200

According to the nattily attired center panelist at the ‘Thrillers and Killers’ discussion, somewhere around 200 people make a full time living as writers of novels. 200! In the united States, that’s less than a 1 in a million shot. It’s one of those figures that sounds so incredible that it must be true. He didn’t back it up with anything approaching fact or citation, but it passes my sniff test. I am somewhat acquainted with a man who has published several books. One was even turned into a major motion picture. He does not smoke cigars on his yacht in St Tropez. He works a regular job and this book thing probably gets him a nice check every once in a while. By the way ‘Thrillers and Killers’ was a session at the 1^st Annual Boston Book Festival that M and I attended last weekend. This particular gathering matched spy/thriller novelists with a terrorism expert from Harvard. M and I went to a few other sessions, which were overwhelmingly crowded. Maybe it was rain, maybe Boston is a book-learnin type of place. I know I saw a Ken Burns groupie or two (we missed his talk due to overwhelming crowds). The sessions all had their own themes, but for the most part it seemed like the discussion always went back to what it was like to be a writer and to describe each particular writers’ creative process. It seems that professional writing is not an easy thing, despite what I had secretly, deep down believed. I was a somewhat talented ‘english person’ back in the day. I went to schools where teachers saw I could read harder books and they sent me to the big kids’ section on the library. I read a lot of challenging books and I think I did a decent job of regurgitating what I read. Book reports were never something I dreaded. I was given much praise and encouragement (not from 10^th grade Mr. McCarthy though) and the cycle repeated itself. I got nice standardized test scores, got the awards, etc, and off to college I went. In hindsight choosing majors and classes by what time they were scheduled was probably not the best path, but it worked. I took a lot more English classes, albeit of the analytical, not the creative variety. Lots of poetry and dusty Milton ensued. Graduation approached and various older people started asking me if I was going to be an English teacher when school was over. Hell no, I was going to be an investment banker! (I think I covered this somewhere else). Or at least get something to pay the bills while I wrote by manuscript/novel/manifesto. I knew a movie script was 120 pages long – how hard could that be? I made a few hesitant stabs at it and realized I have no mind for dialogue. There’s something else I have no appetite for – revisions. Mr. McCarthy had a real thing for rewrites. He never graded a paper the first time it was turned in. He’d make some notes, hand it back and give you a second chance. What? No way was I doing that again! My first shot was good enough. So I’d hand that sucker right back at him and take my grade. The twist was that you could do this indefinitely. If you didn’t like your C, you could keep rewriting it until it was an A. I couldn’t be bothered. Apparently rewrites and revisions are quite commonplace in the professional writing world. After I’d write a few scenes down, I’d take a look at them and realize how bad they were, but the idea of re-doing all that work was too much. Maybe movies weren’t for me. Books are where I’ll make my fortune. I’m constantly eavesdropping on people, analyzing their situation, noticing interactions – all . with a running dialogue in my mind, connecting them in a grand plot or saving good interactions for scenes the next day or whenever I feel like it. Writing a book would be easy. Or at least, writing a few good scenes would be easy. Once I got a some killer scenes, the plot would take care of itself. I tried that – there are more than a few aborted novels filled with ultra macho action and violence tucked away on every laptop I’ve ever handed over to the IT guys. I really don’t care if anyone reads them. I usually run out of steam after the first 800 words or so. Then the idea of re-writing it? No freakin way. You may notice how long some of these blog posts are and realize they are way past 800 words – that’s dumb luck. And while I may rewrite a sentence or two or change a word, there is consistently zero rewriting done. So back to the 200. Who are these people? I saw three of them on this panel. One of them was a Yale law Professor – sounded like he had a decent day job. One had been recruited to work at the CIA at a young age but realized it wasn’t all spies and guns. The third guy, spouting statistics, seemed to be the only ‘normal’ guy, i.e. not already endowed with super skills/intelligence/determination that would correspond well to crafting a page-turning novel. Dan Brown? John Grisham? Dean Koontz? I know I make fun of these guys, but if that 200 number is correct, these guys are more obscure talents than professional basketball players. They’re rarer than billionaires (and if you’re JK Rowling, you’re both). Luck seems to have little to do with this. I’ve read business case studies that analyzed thousands of years of man-days worked by all sorts of business executives. These studies then asked the executives why they made certain decisions and what resulted from these. The end result was basically luck. You can’t ask someone who flipped a coin on heads 10 times in a row how they did it, nor, so it seems, can you ask many executives what the secret to their success is, since it’s all conjecture and mostly luck. None of the authors had similar stories. Some outlined their arcs, others waded in with the writing. It seems the secret to writing a bestselling novel is to somehow capture the attention of a good agent and editor and publisher who can then propel your book to the most shelves and hope lots of people buy them. Of course the internet makes this all the more difficult. Anyone can publish a book these days. Anyone can fling opinions around in an article and get noticed. Very few get paid and ever fewer make all their money from it. I wonder if this 200 ever get together like the Spartans from 300 and howl and chant to fire themselves up and revel in their virtuosity. That’s probably what these book fairs are, actually. Get a bunch of authors together, let them measure each other up and decide who’s got the most best sellers, who’s a hack, who’s a genius. Wave around a few glasses of Cabernet and quote philosophers and try to look profound. Sounds like fun. Doesn’t mean I don’t have a novel in me, but it definitely means I can’t quit my day job.

slacker

Wow. What a slacker. This guy needs to update his blog soon or people will forget he's there.. Yes I am aware. I'll get something posted here soon.

How low can you go?

Back in the day there was a time when I was known to pull off some pretty low moves when I had a lot of free time to myself? Eat mac n cheese for breakfast out of the pot, wearing boxers, sitting on the couch? Check. Stay up all night playing Grand Theft Auto and go to work the next day? Check. Spend an entire day in a movie theater, watching back to back to back movies? Check. Last night, however, was a new low. M was out of town for a bachelorette party. I had tried to play golf earlier in the day and got kicked off the course because it was raining too much (I got a rain check). Wet and bored, I went up to visit brother M and his wife M and baby A. The in-laws were visiting and I was more of an intruder, but it was good to see everyone. Mainly I was trying to kill some time before 8:30, which was the kickoff of the USC/Ohio State game. I like the pro game a little more, but it’s a narrow gap. The energy of the college game is better and the better athletes stand out more, so you see more exciting plays. This was supposed to be a big one. On my way home, I listened to the thrilling Michigan/Notre Dame finish. Once home, I burst through the door, made myself a decent dinner (no mac n cheese in a pot) and headed upstairs to settle in. I started flipping through the channels and started to get a little nervous. No pre-game shows, no recaps of the days games. There was plenty of crap though. Simpsons reruns, Jeopardy, Access Hollywood and The Insider. Ok, maybe it’s on at 8, I thought. 8 came and went and the shows changed, but not for the better. Now I had ‘Law and Order: SVU’ (law and order is still on?), COPS (normally this would be fine, but I’d been waiting to see this game all day), Women’s Tennis (this turned out to be pretty exciting, as I just found out) and Nascar. I’m not going to go on a Nascar tirade here. I sort of like Nascar, It’s somewhere between hockey and basketball but below football, MMA and baseball in my decision tree of ‘will I watch this random sporting event?’. However, on this occasion, it filled me more or less with rage. Golf and Nascar have seasons that are WAAAAY too long, stretching from February-November, ending with interminable and mind boggling points/playoff/shootout (i.e. we can’t have a tournament, so we invented this to artificially generate excitement and try to have a champion of sorts). So this time of year is filled with pseudo-important events that everyone knows don’t mean anything, except to the sponsors who got duped into paying huge amounts of money on the premise that if you tell someone this is important, they will believe it (sorry that was sort of a rant). So there was a race on instead. That would only mean that the football game was on ESPN (the race was on ABC, parent of ESPN – if it weren’t on ESPN, then NBC and CBS should be fired for ignoring this game). This posed a problem – I don’t have cable. No worries, I’ll see if it’s online. It was on something called ESPN 360 – all I had to do was plug in some information about my ISP and we’d be good to go. Except my world-loser cable/isp company doesn’t get along ESPN. So no dice there. I tried telling ESPN 360 that I had a different ISP – no luck. It ws almost 8:30, I could see updates from the game as they were happening online. This was definitely not good. Then I remembered that we sort of get VH-1. I knew my TV had some tuning capabilities, so I looked up what channel ESPN was and went there – static. But I started playing with the tuner and I sort of got a signal I could see the score at the bottom, I could see players when the camera went close up, but the screen was really washed out and the sound was unbearable. Brent Musberger’s dulcet tones were scrambled like he’s been smoking Pall Malls for the last 60 years. Then things got really dark. No, literally. I turned off the lights. Maybe if it were darker, the contrast of the scrambled static with the dark room would make things stand out more. Sitting in a dark room, by myself, watching a static filled screen and believing I was seeing things… I think they made a movie about this. The irony and patheticness of the situation was not lost on me. Hey, at least I had clothes on. There was a time when I figured out that if you flipped back and forth fast enough between certain channels on the cable box, you could get the box to freeze for a few minutes and you’d get a salacious, albeit muted and somewhat shaky piece of cinematography that was particularly interesting to the teenage male, but I digress. Sitting watching static was not a noble end to a day that had thus far been relatively disappointing. I hadn’t really explored the online solution to this adequately. I know that you really can get anything you want online, provided you know where to look. It only took me a few minutes but sure enough, by 8:50, I was watching an ESPN HD broadcast from the LA area on my laptop, wirelessly, lounging on my couch. EPIC EPIC EPIC WIN. So much winsauce I was bouncing like a kid on Christmas. There I sat, until midnight, hoping the stream didn’t go down. I saw all the big plays, all the highlights. I love the internet. Last night, in my mind, the full potential of the internet was realized. Thank you DARPA nerds, thank you Al Gore, thank you anarchist hacker/freedom fight , whoever you are. And yes, it’s 10:50 and I’ve been watching ESPN’s Sunday football broadcast for an hour already. Life is good.

The Red Whale

Add this to the list of things I didn't know I wanted until I had it. M and I found this creature down in Hyannis this weekend. That's a Queen-size headboard beneath him, so he's not small. I think he's supposed to hang as a sign or weathervane. For now he's in the bedroom.

Fantasy (and real) football season is here. My teams are drafted. Now all that's left is to wait for the money to flow in. I'll spare you any long winded analysis. All I can say is that I'm excited.

The big thing bothering me today is my alarming proclivity towards fantastically crappy music. It seems that almost every time I hear a song and think "hey, this is different, I kind of like it" and then proceed to look it up, it's by someone I can't stand or admit to liking. Case in point Kanye West and Miley Cyrus. I've fallen so low as to purchase two Kanye songs on itunes, affirming his BS and giving him my hard earned cash. 32 year old men do not buy Miley Cyrus songs though. I will have to stick to Youtube for while until the songs are no longer interesting to me.

Growing older, growing up

Well kiddies, it was Big B’s birthday recently and he took a trip with his little lady up to the green mountain state. Since it’s a little bit of a pain to tote around wrapped gifts, we opened them a few days early and went up sans gifts. The gift for the actual day was a round of golf at the #1 rated course in all of Vermont. I think I did fairly well, despite stumbling out of the gate. I’d like a chance to play it again if only because I’d make sure I practiced a little before the actual tee time. The rest of the trip was excellent, with a fly fishing lesson and some hiking mixed in there. M and I were younger than most of the other people we saw (again) and while we lacked a Range Rover, we did have a Subaru, which lent us some serious Vermont street cred. I think we will definitely be back at some point. After we got back, I received a most excellent gift from M’s family – a Blu-Ray DVD player. Now I know I might have boasted earlier here about not having cable or electricity or something along those lines. The TV we own is 10 years old and was the first big thing I bought with a credit card, which coincidentally was also my first brush with monthly payments that I didn’t enjoy paying and other various scary financial landmines I tiptoes around before the millennium. I am admittedly envious of even luddite family members with high-def and surround sound setups. The thing is, we really needed a DVD player. Since the dvd player we moved to the house with broke, we had been using a Playstation2 as a dvd player. That is, until the controller broke and we were unable to use it. We were really in the dark ages. We even bought a puzzle in Vermont so we’d have something to do when we got back home. (The puzzle is a work in progress). So now we have a Blu-Ray player and an old school TV. Someone pointed out to me that in the past, I might have freaked out about a gift like that. There was a stage in my life where any gift that required me to do something was immediately a crapola gift. Even worse, it would provoke an almost angry response. I liked having no stuff, being able to pack up and go in a moment’s notice. Not that I had any reason to, but anything that required assembly or transport was not likely to make it with me on my next move. So here was a gift that would most likely necessitate a new TV purchase. I say most likely because what’s the point of having this super high def player with a low def TV? And if you get the nice TV, why watch bad programming when there’s HD programming out there, which means… a cable package? I’m not sure about that yet. Until they stop broadcasting NFL games on the old fuzzy pixels, I don’t know if we need to switch. The point is, I got older and I got a gift that might at one time riled me up a bit, but this was a nice surprise. We’ve scoped out a few new TV’s but until the old one has an ‘accident’ I don’t know if there’s a need just yet.

Are you ready?

For some footballllll!!! yeah the Patriots were on last night. Granted, it was only a preseason game, but it's good to see the season starting again. Unfortunately, this means summer is coming to an end. It's taken a solid 11 years since I stopped having a summer vacation period to realize that the school break for summer isn't really that long. I remember lazing about for what seemed like months and then begrudgingly heading back to see friends that had suddently gotten huge and were full of stories of summer adventures. Now? This summer has flown by. I don't see why kids need a whole new 'back to school' wardrobe for 10 weeks off. The more I think about it, summer vacation is ridiculous. I understand the old school famrers needed their hands to help with the crops, but I see a lot of tubby non-farmers wandering around, forgetting what they learned and trying to look tough. I'm sorry in advance, but M and I have some un-fun plans for our summer kids. Tough nuts sonny.

Summer also means a little bit of cooking outdoors and enjoying the longer days. It stopped raining for the last part of July and first part of August, and while I haven't been able to do any super-long smoke cooking, I have done some nice burgers, corn, and even a steak or two. There's still plenty of time.

Golf - Last weekend I got to play at the local course and hit them pretty well. I got to play with a 14 year old who's dad spent $350 for the summer so he could drop this kid off in the morning and pick him up at night. He played at least 18 holes, sometimes 36 holes a day. This is a great idea! This is a pretty cheap way to ditch the kid for the day, and if they get great at golf, college is paid for. If they're really good, you can cash out the 401k and get a boat and start collecting an allowance. Or something like that. Anyway, this kid was good. Not quite pro material, but he has some growing to do. When I got home, M was not interested in dinner, so I fended for myself. I have this bag of chipotle peppers that I try to incorporate into meals without burning M's mouth out. They have a nice smoky flavor and a little bit of heat. They'd have more heat, but I usually cut out the seeds and ribs since that's where all the heat is. Right in the middle of my cooking, I started to feel a slight burning sensation around my groin area. It started like an itch or something, but gradually gained intensity, finally making it hard to move or breathe. I was standing in the kitchen, food on the stove, and I wanted to tear my clothes off and hose myself down. I'm not a sailor. I don't frequent houses of ill repute. What's with the sudden fire down below? Turns out at some point in the middle of my cooking, I had to use the bathroom. Who thinks to wash their hands BEFORE they go in there? If you're cutting hot peppers, maybe that's a good idea? I wasn't going to touch my eyes or nose, I had enough sense for that. The peppers were a good 20 minutes beforethe bathroom. Who knew they carried on for so long?About 30 minutes later things returned to normal. Not the best way to enjoy your dinner, but it was not dull.

Nuts, Flowers and a Crazy Pink Lady

HowdareyouignoremewhodoyouthinkyouareLookatmewhenIamtalkingIcannotbeleiveblahblahblah!!!! This is what I heard coming from a car while I was walking through the commuter rail parking lot this morning. As the car got closer, the ranting got louder. People turned and looked. I saw a green Ford Explorer with an indifferent looking man driving and the screamer in a pink shirt sitting next to him. The sound went quiet as I walked away and then got louder as the truck pulled up and let this individual out. She seemed normal enough, but clearly had some anger issues. I don’t know if the guy deserved it or not, but it made my day? Why? Because I knew, whatever else happened, my day was starting better than his was and would probably end better as well. So thank you, O lady in pink, for making my morning a little brighter with your howl at the moon insanity.

I’ve been sort of busy lately. With all my recent book purchases, I started to go back to olden forms of entertainment. So far my selections merit about a B-minus. I have another monster sitting in my bag that I’ve been a little unwilling to start. I haven’t read this much consecutively in a long time, at least since I was being forced to read for school or something. There have been some big family doings as well. Not so much for M and myself, but the extended family counts, too. I am an uncle to a baby girl now. M and I went to visit her and the happy parents last weekend. Seems at this stage it’s a lot of sleeping, eating, crying and diaper changing. Not a bad existence. M and I also headed out to Martha’s Vineyard for the passing of her Grandmother. This of course stirred up feelings about the beginning / end circle of life thing. I guess this is what happens when you’re 30-plus. In another ten years these events will happen more often until I freak out and buy a morotcycle or 1965 Shelby Cobra to soothe my anxieties.

This picture here is of my new bags of nuts. Sick of paying ridiculous per pound prices, even at Trader Joe’s, I went in on a wholesale bundle with a guy here at work. That’s 10 lbs of almonds you’re looking at. I’ve been happily munching them for a few weeks now.

So far it’s been a pretty bad summer for the grill. An extraordinarily wet June and July made extended cookout sessions impossible. We’ve had some nice weekends here and there, but we’ve also been out and about a little bit. The rain has had some upside, though. The plants we put in are growing like crazy. I don’t do anything more than knock bugs off them and sprinkle some miracle-gro on things occasionally and check out these flowers. The front of the condo smells like a florist shop. The added bonus is that since we don’t get the same sun as other people, our flowers are just blooming now, and everyone else’s are long shed and gone. We received a basil plant as a gift not so long ago and it has to be 30 inches tall at this point. We’ve been trying to eat as much basil as possible and this thing only grows faster. Can’t complain about that.