The In-Betweener

I recently had a meme cross my desk that defined a book hangover as the feeling a reader gets when they finish one book but cannot yet start another because they’re still living in the last book’s world.

If readers think they’ve got it bad, they should try writing.

No book is ever finished until someone pries your fingers off the keyboard and forces you to type “The End”, and after you type that terminal sentence, it’s good to take a bit of time to catch your breath. I suppose if you’re writing series characters or a shared world, that’s not as necessary, but when your worlds vary as widely as the madcap flights of Howard Carter’s fancy and the always-grounded and very adult world of AJ MacLeod, it’s enough to give anyone whiplash.

These are the in-between times.

While I’m never writing only one thing at a time, I do tend to pause at the end of a piece and take some time to cleanse my palate, to clear my head of the rules and mores of that world to lay the groundwork for another. Sometimes this means finally taking the time to plunder any lingering ideas that didn’t fit into the completed work as short stories, burning the last stubs of the old candle until there’s nothing left, no dangling threads to call out to me. Sometimes it means a Big Crazy Project, throwing everything I have at teaching myself something like shoemaking.  Sometimes those projects snowball into a Whole Other Thing, and sometimes they’re just fodder for future stories or background for future characters, but mostly they just take my mind out of fantasy world mode and ground me back in the here and now.

Whatever I end up doing to pass the days, be it short stories or shoes, at the end of a writing jag is when I finally have the time to read something unrelated to whatever I’m writing. Sweet release! Research might be my favorite intoxicant, but even so, it is sheer heaven to give myself lease to devour every book I can get my hands on be they drawn from fact or fiction.

Book after book piles up and gets absorbed. News stories too, and conversations, and daily interactions all get thrown into the hopper to be pulped and blended and spat back out as lessons on What Not To Do or notes about roads not taken that give rise to new characters and ideas that will some day carve out stories of their own. Wherever it comes from, it’s all fair game and it’s all fuel for the next fire.

Some writers will tell you that all writing is rewriting, and that may be true for those writers, but for my money, all writing is pre-writing. Even if it’s what happens after you get the ideas down on paper that makes the writing good, it’s what comes before that makes the story good. Because while all the grammar lessons in the world cannot save a bad story, a good enough story is Teflon.

This is an unfortunate truth that we all try to deny, yet there’s no other way to explain the number of mediocre writers that ascend the bestseller lists without devolving into conspiracy theories. The idea that some stories are going to resonate even if they’re handled poorly isn’t a terrible thing because it means that when you do pair a great writer with a great story, it’s unstoppable: Hilary Mantel and Wolf Hall, John Green and The Fault In Our Stars, Carlos Ruiz Zafon and The Shadow of the Wind, JRR Tolkien and The Hobbit, JK Rowling and Harry Potter et al…

Read the stories any of the aforementioned writers tell about how they arrived and those stories and you’ll hear tales of the Between Times, of pieces long held falling into place because of some quirk of fate that happened when they were open to it, whether it’s John Green meeting Esther Earl at a Harry Potter convention or Tolkien finding a blank page in a student thesis he was grading and jotting “In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit…” These are stories that were formed in the Between Times, moments when something coalesced that the author had long been thinking about, such as Green’s long-simmering novel about teens in a cancer ward, or Tolkien’s bedtime stories finding purchase in the languages he taught at Oxford and his rose-coloured memories of a more pastoral England.

This most recent in-between has been rather longer than I’d intended, but I think it’s about to end. 

I always think in stories, but there’s a qualitative difference between the stories I’ve been forming recently and the ones that have been coalescing recently around a single idea.   I’ve stopped getting distracted by the trees I’ve already climbed or others have tried to cut down and started seeing the forest.

It is time to come out of the in-betweens and start writing things down again.

Sorry I was gone so long and also that I’ve thrown so many writing metaphors at you in a single post. I had a few pent up, apparently.

Scott

You Ruined It!

Hollywood is chock full of milquetoast renditions of great books. I just read a thoughtful comparison between the movie Inkheart and the book by Cornelia Funke upon which it was based over at the book blog We Be Reading (the movie - though enjoyable - varies drastically in character and tone from the book). It was all handled delicately and she was most gentle when discussing the variance between the two, but it stoked a mental fire that I've been tending for quite some time.

What I appreciated most about Kristen's assessment of the two (book and movie) is that she never once implied that the one destroyed the other. Last night I watched the new Harry Potter movie and came home to finally read the reviews without fear of spoilers (though reading the books was spoiler enough, I suppose) and was surprised at the number of fans taking it to task for varying too much from JK Rowling's story and "ruining the book".

Yes things were deleted. And things were added. And people were shuffled. Can't say I minded much. And it certainly didn't ruin the book.

That's a complaint I hear and read a lot and I can't say I understand it. The list of books I've heard fans complain of being "ruined" by their filmic translation is seemingly endless and ranges wildly from James Bond to James and the Giant Peach. The popularity or critical success of the movie seems to stand somewhat apart from the reaction of the dedicated fans.

I have to admit that upon hearing that one of my favorite books will be set to film, I too sometimes find my teeth grinding. Why is that? No matter how far afield a two hour Where the Wild Things Are movie takes a 48-page children's book, the impact that this seminal book had on my life won't be undone. So why do we care so much?  

Bladerunner was an excellent movie that never got anywhere near Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Watchmen was simultaneously praised and lambasted for its adherence to Allan Moore's graphic novel. Yet classics by Dickens, Austen and God-knows Sir Arthur Conan Doyle have been endlessly made and remade without the pantheon of English Literature spiraling into oblivion... So why does my hair stand on end when I hear that a Neuromancer movie is in the works? It can't really "ruin" the book. Can it?

There are certainly movies I've seen that made me slink out of the movie theater wishing for a trick of Space & Time to allow me to go back and regain the hours lost. (A good argument for investing heavily in time travel research). And I'm sure many of them were based upon books, sometimes a mite too loosely. But did the 2002 adaptation of The Time Machine alter my perception of the HG Wells story? No. At most it ran afoul of the wholly-imaginary movie I've spent the last thirty years casting and re-casting in my head. Is that what's really being 'ruined' by these film adaptations? That's not really the same as ruining a book, is it?

I've been told by some that the mental impression left by film is stronger than the impression left by text. And while sounds somewhat plausible in our remarkably visually-oriented society, there's at least one interesting scientific study that seems to indicate that the reaction to scenes on the screen and on the page are essentially the same. If you follow that link above, you'll find a WIRED article about the scientists who determined that "what's disgusting on the screen is just as disgusting described in a book" -- ultimately the brain doesn't care if it's seeing it on the silver screen or imagining it from a passage of text. Is this the neural chemistry that's hampering the ability of some to differentiate between the movieplex and the bookstore? Is the image flickering on the screen overwriting the memories of the original story? Not for me.

My problem is that the idea implies that there isn't room on my mental bookshelf for the filmic adaptation of Coraline and the Neil Gaiman book despite the similarities and differences between the two. In the current climate books are transforming from ink on a page (or at least only ink on a page) to a picture on a screen, whether we're closing the gap between the two or they are already on the verge of overlapping is a bit of a debate.

For the nonce, I think that it behooves us to remember each for its charms, quirks and merits. Revel in the quiet elegance of the inner dialogue only possible in print, in the images that flicker behind our eyes as we doze off with a beloved book on our chests and don't confuse it with the communal event found in the darkness of a movie theater.

Make a movie. Write a book. Adapt one into the other. Heck, re-imagine Mystic River as a Broadway Musical. There is too much to enjoy (or revile) in any one format that I cannot help but regard each as a separate entity to be praised or damned on its own merits. The movie sits beside the book on my shelf rather than replacing it... or ruining it.

The Thing About Charlie...

I occasionally spend some time ghosting over on Book Blogs at the Ning. Even though book reviews aren't really my main 'thing', I like to see what the book reviewers are talking about and there's always something fun going on over there.

 Over the weekend, the subject of Dickens came up: Is he still relevant? 

Notwithstanding two recent books spun from the stuff of his final (and unfinished) novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood, it's an open question. Dickens thus-far seems to have been skipped by the renaissance being enjoyed by other classic authors such as Jane Austen. So... does he need an infusion of post-modern zombies to bring back the readers? Or is he already just another zombie author refusing to shamble off to the churchyard and a peaceful afterlife confined to the shelves of English Lit professors, destined for a messy end on the killing fields of postmodern lit crit?

The main trouble with Charlie is that he was made victim of his own success. So many see elements central to his plots as cliche (Orphans? Wicked stepfathers? That is SO overdone!) but what Dickens did was not cliche -- it was made cliche by endless repetition from the pens, typewriters and laptops that followed him. It's a mental space that a reader needs to get themselves into before embarking upon any of the classics.

This is doubly-true of Dickens, whose plots and twists and characters have become so indelibly woven into modern fiction. His ideas and plots and characters have been endlessly plundered by nearly everyone because his voice was so persuasive that he set the bar that we're all trying to clear. Not long ago I was reading a music critic talk about the number of bands whose entire catalog and careers could be summarized as "Variations on one song from the Beatles' White Album". (I'll have to find the article so I can quote and attribute accurately). So too could many more authors and screenwriters be summed up as churning out endless variations on the source material drawn from Dickens. Some of it has been amazing, epic tales built upon a 'Dickensian' and some of it should remain nameless and fade from our minds. Regardless, the quality of imitation does not strain the strength of the source material.

In a time when optimism is oft times treated as though it were a contagious disease, perhaps the inveterate optimism of Dickens' characters can't catch hold upon the modern mind. Perhaps the moments of astonishingly-modern wit are too weighted with the passages of florid Victorian prose. I tend to disagree. Dickens' voice was so modern and his wit was so sharp that we can still hear ourselves in it.

Still don't think he's relevant? I think he's so relevant that the biggest publishing phenomenon ever doesn't make sense until you view it through his works. There has been no more profound reflection of this influence than Harry Potter. The boy wizard aside, this is a time of literature cast in the light of Hemingway, awash in the blood of a million murdered adverbs. Yet, despite Rowling's cinder-block sized tomes, often grandiose prose, and sweeping tales, even books that are meant to appeal to her audience are pared down and scaled back ever more as writers and publishers chases an allegedly dwindling attention span. Have our attentions really so dwindled, though that we're in need of a zombie incursion into the classics to renew the spark of literature that has aged? I had a love-hate relationship with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. And I fear however, that this is going to spawn a trend of duct-taping postmodern monsters into classic tales until it devolves into an Abbot & Costello movie.

In my opinion, P&P&Z only worked because of a brilliant blend of two gifted writers (Austen and Grahame-Smith) hundreds of years apart and it took off because the readers were primed by the Austen renaissance (and in case you've been living in a cave, zombies are kind of a thing right now).

Maybe it's for the better, this mashup culture. If nothing else, before we're ready to receive Little Dorrit Versus the Zombie Debtors of Doom, we'll need to reacquaint ourselves with Dorrit's creator.

However, I'm thinking of shopping around a story about a zombie antihero escaping a zombie-infected prep school to bum around New York for a day. He'll have a thing for ducks, wear a funky red hat and spend a lot of time trying to eat the brains of the prostitutes in he meets...  Just kidding, Mr. Salinger. Just kidding.

But I think you should write down the date and time you scoffed at the notion of Zombiecatcher In the Rye.  Because at this rate, it almost seems inevitable.

Wabbit Twacks

I was going to write about "Fear" today. The trepidation that you feel when you near the end of a big project, the fear of failure, the anticipation that gnaws at you as you send a part of yourself out into the Big Bad World to live a life of its own. 

Then a friend of mine posted something on Facebook that demanded my brain shift gear slightly and view this fear from a different perspective... the perspective of a cartoon character.

My friend, we'll call her El, is nearing the end of grad school, achieving a Doctorate in one of those wonderfully obscure disciplines of computer engineering that make the internet work. Esoterica of the digital realm. One of those things I'm glad someone is doing but wouldn't want to do myself. Like law enforcement and experimental physics.

This crossroads naturally raised all the same specters that I feel at the end of a big writing project or assignment and she voiced her current situation in terms of Loony Toons characters: Wile E Coyote and Bugs Bunny. One is the genius who has no intuition and the other an intuitive genius. One seeks no advice or help and perforce fails every time, and the other is frequently lost but knows it and asks directions.

It's a lovely and vivid description of someone at a turning-point in her life. And how unfair that someone should be so expressive and gifted in the esoteric disciplines of the digital and the literary at the same time. I'm not sure what kind of advice I can offer her that would be germane in such pursuits.

So I too turned to the Sage of the Silver Screen, Mssr. Bugs Bunny. Like any good sage, most of his lessons are timeless and you should find them germane whether you're an English major or one of them science people. Mac or a PC, Bugs is the original cross-platform app.

I often refrain from offering advice. I believe that opinions are like underwear: Everyone is expected to have a set, keep them in good order, and not show them to anyone unless they are asked (and then do so with discretion). As often as not, advice-giving is a matter of re-voicing something the recipient already knows anyway. Most often, we need our own advice more than we need the opinions of others and it's up to our friends to tell us this. This morning, El reminded me that we all need to be less coyote and more rabbit, to remember the advice of our favorite fearless hare, reflecting back to us the things we should already know...

• Don't look down, just keep running,
• Pronouns will get you into and out of more trouble...,
• If you don't know the lyrics sing anyway,
• If you do it, you'll get a wuppin' (but you should do it anyway),
• Always keep a disguise and a getaway plan close at hand,
• When in doubt, quote Groucho,
• We are most often defined by our enemies or what we stand in opposition to,
• If you've got someone right where you want them, the last thing want to do is give them a chance to talk,
• Size is irrelevant, tenacity and guile win in the end.

As ever, she put the coup de grace (or as Bugs might say, the Coop d'Gracie) on my little list...

• Kiss everyone - It wins friends and annoys enemies.

Because there's no offense like a good smack on the lips from a rabbit in drag. If that doesn't get you over the mid-week hump, then I don't know what will.

Random Thoughts On a Monday!

Website overhaul! I'm working on getting my internet presence worked around to a more professional site. Someone owns ScottPerkins.com and wants to sell it to me so I'm contemplating some other permutation of my name or perhaps this blog that will be simple enough to remember, yet wholly mine. Leave your suggestion in comments! (And be nice! My mom reads this blog.) "This Bespells Doom..." The New York Times today had an article about authors trying to figure out how best to adorn an e-Book with thier signature. David Sedaris signed one "To Marty -- This bespells doom" and other authors are reporting being asked to sign the things too. Amazon needs to come up with a digi-pen signature or something before Kindles start to look like the side of an elevated train. Then again, that might be an improvement, they are rather sterile-looking to my eye. Living in the present tense... The Onion announced today that funding cuts have forced underfunded schools to cut the past tense from their language programs. During budget negotiation, administration officials apparently decided that "...the past tense was deemed by school administrators to be too expensive to keep in primary and secondary education." Indeed. In the future, we won't need the past, that's what makes the future perfect. In all seriousness... If you haven't seen Elizabeth Gilbert's TED Talk, you are missing out. Sooooo much of what she has to say is immediately germane to my life. Inspiring. Ole!!

A writer on the hoof...

Awhile back, I gave up running for various reasons. Mostly because it hurts and I'm something of a wimp. But as soon as my broken toes heal I promised myself the supreme joy and mind bending torture of taking it up again from scratch.

When I first got into it, my reasons were many: Showing-up are those gym teachers who seemed to take sadistic pleasure in torturing the nerdy unathletic kid (how that would work, exactly, I can't tell you ), being able to sniff at joggers and say "I'm a runner", and mostly because I agreed to run a 5K for breast cancer.

Whatever my reasons, I kept with it (sporadically) for awhile because I discovered that running fascinates me. Admittedly, it’s sort of the same way that the strange itching ache and strange colors of the scab on my knee fascinate me, but all the same...

My main fascination with running is why we do it when no one's chasing us. Because - let's face it - running hurts. Period. I mean it, really, really hurts. A famous distance-runner once said that the best thing about running is that when it gets really, really terrible… it stops getting worse. Her name is Ann Trason and she was once clocked doing a mile in 6:44.

Not impressed? Then how about this, she did it 62 consecutive times to complete a 100K race in world-record time.

She does this for a living and is arguably the foremost female distance runner in the world. This woman is also - by all accounts - otherwise perfectly sane. I went out on the 'net to see if I could find anyone who had anything nice to say about running and was struck by the number of famous runners who agree with me.

Here’s more of what some of the world's foremost authorities on distance running have to say on the topic:

"You have to forget your last marathon before you try another. Your mind can't know what's coming." Frank Shorter - gold medalist 1972 Olympics

"If you start to feel good during a [race], don’t worry you will get over it." Gene Thibault - x-country race champion

“To describe the agony of a marathon to someone who's never run it is like trying to explain color to someone who was born blind.” Jerome Drayton - winner of Boston Marathon 1977

“Marathon running is a terrible experience: monotonous, heavy and exhausting.” Veikko Karvonen, - 1954 European & Boston Marathon Champ
And my personal favorite…

“It’s like cutting yourself unexpectedly. You dip into the pain so gradually that the damage is done before you are aware of it. Unfortunately, when awareness comes, it is excruciating.” John Farrington - Australian marathoner

In any other professional sport, these people would be called “ambassadors for the sport”. Ann Trason is practically the sport’s posterchild! Wow, sounds like fun, sign me up! 

These people must be nuts. What other sport do you find where the foremost proponents of the game describe every moment as “monotonous, heavy and exhausting”? Ever heard Wayne Gretzky describe hockey as painful drudgery, moaning about the agony of every minute they’re on the ice? Ever heard Brett Favre say that? Ok, maybe Favre would say it, but for most other high-end players, the answer would be no.

So what person in their right mind would put themselves through this daily horror of running necessary to compete in even a piddling 5K? When even the people who are at the front of the pack (which I am nowhere near) seem to hate it so much? People do this on purpose?

At this point you’re saying to yourself “Wow, Scott really hates running.” But I don’t. And that’s the weird thing, and why it - like the scab on my knee - is so fascinating to me. I love running. Since I started running, my posture has improved because you can’t breathe when you slouch (your diaphragm gets constricted). My legs are stronger and even when my knees ache, they feel better and stronger than otherwise. And when I’m running I get up earlier, sleep deeper and feel better 90% of the time. The remaining 10%? Well... that’s the time spent running and recovering from running. At that point I feel like crap. But it isn’t just the benefits of exercise. If it was, I’d take up weight lifting or yoga or something that doesn’t make you feel like crap. It’s not about exercise, it’s about the run.  The journey.

Truth be told if I was on a treadmill I really would defer to yoga or something. Momma didn’t raise no hamster. I gotta be going somewhere.

I live out in the country, on an island in Puget Sound and it seems made for this. There are long stretches of level blacktop with shoulders wide enough to accommodate a pedestrian and cars. There are hills that will kill you with a dull machete and hills that will apologetically stab you in the side with a sharp stiletto. The fog swirls around your ankles on morning runs and permeates your shuddering lungs with the fragrance of green and growing things and the distant tang of sea air. Much of my usual route takes me close to the shore, which is sadly lined with houses because that’s where the best blacktop is to be found. But what houses these are! Multi-million dollar estates framing the most breathtaking views (if I had any breath to take at the time) of Puget Sound.

If I’m out early enough, I get to catch the end of the lightshow from the distant city, as the night relinquishes its grasp on the world of man and the Xenon stars wink out at the onset of day. It’s a selfish sport really. It’s about personal bests. Whether you run a mile in 6:44 or 11:25 or 30:22, it’s not about the other guy. There is no other guy. Just you, the clop of your rubber on the tarmac, and the wheezing of your asthma-ravaged lunges whistling in your ears.

It’s a time for introspection, for measuring your stamina, for building your reserves, for proving to yourself once and for all that if you had to, if you really, really had to, you could outrun that maniac with a chainsaw you saw on the movie last night. You could just about outrun anything. Even sickness and sorrow and heartache.

It’s about life. The run. The journey.

And it’s also about staying a couple steps ahead of that lunatic with the chainsaw.

Wheezing and wandering… Yours faithfully, Scott

Good? That's a matter of opinion...

If the value of an experience outweighs the quality of what's in my cup, then I can definitely stand up and say that some of the best coffee I have ever had has also been some of the worst. The most memorable events in my life - ranging from the fine or merely the defining - have all been punctuated and underscored by mugs of some of the foulest venom ever squeezed from a diner's drip coffee maker. I'm talking about java that tastes like it has been filtered through an old sock and then left on the 'warmer' so long that all the water has boiled out of it, leaving it as dry as David Sedaris' wit and twice as acidic. Undeniably, it was all terrible coffee. Yet, if the persistence of memory and the affection of nostalgia are to be trusted, it was also some of the best I ever had simply because of the events it punctuated. I spent Easter Sunday, 1998 hunkered down in a tent in Rocky Mountain National park, waiting for a storm to pass. It was there that I sipped acrid coffee made using a French Press touted as 'unbreakable' by it's manufacturer which had a long crack running through it. It had been brewed from snow, melted boiled over an MSR Whisperlite stove in the wind shadow of my tent. If you are unfamiliar with single-burner camp stoves, the Whisperlite is the hind-end of a very small jet engine with two settings, 'off' and 'afterburner'. It has no finesse and certainly no temperature control. And if Coors ads have convinced you of the purity of Rocky Mountain snow, I feel sorry for you. Fine coffee is beyond your reach in a situation like that. And yet we all drank it. You might thing we drank it because we were afraid of freezing to death. Write off that horrible java as a survival necessity. But that wouldn't be true. Four well-equipped people in down sleeping bags and a decent tent a day's ski from a ranger station isn't cause for survivalist mentality. We had hot cocoa with us, powdered Tang and Gatorade, all of which could have warmed our innards. But we made coffee anyway. We made wonderfully terrible coffee in a defective press, because it was our minds we wanted to warm, not our stomachs. Perhaps I was cursed from the beginning. My first sip of coffee comes vividly to mind. It was brought to me by my sister and my cousin Julie. "It's tea" they told me. Being eight I hadn't yet read the Iliad, so I didn't know yet not to trust people bearing unmerited gifts. It wasn't tea, it was instant Sanka. It was gross. I spat it back into the cup as I recall. It would be another twelve years before someone could persuade me that coffee wasn't all like that. Since I was finally brought back into the caffeinated fold by my dear cousin Chris, I have sipped amazing coffee from some of the finest roasters in the United States. From Cedarburg Coffee Roastery in Wisconsin, where I learned for the first time about why some coffee was good and others were terrible to the back alley coffeehouses of Denver and Seattle where good coffee is a religion and Starbucks heathens are laughed out the door when they order a double-tall-half-caf-extra-dry-vanilla-nut-pumpkin-spice-why bother'. Oh, I can recall the coffee I drink in those fine establishments and even sometimes tell you who I was with. But I don't remember what day it was or what the weather was doing outside, or much else. How is it that the best coffees have the least hold on my memory? I remember every tortuous sip of the coffee I made in that tent in Colorado. I can clearly recall every word of the conversations I had with my tentmates during that blizzard. Horrid coffee, made with water from melted snow, from beans ground the day before and hurriedly prepared and decanted into our mugs before the water leaked out of the cracked press, giving it no time to fully steep. But I remember it and savor the memory more than other, much finer cups. It can be argued that the odd situation cements that memory more than the coffee. It would be a fair assertion, except that mountaintop brewing isn't the only fond memory accompanied by the pungent stench of a bad brew. At an Irish-themed pub in Dayton, Ohio I found - quite possibly - the world's most honest waiter. He came over to offer us a round of after-dinner coffees. "Is it any good?" I asked him. "Not really." came the response. How can you resist a sales pitch like that? I ordered the coffee anyway and found that he was right. I seem to remember saying "Anything that tastes that bad should have alcohol in it" and the second round did. The conversation at that table (punctuated by the terrible coffee and later by much better single-malt scotch) was later turned into the plot of a wonderful (and sadly unpublished) novel by my enterprising cousin Chris. While somewhat-lost in the middle of nowhere in Illinois I stopped at a diner to escape the sudden deluge that had managed to make my windshield all but opaque. There I sipped coffee that could well have been an attempt by the waitress to kill me. I later learned that the thunderstorm I was escaping had spawned several tornados across Iowa and Illinois. On a diner napkin I wrote the first lines that would one day become the novel The Paleographer. The coffee was terrible but I will always remember it fondly because of the novel on the napkin and because I was on a trip to visit the woman who would one day be my wife. It was Friday, 1 October 1999. I still have that napkin somewhere and there's a mug ring at the edge of it. Perhaps someday I'll have it tested to see if that swill really did begin its life as coffee. And there are many many more. I realize that there are several fronts in the war over what defines a fine cup of Coffee. I distill them into two major camps, effectively splitting the debate over the aesthetics of coffee into what side of a 70/30 split you are on between the quality of the coffee and the manner & environment of its service. Do we savor the experience first, the atmosphere, the circumstances that brought us to the coffeeshop ere we ever taste drop one of our beverage? Does that define the experience? Or do we wait, our minds a blank slate until written upon by that first sip of God's nectar, only then taking in our surroundings, paying heed to the babble of the crowd around us? I tend to come down on the experiential end of the continuum. For some reason I often find myself in memorable situations, far from any hope of decent coffee, and those are the memories writ large on the folders I have filed away in the drawer of my mind marked "Coffee".

Poking the Mermaid...

An Open Letter to Starbucks (Because they asked...)
Dear Starbucks,

When you purchased Clover, you acquired sole access to a truly spectacular and groundbreaking coffee brewing process that blends the best parts of French Press and Vacuum brewing in a new technology. A better cup, by brewing every cup. But if all you are going to do is grind the same beans you have today, all it’s going to do is give America a better cup of mediocrity.

Stop telling America that burnt coffee is good coffee.

Stop burning all the character out of your beans.

Your "Pike's Place Blend" is a hesitant shuffle in the wrong direction. And instant coffee won't save you. Starbucks needs to differentiate its coffee from that brewed now by your two greatest competitors: MacDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts.

What does it say to you that the company that brought the idea of gourmet coffee to America is challenged by those two. Dunkin’ Donuts? McDonald's? Can’t you see that homogenizing your beans by roasting out the regional characteristics has made your coffee indistinguishable from the sludge that the donut shoppes pour?

You have become the Burger King of coffee, congratulations.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Starbucks has the market share and the unique position to teach America what gourmet coffee really is. By cornering the market on the Clover and restricting its sale to the Starbucks stores, you are even more in a position to give a better cup of better beans. By roasting single-origin coffees to a lighter roast you can teach America what gourmet coffee really is. You can differentiate from the fast-food franchises that challenge you. You can brew better good coffee rather than giving us a better cup of bad coffee.

Starbucks taught America that there was such a thing as gourmet coffee. Thank you. But you did so by creating an inoffensive product without differentiation from one cup to the next; scorching the regional characteristics out of it; serving it pre-ground and stale so that ultimately, we’re no better off than we were before you told us what was possible and then failed to deliver it. Failed to the point where we now cannot tell the difference between a five-dollar cup and a two-dollar cup at Mickey-D’s.

You can move the needle again, start innovating rather than maintaining the status-quo. Take those Clovers you’re hoarding and actually use them to their fullest advantage. Brew coffee roasted to highlight the regional varietals, teach us to differentiate between Ethiopian and Guatemalan beans, educate our palates to taste the subtleties of terroir. And let us enjoy an amazing cuppa while you turn your cafés back into cafés rather than the high-priced soft-drink stands they’ve become.

It pains me to say this because I know and adore a number of wonderful people that proudly wear the green apron, but Starbucks is the coffee of last resort. If there's nowhere else to buy a cup, I'll enter your establishment, but otherwise... no.  Your beans are charred beyond recognition.

I’m not alone in this feeling. You've turned coffee from something transcendent into a lowest-common-denominator softdrink. A better brewing process can't change that. Bad beans beget bad coffee no matter how you brew them. I maintain contact with beanheads across the country and we all say the same thing: until your coffee delivers on it’s promise… well, you could brew it in a golden chalice with water from the the fountain of youth and I wouldn’t accept it.

If you can't do this simple thing, then give the damn Clovers back. You don't deserve them.

Sonnet Self-Reflection

Today marks the anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare's Sonnets in 1604. It is said that they were obtained by the publisher and put to press without the author's permission... Napster c.1604 (everything old surely is new again).

At risk of reviving the Great Debate, I daresay that they were and remain 154 of the most vexing pieces of poesy every visited upon the world. The sonnets raise ever more questions about the biography of the man than the plays ever have, though the questions have more to do with his preference of gender than the possibility that he was a literary McGuffin for someone else.

Are they autobiography and therefore a confession of his homosexuality? Were the sonnets addressed to the young man urging him to continue his genetically line (presumably despite his inclinations toward men) written for hire for the youth's father (as has been posited by those who don't accept the "Shakespeare was gay" thesis)?

Or are they just snippets of the things on his mind as he did other things and wanted these snippets of verse out of his head and put down somewhere he could keep track of them, a sort of poetic chapbook?

Honestly, we have no idea. As is the case with so much of the Bard's works, the sonnets rest comfortably atop a cushion of mystery, viewing the mortal scribblers who try to pin them down with sphinx-like disdain.

There are interesting arguments made by all sides of the "Shakespeare as Gay" debate and I don't really feel that his gender-preference changes the impact or cultural value of the poetry. Not for me, anyway.

All that aside, after this morning's round of NPR stories on the Sonnets and sundry issues arising from them, I've been trying to decide which of the sonnets is my favorite. (Shakespeare, of course was not the only sonneteer, simply the most famous and by far the most accomplished of his time.) The NPR piece ended with a call for favorite love verse and like any recursive thought, that returns me to pondering a favorite from the Bard himself...

Being no different than the next bloke to come along with an English Lit class or two under my belt, Sonnet 18 is a favorite (My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun...) and one of the few I can recite from memory.

As with any poetry, though, I tend to think that the real meaning has less to do with the poet than the reader. Biography and time can be transcended by the correct turn of phrase, the timeless advance of age and season and the wax and wane of love... each finds its niche in the reader regardless of the writer's original intent. It goes back to the writer's role of holding up a mirror in which we may see ourselves in others. The laments of Tennyson or the Idylls of Byron are each reflected and transmitted through our experiences and viewed in our terms, and so it is with Shakespeare.

For me, relevance is the handhold by which I manage to bridge the century's divide.

Which is the long way of going about saying that as a chronic insomniac, I have a particular affection for the 27th and 28th Sonnets, which I refer to privately as the "Sleep Cycle".

Sonnet 27

Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed, The dear respose for limbs with travel tired, But then begins a journey in my head To work my mind, when body's work's expired. For then my thoughts (from far where I abide) Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee, And keep my drooping eyelids open wide, Looking on darkness which the blind do see. Save that my soul's imaginary sight Presents thy shadow to my sightless view, Which like a jewel (hung in ghastly night) Makes black night beauteous, and her old face new. Lo thus by day my limbs, by night my mind, For thee, and for my self, no quiet find.

Separation anxiety is nothing new, I suppose.

Whilst I comprehend and cannot deny that the angst of separated lovers stands at the nexus of these two sonnets, I tend to focus (from my own life) on the sleeplessness aspect. It is difficult not to quote these words "How can I then return in happy plight that am debarred the benefit of rest?" so eloquently put as it is. Insomnia too is nothing new and is the go-to for dramatizing the unquiet heart and mind in 16th Century poesy and present as it is in Shakespeare's other insomniac lament in the Scottish Play: "Sleep no more, Macbeth hath murdered sleep!"

Sonnet 28

How can I then return in happy plight That am debarred the benefit of rest? When day's oppression is not eased by night, But day by night and night by day oppressed.

And each (though enemies to either's reign) Do in consent shake hands to torture me, The one by toil, the other to complain How far I toil, still farther off from thee.

I tell the day to please him thou art bright, And dost him grace when clouds do blot the heaven: So flatter I the swart-complexioned night, When sparkling stars twire not thou gild'st the even.

But day doth daily draw my sorrows longer, And night doth nightly make grief's length seem stronger

My favorites? Not necessarily, but they are the two which ring most familiar with me and that goes a long way toward achieving that dubious honor. Their place in my heart was admittedly achieved one dark and restless night in college as I was knocking around and trying not to awaken my roommates and The Arden Shakespeare came easily to hand as what I thought of at the time as insomnia's cure. At dawn I was still awake and reading the words of a man four centuries in the grave. There's something to be said for relevence and self-recognition helping us grapple with our literary culture. (Thanks goes out to 'Open Source Shakespeare' for keeping me from the necessity of re-typing the sonnets in this post.) What is your favorite sonnet (and why)?

Friday Randomness...

It's (almost) finished! The first draft of my second novel in the AJ MacLeod/Jordan Elias series is almost complete. It is tentatively titled The Mummer's Masque. Click the link to read a short synopsis/teaser for the new book from my website. I've been plugging away at it for about a year now, and it's in a stage of completion where I will be sending copies to my reading group soon. This is quite the milestone for me. Meanwhile, if you're an editor or agent who has yet to see it, look forward to seeing my letter of enquiry arrive in your inbox soon! --- This August, I will be attending the Pacific Northwest Writer's Conference which is hosted by my good friends at the Pacific Northwest Writers Association. The keynote address will be given by Terry Brooks, which is every geeky sci fi kid's dream come true. As you may or may not know, the first Fantasy book ever to appear on the New York Times Paperback Bestseller list was The Sword of Shannara. I look forward to hearing what he has to say.

Mindwandering Monday

The week has got to change. It's too static. Too predictable. Monday gets all the baggage of "weekend killer" and all the blame for how long the week feels. We need a system which includes one free-floating day off. We shall call it... Nonesuch Day. Nonsuch Day will float through the week at a predictable rate. Each week, one weekday will be supplanted by Nonsuch Day and each month, everyone shall be given the option of taking Saturday or Nonesuch day off. Of course, when Nonsuch Day falls on a date that is also a prime number (2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31) it's an automatic day off and all will celebrate the wonder of Nonesuch day. Nonesuch day will be a day of thankfulness and wonderment, of feasting and merriment, a constant surprise and element of random bliss that will banish the midweek blues. I think we need a free-floating day of frivolity that will supplant the need for a seventh weekday. It seems only fair that the rest of the week share the wrath of the working world and students for returning them to the drudgery of their workaday lives. Sorry, the clouds over Puget Sound have been on a bigtime crying jag of late and all that extra gloom and water does things to my mind sometimes. (sigh) Anyway... Who's with me?!

To Kindle or not to Kindle? Round II

I own thousands of books. Old-fashioned pasteboard, buckram, leather and paper. I love the written word in all its forms and the ebook is something I am very gradually coming to terms with over the Luddite impulses that have generally ruled my reading life.

As part of my ongoing internal wrestling match on the incipient eBook revolution, I've been researching the potential prizes and pitfalls of the current iteration of the phenomenon.  

The Defender... Awhile back, Newsweek Published this Op/Ed by Techie Geek Chic Jacob Weisberg In Defense Of the Kindle makes the argument that the Kindle - while clunky - is a step forward for struggling publishers and writers. He scores several good points regarding the inevitability of the e-book as a format and makes good mileage with his theme that "sure it stinks now, but do does every technology when it first comes out, be patient."

The ebook may well be inevitable. But is the Kindle?

A Kindle world is a world where your books are infinitely portable - as long as you don't lose your $400 Kindle reader. Your books don't belong to you, but you have a limited lease to read them, a very limited ability to loan them to others. I pick on the Kindle because it's the big fish and the easiest target, but this is a model that is propogating all over the place in various forms. The Sony eReader is much the same (also $400) a device that gives you access to a digital library of books that you can't really pass to the guy next to you on the airplane.  

Which brings us to our Challenger... Literary agent Michael Bourret wrote an interesting blog post at his agency's (DG) blog titled "Is Kindle a Danger To Ownership?" (He was apparently inspired by this article in the Christian Science Monitor.) Both Michael and CSM make a compelling case that our libraries are headed the way of our movies and music, down a road where the concept of "owning" a book you buy is a foreign concept and loaning a well-loved paperback to your friend is a thing of the past. Michael and CSM both point out that there is a middle ground, a path that does not take us down the Kindle road toward a third party claiming proprietary ownership of our libraries. A hybrid model where the purchase of a hardcopy comes with a free ebook version of the text is working for several publishers. A model that can reflect the current culture of a book as a possession, where the word-of-mouth can be accompanied by the load of a well-loved copy of the text. A loan that often leads to more sales for an author and a broadened fanbase.  

And then there's me... I'm still trying to make up my mind about the Kindle. To be honest, (aside from the price) the most significant drawback for me is the fact that you don't want to use an eReader in the bath tub or on a sandy beach. I like to read in circumstances that the eReaders of the world might consider "adverse conditions". My reading habits aside, I'm still torn on the whole thing. Like I said, the ebook might be inevitable, but the platform isn't necessarily. The idea of a world where we don't own the books we buy makes me intensely uncomfortable. As an avid collector of books, the very idea is anathema to me. I can come to terms with the idea that the ebook is an environmental necessity. That the forests of the world cannot support the creation of yet another mountain range of pulp paperbacks to match the ten or twenty the publishing industry has generated in the last hundred years or so. And with the written record of culture in the industrialized world growing exponentially, this is ever more true with each passing year.

Nevertheless, there are cross-platform formats available already which might mean we can avoid a Betamax-vs-VHS problem (and remember that the lesser of those two won that bout) between the Sony eReader and the Kindle and avert a future where the reader never feels that they own the book they hold in their hands. It's a future where recommending a new author or idea you just discovered to your friends necessitates either a broken law (or Terms of Use contract) or an immediate outlay of cash before they can see if you're right -- where such recommendations become less common thereby and word-of-mouth authors die on the vine.

In the snarl of Digital Rights Management and contracts and whathaveyou, the larger picture so often gets obscured... Whether it's ink or electrons, the growth or literary culture and the transmission of ideas depends largely upon the works belonging to the reader, not to the librarian.

---

Please let me know what you think of Kindle, the Sony eReader, and others as well as eBooks in general in the comments section.

Would you like fries with your Twilight?

In a recent interview, Newsweek tried to deconstruct what made David Baldacci's books so damned buoyant despite the weight of negative opinions from the likes of the Newsweek and the New York Times.

"The suggestion that reading a thriller is a kind of civic obligation is questionable, to say the least, and there are plenty of people who dispute that reading potboilers encourages an engagement with more-demanding texts. [...] Baldacci offers a break—and people who care about books should care about him. Whether or not thrillers are crucial for democracy, they are certainly crucial for publishers. Where a more literary book might be considered a success if it sells 50,000 in hardcover, a novel by a writer like Baldacci can sell more than a million." www.newsweek.com/

This is an interesting article, not so much because it's about Baldacci but because even though the alleged premise of the article (as expressed in the subtitle) as a sort of populist defense of the thriller as a genre "David Baldacci's 16 books were all bestsellers. Why do people have such a problem with that?"

The interviewer makes a number of statements that make it clear she's not entirely on-board with her (assigned?) premise.

Baldacci isnt alone in ascending the bestseller lists while the literati stand aside in frustrated amaze. Literature maven Harold Bloom's dismay at the popularity of JK Rowling and her boy wizard is nearly legendary. Stephen King himself once infamously likened his books to the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large order of fries. Tasty and momentarily satisfying, but not good for you in the long run.

One gets the impression from some authors that they are embarassed at thier status as the MacDonalds of the bookworld. But what really tends to get me is the distancing of the literati from the very thing that is keeping the industry alive. As they stand aside and decry the blockbuster model that is keeping the presses rolling and the bookstores open, they live under the same tent that is held aloft by the Davinci Codes and Prisoner of Azkaban.

The backlash against genre writers lives in a world that has forgotten that Shakespeare was the equivalent of a sitcom writer for his age. A quill-for-hire who transcended his genre to ascend the heights of historical figures whose very existence will be forever debated. So many of the great classics of our time were salvaged from the slushpile of history by a mixture of lucky happenstance and an author who didn't care what the critics of his or her time had to say and kept plugging away at the quill or typewriter or computer keyboard.

Will future generations see Baldacci as the Dostoevsky of our time? Perhaps not. Will Stephanie Meyer be looked upon by our literary heirs as the unheralded Jane Austen of our age? Not bloody likely. Nor will JK Rowling for that matter, though she might be our JM Barrie or EB White.

I'm constantly reminded as I read articles like the one in Newsweek what the always-pithy GK Chesterton said in an essay about detective fiction:

"By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece."

I was working at the bookstore when the two biggest phenomena of recent eras began and ran their course. What is often forgotten is that JK Rowling's bestseller status was built upon word of mouth. Advanced Reading Copies were sent to booksellers and the story captured their imaginations. The strange little kids fantasy novel broke out as the booksellers recommended it over and over again to teacher and parent alike. I should have held onto my ARC of Sorceror's Stone. I still have my reader's copy of Davinci Code -- which is ironic since I enjoyed Rowling's little book and didn't so much care one way or the other about DC. Nevertheless, I was there when it came down the pipe and read it before most people.

My personal feelings about both books aside, it was almost amusing to watch as the esteem of the booksellers and literati who frequented my store waned in the face of growing commercial success. You can't be good and popular at the same time. That's just the way it is!

Both narratives have problems which I will discuss at another time. Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series has similar flaws in the execution of the ideas to the point where I would put them on a descending scale with Rowling at the top, Dan Brown in the middle and Meyer at the bottom. Yet all three caught the crest of the wave, defied the dismay of their critics and built empires bolstered by their many imitators.

Are they good? That's not for me to say. There are better out there, for certain. But that doesn't invalidate the opinions of the masses. I'm not about to argue for market-driven literary criticism, but the pooh-poohing that happens every time Baldacci, King, Brown, Rowling and Meyer put a new book in the stores ignores a very germane element of their stories that undercuts the criticism: They're obviously telling stories that resonate -- stories we want to hear. Manifest in their sales data and the adherence of their fans.

As he was lambasting Stephanie Meyer as a hack, even King took a moment to point out that the strength of her books is the resonance of the stories she tells. Davinci Code, Harry Potter, and pick-your-thriller by Baldacci (or anyone else) all have one thing in common... they are all crafted from archetypal stories that resonate from a time when such tales were told to stave off the darkness that edged in from the corners of the wilderness beyond our firelight. Some of them are the tales told by the children at a campfire in the backyard, but those stories are simply smaller echoes of the greater tales being related at the fires of the grownups.

In the Newsweek interview, Baldacci suggested that reading thrillers was a democratic institution, a blow struck for literacy. The Newsweek interviewer sniffed at the very idea, but he was right. He was right because the more we tell stories, the greater our hunger grows for more. Every book put into the hands of someone who might not otherwise be willing to read one is a victory for literacy. I don't care what imprint the book has on the spine or who the author is, when people are reading, literacy wins. And one way or another, a literate nation will take care of the industry that feeds its need.

This doesn't necessarily mean we will always throw the greatest literary heroes up the bookcharts, but the taller and stronger the tentpoles that bolster the industry, the better chance the unheralded geniuses have of getting into the tent at all.

Daylight Wasting Time

On sleepless nights, by tempest tossed, 
I wait for the bleary day to start. 
My mug will catch the hours lost; 
Strong as death and as black as his heart. 


 - Scott

QWERTY Love: Typewriters Endure In a Digital Age

Heard it on NPR this morning. "Wallace Stegner felt electric typewriters and computers went too fast. He needed the mulling time of a manual, the slower ritual of rolling in the paper, poising fingers over the keys.." Obviously I'm not anti-computer, and I would never prepare a manuscript on my typewriter. But there's just something about the clack-clack-clack-DING! that lets me know without a doubt that I'm writing something. The rubber platen catching the page as I feed it into the machine, the force of the fingers against the key... writing used to be such a visceral experience, a worthy heir to Voltaire's quill. Sigh... ----- Photo by Me

Imagine All The People

Because I work in a writing center, there’s always talk about how better to get across to the student you’re helping that you’re serious about helping them overcome their challenges. That you ‘feel their pain’ in a totally non-ironic, non-Clintonesque way. Displaying empathy.

The trouble with conversations like this is that often I hear too much focus on how to display empathy. “Think about sick kittens” was a half-joking response in the most recent discussion I witnessed, dwelling on the method without properly dwelling on what it means to be empathetic.

The difference is an understanding that the easiest way to display empathy is to actually have empathy. 

Genuine empathy is something that no Stanislavski technique is ever going to teach you to emulate if it’s not actually there to begin with. Empathy is the triumph of imagination over instinct. I’m sitting across from a student. That student has a (generally) very concrete academic issue that they need our help with. An hour or half hour appointment isn’t long enough to really delve into their life and motivations and challenges and obstacles… so we revert to emotional shorthand: Archetype, Stereotype, Xenotype, cross-type and match and then move on. Help the student get their paper finished. Get them as close to the “A” as you can.

There’s always another student waiting.

Everyone does it. We imagine others in the simplest possible terms because it’s the least taxing manner in which to interact with others. I think of it as emotional shorthand. Don’t believe me? A driver cuts you off and speeds off down the highway ahead of you at breakneck speed.

What do you do?

If you’re like me, you swear, call into question their parentage and generally think ill of them. What a jackass. We don’t generally assume they are a doctor rushing to save a life or a son rushing to the bedside of his dying father because the conditioned response is one-dimensional.

Archetype: Bad driver
Subgroup: Roadhog

Think this isn’t a blogpost about writing? How many movies do you see where the characters are a mile wide and an inch deep? How many books? Where do these one-dimensional paper cutout characters come from if not a perceived refusal on the part of the reader (or writer) to be willing to fully-envision someone as a complicated and often contradictory entity apart from us?

And why not? We do this every day in real life, more often than anyone is willing to admit. We fail to fully accept the person standing opposite us is an entity with a big bag of reasons for saying, seeing, doing what they do the way that they do. We turn on the emotional shorthand function and imagine them in the simplest possible terms before we move on. The person in the express checkout with three too many items, the person that cut you off on I-5, the ESL student whose accent you can’t understand, the coworker who is always late, the waitress who doesn’t keep your coffee full… Do you think they're inherently bad people? Or are they reacting to parts of their experience that we don't get to see? Or do you honestly think about it at all?

Archetype + Stereotype = Conditioned response. 

For better or worse, writers use this fact all the time. Big dudes are bad. Skinny dudes are nerds. Sexy blondes are airheads. Fat women are bitter about it... the list of sins is long.

Empathy is hard. We have to act against the human impulse to assume motivations, to act on information not in evidence, to simplify situations so they’ll be less stressful. At the risk of getting too John Lennon here, we have to imagine all the people. Empathy is imagining others as complex entities that are momentarily overlapping us like an organic Venn diagram.

The trouble with this isn’t the question of how better to display empathy, the trouble derives from the question not digging deep enough. It appears to focus on giving the appearance of empathy rather than finding ways to display and incorporate actual empathy into our interactions with the people around us. 

Empathy is best defined (by me anyway) as laying aside the simplistic and instinctual reversion to a gut response. No one is a stereotype, archetype or paragon. Showing genuine empathy is about supplanting our shorthand with a fully-imagined person, an open reception of all that they are displaying to us in every nuance of their manner and beyond the ubiquitous device of "actively listening", what we should be doing is "actively imagining".

What's in a name?

Awhile back I wrote a novel that I've been calling Ex Libris from day one. It's an historical fiction/thriller for bibliophiles. It is woven from the histories of various collections of books and the claims these libraries have upon a single book which might reveal the location of yet another older and infinitely more valuable library... which sounds convoluted but isn't.

The point being that "Ex Libris" (Latin for 'From/out of the Library') is the perfect title for such a book.

But there's already an Ex Libris out there. It is a book of an entirely different sort, which is generally sold in a different section of the average bookstore than mine would/will be. Even worse, the fallback title I had in mind, Palimpsest is a novel that is coming out in paperback in February.

I just can't seem to win.

The Writer's Digest Guide to Query Letters expressly forbids pitching a book with a title that's already out there. It pointedly makes fun of someone who does so, as a matter of fact. While I'm not generally disposed toward taking any one guidebook's advice as a mandate from on-high (with all due respect to Ms. Burt-Thomas), I worry that any of the other titles I've come up with will fail to as fully encapsulate the story I have told and "Untitled" leaves a great deal to be desired as well.

I readily admit that this is probably a tempest in an inkwell. The jitters of a first-time novelist are innumerable, but nothing I've come up with and nothing that any of the others I've discussed it with (sorry guys) fully captures the essence of the novel either. Working titles rarely make it all the way to the dustjacket on the store shelf, but I do worry that by any other name it just won't sell the same.

Thought of the moment....

"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."

- Jack London 


Public domain photo via Wikimedia Commons

Disclaimer

This is the blog of Scott W. Perkins, novelist, artist and bibliophile. These virtual pages will help my far-flung friends and those interested in my writing career keep track of me. They will also give me something to do with the things that occur to me to write down, but don't fit into whatever book I am writing.

I will periodically empty the "Wish I'd Known That Yesterday" box on my desk for you, discuss interviewing and research techniques as well as other tricks of the trade. I hope that this helps someone out there who isn't blessed with such a full box of hardwon lessons to learn from. Please, have some of mine.

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The word "Novel" appears in the subtitle as a noun, not an adjective. I am a novelist. That is not to say the things I write here will not be new or even novel. Novelty is in the eye of the beholder.

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