store and local bookstore ensues).
4. Draw up an elaborate plan involving winding stone paths, raised beds and the sort of mature plantings that take decades to evolve on their own. Present these to your spouse.
5. Revise plans when your spouse wisely points out that you're not a Rockefeller and don't have any experience as a stonemason.
6. Remove part of the lawn and realize how pernicious grass really is.
7. Finish about1/4 of the project and find other pressing things to do.
8. Wait until you forget how pernicious grass really is (this may take some time, it took me two years).
9. Buy tool to make pernicious grass removal easier and boldly set forth to remove your pesky lawn.
10. Realize that new tool sucks and go buy a decent shovel and a large bottle of Advil.
11. Get really mad at the pernicious, evil, weedy little parasites that we laughingly call "grass" and vow to go outside and come back in your wheelbarrow or not at all.
12. Plant things that aren't grass and step back to take your Advil and ponder the next phase in your campaign, for there are lawns yet to be conquered...

Writing Life Part III: The Writer's Life

How much of you is found in the stories that you write? If you don't write stories, how much of the author do you think is present in the characters that populate your favorite stories? Probably rather less than you think (unless you're reading Cussler or Hemingway, in which case the answer is supposedly "rather a lot" but those guys aren't necessarily the norm).

I have been told many times that mining you own life for material is a losing game. As with any resource, the more you use, the less there is.

Never mind that Hemingway and many others wrote mostly biographically and thereby created most of the canon of modern literature. Can you continually mine your personal history for stories to tell without escaping your home country to live in self-imposed exile or having harrowing adventures on the slopes of Kilimanjaro or on a battlefield amidst a world war?

Maybe the moral of that story is that you have to live BIG in order to get away with it?

I once thought so. How big does your life have to be in order to tell successful stories... especially adventure stories? (Though it should be remembered that even Hemingway ran out of stories to tell with tragic results.) I once believed that in order to tell the types of stories I wanted to tell I had to go the Hemingway route... or at least the Kerouac. I wandered the central and western United States looking for stories. I went to art school, practically lived in dim coffee shops, braved dive bars and then turned around to climb mountains the next day. Probably the only reason I never washed up in the East Village was lack of gas money.

I admit that I had myriad reasons for doing these things, but at the center was that urge to find stories to tell and the belief that I couldn't tell them if I hadn't lived them. It makes a certain sense. In order to tell a believable cop story, one should either be a cop or have an intimate knowledge of them before you start. Ditto with the military. But a good researcher and a competent writer can overcome those deficits and I'm a damn good researcher if I do say so (and have the awards to prove it).

But still, there was this voice telling me research wasn't enough... get out there and do.

It was a long time before I arrived at the realization that the Hemingway route might make good writing for someone, but not for me. I got married, moved to Washington and bought a garden with a house attached to it. Now I wile away most of the time I used to spend hanging off of mountainsides laying stone paths and growing herbs and flowers.

I don't need to live a certain lifestyle to create compelling fiction. No one does.

There's no formula for life that will turn you into an author. The desire to write and the ability to convert thought into word is all it really takes... but back to the topic at hand.

I suppose it seems easy for me to say this after stockpiling so many adventures before 'retiring' to my garden to write about my adventures. Except that I don't write about them. I tried and didn't get anywhere. I'm not saying I won't ever write about mountaineering or being the first to descend such & such a peak on a child's bobsled (true story) but at the moment, I have found that that most of it goes unused.

My heroes are precocious boys, learned men, scientists, and scholars, but they are no longer prone to be able to field strip an M-16 or defend themselves from ninjas with a spork. Much like me, they're not generally in the business of being either dashing or daring. Most of them spend the book wishing they were somewhere else. And I find that people respond to them on a level I'd never seen before... as if they're real people.

My main character in the novel I just finished is a gardener. A very smart gardener with a complicated past, but a gardener nonetheless. Is he me? No. Absolutely not. I'm not writing an autobiography. And it's worth noting that at no point in the narrative does he really spend any time planting things, it's just there. An item mined from my life and inserted into the story to make him more relatable to me as a writer.

And for all of me that there is in him, there's a lot more of the fictional and that's what I think the key is. Not all hooks are set for the reader, some of them have to be set for the writer in order for a story to progress from idea to print. For me, it's a bit of knowledge the character has that may or may not ever be used in the narrative, something only he and I know. Mined from my life without waxing autobiographical.

So should you mine your life for fictional pursuits? I leave that up to you. Not in the way Hemingway did, unless you've lived such a life that's the only way your government minders will let you tell your life story is to fictionalize it. In which case, who am I to tell you otherwise?

All I know is that I no longer believe it's necessary to seek out the "Writerly Life" in the romantic terms I once attached to it. The idea that you can't or shouldn't mine your life for stories and hooks because you'll "run out" presupposes that you're going to stop living the moment you first sit down at the keyboard. And that is one thing that I would never advise a writer (or anyone else) to do.

Raspberries...

I used to get in trouble for blowing raspberries in science class (and elsewhere) not because of the content being taught, mind you, I just liked making rude noises.

I'm a boy, it's chromosomal.

This morning, the following headline made me realize that all those science teachers owed to me an apology for interrupting my important research: "Galaxy's centre tastes of raspberries and smells of rum, say astronomers -- The hunt for chemicals in deep space that could seed life on other planets has yielded a large, fruity molecule..." ~ www.Guardian.co.uk

The money quote has to be the vaguely embarrassed astronomer the Guardian called up to quiz over this odd revelation: "It does happen to give raspberries their flavour, but there are many other molecules that are needed to make space raspberries," and here I thought there was a nougaty center...

Oh, and I double-checked, the story isn't dated April first. It's not the jetlag either, I looked and it's still there. Hrm. There's a Hugo Award in these scientists' future. Space Raspberries From the Centre of the Universe!

Douglas Adams would be so proud...

Wordless Wednesday - Angels in our mist

Calvary Catholic Cemetery, Queens, NY

Stories in the mists...

Morning fog on Darrow Pond, East Lyme, Connecticut.

Believe it or not, this is not a black & white photo of a color world,

it's a color photo of a black & white world.

Thing One: I went to New York.

Thing Two: Really? What was it like? 
Thing One: I don't know, I didn't see it!

It was very foggy today in the Big Apple. (Seriously, does anyone call it that?) So while I spent the better part of a day in Queens and Long Island, I can't say as I once saw more than the shadow of a glimpse of the famed city skyline. Maybe next time.

We weren't there to sightsee. We enurned my wife's grandfather at Calvary Catholic Cemetary, which is a beautiful and haunting place (photos tomorrow for Wordless Wednesday). It all took several hours because of scheduling problems with the priest and the military honor guard. Which left the younger cousins and myself free to wander the aisles of weathered statues, taking pictures of marble angels and mausoleums in the fog.

Once again I was struck by how many people tell me that they would write a book if only they had an idea. Today was one of those days where I was surrounded by them. From the weathered statuary of the mausoleums to the names engraved in the granite, too weathered to be clearly read... there are stories everywhere. From the family that surrounded me and the elders that greeted me with the gravity and willingness to open up about the dim and fading past as befitted the occaision... there are stories everywhere.

Open your eyes, your heart and your ears.

My next novel came to me today. In total. I have only to write it down, dictation from my subconscious mind, distilled from a dozen conversations I've had over the past few days watering a nugget planted last winter in a conversation I had with my father right before he passed away. Or maybe it's just that New York really is a city with a thousand stories...

I'll be back in the Pac Northwest and writing about writing in nothing flat. I appreciate your patience as I sort through these things. So much has happened and I have so much to write about it that it's all at war in my head. As soon as something slips free from the melee and claims the flag, I'll let you know...

Wordless Wednesday -- Reflecting on Puget Sound

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Lying for a Living

NOTE: I took Easter Sunday off, so you get two posts today. Enjoy! 

Book Review A lot of writing books have made the trek from the store to my shelves and back out again, but there's only one that I reread on a regular basis. It is also the one I enthusiastically endorse to anyone who asks me for advice on writing.

I push it into people's hands with such free abandon, you would almost think I was trying to get rid of it. (It's frankly amazing that I still have the original copy I bought at a Milwaukee bookstore back in the day.)

For my money, the classic Telling Lies For Fun & Profit is the quintessential writing book. If you can only buy one, buy this one. It's been in print without update for some time, so some of the nuts and bolts issues Lawrence Block deals with in the book are a bit dated (he talks about typewriters even more than I do) but good advice never expires. I can't think of another place you'll find this quality of advice about the writer's life and the business of cranking out lies with sufficient consistency to make a living at it.

(On a sidenote: I don't look to books for the latest on publishing anyway. Since the most current information about dealing with editors, agents and maneuvering the current publishing labyrinth changes constantly, getting that advice on the web only makes sense. Most literary agents maintain websites and many of them have highly-informative blogs, which I recommend more than any of the many books I've read.)

I have a confession to make: Years ago when I first "discovered" this book, it was because I quite frankly wanted a book with that title on my shelf. Seriously, who wouldn't want to have people peruse their shelves and find a book with this title?

After I got past chortling over the clever title, I was pleasantly surprised by the essays contained in this odd little tome.

Lawrence Block is the depressingly-talented author of over 150 books. He sold his unagented first book at an early age and on the first try back when those things really happened. He quickly established himself at a time when short stories were still a going concern and his stories of this education in the booktrade and his years turning out unabashed slush for a paycheck are hilarious and the lessons to be learned thereby are hilarious memorable.

Block's essays are compiled from his years writing for Writer's Digest, so the tone - while lighthearted - is educational. It deals with more than just the usual "Where do you get your ideas?" topics, expanding to advise the aspiring writer on finding your voice, what to study in college, procrastinating, plagiarizing, avoiding chemical dependency, and how to answer the people who ask you "So... where do you get your ideas?"

In between he also manages to cover plotting, characterization, structure and characters that speak languages fluenty which you're only passingly familiar with. His college advice will make you wish he'd written you a letter before you chose your major. The final chapter - a writer's prayer based upon AA's Serenity Prayer - will make you wish you could get it printed on a poster and hang it above your desk or writing chair.

This book should be on everyone's shelf. If only for the title and that last chapter, I dare say that it needs to be on every writer's shelf.

Murder Most Fictional

It's deep in the twentieth chapter. The bad guys are ascendant but the good guys are getting complacent. Too many characters have stepped out of their background roles and are threatening to take over the narrative.

You're just gonna have to kill someone.

I'm not a writer of murder mysteries per se, but in any bit of fiction featuring as much peril as the modern historical thriller demands, someone's going to die at some point. That said, I firmly believe that the only way to do this without making it trite or feel like you're manipulating your readers is to walk into it without knowing which characters will still be alive in the epilogue.

Look at it this way: If I don't know who will die when the time comes, I can't take those extra annoying steps to ingratiate him to the reader. My writing can only prosper thereby.

In my books, no one gets script immunity.

That being said I hate a lot about the presentation of death in modern fiction. Only in some few cases does it read as real. Not in terms of the death throes of the fallen or the medical steps undertaken to save them and God knows reality isn't spared on the autopsy table, but in terms of the reactions of the people who should be impacted by the passing of the fallen. Only when the death of the character and the effects upon the family and friends are the plot (Lovely Bones springs to mind) does the death of a character really seem to have the full force and effect of a real death upon real people.

Awhile back when Newsweek said that writers didn't kill enough people anymore, I was affronted on some level. This was partially because the genre shelves of your neighborhood bookstore have a bodycount that surpasses imagining for even the most motivated serial killer. I went back and reread that article and got something different from it. Not that writers don't kill enough people, but that we sell it short as a literary device and as a moment of common humanity. And on that point I tend to agree.

From the standpoint of a reader, one of the worst offenses any writer can commit is to undersell the real-life psychic impact of a death upon those who witnessed it and those impacted by it. There are so many books that screw that up that it almost qualifies as its own subgenre. Heroes drag a burly forearm across their misty eyes and then carry on as if nothing happened. At best the impact seems to last a couple of chapters before the next love scene or comic relief character "snaps them out of it" and all is well. Sometimes (in a series) it's implied that the characters do their grieving between books, which is at least acknowledging the humanity of the characters.

Killing a character is more than taking a trip to the library to read Guns & Ammo or a medical journal, or making a call to your friend the ER nurse. Death goes beyond the straight razor or handgun that does the deed, and makes deep changes in everyone it touches. Changes that go beyond snapping out of it because someone makes a smartass comment or two people fall into bed.

Not every book with a death in it would benefit from a widening circle of grief and pain, far from it. But to not pay attention to this aspect, to the experience of it is to pay no heed to the value of the fallen character or the humanity of those he left behind. . . but I guess that's why they call it fiction.

Rain Delay

Someone once told me that God invented rainy days so that gardeners will get housework done. (And here I thought it was so that gardeners could also be writers.) Anyway, I'm reasonably certain that this was why umbrellas and rain slickers were invented... Things are blooming, weeds are in need of pulling, soil in a desperate plight, and only these two poor souls to tend the lot. I must away or no writing at all with get done today!

Writing Life, Part Two: A Literate Lineage

In an email last year, my mother intimated to me that she didn't feel that they had contributed significantly to my writing skills. (Such as they are.) I wish to say here and now, in front of God and these witnesses... Au contraire!  

I'm still trying to decide if she meant she didn't want credit for all this... (it's a bit late for that, don't you think?)  

We'll set aside the fact that dad accidentally taught me to type partly because he didn't like my messy handwriting and simply point out that my upbringing (as previously noted) was quite literary. 

Both of my parents tattooed the love of reading into my psyche. Mrs Robinson and the English teachers that preceded her may have taught me to care about the difference between "it's" and "its", but that doesn't get mom and dad off the hook.  

My friends will tell you that I talk about my parents a lot and with good reason. They brought to me the worlds of Dr. Seuss, Richard Scarry, The Hardy Boys, Encyclopedia Brown, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, H. Rider Haggard, and the rest. I came to be aware of a wider world than that of our small town in Missouri. Mark Twain alone (who was also coincidentally from a small town in Missouri) made me believe that this was something I could do too. We went to libraries instead of sitting at home watching TV. 

I wanted to be well read because it looked like A Good Thing To Be. In our house, it was the only way to be.  

Mom & dad also taught me funny. But that's more than how to tell a joke. I was introduced not only to Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, but to Red Skelton and Jack Benny. I learned that being funny didn't require a four-letter vocabulary and that clever was better than brassy (the most important lesson any writer can learn in my opinion) and not to bite off a subject I can't chew. 

It's appropriate that my first published short story was a humorous lark about daylight savings time being used to avert Armageddon. 

I also learned that "neatness counts" and if I can't write it neatly, then type it. I got all that somewhere, and I don't really think I got it at school. I couldn't have because honestly, I wasn't really paying that much attention in class. (ahem)  When my fourth grade teacher challenged my authorship of a paper, dad went to bat for me. "Yes, a fourth grader really can write like that..." Incidentally, I began my first novel that year. (I recall it later caused trouble with the administration because it was an action-adventure kids-are-smarter-than-adults kind of novel and they didn't approve of such notions.)  

Most writers I know are readers who read something somewhere along the way and say "Psht! I could do better than that!" This is generally followed by someone who says, "Really? Then maybe you should." For me, it was my parents, who told me it was ok to be a writer as long as I got my homework done first. (Not that I ever did...) 

Parents who make it a Good Thing to be well-read, literate, and well-spoken are forming adults who hold the same values even if we don't seem to be getting it at the time. I'm not sure my parents appreciate how rare they were when compared to the parents of my friends in highschool and college. No matter how you cut it, parenting as much as anything made me a writer. 

Sorry, mom. You're just going to have to accept your share of the blame... er... credit.

-Scott 

Wordless Wednesday: Sundrenched

A Journey Through Bookland (redux)

I'm not sure I can quantify what it is that I like about books. It's rather like explaining the merits of a root beer float to someone who has never had one... or doesn't like them. (Gasp! Tell me those people don't really exist!) There are some things that you either feel or you do not.

Much like the nuance and subtle nose of a fine not-too-sweet, but full-bodied root beer, Bookhunting is one of those things that cannot be fully appreciated by or explained to those for whom a book is something you read and then throw in the pile for your next garage sale or trip to the local Goodwill.

Not that there's anything wrong with that sort of behavior. If no one ever got rid of their books, there would be nothing for me to hunt for and I... well, I would be sad. Just don't actually throw them away and we're good.

There are certain things that I particularly love about books. The frustrated thrum of the pages as they reach the apex of their arc and fall upon the page before it, staccato reminders that these ideas are contained but not tamed; they constantly seek to escape. The faded glory of spent gilding, hidden deep in the heat-stamped recesses of aged leather. The scent that wafts past my nose as the pages of an old cookbook flee my thumb, faded memories of a thousand thousand dinners (many of them obviously unsuccessful). Old typefaces laid long ago with handset lead type, tarnished gilt edges and worn marbled endpages... I could go on, but the single thing I love most about books must certainly be: the hunt.

You'll note that not very many of the things I mentioned are true of new books. That's not to say I turn up my nose at new books; I've purchased rather a lot of them and spent rather more than my fair share of hours in both Borders and Barnes & Noble. It's just that in the days of Internet bookselling the hunt for a new book simply isn't much of an adventure.

Whatever it is that draws me to these aged agglomerations of paper, ink and ideas, beyond the contents or the authors, there is the object that supports all those things. There is gilding and sewing, headbands and backboards, cloth and leather, paper and paste, the tactile certainty of the ineffable thing. And of course, there is the quest to find the thing.

The new guys in the big spaces lack several small-but-crucial features I cannot do without. For one, they don't have the bell over the door that jangles when I walk in. I love that about second-hand and rare bookstores. They all have that bell. Like it comes with the kit or something. A jangly bell, ten thousand useless backlist titles, a cat and ten genuine nuggets to bury among the dross.

In my wallet at any given moment is a short list of titles that I'm looking out for. In my head is a much longer list of 'target of opportunity' titles. Most of them are on my list simply because I want to read them. Or because they have some sort of personal meaning to me. Most have very little in the way of resale value. Periodically, I get to throw the list away and make a new one. Because I generally find what I set out to find.

My dad taught me that. Never a day went by when he didn't have a list of books in his wallet. It was as mandatory as his driver's license. When we were cleaning out the house after he died, we found a small pile of booklists, squirreled away in drawers and between the pages of books. And he had thousands and thousands of books, rooms, and boxes, and lockers, and an entire attic full of books. Because patience and persistence and a willingness to shift the stacks at auctions will eventually bear fruit.

If it exists in the Pacific Northwest and someone is willing to part with it, I will eventually run across it. 

But that's not what keeps me hunting... it's the things I find beyond the musty book exchanges with cats and jangly bells. Things I find when I'm not looking or that I didn't know I was looking for in the first place.

At the Goodwill in Port Orchard, Washington I struck just such a vein of gold. Journeys Through Bookland was published in 1909 and edited by Charles H. Sylvester. It's a 10-volume reading plan for children and their parents to wade through the classics of western literature. Each book is bound in grey-green cloth with a beautiful art nouveau design gilded and embossed into the covers and spine. Each story begins with an illuminated capital and is lovingly illustrated with fanciful engravings and halftone plates.

They've been given pride of place in my collection (and an honor guard of Iron Bunnies as you can see).

There's something about holding an old kid's book that you don't necessarily get when you're holding a copy of Joyce or Proust. It takes very little effort to envision the bright young minds that were inspired by these books, youngsters in pre-modern kit, knee-pants or ruffles. Young minds leafing through the pages while sitting on velvet chairs stuffed with horsehair. Youngsters who went on to become moms and dads in their own right. And farmers and pharmacists, barristers and bootleggers. (Yes, bootleggers, it was printed in 1909 after all!)

Were they bought for a boy by his father ere he took ship for foreign climes, off to fight in the trenches of a War alleged to End All Wars? Was it then passed along in turn as the boy became a man and took his turn against the Germans in '42? Was it the first glimpse of print for a girl in an age when women weren't supposed to read such things? Or were they an item of furtive erudition in a time when it was ill-advised for a person of color to seem too educated, hoarded in hope of a better tomorrow?

So much has happened since these books were published, so many stories lie between the lightly-yellowed pages. Stories I can never know but only imagine.

Whatever their tale, the books I found were obviously treasured by someone for over a hundred years before the finally ended up in the donation pile. Short of holding a family Bible in your hands, you cannot ask for a more poignant cross-section of a life. Every old book has a story to tell. Beyond the story it contains, there is the story that it supported, the life that it led before it came to me.

I'm not sure why I love and collect children's books but I do. Probably because that's when I discovered the simple joys of a book.

Without an effort, I can drum up memories of the dim stacks of the Sedalia Public Library, staring up through the wavy glass at the outline of my dad's feet as he browsed the adult sections above my head. There was something comforting about the basement space in that monolithic old Carnegie building on Third Street, at the foot of that grand old staircase. I spent innumerable happy hours there as a kid, looking at pictures of tanks and helicopters, occasionally glancing up to see if dad had shifted to a new section. (Yes, there was an astonishing number of children's books dedicated to weapons of mass destruction in those days and I think I probably read enough of them to become a UN weapons inspector.)

As all children must do, I grew up and transferred to the upper floors with my dad. Bought my own books, started my own private library to match his. And as I sit here staring around me at the books on my shelves, I wonder what stories the antiques have to tell, and I ponder the stories that those new books of mine will one day acquire. But that's a thought for a future bookhunter.

I have some childhood reading to catch up on that has nothing to do with helicopters... or tanks.

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What were your favorite books as a child? What books do you collect (if any) and if you don't collect the books you read, I'm curious as to why? Leave your answers in comments!