The Leaf Blower

The Hint Fiction Anthology is Here!

2010-11-02T08:46:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was an oddly joyful day. On the way to work, I got pulled over going nearly double the speed limit, but got off with a warning (and a little humiliation: the cop who pulled me over was on foot. He just pointed to the side of the road and gave me the same look I give my dog Chester when he gets into the trash). I watched my six-week-old daughter roll herself over (gymnast, genius). And I watched the SF Giants win the World Series (joyful for a number of reasons, odd because I was actually watching a baseball game).

And… the Hint Fiction Anthology was officially released… and reviewed favorably in The New Yorker! Yes, that New Yorker.

I received my contributor's copy of the anthology, and it’s a handsome little book. It feels great seeing my name and my story nestled between the likes of Joyce Carol Oates and Peter Straub. My story is on page 53, right after Jack Ketchum's.

So I had to come out of blogger retirement to urge you to buy the Hint Fiction Anthology on Amazon (where it was, for a moment, #1 in the anthology category), Like it on Facebook, and generally talk up its awesomeness.

Double-blind is done; The Leaf Blower takes a hiatus

2010-09-07T05:47:00.000-07:00

The DOUBLE-BLIND project is officially done. For now, at least. I've completed my my first batch of agent queries. I sent out about thirty in total, which isn't a huge amount compared to what most first-time authors send. I could have sent fifty, or one hundred, but I wanted to make each letter somewhat personalized, and after a certain amount you're running into diminished returns anyway. I've gotten rejections back on about half of the queries. And I've received six requests for a partial or full manuscript -- a stat that I'm pretty proud of! Although I've already gotten rejected on half of the manuscript submissions, too.

At some point, I'll probably send out query round two (I may do a snail mail round; I initially skipped any agent who only accepted snail mail queries, even though a few of these agents seemed promising. Which, I imagine, is the reason they request snail mail in the first place: if the thought of printing a few pages and dropping them into an envelop is too much of an obstacle for you, maybe you're not that serious about pursuing that particular agent -- or about your writing project in general).

And, if the traditional publishing route doesn't work out, I will self-publish DOUBLE-BLIND and/or put it out as an e-book.

But for now... I'm moving on. I'm tired of DOUBLE-BLIND. I'm tired of revising it, I'm tired of writing about it, and I'm tired of talking about it. The proverbial desk drawer has been calling ever more loudly for my manuscript, and it's time to drop it there and work on some new material. I have so many ideas, I just need to write! write! write!

And finally, after 125 consecutive Tuesdays, The Leaf Blower Blog is going on hiatus for a while. My wife and I are expecting a baby in nine days (!) and I want to devote what precious writing time I'll have to working on some new fiction material. I enjoy writing this blog, and I look forward to the comments I receive each week. But, as Sherman Alexie said, every word on your blog is a word not in your book. So The Leaf Blower is going off the air -- probably for a few months.

Thanks again for reading... I will be back!

Lunch with a homicide detective

2010-08-31T10:40:00.000-07:00

At the back of any thriller or crime novel, on the acknowledgements page, the author always says, "I'd like to thank Detective Frank Drapo of the NYPD Special Victims Unit for telling me everything I've ever wanted to know about murder and forensics, and for letting me ride along in his police car and even shoot someone. All the bloody details are his; all mistakes are mine alone." Or something like that.

Nearly every thriller novel involves a law enforcement agency at some point, and every author worth his blood spatter needs a knowledgeable, trusted police contact to help him get the details right. But I've always wondered, how do authors get these contacts? I mean, it's probably not too difficult if you're Michael Connelly or Dennis Lehane. But what about a no-name unpublished author? Do you just call up the police station and ask if anyone feels like reading your manuscript?

During the process of writing Double-blind, I tried to establish contact with two people at the FDA (one of whom I actually spent a week with during an audit) and neither of them would help me. Although I did have some productive meetings with a rheumatologist -- to learn more about lupus -- but that's only because this doctor and I happened to work at the same company. With the police, I had no connection whatsoever. Until now.

As with most things in writing, my police connection came fortuitously.While waiting in line to pitch agents at the San Francisco Writers Conference, I met a wonderful lady who was writing historical fiction. When I told her what I was writing, she said, "My husband would probably like to talk to you. He's writing a book that involves the pharmaceutical industry. Oh, and he might be able to help you, too. He's a retried LAPD homicide detective." Um, yeah.

I never did meet the detective at the conference, but after staying in contact with him and his wife for a few months, I finally met him for lunch last weekend. I'll call him Mack, which isn't his real name. And I won't reveal too much about him. He's kind of private about his online profile. Not because, like the rest of us, he doesn't want unflattering photos of himself on Facebook, but because there are people out there who may want to KILL HIM. Also, he reads my blog, and he doesn't seem like the kind of guy you want on your bad side. All that said, he was just the nicest guy. Seriously, if I ever kill someone, I want Mack to be the one to arrest me.

Mack and I had a fascinating conversation, and he had some incredible stories to tell. What's more, he's happy to help me in the future whenever I have questions about law enforcement. He's willing to read what I've written and answer the key question: would this actually happen? In turn, I hope I can help Mack with his pharma/biotech questions, and we can both help each other with the writing aspect. Pretty cool, huh?

So Mack will be an invaluable resource for my writing. But he's also just fun to talk to. During our lunch, I couldn't help ask a few "cop questions" I've always wondered about:

Are people really that rude to the cops? Whenever you watch Law and Order, a suspect is always saying, "now, if you'll excuse me, detective, I have work to do." And they're usually walking full speed, in the middle of something ostensibly more important than talking to a HOMICIDE DETECTIVE. I don't know about you, but if a detective wanted to talk to me, I'd clear my calendar for a few minutes and try to be as polite as I could muster. Mack said that people are generally cordial, but he has run into the arrogant brush-off many times, especially from doctors and lawyers.

Do detectives really say "we can talk here, or we can talk downtown"? YES! Mack told me he used to say this all the time.

During a police interrogation, after all standard routes have failed, does a detective really come in Elliot Stabler-style and say, "I know why you killed him. I don't blame you. He had it coming, the son of a bitch. If you hadn't done it, I would've killed him myself, after what he did to you." And the suspect blurts out "Yes, he did have it coming -- that's why I killed the bastard!" Again, YES! Mack told me a story about a suspect who passed a lie detector test, but then inadvertently confessed when Mack confronted him later.

Is it true that the tough cases can only be cracked by a jaded, retired detective who's been living alone on a boat and battling his demons? I didn't actually ask this question, but Mack answered it. He was recently pulled out of retirement and hired by a private firm to solve a case that sounds like something out of a blockbuster movie. Although... Mack doesn't live on a boat, and he seems to be a pretty well-adjusted dude.

And finally, do detectives really notice things that normal humans don't? Again, I didn't ask this question directly, but the answer seems to be Yes. When we were having lunch, Mack said, "I'm trained to observe, and I notice things." He lowered his voice to a whisper "For example, I know that couple behind us is having marital problems." And I said, "what couple?" And earlier, when I first arrived outside the restaurant, Mack immediately came up to me and said, "you must be Brian." I'd never met him before that moment. Weird. Later, he was telling me how easy it is to put a tracking device on any vehicle. Hmm... I've got to go now.

Email Intervention

2010-08-24T07:45:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Franzen has said "it's doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction." Now, I probably shouldn't take advice from a guy who got upset when his book was selected by Oprah's book club, but he has a point. It's no secret that the Internet and email are the biggest time wasters in modern history.

I've always prided myself on being email efficient. I'm a strong believer in batching messages. Have you ever noticed how, when returning from vacation, you can go through a hundred emails in 30 minutes, when normally it would take an entire day? That's batching. That's sorting by subject and eliminating, chunking up, ignoring. I try to do this in my normal workday -- vacation or not. I never check email just to "see what's going on" and then leave the messages in my inbox to respond to later. I have a saying: you don't check email, you respond to email.

I scoff at those people who check their blackberries every two seconds. I cringe when I hear colleagues say that they check their email before they roll out of bed, and before retiring each night (all that's going to accomplish is interrupting your sleep and putting you in a bad mood first thing in the morning). And I'm incredulous when someone, in 2010, still has his or her computer set up to play a sound when a new email arrives, or -- even worse -- a window that pops up saying, "You have a new email message, would you like to read it?" (okay, maybe that one went away in 1999, but you know what I mean).

So I try to follow these same principles with my personal email as well. And, for the most part, I've succeeded. But it all went out the window when I started querying agents.

When you have query letters out there, every email could be a request for your manuscript, an offer of representation. Even a rejection is better than email silence. I also get an automatic email every time someone comments on my blog, which excites me (hint, hint).

Not only is this constant checking extremely inefficient, but it sets me up for continuous disappointment thought the day: every time a new message turns out to be a LinkedIn update or something, a little part of me dies. Then it's like I have to fill the void somehow. So, since I'm already on my Google homepage with links to everything in the world, I end up checking an agent blog, exploring why the stock market is down, or watching those acrobatic cat videos on YouTube. More time wasted.

I've tried to set limits. When I was on a recent vacation, I had my phone with me most of the time. I didn't check my work email once, no problem. But I kept checking my personal Gmail. So I disabled that account on my phone. And then re-enabled it ten minutes later.

I have a problem. I need an intervention. I've considered some drastic measures:

Changing my Gmail password to an obscure set of numbers and putting the code in a safety deposit box.
Deleting Internet Explorer from my computer.
Dropping my iPhone into San Francisco Bay.

How about you? Have you found any email/internet-limiting strategies that actually work?

Still in the running...

2010-08-17T07:34:00.000-07:00

Good news on the Double-blind query front: I got two more positive responses -- with requests for material. One agent said he'd like to consider my project "if it's still available." As if someone was about to snatch it up at any moment. Lucky for him, it's still available. Just barely.

The other agent's response was even more promising. She requested the full manuscript! And she asked for a two-week exclusive, meaning that she plans to read it in the next two weeks and wants to make sure no other agents are considering the project during that time. As if I'll have a parade of agents offering representation in the next two weeks.

Keep your fingers crossed for me!

The Art of Querying (in the Rain)

2010-08-10T02:27:00.000-07:00

Still querying agents, still racking up rejections. But... I just got my most promising response yet. Another agent asked for a partial manuscript, saying my novel sounded "right up his alley." Woo hoo!

Meanwhile, one of the agencies I queried has posted on its website an example of a successful query letter. And it just so happens the letter was for a book I've recently started reading. It's The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein. My wife raved about this book, and I can already tell I'm going to love it, too.

So, what does a successful query letter look like? The agency, Folio Literary Management, posted Garth's letter along with the agent's commentary.

Now, Garth's letter isn't all that different from mine, except that I haven't published any previous books, haven't won any prestigious awards, and I don't already have an agent. Oh, and my plot isn't nearly as interesting. Wait, maybe I could have a dog narrate Double-blind...

Thank you for your rejection. No, really. Thank you.

2010-08-03T07:39:00.000-07:00

Still sending out query letters to agents. Here are my results so far, courtesy of QueryTracker:

The Closed/No Response are letters I sent out months ago and never heard back. The Rejections are, well, rejections -- all form letters (emails), with my name occasionally thrown in to make it sound personal. The exciting one is the Partial Request. That means partial manuscript. One agent read my query and the first five pages, and she requested the next 50 pages. A glimmer of hope on the sea of rejection!

Needless to say, querying agents is a very humbling experience. Especially coming from a work culture where we get positive reinforcement for every little thing (thanks for sending me this email... you're welcome, thanks for reading it... no problem, any time!... thanks again; here, I'll reply to all, so everyone knows how thankful I am!)

As the form emails roll in, you get starved for any type of personal feedback, even if it's bad. I've developed this trick to get some feedback (emerging writers, take heed). In an effort to stand out, I've made my query letter format a bit different than the standard formula. For the past few rejections, I've responded to them: "Thank you for the immediate response. A quick question: I know my query format is a little different -- I'm trying to stand out from the masses. Did the format work for you, or was it an automatic turn-off?"

A few agents have actually responded to this with a brief personal message. One agent said "the format is fine; it was the plot that didn't work for me." There it was, personal feedback from a genuine human. The way I felt, you'd have thought she'd sent me a love letter.

What would Abe Lincoln do... with an iPad?

2010-07-27T07:54:00.000-07:00

A literary agent recently told me that the medical thriller is dead. At the San Francisco Writers Conference in February, she said that even established writers in the genre, like Robin Cook and Michael Palmer, are having a hard time selling their books to publishers. Obviously, this doesn't bode well for an unknown author trying to publish in that genre.

Like anything, getting a book published is about having just the right thing at just the right time. And just like with buying stocks, if something's super hot, you've already missed it. Not long ago, for example, you could have written a vampire romance that generally sucked Dracula balls, but if it had all the right elements, it had a good chance of being picked up. But that ship has sailed.

So, what's super hot right now? The Young Adult market is still on fire, but it's moving away from vampires. Paranormal romance is huge. And -- you're gonna love this --Amish romance. I'm serious. In this WSJ article, Barnes and Noble book buyer Jane Love says, "It's almost like you put a person with a bonnet or an Amish field in the background and it automatically starts to sell well."

But, do you know what's even hotter than Amish love? Do you know what all the agents are talking about, what publishers are snapping up like the next Apple product? It's called "steampunk." According to Wikipedia, Steampunk is a sub-genre of science/speculative fiction set in a world where steam power is still widely used — usually the 19th century, and often Victorian era Britain — but with prominent elements of either science fiction or fantasy, such as fictional technological inventions like those found in the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, or real technological developments like the computer occurring at an earlier date.

We live in a weird, weird world.

A novel by any other name

2010-07-20T04:27:00.000-07:00

I was visiting today with my psychic dentist (another story for another time) and she asked me how my novel was coming along. I told about the frustrating process of querying agents. She said that my book is fine, and it will surely get published one day. The problem is the title. Now, I've never told her the title, and she didn't want to know it. She just said she had a feeling it would not appeal to a wide audience. It was hard to ask for clarification with an electric tooth-polisher in my mouth, but she did get me thinking.

Is my title, Double-blind, appealing to readers? Do I even like that title? Did I just keep it because I'd already registered the website? After all, I thought it up before I'd even written the book. But it does apply quite well to book's general themes. "Double-blind" refers to the type of clinical trial that's featured in the book. And the main character is, in a sense, "doubly-blind" in that he fails to see two very critical things going on in his life. So it fits. But is it catchy when taken out any context? Does it appeal to the layperson with no knowledge of medical research?

When you're trying to get someone to read an unsolicited manuscript, the title is critical. It is one of the first thing an agent sees: "I hope you will consider representing my medical thriller, "DOUBLE-BLIND."

If I was going to change the title, I'd like to make it relate to lupus, the autoimmune disease featured in the book. The name "lupus" comes from the Latin word for "wolf," because early doctors thought that the butterfly-shaped rash, which often signifies the onset of the disease, resembled the facial markings of a wolf. So maybe the title could have something to do with wolves or butterflies:

The Wolf and the Butterfly

In the Shadow of the Wolf

In the Shadow of the Butterfly

Red Butterfly Rising

Red Wolf Rising

Mariposa (butterfly in Spanish; most of the book takes place in Mexico)

La Mariposa Roja

The Mark of the Wolf

The Girl with the Butterfly Tattoo

LB Readers: what do you think.... at first glance and without having read the book, do you like the title "Double-blind," or would you suggest something else?

Tools of the Trade

2010-07-13T18:42:00.000-07:00

After months of procrastination, I'm finally back to working on agent submissions (queries) for Double-blind. Researching and querying agents is way, way less fun than actually writing. But I want to give it my best effort, want give myself the best chance of finding representation. I also want to have a definitive end date for this project -- so I can move on to the next one. And I won't feel like I've hit that date until I've sent out a healthy amount of queries and gotten rejections on them.

The odds are daunting. Agents receive hundreds or thousands of queries a month, and reject 99.5% of them, usually with a form letter. Now, the quality of the query letters and sample pages has a lot to do with it, of course. But I think another reason why the rejection rates are so high is that everyone is out there doing the same thing -- sending a barrage of letters out to every agent who's ever sold the written word.

There's got to be a better way. I'm a strong believer in metrics, benchmarking, and targeted effort. In the clinical trials industry (my day job), patient recruitment is one of our biggest challenges. Time and time again, companies throw countless hours and millions of dollars into blanket recruitment strategy, without targeting the right geographical area and the right research sites with the right patient population. It's the old 80/20 rule again: 20 percent of your research sites will generate 80 percent of the results. So you should focus all your effort on those 20 percent. A cottage industry has sprung up to provide clinical trial data so companies can take advantage of this. And it's making a difference.

I'm guessing the same goes for querying agents. I bet it's less about your credentials and how perfect your query letter is, than it's about hitting the right agent at the perfect time with exactly what he's looking for. And for that, you need data. Enter QueryTracker.net

The concept of QueryTracker is simple -- and genius. The website offers a comprehensive list of agents/agencies, along with a nice tracking system to track your submissions. Now, the tracking system itself is no big deal, nothing you couldn't do in Excel. The big deal is the data they keep on the agents. By making the tracking system free, the service is able to collect a boatload of data about the query submission process. You can get a decent amount of this information for free, but if you pay 25 bucks for the premium service (money well spent, I think) you get access to a treasure trove -- agent genre/word count preferences, turnaround times, even the month they're most likely to request a partial manuscript!

Let me give you an example. Before I joined the service, I queried an agent who looked promising and seemed to represent the genre my book is in. Once I joined QueryTracker, I looked at his stats and saw that out of nearly 900 queries, he only responded to about 100, and rejected all but 5 of them. He requested partial manuscripts for those 5, and offered representation for exactly zero. And none of the partials he requested where anywhere near my genre or word count. Now, his rejection stats, while depressing, are normal. But his response rate is not. Most agents at least eventually respond with a form rejection. So why take the time to query an agent who's never shown interest in my genre, and who doesn't typically respond at all?

Obviously, I need to focus my efforts elsewhere. And I'm hoping QueryTracker will help me do just that. I'll keep you posted.

Countdown to the Hint Fiction Anthology

2010-07-06T04:27:00.000-07:00

Happy sixth of July!

Four months until the release of Hint Fiction: An anthology of stories in 25 words or fewer. The book's cover is finally up on Amazon, and it looks pretty cool.

I had a story accepted for the anthology, so I'm somewhere within those 192 pages, perhaps nestled between the words of Joyce Carol Oates and Peter Straub.

The anthology even has a blurb from New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult: "The perfect story collection for all of us with too little time on our hands is a brilliant reminder of the magic that happens when you string the right words together. A must-read for anyone who is or wants to be a writer."

Pre-order your copy today!

I'm going to play in the NFL!

2010-06-29T04:27:00.000-07:00

People often ask me, if you get your book published, are you going to quit your job and write books for a living?

If statistics have anything to say about it, the answer is NO.

The fact is, very few people make their living as a fiction writer. The ones we hear about – the Dan Browns and James Pattersons and Stephen Kings – are such extreme outliers that we shouldn’t consider them at all. They skew our perception of the whole field. It’s weird that this phenomenon doesn’t seem to be as strong in other professional arenas. Maybe it’s because with athletes it’s easier for us to picture the physical requirements and sacrifices it would take to get there.

Take NBA basketball. I’m pretty tall, and I like to play a pick up game as much as the next guy. Statistically speaking, I have a much better chance of becoming LeBron James than James Patterson. Yet, no one catches me shooting hoops in the gym and asks when I’m going to the NBA finals. So why is it so different with writing?

J.A. Konrath likes to say that there are more NFL players than there are professional fiction writers. Think how hard it is to be become a pro football player. First off, there’s genetics. If you’re going to be an NFL player, you must have a certain body type: freakishly strong, freakishly huge, and freakishly quick. If you don’t have this, you’ll never be a successful pro player, not matter what you do. So that’s the foundation. Then you have to cash in that genetic lottery ticket at just the right time and place – get yourself into the right program, the right coach, etc. Then you have to practice your ass off.

To look at it another way: how many unique author names have been on the New York Times bestseller list (which still doesn’t guarantee they’ll be able to make a living as a writer) over the past four years? I don’t know the number, but I can assure you it’s far less than the 11,000 athletes who participated in the last Summer Olympics. And those people were genetic freaks of nature who’d spent every waking second of their lives preparing for the event. Seems pretty unlikely that I’d become an Olympic athlete in my spare time, right? So again, why should a professional fiction writer be any different?

I’m not bitter about this – really. But lately, I feel like I’m throwing a Nerf football around the parking lot, and you’re asking me when I’m going to play in the Super Bowl.

Dear Editor

2010-06-22T04:27:00.000-07:00

I wrote a letter to the editor of Writer's Digest Magazine, and they printed it. In a previous issue, Leslie Epstein, a distinguished writer and professor, had shared some tips on writing and life. I took issue with some of his "tips," and I wrote the magazine about it. As WD printed it, my letter looks like this:

In the MFA Insider article "Tips for Writing and for Life," Leslie Epstein tells us not to write such things as "He go out of bed, pulled on his pants." He says such constructions, leaving out the and or the then, are pretentious. Well, they're not as pretentious as Epstein instructing us not to pronounce the e in forte. How is that supposed to make me a better writer?

Brian Crawford

San Francisco, CA

It's embarrassing to admit how excited I was to see my name in print (reason enough for Epstein to give me no more notice than an errant thread on his tweed jacked). But I was disappointed, too. The magazine edited the content of my letter. In the printed version, my final sentence is missing:

Following that kind of advice is likely to get me punched in the head.

Come on, that was the best part. How could they cut it? Did WD think it was too incendiary for their readership? Or were they simply trying to preserve a modicum of hope that I could someday get into Boston University's Creative Writing Program, of which Epstein is the director? Regardless, this will no doubt be the first of many futile attempts to censor my dangerous literary genius...

Brad Pitt vs. Chester

2010-06-15T04:07:00.000-07:00

In the spirit of taking over the world, Google has developed Analytics, a program that can track your blog's visitors in alarming detail. It's the best free product I've used since the original Napster, and that one wasn't even legal.

It's fun to watch geographical trends, track the key words people are using, and to see how Leaf Blower's blog traffic changes depending on the topic, type of post, etc. I've noticed that on the days when I ask a question, about the same number of people visit, but they are much more likely to comment -- and to come back for a repeat visit. Presumably because they want to see what other people going to say.

The only thing that makes a big difference in the number of unique visitors is when I post a link on Facebook. On average, this nearly doubles my visitors for that post. Check out the graph above. The spikes are on Tuesdays, when I update my blog. On May 25th, I didn't post a link on Facebook; on June 1st and 8th, I did. But there's something else that appears to make a difference: the picture. A thumbnail is included with the link on Facebook. The May 31st post featured a picture of my poor injured dog, Chester. He's a real crowd favorite. But not, it seems, as much of a favorite as Brad Pitt. On June 8th, the Brad photo brought a 20% increase in visitors.

I guess sex really does sell, even with the sophisticated Leaf Blower readers. Just wait... next week, I'm really going to jump the shark.

Sometimes Less is More

2010-06-08T06:53:00.000-07:00

In my writing workshop, I read a lot of horrible stuff. I don't mean poorly written -- the group is filled with talented writers -- I'm talking about scenes where bad stuff happens.

The tendency is to put these moments "in scene," using vivid descriptions and dialogue so the reader can see and hear exactly what's happening. There is a place for this, of course. But I think that some of the most powerful moments are defined by what is not said, by what is not shown to the reader. Because, if left to his own imagination, the reader will conjure a version of the scene that is most horrific, most personal, to him. Something an author could never do, no matter how good she is.

For example, lately I've read pages where the character gets a call telling her a family member has died. And we hear these calls: "So-and-so is dead. He's dead... how? No, it can't be!" Now, don't get me wrong: these scenes were well-written and gut-wrenching. I'm just wondering if they would've been even more powerful if the reader was left to imagine how terrible the event would be. It brings to mind a paragraph from Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It, one of the most powerful I've ever read:

"For, when the police sergeant early next May wakened me before daybreak, I rose and asked no questions. Together we drove across the Continental Divide and down the length of the Big Blackfoot River over forest floors yellow and sometimes white with glacier lilies to tell my father and mother that my brother had been beaten to death by the butt of a revolver and his body dumped in an alley."

Of course, this is only so powerful because up to this point, the author has already shown us what would be lost if Paul were to die. And this Maclean does masterfully.

LB readers, can you think of any scenes where the author accomplishes more with less? Or where the author gives away too much?

The Cone of Shame

2010-06-01T07:54:00.001-07:00

It only took a second. My black Lab, Chester, was chasing his beloved tennis ball in Golden Gate Park when another dog attacked him. The dog only connected with Chester for a second before the dog's breathless owner caught up and dragged him away.

After the attack, Chester paced around in a circle, a dark line of fur spiked along his back. He's a sensitive soul, and when he gets bullied he often hides his embarrassment by walking around and pretending he's doing something. To get his mind off the incident, I flung his tennis ball deep into the field. And then the most amazing thing happened. He didn’t move. He just sat there and watched the ball bounce over the grass.

That’s when I noticed the blood pouring down his leg. On closer inspection, I couldn’t believe what I saw. The soft skin of his belly had been torn open, exposing a wound deep into his body cavity. I mean, I could stick my fist through that hole.

At the emergency pet hospital, I burst through the door like a TV cliché: “Get a doctor out here now… my boy’s hurt bad!” The vet tech came out and started checking Chester's gums. I learned later that you check a dog’s vitals this way, but at the time I’m thinking, my dog’s got a gaping hole in him, and you’re looking for cavities? I point to the blood on my shirt and then to the giant hole in Chester’s belly, in case the tech missed it. “It’s down there -- see it? That huge, flapping hole? Doesn’t that need immediate attention?”

Turns out it didn’t. It was a big gnarly wound (her words), but it wasn’t life threatening. Six hours later, Chester came home with a tissue-glued wound, a fluid drain, and the Big Plastic Cone of Shame.

What, you may ask, became of the other dog and his owner? After the attack, I was so frantic, I wasn’t thinking straight; I was only concerned with getting Chester to the car. So I gave the guy my phone number, and didn’t take any of his information. He never called.

Now, I'd like to think that in my haste I gave him the wrong phone number. Why else wouldn’t I have heard from him? How could he watch his dog tear my dog open, and not call, if not to pay some of the vet bills, then to see if Chester was okay? If I remember correctly – and I see why victims of a crime make terrible eyewitnesses – the guy had a little boy with him. When his son asks later how the hurt dog is doing, what will he tell him?

Page Critique Mondays!

2010-05-25T03:47:00.000-07:00

As if I didn't have enough reasons to procrastinate on Monday mornings, now there's Page Critique Mondays! Check it out on Nathan Bransford's hugely popular blog. Nathan is a San Francisco literary agent, blogger, author, and overall superhuman -- I don't know how he has time to sleep.

The first person to post a 250 word excerpt from their novel into the comments section gets a critique from Nathan -- and the rest of the world. It's educational to see real-life examples of what agents actually look for. It's fun to see what other people are writing, and what other people think about what other people are writing. And there's the train wreck factor, too: since it's first come, first served -- usually there's a filtering process for such things -- the potential for "interesting" writing is high.

So, would I ever submit my work? I don't think so. It would be great to get an agent's critique, but I'd prefer it to be a little less... public.

What's the longest book you've ever read?

2010-05-18T03:17:00.000-07:00

As I rework my book on Lulu, I've been playing with the font and spacing. It's such a long document that minute adjustments can change the page count dramatially. Reminds me of those papers in college when you'd kick the font up to like 14 and put in two-inch margins just to meet your page quota.

But even when I adjust the font and spacing to near-comic book proportions, my novel doesn't stretch much longer than 500 pages.

This got me thinking about some of the longest books I've ever read. Stephen King's The Stand (1153 pages) comes to mind. But after listening to this podcast, the book came back to me, and you know what? -- I'm not sure I ever finished it. But I did finish It, Stephen King's second-longest novel at 1138 pages.

So, what's the longest book you've ever read? And by longest, I mean the most pages, or the one that took you the longest to get through.

Book Bound

2010-05-11T02:37:00.000-07:00

I'm finally ready to send the Double-blind manuscript to my family and close friends to read. But I didn't want to send them a big stack of paper held with a binder clip, so I went to Lulu.com and had it printed like an actual book.

The Lulu service is awesome. You can go from basic self-service (which I did, and it only costs about 6 bucks a book) to a full editorial/publishing package that will make your book as polished as anything you'd see in a bookstore. You can even get an ISBN number and put your book up for sale on Amazon as a print and an e-book.

I didn't spend much time on the project -- I'm not self publishing the book, I just wanted to have some fun and make the manuscript more readable. So I sped through the basic process and ordered ten copies.

Still, I don't recall ever being so excited about receiving a package. Opening the box and seeing Double-blind in a real book format was so very cool. The cover and binding are beautiful. It looks just like something you'd see in the bookstore, with my name on the spine. And it's pretty thick -- the thing has some weight to it. It feels great to know that I've created this, that it didn't exist two years ago and now it could take up physical space on a bookshelf. Then I opened it.

The inside of the book has some issues. Lulu shrunk the MS Word page exactly as it was. Imagine a paperback book-sized page with a miniature Word document imposed on it. The font went from size 12 to, like, 7. It's barely readable. I asked my wife if she thought the text was too small, if it would be a deal breaker for anyone reading it, and she said, "It looks fine. I mean, both of your parents have reading glasses, right?"

So I'm doing it over, whether Lulu compensates me for it or not, in bigger font. Hold on mom, just a little longer...

This is a busy slide, but...

2010-05-04T03:27:00.000-07:00

I sit through a ton of slide presentations at work, and I've noticed an alarming trend. Being PowerPointed to death is nothing new, but lately it's reached a new level. It seems that 45 is the new 10. I swear that there used be 10 slides in the average deck. But somehow, quietly, insidiously, that number has grown to 45. Forty. Five. Slides.

What's the cause of this malevolent trend, this metastasizing cancer? Is our work getting harder, more complex? Maybe. But I think it's something else. You could call it laziness, but that's not fair -- I don't work with lazy people. It's more a lack of time. We have limited time to prepare for a slide presentation, so we don't prepare at all. We just throw every conceivable bit of information into our presentation. Every possible slide and bullet point. Every convoluted table and graph. No need to prepare a speech ahead of time if the words are there on the screen. No need to filter, edit or summarize. Let the audience sort it out.

Mark Twain once said, "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead" (which, oddly, is the most common search phrase leading to my blog). It's hard to narrow down a complex topic into a few salient points. Believe me, writing a decent one-page summary of my novel was one of hardest things I've ever done.

What's more, every one of those 45 slides is so overpacked with stuff, I'm surprised Microsoft can handle the file size. How many times have you heard, "I know this is a busy slide, but..."

But what? You're going to waste my time with it anyway? Instead of that minuscule chart, that unreadable text, why not put up a serene landscape, or a picture of your cat, and tell me what I need to know. At least then I'll have something nice to look at. Often, this person will continue with "the key takeaway here is..." Why not put the key takeaway on the slide?

The other day, a presenter went to so far as to project a series of emails onto the screen. This is like taking the grandaddy of business faux pas, the old "I'll-just-forward-this-ungodly-long-email-chain-and-put the accountability-on-you" move, and forcing it on an audience. One might hope for the projector to fall on a person like this.

And don't get me started on excessive adjectives and dead words. A writer soon learns that the more adjectives, the less powerful the message. Yet, apparently every slide must say "effective and efficient" at least once. Tell you what, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you don't strive for inefficient ineffectiveness. That's the kind of guy I am. I know you're trying to "promote the effective and efficient implementation of the migration"; you can save me the eye drops and write "migrate."

A presentation is supposed to be a person talking to you, trying to convince you of something. Otherwise, why not just send the document to the audience and skip the presentation altogether? Actually, this is happening more and more. I work for a global company, with ever-increasing teleconferences and web-based meetings. It's hard to grasp the key message when you can't see the presenter, can barely hear her, and besides it's so early in the morning you can't absorb it anyway, so you just read the slides later. Hence, the need for more info in the slide deck. If this trend continues, I worry that the monster slide deck will replace the very oral presentation it used to supplement.

Am I alone on this?

The thing and the other thing

2010-04-26T20:49:00.000-07:00

Next week, I'm going back to my writers' workshop. Now that my novel is done, I need some new material to share with the group. So I'm attempting to write a new short story. I haven't written much short fiction. I haven't even read much short fiction. What, exactly, is a short story?

The main distinction is that a short story is short and a novel is long. A short story is usually under 10K words whereas a novel is over 50K. But there are other, more subtle, differences. Unlike novels, which may have several waves of rising stakes and climaxes and resolutions -- not to mention subplots -- a short story has one single climactic event. It usually has one or two main characters and is told in one point of view. And there's not much room for detailed setting and long chunks of exposition.

But that doesn't mean a short story is simple, or easier to write. In fact, it's often viewed as the purer, higher form of literary fiction (probably by short story writers). A successful novelist by no means makes a successful short story writer and vice versa. For example, The New York Times predictably skewered John Grisham's attempt at a short story collection, equating it to Michael Jordan's unfortunate baseball experiment. Personally, I might have used the Garth Brooks - Chris Gaines analogy.

It's been said (by Hemingway, I think, or someone like Hemingway) that a short story is about "the thing and the other thing." In addition to what physically happens in a narrative, the best stories also have some deeper meaning or theme that, while not explicitly stated, is really what the story is about. In a short story, the writer has to cover the thing and the other thing quite quickly, in a limited space. He has to make more with less. This as opposed to the literary novel, which allows more space, and therefore can be about the thing and the thing and the thing, and also the thing, and, if you're smart enough to get it, it's really about the other thing.

It's all too much to consider. I'm going to shut my computer and go watch "The Hills," which is just about the thing. Although sometimes that's about the other thing, too.

Hint Fiction Contest

2010-04-20T10:18:00.000-07:00

As loyal Leaf Blower-ers may remember, last year I had a short-short-short story selected for publication in Robert Swartwood's Hint Fiction Anthology, which, by the way, is available for pre-order at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

As Robert puts it, Hint Fiction is a story of 25 words or fewer that suggests a larger, more complex story.

This week, Robert is a having another hint fiction contest. The first prize is $100 and the finalists will be judged by none other than James Frey.

Check out the contest and give it a shot. I did!

Disturbia

2010-04-12T19:29:00.001-07:00

For my next book, I've been toying with the idea of writing something completely different, like a horror novel. I grew up reading horror books, but I've steered away from them over the past decade or so. I'm not sure why. I guess because so few of them are actually scary.

Last week I read one of the most disturbing books ever, Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door. It's about a group of suburban kids who, over several months, torture, sexually abuse and ultimately kill a young girl. They do this under the direction of their mother, while other neighborhood kids watch and participate. It's even more disturbing when you realize it's based on a true story.

I started thinking about other books that have truly disturbed me. Considering how many "scary" books I've read in my life, the list was surprisingly short. Here are six more of my most disturbing books:

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis: Super-disturbing, but also kind of funny. The genius of books like The Girl Next Door (and one of my other favorites, Scott Smith's A Simple Plan) is that the author somehow makes the reader complicit in the events, and escalates them in a way that you could almost -- almost -- see how such a thing could happen. In American Psycho, however, the guy's just insane.

Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk: Just read the first short story, "Guts." One of the only stories I can think of where I felt physically ill while reading it.

The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson: I read this about 20 years ago and it scared the hell out of me. I don't know if it would still be scary if I read it today, but I remember waking up at 3:15 a.m. a few times (like the guy in the book) and wondering if the evil had leaked out of the book somehow.

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy: Follows a band of outlaws hired to hunt Indians. Perhaps the most violent book I've ever read, but also one of the most beautiful.

Blindness by Jose Saramago: A city is hit by an epidemic of sudden blindness. What follows shows us the best and worst of humanity. This is another example of how, despite the horrors you're witnessing, the author escalates it in such a way that you can almost see how it could get to that point.

Pet Sematary by Stephen King: I had to include one Stephen King novel. Supposedly this is the one story that the master of horror was, for a time, too scared to finish. Much of my memory of the book is colored by the equally creepy movie, but I still consider this to be King's most disturbing book.

What's the most disturbing book you've ever read?

Special Agent

2010-04-06T06:48:00.000-07:00

So begins my search for a literary agent. A literary agent is someone you hire to sell your book to an editor at a publishing company.

Do you have to go through an agent?

Yes.

But do you really have to go through an agent?

YES.

Most publishers won't look at unsolicited, un-agented manuscripts. The slush pile is dead. According to this WSJ article, the last time Random House published something from the slush pile was 1991. At the SF Writers Conference, an editor told me that her publishing house still holds slush parties -- late night pizza feasts where the interns sift through the slush pile -- but only to slap on rejection slips and send the manuscripts back. The material goes unread.

It makes sense that publishers will only consider agented work. An agent's not going to waste her time -- and stake her reputation -- on something she doesn't think will sell. By the time a manuscript reaches a publisher, the agent's already taken the time to separate the wheat from the chaff -- so the editor doesn't have to.

That's why landing an agent is often harder than actually selling your book. And why this process is so tedious and discouraging. The only thing more depressing than searching for an agent is writing about searching for an agent. So I'm just going to go back to procrastinating by looking at these scandalous new pictures of Kim Kardashian.

Taking a week "off"

2010-03-30T04:07:00.000-07:00

In honor of finishing my novel, I'm taking the week off from writing. So, in lieu of actually writing something, I'll leave you with a link to the hilarious "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks. Bottom line: don't use quotation marks to denote "emphasis."

My book is DONE!

2010-03-22T19:28:00.000-07:00

I finished my novel on Sunday! Two years and 7,421 revisions later, I'm done with Double-blind. And I met my deadline of March 21st.

A few weeks ago, I was thinking about adding some scenes, and/or hiring another editor to review the manuscript. But I decided that the narrative flows well as is, and I have all the scenes I need. I don't want to add anything just for the sake of hitting a word quota.

And I'm not going to hire a copy editor -- unless I decide later to self-publish. Over the past week, my wife (thanks Amy) and I each read through the manscript again and found very few errors. I could keep tweaking it forever, of course, but I want to move on. If I am fortunate enough to secure an agent or publisher who wants me to revise further, no problem.

The world of Ethan Cole in Mexico City has been exciting, and I'll surely miss it. But I've overstayed my welcome. It's so refreshing to leave it behind. And I'm leaving it in a good place. After reading through the whole book again, you know what? I like it. It's a pretty darn good story -- for a first attempt, at least.

Now, I can't wait to work on something new. But before I do that, I have another major step. It's time to research potential agents and start querying to solicit interest in my novel. But that's for another day, another blog post. Just for a while, I want to enjoy that rarest of feelings for a writer -- a sense of completion.

Call me Ishmael: Best Beginnings

2010-03-16T06:53:00.000-07:00

As I near the end, I can't stop thinking about the beginning. I'm very close to finishing my book, but I keep coming back to the first paragraph. Over the past two years, I've rewritten the first paragraph far more than anything else. And I'm still not happy with it. The book opening is just so critical -- especially for an unpublished author trying to get noticed. It might be the only thing an agent or publisher reads before deciding to reject the book.

So, what makes a great book opening? Like so many things in writing, it's hard to put your finger on. For me, the perfect first paragraph should tell me everything without me knowing it. Like the start of A River Runs Through It: "In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing..." Only later do you realize how right that first sentence was, and how much the author was telling you with so little.

LB readers, what are you some of your favorite book openings?

100th Post!

2010-03-07T18:45:00.000-08:00

That's right, this is my 100th blog post. That means some of you (thanks Mom and Dad) have endured 100 straight weeks of The Leaf Blower. In celebration of this milestone, I'd like to recap ten of my favorite posts, in no particular order:

Writer's Best Friend - Chester: I introduce a perennial Leaf Blower favorite, my black lab Chester.

Rejection, Konrath Style: Famous author JA Konrath writes a guest post about being rejected -- and my readership increases a hundred-fold for a day.

Writer's Best Friend, Part II - Hannah: The picture of Hannah on Chester's bed might be my favorite photo on planet earth.

The Feuilleton: I attempt to write a story using an entire month of MW's words-of-the-day. Fondly reminds me of the year when I had a lot more time on my hands.

Dog Days of Winter: I develop a case of doggy tourettes syndrome.

Always be closing: My first speed-dating experience at the San Francisco Writers Conference.

Hannah Moosh Babushka Houshmand Vanportfliet, 2000-2008: Eulogy for my writing partner. Can't really call this one a "favorite," but it's one of the most significant.

Don't Bring Me Down: Top ten worst classic rock songs to write to.

Back to the Sea: An exercise from my writing class. One of a few pieces of fiction on this blog.

How to Pitch a Book: My success at this year's San Francisco Writers Conference.

Chester, again: Sorry, had to include an eleventh one -- about Chester, of course. Here, he tries to steal a tennis ball off the bottom of an old man's walker.

Thanks for reading... looking forward to 100 more!

I am right to you from my speak fascination sofa wear.

2010-03-02T07:42:00.000-08:00

I have a new tool in the war chest: speech recognition software. After years of hearing about it, I finally picked up Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which claims to turn your voice into text three times faster than you can type --with 99% accuracy.

I’ve been testing the program for about a week, and it takes some getting used to. At first, my writing came out like email spam from the deposed prince of Nigeria. But the program learns quickly. It adapts to your speaking style, your unique phrase usage— even your accent. It’s eerily good at it catching stream-of-conscious ramblings. It is awkward, however, when you’re writing something with a lot of punctuation, like dialogue. It just doesn't feel natural to say “open quote, that’s great, exclamation point, close quote, he said, period.”

I’ve read that some professional novelists use this program almost exclusively to write their drafts. One famous writer supposedly spends her entire day laying flat other back, talking into her headset. That's not for me. Not only would I fall asleep instantly, but I would miss what I see as a critical step in the creative process: there's something about the deliberate movement of my hand, the friction caused by that extra step, that forces me to think for just a second longer before putting something on paper, and helps me access a part of my brain that can be a little stubborn.

But the program is quite helpful for second drafts, or what I call draft 1.5. When I’m writing a brand new scene, I like to write freely in longhand -- just let it go and see what happens. Then I type it on my computer, repeating some sentences verbatim, reworking others, and skipping some completely. Speech recognition is great for this, because while it feels cumbersome to type something you’ve already written, it doesn’t feel that way to speak it. Besides, one of the best ways to edit is to read something aloud; it’s much easier to pick out the false notes when you have two senses working together instead of one. And once you learn some basic commands (undo, delete this, add that) you can do extensive editing without ever touching your keyboard.

Where I think this speech recognition thing could really take off is blogging, where perfection isn’t the goal so much as getting your voice and your content out there in real time. Blogs are by nature more conversational. It's about showing your authentic voice. And what could be more authentic than speaking directly to your audience? That said, I wrote this on my trusty keyboard. My wife rolls her eyes every time I speak robotically into my Dragon NaturallySpeaking headset. So I don’t think she’d be thrilled about me doing it at six in the morning.

Dear Agent

2010-02-23T09:31:00.000-08:00

And they're off.

I’ve sent sample pages to most of the literary agents who expressed interest at the San Francisco Writers Conference. It was a slow process, since all them have different submission requirements. One agent requested a query letter and the first chapter, hardcopy. One wanted a synopsis and the first 30 pages pasted directly into the email. Another requested the first 50 pages, hardcopy. And so on.

Needless to say, I spent the weekend writing cover letters and e-mails, polishing my synopsis, and rewriting my first chapter 487 times.

It's exciting, knowing that my stuff is out there in the electronic ether, or on a mail truck somewhere. I’ve already started checking my email constantly. And for the first time since I applied to college, I can’t wait to get home and check my physical mailbox.

Now, about that deadline. I’d wanted to wash my hands of DOUBLE-BLIND by March 21st. With all the activity around the writers confernece, I haven’t been able to do any new work on my manuscript in a few weeks. Also, I learned at the conference that my book is a tad short for its genre. The current version is around 75,000 words (260 double-spaced word doc pages; about 300 printed book pages). Ideally, it should be at least 80,000 words. I’m not too worried about it; it’s always easier to add then to cut out. Plus, I have about 50,000 words of deleted scenes at my disposal. But those are draft words. So once I add a scene, I’ll need to rewrite, polish, and polish some more.

Another thing I learned at the conference was that I probably should have another editor look at my manuscript before I consider it completely ready. One published author said she always has at least two professional editing sessions -- and sometimes four -- before she considers her book ready. The last freelance editor I hired was more of a manuscript consultant -- she made suggestions about the plot and character development. I’m undecided on this, but I do think it would be useful to hire a copy editor to through it line-by-line, because I haven't had that level of review yet.

Of course, another theme I kept hearing at the conference was that the average published author has eight unpublished manuscripts in his desk drawer. You rarely sell your first book. So part of me just wants to finish this thing, take what I've learned, and start book number two.

Regardless of which route I take, I’m probably going to miss the deadline. It shouldn't bother me; after all, I set the damn deadline. There’s no penalty for missing it, technically. But it does bother me. It bothers me a lot. In fact, I woke up in the middle of the night and thought, I'm going to miss the deadline. How can I tell the Leaf Blower readers that I’m not going to make it?

That's the beauty of this blog. You keep me honest, LB readers. And you keep me going. Thank you for that.

How to pitch a book

2010-02-16T01:47:00.000-08:00

Over the weekend, I attended my second San Francisco Writers Conference. It was exhausting. All the networking, pitching and self-promoting wore me down. For an introvert like me, it was like being at a high school reunion for 36 hours. Sober. With a cold sore.

But I persevered. Despite the grueling schedule and social awkwardness, the conference was a huge success for me. I pitched my book DOUBLE-BLIND to seven literary agents and one editor, and all of them were interested. They all requested sample pages. One agent requested the entire manuscript!

I have a few words of advice for anyone who’s going to pitch a book in two minutes or less:

Keep it short.
Keep it ridiculously short.
Speak slowly.
Speak loudly.
Make eye contact (this means don’t read off a piece of paper).
Know what genre your book belongs to.
Only mention your point-of-view characters.
Repeat your key message at least once.
Now cut some words and make it even shorter.

Remember that each agent will get pitched at least 100 times over the weekend. If you try to go into the subplot about the nephew’s drug problem and the gardener’s affair, eyes will glaze over. With a shorter pitch, you leave the agents a chance to ask questions. And once they start asking questions, it’s no longer a pitch; it’s a dialogue. They’re just looking for a glimpse, a feeling. Something they could turn around and pitch to a publishing house – and sell.

I’m no expert, of course, but I followed these rules and my pitch worked every single time – last year and this year.

I’m ecstatic that there was so much interest in my novel. But I’m also trying to temper my expectations. I got the feeling these agents requested a lot of stuff from a lot of people. And no one has seen my writing yet. Still, it’s got to be an advantage over querying them cold. When I send my pages, I can write REQUESTED MATERIAL; or, WE MET AT THE SF WRITERS CONFERENCE; or, I WAS THE GUY WHO SPILLED MY DRINK ON YOUR LAPTOP. Okay, that last part didn’t happen, but if it did, at least I’d be remembered.

Speaking of being remembered, here’s another tip for conference-goers. I put my picture on my business card. Cheesy, yes, but it turned out to be a fantastic move. Looking at the dozen cards I collected over the weekend, I’m wishing every one of them had a picture. I’m already having trouble remembering who’s who, and I talked to some of these people for hours. The agents probably got a hundred cards --and they only spoke to me for a few minutes.

The cards were a good idea, but I’m thinking I should’ve taken it a step further. Next year, maybe I’ll wear a ridiculous hat, or shave my head into a Mohawk. Then I’d have an even better chance of being remembered. (To the guy at the conference who actually had a Mohawk: I’m not making fun of you -- you’re a freaking genius).

It's hard out here for a pimp: the sequel

2010-02-09T03:27:00.000-08:00

I sit down at the table, elevator pitch in hand, book manuscript in my lap. The bell rings. I have three minutes. The agent across from me is already skeptical; that's his job. I have to find a way to make myself -- and my novel -- stand out. It reminds me of that scene in the movie "Hustle and Flow" when D-Jay is trying to get Skinny Black to listen to his demo tape. Welcome to Speed Dating with Agents at the San Francisco Writers Conference.

The Speed Dating event is just like it sounds: you have a dozen literary agents in a room full of conference attendees who, like me, paid an extra $50 for the hour-long event. The agents stand up and tell the attendees who they are and what type of work they're looking for. Then you sit down with an agent, and you have three minutes to pitch your book, including time for the agent's response. You give your spiel. A bell rings. You stop talking. The agent responds. Then – ding! – the bell rings again and you move to the next one. Pretty intense, huh?

I'm doing it again this weekend -- my second year at the SF Writers Conference. So wish me luck. Because it's hard out here for a pimp.

THE DEADLINE is looming

2010-02-02T03:27:00.000-08:00

Time for an update on my novel, Double-blind. It's been five months since I began my major rewrite, and five weeks since I set THE DEADLINE.

My day job's been kicking my ass lately, so it's been hard to find the time and energy to work on my manuscript. It'd be one thing if I were a forklift driver or a fireman, then the writing could be a vacation from work and vice versa. But right now I'm neck-deep in performance reviews, an activity that taxes the same overstimulated area of my brain. Just like in fiction, writing performance reviews requires you to be creative -- and choose your words carefully.

With my busy schedule, I've settled into a routine of writing for about an hour each morning before work. And I've made slow but steady progress toward my goal. In fact, looking back, I realized I've accomplished a lot. In the past few months, I:

Wrote a new prologue (yes, I've decided to go with a prologue)
Killed a major character
Invented a new major character
Planted some serious skeletons in my protagonist's closet
Deleted 15,000 words
Wrote 20,000 new words
Drank 427 cups of coffee

All said, I'm going to have a solid manuscript in my back pocket when I head to the San Francisco Writers Conference in two weeks. And, best of all, I'm close to being done with this smelly old thing for good -- and moving on to something new.

James Patterson is a robot

2010-01-26T13:30:00.000-08:00

A Leaf Blower reader (Daniel) sent me a NYT Magazine article about James Patterson’s preternatural publishing prowess (say that ten times fast). I recommend reading the article, although the journalist seems to have attended the Patterson school of prolificacy: it’s an absurdly long piece. A few high points: JP (and his team of coauthors) published nine new hardcover books in 2009 and is set to publish at least nine more in 2010. Since 2006, one out of every 17 novels bought in the U.S. was written by James Patterson (and his coauthors). He has the record for the most NYT bestsellers (51). He outsells John Grisham, Stephen King and Dan Brown combined. And instead of toilet paper, he uses pages from Harry Potter books. Okay, so I made that last part up.

I’m not a big fan of James Patterson’s books, but I’m a fan of James Patterson. He seems real to me; he knows who he is and what he’s doing. Of course, I often wish writers like him didn’t exist. They hoard the limited resources of the publishing industry, making it even harder for a new author to get published – and harder still for him to sell any books. But publishing is a business; I get that. If your job was to deliver consistent financial results to your shareholders, would you rather put a billion bucks into a machine guaranteed to return $1.1 billion, or would you rather throw dollars at a roulette wheel?

Patterson considers himself an entertainer first, and unlike many “literary authors” who write for themselves or the critics, he writes for one group: the readers. In the NYT article, the interviewer is surprised that JP would consider rewriting a book to appease readers. He explains: “If you’re writing ‘Crime and Punishment’ or ‘Remembrance of Things Past,’ then you can sit back and go: ‘This is it, this is the book. This is high art. I’m the man, you’re not. The end.’ But I’m not the man, and this is not high art.”

In a world where even reality-show celebrities who've never accomplished anything take themselves way too seriously, this is indeed a refreshing view.

On the tip of my tongue

2010-01-19T06:33:00.000-08:00

Last week, I pledged to give up Google (for my writing; I couldn't go an hour without it in my personal life) and instead use good ol' paper reference books. I had the obligatory dictionary and thesaurus, of course, but I also armed myself with these four indispensable writing references:

Random House Word Menu: A dictionary organized by subject matter instead of alphabetically. For example, if you were looking for a type of storm, you'd turn to "Chapter 3: The Earth," then "Weather and Natural Phenomena," sub-category "Storm," and there it is -- monsoon. This book was moderately helpful; probably would've gone Google if I could.

Flip Dictionary: On the surface, this reverse dictionary seems to be a shoe-in for the "most likely to be rendered obsolete by Google award." But after I got the hang of how to use it, I found tremendous value in this weighty book. It's most helpful if you have a phrase in your head, or a description, and you need a specific word. For example, under "country life, relating to," you'll find bucolic, pastoral, rural and rustic.

When writing, often what you really need is an idea, something you didn't know you were looking for. Say you want a synonym for "create." You might stumble across "creation becoming uncontrollable: Frankenstein's monster." Now that's an angle you hadn't thought of; it could take your piece in a whole new direction. And for certain categories, this book has these wonderful lists and groupings. For example, when I Google "cordials and liqueurs," after sorting through ads for BevMo, martini recipes and drunken forums, I still hadn't found anything near Flip Dictionary's tidy list of 50 spirits, from absinthe to Vandermint.

The Ultimate Visual Dictionary: A big, beautiful book that illustrates and labels everything from the dorsal scute of an Anklylosaurs to the touchpiece of a trombone.

The Describer's Dictionary: My favorite of the bunch. I can't even tell you how useful this is; you you have to see it for yourself. Let's say I want an interesting way to describe the color of a house. Go to the "color modifiers" section, and... well, is the paint "washed out" or is it "dazzling?" In my writing, I find it particularly hard to describe people's physical characteristics. Under "Eyes, having bulging or protruding," I find these gems: pop-eyed, banjo-eyed, prominent, protuberant, starting, exophthalmic, hyperthyroid, bug-eyed, proptosed, bulbous and goggle-eyed. I love it! I never would have thought of these on my own.

So, for the results of my experiment. I have to admit, it was agonizing to retrain myself not to open my web browser every time I wanted to look something up. I realized immediately that my skills for quickly locating a word alphabetically have been pushed to the same atrophied part of my cortex that used to remember phone numbers. But once I got used to it, a sort of grade school giddiness enveloped me, and it was -- dare I say -- fun.

The internet is just too vast when you're browsing for something specific; we need boundaries. On the web, you are likely to get distracted by something that's not useful-- like celebrity gossip. But when you're browsing through a book like the Ultimate Visual Dictionary, you discover treasures that are even better than what you were looking for. Say you're searching for an intriguing place to set the climactic scene of your novel. You're thinking of having it in a kayak. But when you thumb through the "Sea and Air" section, there it is in all its glossy glory: a medieval warship with each and every part intricately labeled, from the stemost to the main topgallant mast. Now find THAT on the internet.

What does it feel like?

2010-01-12T07:24:00.000-08:00

In a previous post, I discussed the wonders and perils of the Internet when it comes to writing. On the positive side, you have unlimited information at your fingertips, just milliseconds away. On the negative, well, you have unlimited information at your fingertips. Sure, you can usually find what you're looking for, but you have to sift through countless dead ends, unreliable information, and all those pesky flashing advertisements. It takes tremendous fortitude to avoid getting distracted and taking your web surfing in a new direction. Because, believe me, when you're stuck, anything sounds better than writing.

A perfect example occurred yesterday. My book highlights the autoimmune disease lupus. Lupus patients can have seizures, so I wanted to Google "What does it feel like to have a seizure?" Google, being the helpful-cyborg-taking-over-the-world that it is, auto-populates a list with the most-searched items starting with your key phrase. So after I typed "what does it feel like," Google diligently pulled up a list of what it thought I might be looking for, based on the general population's most common searches. Its suggestions, in order of popularity:

What does it feel like...

to be fingered (seriously, #1)
to be high
to be eaten out
to be pregnant
to die
when your baby moves
when your water breaks
to get shot
to be drunk
to be in love

Pretty much covers all the bases. What was I looking for again?

I recently acquired four writer's reference books: Flip Dictionary, Visual Dictionary, Describer's Dictionary and Word Menu. Before the Internet, these books could literally change a writer's life. But even now, I'm finding that they save me time. It takes a little longer to uncover what you're looking for, but you don't have to sort through false information, browse insipid reader forums, or put on your horse blinders to avoid being distracted. You find what you need, and get back to your writing.

So this week I'm going to try an experiment. When I need to look up something while I'm writing, I'm going to try to shun Google and use these books exclusively. Next week, I'll explain more about how each reference book works -- and report the results of my experiment.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to continue reading about what it feels like to be shot, drunk and in love.

Double-blind Tattoos, Anyone?

2010-01-05T04:07:00.000-08:00

Somehow, I've managed to go a year and a half without mentioning Stephanie Meyer and her Twilight series. It's just one of those things that aspiring authors like to pretend never happened, like Who Moved my Cheese. In case you've been living in a -- wait, they probably read it in caves, too -- Twilight is the vampire romance series that spawned (or re-birthed) an entire genre. Not to mention those ubiquitous movies (what did People magazine do before Robert and Kristen?).

It's scary enough that Meyer, who'd never even written a short story before she dreamed up Twilight, could start a worldwide phenomenon. But when fans start tattooing Twilight stuff on their bodies, it's downright frightening.

Re-Kindled

2009-12-29T04:55:00.000-08:00

2009 has been more than just the year of Tiger. It's also been the year of the e-reader. E-reader sales have tripled this year amid a torrent of new devices. And the device to kill all other devices, the Apple tablet computer, isn't even out yet. So it's an opportune time to mention that e-readers are back in my good graces. A month ago, I was lukewarm on the gadgets. But I have since re-kindled my enthusiasm for the Kindle.

I've been traveling a lot recently, and the Kindle has been the perfect companion. Before a recent trip to Miami, I didn't frantically scan my shelves for a book to take along. I didn't have to worry that I'd take the wrong book and then have to lug around a useless paper brick the rest of the trip. And I didn't have to make the agonizing decision I often face on long trips: one book, or two? I mean, what if I only bring one book and I finish it somewhere over Dallas and I'm forced to watch Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince? Or that eerie American Airlines pseudo-TV channel that's always featuring something with Charlie Sheen?

But not with the Kindle. While sitting on the tarmac, I bought and downloaded two books, a magazine and a newspaper. On the way to Miami I read half of the novel Gilead. But on the way home I was tired and hungover, so I had to switch to The Lost Symbol (another great thing about the Kindle is you can get the new "hardcovers" for 10 bucks). And when even Dan Brown was more than my taxed brain could handle, I switched to the magazine -- all without ever reaching for the overhead bin.

The Kindle is also improving my vocabulary. I love the built in dictionary. It was especially helpful while reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Although many of those unknown words turned out to be Spanish slang.

There are still a few e-reader quirks I haven't gotten used to, and I don't know if I ever will. Since the font size is variable, there are no page numbers, just "locations" and a "percentage-complete meter." I still find myself doing conversions in my head (if the book is about 400 printed pages and I have 10% left on the e-version, that's 40 pages, and so on). As I've gotten used to it, however, the page thing has faded to a minor nuisance, just a small con against a long list of pros.

But today brings a new challenge for the age of e-ink. Today I leave for Hawaii. Let's see how the Kindle does on the beach.

New Years Resolution (really)

2009-12-20T16:18:00.000-08:00

As the year draws to a close, I've been finding less and less time to work on my novel. First came Thanksgiving. And now there's Christmas shopping, holiday parties, end-of-the year deadlines, performance reviews, cookies, eggnog... writing killers, all of them!

I'm feeling better about the direction of my book than I did a few weeks ago, but I just have no time to work on it. I need to make it a priority. I need to make time in 2010, or I'm never going to finish it. If you really want to finish something, you have to set a deadline and announce it to the world. Or at least to The Leaf Blower readers. So, here it is: I will complete the Double-blind manuscript by March 21, 2010.

There. Three months. I can do it.

Stanley and the anatomy of a bestseller

2009-12-15T07:01:00.000-08:00

Last week, at a Miami hotel pool, I ran into Stanley from The Office. The actor (whose name isn't actually Stanley) waddled around the pool for a while and then plopped down to read a magazine. With his eyes half closed and that sour look on his face, he could have be sitting at his desk at Dunder Mifflin.

While we were staring at the popular actor across the pool, my friends and I started hypothesizing about how much money Stanley makes per episode. We threw out numbers like a million a pop, or $500K. Now, after doing some research on the Internet, I would bet it's closer to $30K. It just shows how, when we think about successful actors, our perceptions are skewed by the rarities we hear about in the news -- like the "Friends" actors each making a mil an episode.

When it comes to authors, our perceptions are even more skewed . We hear about the Stephen Kings and Stephanie Myers of the world making tens of millions of dollars on their books, and we assume that all authors are rich. In reality, most published authors -- if writing is their day job --are dirt poor. But what if you reach the top, the holy grail, the New York Times bestseller list? Surely it's time to roll out the private jet, right? Not exactly. In this fantastically revealing post, Lynn Viehl breaks down the financial reality of her NYT bestseller, Twilight Fall. She even shares her actual royalty statement. After expenses and commissions, she made about 25K profit on her book. She's a NYT bestselling author, and if this book were her only source of income, she'd be floating just above the poverty level.

This is an unfriendly reminder.

2009-12-08T04:27:00.000-08:00

I took a business writing class at work -- a nice melding of my personal and professional interests, I might say. One of the topics we covered was cutting out "deadwood," or unnecessary words. In case you haven't noticed, this is a gargantuan problem in corporate email. I could write a thesis about this, but time is short, so let me just mention my two biggest pet-peeve email phrases:

Feel free (or do not hesitate) to contact me with any questions or concerns.
Never once in the history of correspondence has this phrase compelled anyone to do anything they weren't going to do anyway. And if you're going to mention both questions and concerns, why stop there? What about suggestions? Or issues? I have issues!

This is a friendly reminder.
As opposed to an unfriendly reminder? You're telling me again to do something because I didn't do it the first time you asked me. Seems pretty unfriendly to me.

LB Readers, what email phrases annoy you?

Stuck

2009-12-01T03:07:00.000-08:00

I’m stuck. Progress on my book has been slowing for months, and now it’s stalled completely. All four wheels spinning fruitlessly, engine sputtering, mud up to the floorboards -- stuck. I could blame it on the holidays, my ever-encroaching day job, or Tiger Woods, but the real problem is I still don’t know which direction to take my rewriting. Every time I think I’ve made a decision, I write a scene, scrap it, and change my mind.

The way I see it, I have two options. Option One involves keeping the plot similar to how it is now and making some significant character changes. A healthy amount of work, but not as bad as Option Two, which requires me to get rid of one character and bring another character back to life. If I go this route, I have to throw out about 50 pages and write a hundred. Which at my current rate of prolificacy would take me a year. Painful -- yes-- but it’s not uncommon for writers to have to throw out hundreds, even thousands, of pages to make a piece come together. It’s one of the reasons writers are generally miserable people.

I think Option Two may allow for a greater character change (a stronger narrative arc, to be fancy) and a more powerful ending. But I’m not sure. I’m worried that I’ll put all that time into a new direction and my book won’t end up any a better. I know I need to pick a road and just move forward -- and not look back. There’s a fine line between finessing and obsessing, and at some point, I just need to do the best I can, finish that first novel and send it out -- or throw it in the proverbial desk drawer -- and move on.

It makes phone calls, too.

2009-11-24T06:46:00.000-08:00

As the eReader war heats up, I've been reflecting on my own eBook experience. Since I reviewed the Kindle here in June, I haven't used the device nearly as much as I hoped I would. For the most part, the e-reader has been gathering dust on my nightstand (I have to keep reminding myself not to set my glass of water on it).

It's not all Kindle's fault, though. I just happened to possess a trio of excellent paper books (Motherless Brooklyn, Legends of the Fall and Beat the Reaper) and I wanted to get through them before buying anything new. Now I'm out of intriguing paper books. I'm going to Michigan for the Thanksgiving holiday, and I plan to bring the Kindle with me. The e-reader was made for times like this: I need a new book to read, but don't have time to get one before I leave, so I'll just take the entire bookstore with me and decide on the plane. Welcome to the future.

Speaking of eReaders, yesterday I finally tried something I've been thinking about for months. I read a book on my iPhone. I was violently opposed to the idea just on principle (what's next, brushing my teeth with an iPhone?). But since everyone else is doing it, it can't be that bad, right? Turns out it isn't. Actually, it's alarmingly good.

It's not as easy on the eyes as e-ink (say that ten times fast), but the crisp, auto-dimming screen that we've grown to love for everything else on earth is quite good for reading, too. I used the Kindle App, which is free and lets you sync your Amazon e-books to your iPhone. Now, I wouldn't use it as my primary e-reader, but if I was stuck in line and didn't have reading material with me, the iPhone would be more than adequate.

And I love the page-turning feature. You just click the side of screen, or even better, flick it with your thumb like you would a piece of paper. And there's no micro-delay between pages, which is one of the main complaints of e-readers; they "blink" for just a fraction of a second between pages, while redistributing the e-ink, or something.

Just like any e-reader, the iPhone feels weird at first, but after a few pages you're fully into the story, and you forget that you're reading on a 3-inch screen. Of course, you'll also forget you're reading altogether when your book rings.

Don't quote me on that.

2009-11-17T06:45:00.000-08:00

Someday, I'd like to set the tone for a story by kicking it off with a quote from Neil Young or Bruce Springsteen.

Like this:

What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?

--Neil Young, "Ohio"

Or this:

They declared me unfit to live

said into that great void my soul'd be hurled
They wanted to know why I did what I did
Well sir I guess there's just a meanness in this world

--Bruce Springsteen, "Nebraska"

But how do you go about including someone else's song lyrics in your own work? What type of permissions do you need? I did a little research. Basically, you need to secure permission from the artist or copyright owner. And with today's convoluted song ownership structure (I just made that up; I have nothing to base it on other than the Michael Jackson/Beatles thing), it can be hard to track down the person who can actually say Yes. And you may have to pay a licensing fee, which, if the authors are named Lennon and McCartney and you're a first-time novelist, could be prohibitively high.

Now, if the quote falls under the legal doctrine "fair use" you can use it without permission. But --surprise -- it's a gray area. Generally, you can invoke "fair use" if the material is used for non-profit and/or educational purposes, if the amount quoted is small in relation to the entire copyrighted work --or if the quote is really old. So you can quote the Bible, but not The Boss. Finally, it's worth noting that "acknowledging the source of the copyrighted material does not substitute for obtaining permission."

I took that quote from the Copyright Office's website; I hope I can use it without their permission.

A week in the writing life of Brian

2009-11-10T06:34:00.000-08:00

I didn't write much this week, about an hour each morning. I spent the weekend at my parents' house and it's impossible to write there. I'm not sure why. I could have stolen away an hour or two, locked myself in a room. Maybe it's the sense that there's someone just outside the door, even if there isn't. A muscle memory from growing up, when one of my brothers could burst in at any moment. Even though we are now (nearly) old enough to be past that point, old memories die hard.

I've been tormented by a book called The Anatomy of Story, by John Truby. It's primarily about screenwriting, but it translates perfectly to novels. It's made me re-think everything about my book, and has left me marginally paralyzed. Truby argues that every good story goes through a series of basic steps, and if your story doesn't have these steps, it will fail. I'd like to dismiss this as a bunch of overthinking gobbledygook, but I can't. Because he's right.

I've been writing a lot with my sweatshirt hood on. Not because it's cold but because it blocks out Jersey, who always sits just at the corner of my vision field, pretending not to stare at me. She's distracting, that cat. Chester's technique is more simple and earnest; he just comes up and nudges his nose into my thigh.

I read two novellas by Jim Harrison -- Legends of the Fall and Revenge. Both of these 100-page stories were made into decent movies. Now blast those images of Brad Pitt and Kevin Costner out of your head: these stories are like Hemingway concentrate. So stripped down and far-reaching is Harrison's prose, the novellas read almost like synopses, but beautiful synopses. Writers are supposed to show and not tell but Harrison tells, with very little in dialogue or scene. It works because everything fits together in a way that propels the reader forward. And it works because nothing is extraneous; every line is a poem.

Stephen King published a story in this week's New Yorker. I read the story and it was okay. It's biggest attribute was that it wasn't too long like everything else in the magazine. Sometimes I wish I could be stranded on a deserted island with nothing but a subscription to The New Yorker. Only then could I ply the depths of all the articles, stories and poems before the next week's edition came out. I thought it was strange that Stephen King would publish there considering his aversion to literary snobbery but I Googled the situation and realized he's published a bunch of stories in The New Yorker, including some of the ones in his recent collection, Just After Sunset. If you pick up that collection, read the story about the guy who gets trapped in a porta-potty. Who hasn't thought of that happening? And why didn't I think to write a story about it? It's also worth noting that The New Yorker only publishes stories by authors who have a book coming out that month, and SK's 1,000-word tome Under the Dome comes out today.

And finally, I was stuck while trying to write yesterday and I picked up You Shall Know Our Velocity! and turned the page to the exact passage --finally -- I'd been looking for for the past two years, idly now and then, whenever I came across the book on the shelf. The part I was thinking of only turned out to be a paragraph instead of a dozen pages as I'd pictured it in my head; so largely does an image loom when we long to return to it. I don't know why this particular page resonated with me so much that I'd remember to look for it years later. It's hard to know why certain sentences, after all the words we've read, stick with us, sometimes forever. I think it's because we've experienced an event or a feeling just the way the author describes it. It might be a small moment (the scene I mention is just a guy hopping from rock to rock for no reason at all), but you've been there, somewhere, as a kid perhaps, and when a stranger explains something you experienced, or at least the way you'd like to remember it, it feels like magic.

Where to begin...

2009-11-03T05:01:00.000-08:00

It’s happened to us all. You settle into bed, crack the spine on a new book, flip to the beginning and -- what’s this? -- the author wants you to read a few pages before the story even starts. Enter the prologue. A prologue is designed to give the reader information that is, at least least in the author’s opinion, essential for understanding the main story. It could be a scene that illustrates a powerful backstory, but happens long before the rest of the book starts; or a part of the story told in a different point of view from the rest of the book. Or, the prologue can just be a teaser to hook the reader with the promise of more exciting things to come.

So, is the prologue another tool in the writer’s chest that, if used properly, can add new dimension to your novel? Or is it just another item on the Long List of Things Writers Should Avoid at All Costs Even Though a Lot of Popular Writers Do It And No One Seems to Mind?

The experts, of course, are mixed. According to this Writer’s Digest article, agents hate prologues because they see it as a lazy way to insert backstory; a more skilled writer would find a way to weave it into the rest of the narrative. But if that’s the case, why do so many wildly successful books have prologues? Peruse the NYT bestseller list and I’d bet you’d find that over half the novels have prologues.

There are times when prologues work well. Say you have a story about a rogue virus that takes over the world. Before you get to your protagonist’s little story, you want to show firsthand what it’s like for someone to get the virus and suffer horribly. And since the entire story is told in the hero’s point of view (and he doesn’t get the virus), you tell it in first person, in a prologue.

As a reader, I’m not a fan of prologues. It’s a big commitment to start a book, and it takes some time to get into the story. A prologue essentially forces you to start the book twice, and often it feels like just one more barrier to getting lost in a story. But as I’m re-writing my own manuscript, lately I’ve found myself leaning toward including a prologue. I have a backstory scene that makes for a dramatic start to my novel, but it happens out of sequence with the rest of the narrative, and it wouldn’t be as powerful if I weaved it in through flashback. But I need to be honest with myself. Am I putting the scene into prologue because it’s the only way it makes sense, or am I doing it because my real first chapter isn’t exciting enough?

The problem is, these days, not even established writers can get away with Dickensian introductions and long chunks of backstory. Today’s readers want to get in media res right away, or they’re gonna drop you as fast as they can type in their Facebook password. Agents know this, so they look for a first chapter (or prologue) that snares you like a treble hook. As a consequence, the first chapter – or more likely the first page or the first sentence – is all the agent’s going to read before making his decision. So I need to make it count. Which brings me back to my dilemma: do I include a prologue that starts with a bang, but risks turning off the agent and readers for the sole reason it exists, or do I start slower but weave everything into the main story?

How about you, LB readers? Think about the books you’ve enjoyed... prologue or no prologue?

Double-blind Word Cloud

2009-10-27T03:27:00.000-07:00

I created a "word cloud" of my novel, Double-blind, at wordle.net. I discovered this site a few weeks ago and it's already provided me with hours of entertainment. The way it works is the cloud gives more prominence to the words that appear most frequently in the text. I pasted my entire manuscript into the word-cloud generator. And, for reasons I'm not sure I can articulate, I substituted my hero's and villain's names with "Harry" and "Voldemort."

You can generate an endless array of random clouds, but I like this one because it shows all of the main character's problems hovering above him like a literal rain cloud.

Published! (?)

2009-10-19T18:04:00.000-07:00

It's a monumental event in my writing career: I had a story accepted for publication! Don't get too excited (though I certainly did); the story is only twenty-one words long. As I mentioned in this post, I submitted to Robert Swartwood's Hint Fiction Anthology, which will be published next year by W.W. Norton & Company. Out of over 2500 submissions, my story was selected to be among 125 in the book. The coolest part is I will share the pages with some big-name authors, from Joyce Carol Oates to Peter Straub. I mean, you could read JCO's story and turn the page and see Brian Crawford (perhaps the editor will go in chronological order but for some reason use JCO's middle name, and Crawford will be next; or maybe he'll group all the dark stories together, and since my story is dark and JCO's is bound to be -- she wrote Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? for God's sake -- we will be forever linked.

What's more, I get paid for it. Twenty-five bucks. Not bad, more than a dollar a word. Now, if I could just get that rate for Double-blind, I'd have seventy grand.

Also, check out this MSNBC video about the anthology... Robert comes on toward the end.

WWDDD?

2009-10-13T06:33:00.000-07:00

I've officially started rewriting my manuscript (based on the editor's feedback). I have a ton of work to do, so I'm trying to focus on one piece at a time and not get overwhelmed.

My most weighty task is to reinvent my main character. Beginning writers often try too hard to make their hero likable. Newbies think they need to make the protagonist morally above everyone around him. This doesn't make the hero likable; it makes him boring. I am guilty of this with the lead character of Double-blind. There are interesting -- and often horrifying -- things going on all around him, but my protagonist often slips into the role of a decent, even-keeled, passive observer. Who wants to read about some passive goody two-shoes?

Take Don Draper from the TV show Mad Men. He repeatedly cheats on his wife. He neglects his kids. He lies to everyone. He's mean to his employees. He drinks and smokes too much. But we all root for him. We all love him. I mean, my wife really loves him.

So, as I'm revamping my character, I shouldn't be asking myself what I would do. What would Don Draper do?

A web log entry has been posted for perusal by the intended readers

2009-10-06T15:58:00.000-07:00

I wasn't sure what to blog about this morning -- until my beloved Wall St. Journal came to the rescue. There it was, right on the front page: an article about the Plain English Campaign, a 30-year-old group whose goal is to stem "the ever-growing tide of confusing and pompous language" that "takes away our democratic rights."

Sign me up. SIGN ME UP. I still remember the patronizing sting I felt in college while watching an infomercial featuring a "live" audience. Halfway through the product demonstration, a message flashed across the bottom of the screen: "observers have been remunerated." Now that's just pretentious and uncalled for. Were the producers hoping that anyone watching an infomercial at 2:00 a.m. wouldn't know that they meant "we paid a fake audience to act impressed"?

And I won't even go into how often I see something like this at work: "this strategic initiative was chartered in order to design, develop and implement key functional processes in a collaborative effort to obtain operational excellence" (I didn't make that up).

According to the WSJ article, the Plain English Campaign's latest foe is the financial industry, where, founder Chrissie Maher argues, there can be real consequences from the use of bloated and ambiguous language -- such as "families losing their homes because of jargon-filled credit agreements."

Learn more at the Campaign's website, and be sure to check out the Golden Bull awards and the hilarious before and after examples, such as:

Before
Your enquiry about the use of the entrance area at the library for the purpose of displaying posters and leaflets about Welfare and Supplementary Benefit rights, gives rise to the question of the provenance and authoritativeness of the material to be displayed. Posters and leaflets issued by the Central Office of Information, the Department of Health and Social Security and other authoritative bodies are usually displayed in libraries, but items of a disputatious or polemic kind, whilst not necessarily excluded, are considered individually.

After

Thank you for your letter asking for permission to put up posters in the library. Before we can give you an answer we will need to see a copy of the posters to make sure they won't offend anyone.

Speaking of offending people... while some gobbledygook is clearly deliberate and malevolent obfuscation (sorry), more often, people write this way to make sure their message won't offend anyone. One of my favorite examples is posted on every SF Muni bus (the pantheon of non-offensiveness). A metal sign, tacked behind each driver, reads:

"Information gladly given but safety requires avoiding unnecessary conversation."

What? Come on, it's a tough world out there. We can handle "Don't chat with the driver."

Top 20 of the last 10

2009-09-29T06:49:00.000-07:00

Over at the literary blog, The Millions, they've counted down a list of the best fiction of the millennium (so far). Out of the 20 books listed, I've only finished Middlesex, Atonement and The Road, all of which were awesome. The top two books on the list, The Known World and The Corrections, I quit reading after about 50 pages. As for the rest of the list, I suppose at some point I'll read The Brief, Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao -- even though I can't stand footnotes -- and I've been dying to read Gilead. But beyond that, nothing jumps out at me.

Leaf Blowerers, have you read any of the books on the list? Any recommendations?

Double-blind Deconstruction

2009-09-22T09:01:00.000-07:00

It’s been a while since I’ve updated y’all on my novel, DOUBLE-BLIND. A month ago, I hired a freelance editor to critique my manuscript. I didn’t want a line-by line edit; I needed an exploration of the novel’s major themes: Do the characters work? Is the pacing right? Is the plot compelling enough to hold the reader’s interest? Also, I wanted to know if my writing sucked.

I just got the editor’s comments back. Most of her suggestions are about my characters -- how I can make them stronger and more layered by adding more flaws, deeper motivations, etc. She said that writers tend to protect their protagonist because they want people to like him/her. But in reality, if you add more flaws, people identify with the character even more. Take the book I’m reading now, The Gargoyle: the protagonist has a laundry list of serious flaws, but you root for him just the same. And sometimes we want to read about a flawed character because it makes us feel better about ourselves. We can say, at least I’m not THAT guy.

The best part is the editor said my writing is “just excellent” and that my book could be, with the right tweaks, publishable quality. This is extremely encouraging, because bad writing is hard (if not impossible) to fix. If the writing’s not there, no amount of serpentine plot twists can save you (unless your name happens to be Dan Brown).

The problem with big-ticket issues is, of course, they’re not easy to fix. They involve major character overhauls, or removing characters altogether. They involve exploring characters’ motivation, raising the stakes. They involve substantial re-writing. I have a lot of work to do.

"That was funny," she said.

2009-09-15T05:27:00.000-07:00

The only thing harder than writing dialogue is writing funny dialogue. I was perusing some exercises from Write Great Fiction - Dialogue, and I came across a short exercise that The Leaf Blower readers could participate in:

Your female character is walking late at night on a downtown street of a big city. Suddenly she is accosted by three teenage boys who grab her purse. She yells something at them as they run away. What does she yell? Write one line of dialogue for each type of character below. Try to be as original as you can. The goal is to surprise your reader.

a mom from the suburbs
a prostitute
a businesswoman
an undercover cop
a grandmother
a drag queen

Here's my attempt:

Mom: "I'm calling your mothers!"

Prostitute: "Hold up, boys... maybe we can work out an arrangement."

Businesswoman: "Knock yourselves out, idiots. My Amex card will be cancelled before you can say 'Playstation 3'."

Cop: "You boys ever made a decision, a real bad decision, after which nothing was ever the same? This is one of those times."

Grandmother: "You can have the money, sonny -- just leave my vibrator!"

Drag queen: "Oh no you don't... you are NOT taking my Louis Vuitton!"

Now... LB readers: pick any one of these characters and give it a try.

Honey, I've shrunk my brain

2009-09-08T05:07:00.000-07:00

My neocortex is shrinking. My corpus collusum is collapsing.

I've gone two weeks without doing any serious writing, and I'm amazed at how fast those muscles have atrophied. Sitting down to write this blog feels like a mammoth undertaking. My fingers won't move when I tell them to. My eyes deceive me; the blank page is the size of Death Valley. Even my hard-won confidence has eroded; just thinking about sharing words in public roils my stomach like a late-night carne asada burrito.

But there's this wonderful thing called muscle memory. It's what enables bobybuilders to quickly gain back gobs of muscle after taking time off. So, now that the crazy-wonderful wedding period is over, it's time to get back to business. Dust off those dumbbells for some cerbellum curls. Funnel some protein powder into my frontal lobe. With a little hard work, I'll have that washboard gray matter back in no time.

My Muse

2009-09-01T05:27:00.000-07:00

I'm on my honeymoon this week, so I'm not going to write much. I just wanted to thank my amazing new bride, Amy, for putting up with me and lending her unwavering support throughout this whole writing project. She gave me the courage to quit my job and complete a novel, and she encouraged me along the way by pretending everything I wrote was on par with Faulkner.

Amy, I could not have done this without you!

25 words are worth a thousand... words

2009-08-25T20:07:00.000-07:00

Legend has it, Ernest Hemingway, on a bar bet, said he could write a complete story in less then ten words. He only needed six:

"For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

Hemingway, as usual, was ahead of his time. Maybe it's a product of our Twitter-sized attention spans, but fiction categories keep shrinking. There are novellas, short stories, short-short stories, flash fiction, sudden fiction, microfiction, nanofiction, drabbles (100 words) dribbles (50 words) and now... there's hint fiction. Hint fiction is a story of 25 words or less that suggests a larger, more complex story.

Robert Swartwood is accepting submissions for his Hint Fiction Anthology, scheduled for publication next year. Check out the guidelines... and submit your best. Or, if you don't want to submit officially, feel free to post your hint fiction stories here in the comments.

I submitted my two entries. Who cares if it's only 25 words; if one of my stories gets accepted, I'm gonna walk around telling everyone I'm published.

p.s., coming soon... Decafiction: a story in ten words or less. You heard it here first... I just registered the domain name.

Rejected!

2009-08-18T07:48:00.000-07:00

Six months ago, at the San Francisco Writers Conference, I pitched my book to an editor from a major publishing house. She liked the idea, and asked me to send the first five chapters. I did, and two months later she asked me to send the whole thing. I was elated... and stressed: I had a ton of polishing to do before I felt comfortable sending the entire manuscript. So I locked myself in my office for three weeks, finished the manuscript, and sent it to her.

Then I waited.
And waited.
And waited some more.

It's not uncommon for an agent or editor to take over six months to respond, but it was still maddening. Should I send a follow up email? What if she didn't even get my email? What if she couldn't open the file? Shouldn't she at least confirm? What if I look like a stalker and she rejects it just to get me off her back? After consulting some other writers for advice, I settled on sending the editor a follow-up email once a month. It's so different than my biotech job, where if I don't get a response in four hours, I assume the person is in the hospital.

Finally, last week, over three months later, I got a response: rejected. But it was what the industry calls an "encouraging rejection." Really, any type of response other than a form rejection letter falls into this category. It varies from a phone call or personal meeting (most encouraging) to a handwritten note scribbled across the bottom of a form letter (least encouraging).

My rejection letter was fairly encouraging because:
1) Based on her comments, the editor seems to have actually read the entire manuscript. Now, she's a professional, so she's not going to read the whole thing just to be nice; she'd stop as soon as she had a reason to.
2) She had some positive feedback
3) Her negative feedback was constructive and probably warranted
4) She didn't say my writing sucked; she just had some (totally fixable) issues with the plot

So, while a part of me was of course disappointed that she didn't call and immediately offer me a million bucks for my manuscript, I came away encouraged. Many a NYT bestseller has received dozens of similar rejections before being picked up.

Now. What's next? I'm sticking with my original plan of seeking an agent. But first, I'm going to hire a freelance editor to help with the manuscript. Which is a whole other blog topic...

Back to the Sea

2009-08-11T07:40:00.000-07:00

In my writing workshop, the group leader passed around bags with scraps of paper. On each scrap was written a place, person or verb. We randomly picked two places, two people, and one verb. Then each of us had to write a brief story using those elements. I ended up with:

• Place 1: diner
• Place 2: desert
• Person 1: anarchist
• Person 2: lover/spouse
• Verb: flee

Here is my story:

“Everything comes from the sea, and everything must return to the sea.”

Dylan’s eyes caught the sunlight glinting off the truck grilles lined up outside the diner, and his face was so pale that for a second he looked hyper real, possessed.

It was in these moments that Claire couldn’t help herself; when those dark eyes changed, when Dylan said these profound things, when he became taken by an idea, a crusade, or... a dead starfish.

The brittle orange starfish had been perched atop the napkin holder, like the sea creature was under water and holding fast against the rising tide. More likely, it had been attached with glue, until Dylan pried it loose with is ever-fidgeting fingers.

“Can’t we eat lunch first?” She said without much conviction. She’d seen that look before. Lunch would wait.

“Why? He was kneeling on the torn vinyl now, twirling the fish in his thin fingers. “Because that’s what ‘they’ expect you to do? Three meals a day -- morning, noon and night. Or the almighty order of the world will break down.” He shook his head. “What’s so bad about chaos?”

“Don’t be dramatic.” Claire sighed heavily, her stomach growling.

Dylan didn’t seem to hear her; he’d lasered his eyes on something out the window. Outside, a concord of diesel engines panted in the heat. “I say, screw them. Screw them and their three meals a day. “

The other diner patrons were turning their heads. With each head-turn, Dylan raised his voice another notch. He jabbed the starfish at a curious man hunched over the counter. “Screw you, too, gramps.” He hopped off the vinyl bench and turned toward Claire. “Forget this place and all its rules. Let’s break the pattern. Let’s... fleee!”

He was still carrying the “eee” when he burst through the glass door and into the parking lot.
Claire followed him. What else could she do?

Outside, on the blacktop, the heat closed in and choked her like a plastic bag around her head.

Dylan was far ahead, already off the blacktop and into the desert. He seemed to move faster than his casual strides could possibly allow. The shimmering heat trapped above the sand obscured his form and cut at his legs, giving the illusion he was floating. In his black skinny jeans, torn black sweatshirt and combat boots, he looked like some malformed arachnid. Like an alien on a featureless planet. An alien with a starfish.

Claire struggled to catch up. She blinked against the heat and suddenly she was upon him. He’d dropped to his knees in the sand, and he was holding the creature above him like some terra cotta offering to the sister sun. He was chanting, or maybe he was just breathing heavy from the heat and the walk.

The sand crackled beneath him as he swiveled toward her, and then he was looking straight up at her, holding the starfish out like an offering to her, and she realized that if he asked her, if he asked her right there in the desert, she would marry him.

Dear Apple

2009-08-04T05:07:00.000-07:00

I'm not that guy who writes whiny letters to companies, trying to get free stuff (though I've always kind of wanted to be). But this situation really pissed me off, and I figured I could practice my writing skills, put something amusing on my blog --and maybe get some free stuff. So, here is a letter I plan to send to Apple Computer:

Dear Apple,

I'm a loyal consumer of Apple products. In the past five years alone, I've owned six iPods, three Macs, one iPhone and 27 pair of ear buds (the things just multiply -- they're like Gremlins). But something happened recently that caused me to question my loyalty.

My exuberant dog, Chester, knocked over a glass of water with his tail and spilled about two ounces of water onto my one-year-old MacBook. The laptop was closed, and it was barely a splash, so I wasn't overly concerned. But after waiting a while to make sure the laptop was dry, I hit the power button, and nothing happened.

I took the MacBook into the Apple Store, where the guy at the Genius Bar told me I'd have to send my laptop off for a "Tier 4 repair." Sounded ominous, but I wasn't too worried. Then he told me the repair would cost $755, plus tax. Still, I remained calm. After all, I'd purchased the AppleCare Protection Plan.
Then he told me that water damage is not covered.

I wasn't sure what to do about the repair, but I knew I had to get the data off my hard drive. I'm a writer, and I stupidly hadn't backed up the last few versions of my novel. So I went home to lick my wounds and figure out how to salvage my data. I started taking apart my MacMini Desktop so I could plug my hard drive into it and rescue my manuscript. Kudos to the Apple engineers, because they somehow managed to pack the entire Apollo 13 Lunar Module into that little white box. It took me 30 minutes just to get the cover off. The instructional video I found online involved a razor blade and a putty knife. A putty knife.

Two hours later, I'd completely destroyed my MacMini, only to find that its hard drive uses a different connector than the MacBook's drive. And now I was down two computers.

I called the Genius Bar guy, and he said, no problem, the Tier 4 repair people could transfer the data off my old hard drive -- for an additional $150 fee. Now I was looking at $905, plus tax.
While I was pondering this, the Genius Bar guy was nice enough to point out that a new MacBook is about a grand, and they'd transfer my data to the new computer -- for free. What's more, my AppleCare Protection Plan would transfer to the new laptop. This was very reassuring, considering how helpful the plan had been with my last computer.

Now maybe it's just me, but I can't help but think that this whole pricing policy is designed to push me into a new laptop. But what it's more likely to do is push me into a PC. It's hard for me to stomach paying nearly $1000 to get my old MacBook back, when I could get a brand new Dell for $500. In the past, I paid the premium because Apple products work well and look cool, and because I figured Apple would take care of me. Now, I just feel disappointed.

Before I make any rash decisions about the equipment I'll be using for the remainder of my long and illustrious writing career, I wanted to ask if you could: cover my repair costs under the AppleCare plan; or, give me a discount on a new MacBook.

I'll be posting this letter (and your response) on my blog: http://theleafblower.blogspot.com/

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerly,

Brian Crawford

***Post-blog note***

I contacted Apple today to get the mailing address. I ended up explaining my situation, and they agreed to cover the cost of the repair – including the hard drive transfer. Nice job, Apple, you’re back in my good graces!

Loooong Sentences

2009-07-28T07:04:00.000-07:00

Holy crap this is hard. Taking a page from the Epiphanizing blog, I set out to write a response to this prompt, from The 3 AM Epiphany: Take a sentence from a writer you admire or who provokes strong feelings in your gut. Preferably, this should be a fairly long sentence with a lot of different words in it. Use any of the words and only those words (repeating words from the sentence as often as you want) to make up fifteen sentences of your own—adhering around a character or situation that seems related to the author of this sentence, but it need not be a direct response to the author. This is a very difficult exercise, but you may find a handful of crucial ideas about your character from the struggle of coming up with these sentences.

Very difficult indeed. I tried the exercise with one sentence, then gave up and looked for an easier sentence. Next thing I knew, an hour had passed and I was still reading and re-reading my favorite long sentences from my favorite authors. So forget the exercise. I'm just going to share with you a couple of my favorite long sentences. This one, from All the Pretty Horses, just might be my favorite sentence of all time:

"They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing."

And here is my favorite "love scene" sentence, from For Whom the Bell Tolls:

"Then there was the smell of heather crushed and the roughness of the bent stalks under her head and the sun bright on her closed eyes and all his life he would remember the curve of her throat with her head pushed back into the heather roots and her lips that moved smally and by themselves and the fluttering of the lashes on the eyes tight closed against the sun and against everything, and for her everything was red, orange, gold-red from the sun on the closed eyes, and it all was that color, all of it, the filling, the possessing, the having, all of that color, all in a blindness of that color.

Here is the guy's perspective of that same scene:

"For him it was a dark passage which led to nowhere, then to nowhere, then again to nowhere, once again to nowhere, always and forever to nowhere, heavy on the elbows in the earth to nowhere, dark, never any end to nowhere, hung on all time always to unknowing nowhere, this time and again for always to nowhere, now not to be borne once again always and to nowhere, now beyond all bearing up, up, up and into nowhere, suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were both there, time having stopped and he felt the earth move out and away from under them."

Wow. Remember, this was written before "feeling the earth move" was cliche. I think Hemingway -- the old softie -- actually coined the term.

Where have you gone, idleness?

2009-07-21T21:01:00.000-07:00

Today marked the longest stretch I've gone without writing in over a year. Sure, I did some fiction exercises last week in my workshop, but I was so drained from a gruelling workday that I just went through the motions. And this past weekend was my bachelor party -- hardly conducive to writing. I'm not complaining, really; these are good reasons for not writing. I'm just longing for the time when I had, well, time.

If I'm disciplined, I can always eek out a few pages, no matter how insane my schedule gets. But I'm not missing time to write so much as time to not write. I miss the idle time, where I didn't do much of anything. Not because I'm lazy; idle time is where the ideas incubate. It's where poetry lives, in the moments you're not grasping at it. Because when you're too busy "doing," your soul, as Brenda Ueland put it, "gets frightfully sterile and dry" and "you have not time for your own ideas to come in and develop and gently shine."

I don't know what to do about this problem, other than win the lottery. And now I worry I'm falling into the cycle of thinking that has erased so many would-be writers: I'll wait until work calms down. I'll wait until after the wedding. I'll wait until the kids are grown.
I'll wait.

A Novella Runs Through It

2009-07-14T20:31:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading I Am Legend, the novella on which the Will Smith movie is loosely based. It's a brilliant (and influential) short story, especially considering it was written 55 years ago -- before the surfeit of vampire-ness in books and movies.

Not that I am Legend is a great movie, but it got me thinking about how the best adapted screenplays are often based on short stories rather than novels. I guess a full-length novel is simply too long and complex to squeeze into a two-hour movie, and it always leaves the viewer (and the reader, if he's read the book) feeling like something's missing.

Here are just a few noteworthy movies I can think of that were based on short stories or novellas: The Shawshank Redemption (Stephen King), Stand by Me (Stephen King), Brokeback Mountain (Annie Proulx), A River Runs Through It (Norman Maclean), Apocalypse Now (Joseph Conrad).

Occasionally, a full-length novel spawns a movie that is as good or better than the book. One such movie is The Silence of the Lambs. Can you think of any others?

Group Therapy

2009-07-07T19:19:00.000-07:00

It's an age-old question: do writers' workshops help or hurt? A writers' workshop is a group of people who review each others' writing and discuss it. In a recent New Yorker article, Louis Menand described such gatherings as "a regime for forcing people to do two things that are fundamentally contrary to human nature: actually write stuff (as opposed to planning to write stuff very, very soon), and then sit there while strangers tear it apart. There is one person in the room, the instructor, who has (usually) published a poem. But workshop protocol requires the instructor to shepherd the discussion, not to lead it, and in any case the instructor is either a product of the same process—a person with an academic degree in creative writing—or a successful writer who has had no training as a teacher of anything, and who is probably grimly or jovially skeptical of the premise on which the whole enterprise is based: that creative writing is something that can be taught."

In his book How to Write a Damn Good Novel (which, frankly, is just damn okay), James Frey argues that writers' workshops have their purpose, but only the kind he calls "destructive." In these groups, members ruthlessly criticize your work, and you come away with a bruised ego -- but also with a thicker skin and a list of specific things to fix in your piece. The worst kind of writers' groups, Frey says, are the "puff" ones, where everyone sits around and talks about your wonderful description of the sunset on page four, because they're afraid to tell you that your story is atrocious.

I've participated in several workshops over the past year, and I have found them helpful to a degree. If nothing else, they force you to write. If you have pages due, you're going to finish something. And since people will be reading and commenting in public, you'll be motivated to try and make the pages decent. As for criticism, I think it should fall somewhere between puff and destructive, depending on what point you are at in your writing career. In the beginning, it's nerve racking enough just to have someone read and respond to your work; no brand-new writer is ready for brutal criticism. But as you gain some confidence in your writing, then by all means bring out the red pen; otherwise, it's a waste of time.

Most importantly, writers' workshops give you a sense of community. For those of us who have busy day jobs, these groups carve out a space to hang out with other people who write. And, occasionally, someone who I think is talented calls me talented. And that's enough to keep me going.

Chester Update

2009-06-30T07:29:00.000-07:00

I think Chester injured his back leg a few weeks ago. The tireless brute must have strained something while careening down a steep hill after his beloved ball. It’s hard to know when he’s in pain because he never makes a sound, but he seems to be putting less weight on that leg. And he’s so ball crazy, he wouldn’t stop chasing the thing if he had a jagged bone protruding from his thigh. So I’ve had to force him to take it easy. And this means no ball-throwing.

Oh, the disappointment in those eyes when we get to the park and Chester realizes I didn’t bring a ball. He always holds out a dying hope... he bounds away, turns around and crouches in his ready stance, bewildered eyes darting from my hand to the ground, behind him, then back to my hand. That implausibly long tongue flapping. If I make the slightest move toward my pocket, it becomes a gunfight in the Old West, Chester ready to draw at the twitch of my finger.

Two weeks without his ball and Chester’s getting delirium tremens, probably seeing things. So it was in this state of lunacy that he accompanied me to the park on a particularly warm day near the summer solstice. The sweet tinge of fresh cut grass filled the air, and insects buzzed, sluggish in the rare heat. Chester was on the leash next to me, pulling less than usual – perhaps the ball hiatus has finally cured his leash pulling, I thought with a smile. Then – SNAP – the leash pulled taut, almost knocking me off my feet.

Chester was suddenly behind me, pulling violently, and my shoulder’s tweaked at an odd angle. Then a voice, at first low and stammering, then gathering steam, and Chester’s making a strange noise too – and why is he pulling so hard? I turn my head and all at once the scene becomes clear. The bus stop. A wrinkled old man, struggling not to fall over. Two bright green pieces of felt, deliciously round. It’s a walker with tennis balls stuck on its front legs, and Chester’s trying to wrestle both of the balls off at the same time.

Maybe it’s time for an intervention.

What are you reading?

2009-06-23T03:00:00.000-07:00

Right now I'm reading The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl. After Erica referenced the novel on my blog, I realized I had it on my shelf; it was one of many books I scored for a dollar at the Friends of the SFPL Annual Big Book Sale. I've gone through a string of mediocre novels lately -- I didn't even finish the last three I started -- so Pearl's ingenious novel is all the more refreshing. I have nothing against mainstream fiction (after all, that's what I'm writing), but if you want to know the difference between a "literary" mystery and a "genre" mystery, read The Dante Club, and then pick up something by James Patterson.

Sure, Pearl skated summa cum through Harvard and Yale, and he won a prestigious prize for his thesis on Dante, but that doesn't automatically mean he can write fiction. And boy can he write fiction. The Dante Club is one of those auspicious debuts that simultaneously reignite my passion for writing -- and make me want to give it up for good.

So, that's what I'm reading.
What are YOU reading? And would you recommend it?

And now we come to the end

2009-06-16T07:12:00.000-07:00

I am not worthy.
Some authors, when they talk about their writing process, they make it seem almost doable. Not easy -- don't get me wrong -- but at least something you could emulate with enough practice. I felt like this when I read Stephen King's On Writing, and Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird.

Then there are writers like John Irving, the ones whose thought process is more like something Yoda would conjure; an otherworldly power you can't touch. Longtime Leaf Blower reader Daniel Mason sent me this video from the New York Times, about Irving's unusual process for writing novels. Irving says that knows he has a novel when the last sentence comes to him. Not the first sentence, mind you -- the LAST sentence. Once he writes down the last sentence, he says, he never changes it. Not a comma, not a period. Then he works backward from there. It's been that way for all twelve of his sprawling novels.

Watching the video, I thought, wait a minute, maybe his last sentences are written in such a vague, non-committal way that they could easily be written around, massaged, manipulated. So I pulled out a few of his books and turned to the last page. The final sentence of The World According to Garp is "But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases." Okay, fair enough. I can see how that sentence could come to you first, and inspire a book. It could be a first sentence, really. But then I looked at A Prayer for Owen Meany. The last sentence is "O God -- please give him back! I shall keep asking You." What? THAT's what came to him first? THAT's what inspired him to develop one of the most distinctive and memorable characters in modern literature?

When I started writing Double-blind, I didn't have the slightest idea how it would end. But I have a secret. I've been practicing this skill. In fact, before I started this blog post, I knew what the last sentence would be. It just came to me out of the sky, like lightening in a summer storm. And by the time the sound caught up to the flash, I'd already conceived a whole blog post to preface that last, brilliant sentence: and now we come to the end of my blog post -- see you next week.

Review of the Kindle 2.0

2009-06-09T03:00:00.000-07:00

I've had my Amazon Kindle for a week now, and I've been testing it on all kinds of media -- books, novellas, word docs, magazines, newspapers -- even a clinical research protocol (not recommended).

The Kindle's crisp screen and electronic ink technology live up to the hype. It's just like reading a printed page, although the background is more light gray than white. I still can't get over the fact that you can read the Kindle in bright sunlight. Also like print, the pages can't be read in dim light. This is so contrary to every other electronic device I've used my entire life, it takes some major mental adjustment. Another aspect that takes some getting used to is there are no page numbers on the screen. This is because you can adjust the text size, so it throws off the page count. Instead, it tells you your "location" in the document and the percentage you've read.

Once I adjusted my old way of thinking, and got into a book and started turning (clicking) pages, the device melted away and I was totally into the story -- almost more into the story, because I wasn't flipping forward to see how many pages were left in the chapter, or turning to the back cover to re-read the plot teaser. I got into a rhythm, and after a while I think I was actually reading faster than normal.

My favorite thing about the Kindle is its simplicity and utilitarianism. It doesn't have a color display or flashing graphics or a fancy interface; its main reason for existence is to allow you unbridled access to words. Many reviewers complain that the device lacks a touch screen. I actually see this as a positive. To me, a touch screen on an e-book reader would be smudgy and distracting. The 5-way joystick navigator and page-turn buttons work just fine -- and they don't get in the way of the text. I also love that the wireless is included. This was what put me over the hump to purchase the Kindle in the first place. I was about to order it when I balked and thought, wait, will I have to sign up for yet another monthly service plan? I was ecstatic to find out that the wireless was built in, with no service fees. When you factor that in, the Kindle is cheap compared to many other wireless devices.

Of course, this wireless access makes it almost too easy to buy books. Now, I'm sure I'll be less likely to drunk download an e-book at midnight (like I would an iTunes song), but it's a little scary to have the ability to deliver any NYT bestseller into my hand in 30 seconds flat -- for a mere $9.99.

One of the new features of the Kindle 2.0 is the text-to-speech function, where the device will read to you. This is an utterly useless feature. While the computer is surprisingly adept at recognizing words, it's not going to sound like an audio book because it doesn't know where to place the emphases, inflection and pauses. So it sounds like what it is -- a robot reading words. The only time I could see turning on this feature is if I find myself without the use of my eyes.

The other quibble I have is the slight delay between changing screens. When you push the page-forward button, the screen washes black for a millisecond before displaying the next page. Overall, it's probably less than the delay you cause by turning a physical page, but it still has occasionally caused me to hit the button twice.

I read a lot of other people's work for my writing groups, and the Kindle worked great for this. It saved me from having to print out dozens of Word Doc pages, and I can still highlight passages and comment on the document as I'm reading it.

As for newspapers, I downloaded an issue of The Wall Street Journal to see how the Kindle handled it. It's pretty cool, and would be great if you were on a plane, or eating breakfast at my tiny kitchen table, but it doesn't beat sitting on the couch with that crinkled paper spread over your lap. When I read a newspaper, I like to scan the pages quickly, take in the pictures and graphs; I probably only read a few articles in their entirely but I want to look at the whole paper. The Kindle is just a different experience. There are no pictures or ads. And the articles are categorized in a straightforward, easy-to-navigate menu, complete with word counts of each article. So, if your primary goal of reading a newspaper is to absorb as much information in as short a time as possible, then the Kindle might be your answer. For me, I'll stick to good ol' newsprint -- at least until the bigger, next generation Kindle DX comes out.

A few notes about the hardware. The Kindle looks fantastic and feels great in your hands. The buttons and keyboard are slick and functional. The battery life is amazing -- up to two weeks between charges if you turn off the wireless.

Overall, while the Kindle is not perfect, once you get used to it, it's a remarkable device and a viable alternative to printed books.

WWHD (What would Hemingway Drive)?

2009-06-02T19:53:00.000-07:00

If the implosion of General Motors is any indication, Americans have fallen out of love with the automobile. But cars still, to some extent, define who we are. A quick count of Priuses on the road in San Francisco will tell you people haven't stopped using cars to make a statement. So I wonder, what's the ideal car for a writer?

Hemingway drove a green 1929 Rolls Royce Phantom II Short Coupled Saloon, specially equipped with a mini bar and compartments for golf and hunting equipment:

According to an excellent 2007 Rolling Stone interview which I can't seem to find online, Cormac McCarthy "lives so far off the beaten path, he drives a flatbed truck."

Now a flatbed truck and a Rolls Royce minibar are a little extreme, but what is the ideal car for a writer? Is it the weathered Saab, signifying you're part of the literary elite:

Or a beat-up van which moonlights as your home, writing studio and kidnapping chamber:

Or maybe something like a Pontiac Aztek, which says you're ironic and you just don't give a crap:

What do you think?

Wake up and smell the circuitry

2009-05-26T21:25:00.000-07:00

I've agonized about it for years. I've considered my options, weighed the pros and cons. Tried to ignore the issue, hoped it would go away. But I finally had to face my demons head-on. I decided to buy an e-book reader -- an Amazon Kindle.

For as long as I can remember, I've been enamored with new books: the sleekness of the dust jacket; the wisp of turning pages; the intoxicating scent of the binding glue. There's nothing like cracking the spine of a new tome and flipping through it, getting a peak of what's to come. And, as a new writer, I dream of the day when I can hold my own published book -- a paper book -- in my hands. I still want to see it on my bookshelf, on display at a bookstore, or hidden in the corner of the local library.

Now I'm fairly certain the print book will not die in my lifetime. But it will go the way of the compact disc. At some point in the not-too-distant future, the majority of books sold will be in electronic format. Ignoring that fact is like the music execs ignoring electronic music files. According to this article from the Wall Street Journal, e-books will change not only the way books are read, but the way they are written.

If I hope to take advantage of this new medium, I need to understand it; I need to experience it first hand. Plus, the Kindle is pretty damn cool. The most important feature of the Kindle (and the Sony Reader) is that it uses electronic-ink technology so the screen looks like a printed page. It's not backlit like a cellphone or computer screen, so it's easy on the eyes and can be read in bright sunlight just like a paper book. See a word you don't know? Just click on it and it gives you the definition. Want to know more about a topic in the book? Kindle will look it up on Wikipedia.

I think the uptake of e-books will actually help new writers. E-books are cheap, and they will only get cheaper. It's also easy to give them away for free. With a lower (or nonexistent) price point, a reader is more likely to take a chance on a new author, and this exposure will sell books -- including print books.

So I'm getting on the train. And I can only hope that someday people will be reading Double-blind on a Kindle.

Finished! And the winners are...

2009-05-19T08:32:00.000-07:00

I finished my book! I sent it off to the editor who was interested. It felt so good to hit SEND! The next step is to start researching agents who also might be interested in DOUBLE-BLIND. I'm sure I'll keep tinkering with the manuscript in the future, but for now I’m happy to spend some time away from it.

And now, what you've all been waiting for... the results from last week’s contest. I decided to give away six books, since I own a copy. The winners are:

Emilie: That is scary—especially forgetting who the babysitter was. But Daniel was a smart kid; I’m sure he would’ve found a way to contact you.

Recess: Human trafficking is scary indeed, but it was the flattery that clenched it for you.

Moeller: Hilarious! And true for you—until recently. You earned your book.

Amy: That is funny because I know it’s a genuine concern for you. So far, Chester and Jersey have avoided suffocation.

E: I agree about being eaten alive by insects. When I was growing up, one of my biggest fears was that I’d be buried neck-deep in an ant hole, with my mouth propped open and honey spread on tongue. I was a strange kid.

Kim: Terrifying. You wake up and see a dim figure at the foot of your bed, just casually sitting there. You’re not sure if he’s real. Then he moves.

(Anonymous: I agree that “true” stories are always the scariest. Amityville Horror is still one of the most terrifying books I’ve ever read. I had to disqualify you because you didn’t leave your name. Also, I think you might be my mom, which disqualifies you from the contest anyway)

Winners, please email me your address and I’ll send you your copy of Afraid.

Read a free book, win a free book!

2009-05-12T15:01:00.000-07:00

I'm still putting the finishing touches on DOUBLE-BLIND... by the end of the week, my manuscript will be done!

Speaking of manuscripts, today I am offering The Leaf Blower readers an online exclusive: a free eBook by Jack Kilborn and Blake Crouch. If you recall, Jack Kilborn (aka J.A. Konrath) visited my blog in March to talk about rejection.

The eBook is a horror novella called SERIAL, a tale of hitchhiking gone terribly wrong. Like a deeply twisted version of an “After School Special,” it is the single most persuasive public service announcement on the hazards of free car rides. The eBook also contains a Q&A with Kilborn and Crouch, author bibliographies, and excerpts from their most recent and forthcoming works.

Here's the link to SERIAL; the eBook is located under "Book Extras" in the bottom right-hand corner. You can download it either as a PDF file or ePub version (the Sony eBook Reader format).

But wait, constant reader (as Stephen King would say), there's more: I'm also offering you the chance to win your very own copy of Kilborn's book, AFRAID. The publisher has given me 5 copies to give away.

Here's the contest: I want to hear about what makes you afraid. You can write one word (e.g. "clowns"), or one hundred words; it's up to you. I'll pick the top five scariest entries and send each winner a copy of AFRAID (US and Canada residents only). I've read the book... if you get a copy, be sure to keep your lights on!

I'll be accepting entries (posted in the comments section) until Sunday, May 17th. Enjoy the free eBook and the contest!

One-Minute Writing is All I Have Time For This Week

2009-05-05T07:07:00.000-07:00

Continue to stay tuned... I'm still frantically polishing my manuscript so I can send it off to the editor. Thanks for the encouraging comments. I hope to be back online next week. In the meantime, check out this fun site, and the prestigious One Minute Writer Award I won!

Stay tuned...

2009-04-28T07:07:00.000-07:00

Great news: an editor read my first few chapters... and requested my complete manuscript! I have a lot of polishing to do before I send it out, so I'm going off the blog-rid for a week or so. Stay tuned...

Extremophiles: Word of the Day Part II

2009-04-21T06:00:00.000-07:00

Reading the Wall Street Journal over the weekend, I came across a word I didn’t know. This happens occasionally-- the WSJ sometimes uses big words -- but this word was so utterly foreign to me I thought it was a typo. The word was chthonic, which means: of or relating to the underworld, infernal. When I'm in a vocab crisis, I run to Merriam Webster’s Word of the Day. Last year, I attempted to write a short story using a month's worth of M-W words, in order. For today's post, I tried it again, but with only two weeks' worth of words (hey, I have a day job now). It turned out to be more of an essay than a story... or a stream of consciousness... actually, I don’t know what the hell it is... but it sure was entertaining to see where it led me:

Have you ever looked closely at your computer’s keyboard? I'm doing it now. It's disconcerting to see it in the bright sunlight. You notice things. Sometimes, I wonder what I’d find under there if I removed the keys. There could be a whole colony of tiny extremophiles living off of skin flakes and potato chip oil. Creatures so frail and diaphanous that, if viewed under a microscope, there’d be nothing but innards -- there’s its digestive tract, there’s its beating heart.

But what if they were visible to the naked eye, and one of them crawled out from under the F5 key in the middle of my PowerPoint presentation? Would I shriek? Feign indifference and causally smash it between my fingers? Or would I turn my keyboard upside down, shake the rest of the critters out, and, with an effeminate moue, stomp them with my feet?

We go through life in epistemic denial of the creatures lurking beneath our field of vision. Surely you’ve heard about the mites in our sheets, or eyebrows, but what of the ones resting just under the vulnerable pulp of our fingertips -- ready to strike out with their claws? (Why do unseen creatures always have claws, or at least fangs? Is it not possible these beings are beautiful? That, having evolved unchecked in the purlieus of computer circuitry, they’ve developed brilliant colors, glass-blown siphons, or giant (relative) iridescent wings which flutter to the rhythm of our key strikes?).

Or perhaps they’re climbers -- yes, this makes more sense -- scaling the hachure of wires with otherworldly aplomb. Or maybe they’re more sophisticated then that even; maybe they use their segmented withies like cell phone antennae, tapping into our PCs, drinking our information -- one massive telecommuting workforce spread across the globe. With a billion bio-processors acting in parallel, the colony could occupy a dimension superjacent to itself; like the ultimate quantum computer, it could be everywhere and nowhere at once.

And what if an entity of such raw power and scope became lickerish? It scares me to ideate the kind of havoc it could it wreak! I’m thinking of chthonic (take that WSJ!) foes of biblical proportions – on par with Satan or Beelzebub or whatever sobriquet you prefer.

I’m a dyed-in-the-wool scientist, though, and I tend not to believe in things that have never been seen. Yet, I can’t slake my appetite for stories about tiny worlds that seem even bigger than our own. And this is what I think about at my desk, after lunch, between meetings.

Be an Agent for a Day

2009-04-13T20:55:00.000-07:00

There's a mind-blowing experiment going on this week called Be an Agent for a Day. Nathan Bransford, a literary agent in San Francisco, invited his blog readers to do what agents do -- review a boatload of query letters. In publishing lingo, a “query” is the proposal you send to an agent or editor to try to get them interested in your work. Agents get tons of these -- often hundreds a day. Nathan asked his readers to volunteer their own queries. Then he set his blog to post 50 queries at different times throughout the day to simulate an agent’s email inbox. The blog readers review the queries, and accept or reject them in the comments section. We're only allowed to accept 5 (request the manuscript); we must reject the other 45. Sprinkled throughout the 50 are three queries for books that actually went on to get published. Our job is to find those three. At the end, Nathan will see how good we were at picking out the winners.

The response to the event has been overwhelming. I think this shows how desperate new writers are for feedback. It has also shown -- not surprisingly -- that writers are especially critical of each other. Halfway through the event, Nathan had to jump in and tell the "agents" to tone down their rejections -- reminding us that there are real people behind these queries, and saying "if some of you were real agents you'd have a pitchfork wielding mob outside of your office by now."

Harsh critics aside, I was really hoping my query would get used. What a great opportunity to get feedback from over 200 people. But Nathan said he got hundreds and hundreds of volunteers, and could only use 50.

Check out the contest -- you can still participate. I did, and found it really hard -- and kind of addicting. Here, you can start with my query. Since it didn't get used, I'll post it here:

Dear Mr. Agent:

It was a pleasure meeting you at the San Francisco Writers Conference. Per your request, I am writing you about my novel, DOUBLE-BLIND, a thriller about an FDA inspector who travels to Mexico City to investigate a fraudulent drug trial. The highlighted disease is lupus, an autoimmune disorder that affects over one million people in the United States alone. Ninety percent of lupus patients are women, which presents a unique marketing opportunity for this book. As Ian McEwan said in this week’s New Yorker, “when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.”

I've worked in the biotech industry for over a decade, and a year ago I quit my day job to write full time. One look at a major newspaper will tell you that biotech, clinical trials, and the FDA are increasingly in the spotlight. Yet, these subjects are underrepresented in fiction. DOUBLE-BLIND introduces readers to this world, but in palatable doses: the novel is, at its heart, a page-turner, a love story, and a portrait of a man ascending from a pit of grief.
Ethan Cole left medical practice for a job with the FDA after his wife, Sarah, died of lupus. A stoic, 35-year-old physician, Ethan isn't well-equipped to deal with the loss of his wife. On the first anniversary of Sarah's death, the FDA sends Ethan to Mexico City to investigate a doctor who's testing an experimental lupus drug.

Walter Grenon is a 58-year-old biotech CEO whose obsessive-compulsive disorder has recently flared out of control. When he discovers that his company’s new lupus drug doesn't work, he hatches a plan to manipulate the drug's clinical trial to guarantee positive results. He employs Felix Torres, a charismatic rheumatologist in Mexico City, to carry out the plan.

While investigating Dr. Torres, Ethan has to review graphic descriptions of lupus patients, and persistent memories of his wife threaten to derail his investigation. Then he meets a beautiful nursing student named Carmen, who turns out to be the whistleblower who tipped off the FDA. He doesn't know if he can trust her, but as they work together, he feels a growing connection to her—a connection he's not ready to acknowledge.

As Ethan unravels the medical fraud, he discovers that Dr. Torres is substituting a malicious drug for placebo—and patients are dying. He soon realizes that the biomedical fraud extends beyond Mexico's borders, and his own wife's hasty death may have been due to more than just lupus.

Your list of clients is very impressive. It would be an honor to work with you on this project. My novel is 65,000 words and fully complete. May I send you a copy of the manuscript?

Sincerely,
Brian Crawford

City of Love

2009-04-07T05:07:00.000-07:00

I officially changed by blog description to "On quitting my day job to write for a year, and then going back to my day job while still trying to write." I can't deny it any longer: I'm back to working full time, and I can only find a few hours to write each week. When I do find some time, I need about half of it just to decompress to the point where I can focus enough to write anything worthwhile. That's what I miss most, I think -- the quiet time just before the good writing comes. When I used to have the time to leisurely walk Chester to the park, instead of the way it is now, where I follow nervously behind him, focusing on his butt and willing something to come out of it, so I can go back inside and quickly get ready for work.

When I'm in a hurry, I don't notice the little things. And noticing the little things is critical to writing. Lately, the things I do notice seem mainly to annoy me. Consequently, I started a list today of things that annoy me about San Francisco. I'm sure it will grow over time, but here's what I have so far:

People who wear bike jerseys into breakfast cafes. It's bad enough that I'm hungover and you're not, but do you have to rub it in by wearing a bright yellow jersey?

People who move their cars only once per week -- during street cleaning. Then they are somehow able to move their cars back into exactly the same spot. This is usually confounded by the person having a really conspicuous, annoying car so you KNOW it's the same one.

People who cross in the middle of the street and then look annoyed because YOU didn't slow down. In some countries, buddy, drivers speed up when they see someone in the street.

People who run through Golden Gate Park with water bottles in their hands. Come on, it's 53 degrees outside and you're only running for 20 minutes. You can make it.

People who have those built in poop-bag dispensers on their dogs' leashes. I mean, who's that put together?

People who give you an evil stare because you stopped your car in the middle of a crosswalk. Hey, I know where my tires are -- at least I stopped. When this happens to me I usually pretend like I'm talking on my phone -- but now I get a double-stare for talking on my phone while stopped in a crosswalk.

Cab drivers who turn on their "for hire" light when they're clearly not for hire. Did all the drivers get together one day and decide this would be funny?

When a bus doesn't come for 45 minutes and then three pull up in a row.

When you miss a turn and can't turn left again until you hit the ocean.

Emeryville. I know, it's not technically in the city of SF, but seriously -- are ALL those people going to Ikea?

What annoys you about SF?

The Old Man and the Sex

2009-03-31T07:44:00.000-07:00

Let's play a game called Change One Letter. Take the title of a book (fairly well known) and alter it by changing one letter, removing one letter, or adding one letter. Then give a brief synopsis of the "new" book. I got this from David Giltinan's blog, Mainly on the Plain. David is a fellow ex-Genentecher who left to follow a different path. He's really good at this game, as you can see from his recent post. My favorite one of David's is: "A Thousand Splendid Subs: Jared's Story."

I, on the other hand, struggled to come up with these:

The Old Man and the Sex

A senior experiments with taking three different erectile dysfunction drugs in the same weekend.

All the Pretty Houses

The rise and fall of California's housing industry.

The Sound and the Furry

Hannah, a furry feline, lies still all day. But she's not sleeping... she's waiting.

Cystic River

The world's most polluted river: how it got that way, and what you can do about it.

Angels and Lemons

The heartbreaking story of the auto industry's forgotton familys -- and the crappy cars that got them in their current situation.

Readers, show me what you got.

Interview with Brian Crawford

2009-03-24T01:37:00.000-07:00

Today the Leaf Blower would like to welcome... Brian Crawford. The LB sat down with the fledgling author to ask him a few random questions:

The Leaf Blower: Now that you're back at your day job, has it been tough to keep up with your writing?
Brian Crawford: Yes. Very tough. After I finish writing my blog and reviewing other people's work for my writing group, I have little time and energy left for my book. I'm still trying to find a writing schedule that works. I've tried writing after work, but often I'm too tired to be very productive. My latest schedule is I'll get up in the morning and work on my book for one hour, no matter what. I started that yesterday, but I overslept. Then I had to work on my blog this morning. There's always tomorrow.

The Leaf Blower: A lot of people write books while working full time.
Brian Crawford: I know. While working on his first book, John Grisham used to wake up at 5 a.m. and write for a few hours, then go to work -- 60 to 80 hours a week -- as a State Representative. Some people can get by on little sleep. I'm not one of those people.

The Leaf Blower: When I Google "Brian Crawford writer," this Facebook page comes up. Is it yours? If so, it's pretty lame.
Brian Crawford: No. Shit no. Do you think I'd write "I am the greatest writer in the world" on my own page? Still, he must have done something right to make him pop up in the first few hits of Google -- I could learn a thing or two from him. And then there's this guy. He always comes up first. And he's a writer, too. Damn you, Brian A. Crawford.

The Leaf Blower: Is it hard to keep a low profile when you bear such a striking resemblance to Christian Bale?
Brian Crawford: Yes. I had to grow a beard for camouflage.

The Leaf Blower: What's the name of your book?
Brian Crawford: It's tentatively called Double-blind. My book is about clinical trials, and double-blind is a type of trial design -- where neither the patient nor the doctor know which treatment the patient is on. It also has a double meaning, since the main character is blind to some real bad stuff that's been going on.

The Leaf Blower: Oh, I get it. It's very clever.
Brian Crawford: Thank you.
The Leaf Blower: How's that working out for you?
Brian Crawford: What?
The Leaf Blower: Being clever.
Brian Crawford: Great.
The Leaf Blower: Keep it up, then... right up.

(Last bit of dialogue courtesy of Tyler Durden)

Jersey Girl

2009-03-17T04:17:00.000-07:00

I have a new writing partner. After our beloved Hannah died, we were reluctant to get a new cat; we just didn't think we'd find again that magical combination of beauty and personality. But after months of combing the animal shelter ads, we had an instant connection with a two-year-old female named Jersey, and we brought her home. She has ash-colored fur and marbled blue eyes that seem to transcend her tiny body. The name stuck, although we sometimes call her Jersey girl, Jurisdiction, Jurisprudence, Dickey, or Eloise.

Jersey is markedly different from her predecessor. She's agile and energetic, with a wicked vertical leap. She can't prop herself up on her own fat like a feline Jabba the Hutt, and she never meows at 4:00 a.m.

But she's not without her quirks. She drinks water slowly, methodically, constantly throughout the day, and she uses her litter box at least once an hour. She might be diabetic. And she's obsessed with toilets. She doesn't just drink the water, she licks the bowl. Fervently. We think the animal shelter didn't tell us everything.

Jersey hates being picked up, but she loves being petted -- in a weird way. When you pet her, she raises her backside up and sticks her tail straight into the air. The whole thing is so immediate, so taut and erect, it borders on obscene. I mean, I just want to relax on the couch and languidly pet my cat, and there's that pink butthole in my face.

Chester, of course, couldn't be more afraid of Jersey if she were a lumbering T-Rex. If he gets anywhere near her, she emits a low growl that sounds like it's coming from the apartment below, and Chester backs up slowly, not sure what to do with his eyes.

Jersey's growing on us, though. I have to remind Amy that even Hannah took about a year to warm up to her. So, in the warm and fuzzy department, Jersey is light-years ahead. She's already sleeping on our bed. But much to Amy's (and my) chagrin, she'll only sleep on my side.

Five Questions with Shawna Yang Ryan

2009-03-10T14:20:00.000-07:00

I’d like to welcome Bay Area author Shawna Yang Ryan to The Leaf Blower. Her book, Water Ghosts, a finalist for the 2008 Northern California Book Award, will be released in April by Penguin Press. Shawna was nice enough to sit down with me (over email) and answer a few questions:

-You’ve had a very successful debut. How did you get your break?

I've been very lucky. And by lucky, I mean, I've been lucky to have had great support during the long road to publishing this book. I began sending it out in 2002--7 years ago! It was first published in 2007 as Locke 1928 by an independent press called El Leon Literary Arts. My editor and publishers lived just a few blocks away and were generously transparent about the whole publishing process. It was a great learning experience for me. Then, somehow, a reviewer for the site Shelf Awareness got ahold of a copy and reviewed it favorably. An agent saw it and contacted me. The initial printing was nearly sold out and the rights were about to revert back to me, so the agent ended up selling it to Penguin Press. Working with my editor there, too, has been a very positive experience. I can't take credit for my "break," but one good move I did make was not giving up, even as my rejection binder was filling up.

-Name one writing book you would recommend to all new writers.

William Zinsser's On Writing Well. The title says it's for writing nonfiction, but his advice applies to any kind of creative writing.

-You’re obviously interested in history. Other than Locke in 1928, which time period and place do you wish you could visit?

I wish I could just be Orlando and live through all the ages, but if I could choose only one, it'd be the US in the 1960s! The world was in flux--there was a global shift in culture and politics, and a sense of possibility and hope amid the violence. The "Flower Power" thing has become such a stereotype--I would have liked to have seen it when the ideals were genuine, not spoof-worthy. And I'd love to have kicked around Haight-Ashbury in a fringed vest and beads. Groovy.

-Your prose has an almost musical quality to it. If you were forced to give up reading, or listening to music, for the rest of your life, which would you choose?

This is funny, because I'm pretty tone-deaf and I don't think of myself as musical in anyway. Yet, I just recently realized how inextricable I find writing and music--I make playlists for my books, and have to listen to certain songs during certain scenes. I'd love to embed some audio player in my book. Alas, my true love is words, so the books would definitely have to stay.

-What’s next for Shawna Yang Ryan?

Short term, I'm staring at a stack of bluebooks. Long term, I'm working on a couple of writing projects, and gearing up for the Penguin release of Water Ghosts in April. Hopefully, whatever I can do to sustain the writing life is what's next.

Learn more at http://shawnayangryan.com/

Also check out:
http://www.elleonliteraryarts.org/
http://www.shelf-awareness.com/

Rejection, Konrath Style

2009-03-04T02:00:00.000-08:00

I'd like to welcome guest blogger J.A. Konrath to The Leaf Blower. Konrath's blog, A Newbie's Guide to Publishing, has been named one of Writer's Digest's 101 Best Websites for Writers. I asked Joe to share some of his most humiliating rejections, and here's what he had to say:

***

My name is Joe Konrath. I've published over sixty short stories and articles, sold nine novels and an anthology, and make my living as a full time fiction writer.

I've also gotten over six hundred rejections.

Rejection is part of the publishing business. This is because publishing is mostly based on luck. Getting the right story, in front of the right editor, at the right time, and you'll make a sale. But the stars pretty much have to align for this to happen.

I still get rejected all the time. Even with a few hundred thousand books in print around the world, I still have trouble getting published. It's just how the business works. Those with thin skins need not apply.

Way back in the 90s, before email offered authors the thrill of instant humiliation, rejections came via the US postal service. Looking through my massive collection, I've noticed the majority of them are Xeroxed form letters. But I've found a few choice ones to share here.

"Dear Mr. Konrath. Thank you for writing, but the agent you addressed your query to died two years ago, so he won't be reviewing your manuscript."

A shame. It was a ghost story, too.

"We passed your proposal around the office with great amusement and much laughter. Unfortunately, we don't believe you intended this to be funny."

Glad to cheer you up. Even gladder that you're now out of business.

"I didn't like anything about your book. But someone else may prove me wrong."

They did, and the book won a few awards.

"There's a lot to like about your writing, but a dying protagonist is a tough sell in these days of "continuing" sleuths."

So far, my dying protagonist has starred in six novels and four short stories.

"There is an awful lot of swearing, and if you read a lot of mysteries you will note that swearing is held to a minimum."

You obviously haven't been reading the same shit I have.

"Please find the enclosed brochure for Writing the Blockbuster Novel, a book which provides guidelines for writers seeking to create commercially successful work for today's highly competitive fiction market."

While I enjoy How-To books, I'm a bit put-off by an agent trying to sell me his. Especially since he's never written a blockbuster novel. That his book is now out of print and self-published makes me even leerier.

"I found the premise extremely imaginative and original, and you do a remarkable job balancing the brisk pacing with humor."

This is a rejection?

"Save ten dollars off the evaluation of your manuscript with this coupon."

Run away. Run away as fast as you can.

"To me, this works better as a movie."

Damn it! Why can't I write something less cinematic?

"I have just taken on a thriller with comparable qualities."

I watched. And no you didn't. A few years later, however, you did take on Chapter 11 Bankruptcy.

The list goes on, but frankly, leafing through all of my rejections began to depress me, so I stopped and grabbed a beer.

That said, even now, after an illustrious mid-list career, I still get rejected.

It isn't personal. It's business.

Remember, there's a word for a writer who never gives up: Published.

Persistence is the key. Rejections are proof you're making an effort.

The only writers who fail are those who never submit.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to get back to work.

Here are some pics of Joe's Rejection Book, one of them comparing the thickness to the Chicago Yellow Pages.

JA Konrath is the author of the Jack Daniels thrillers, and writes the blog A Newbie's Guide to Publishing at http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/. His latest novel, AFRAID, was written under the pen name Jack Kilborn. It was also rejected a dozen times before finding a publisher. Read an excerpt on his website, JAKonrath.com.

Guest Blogger on The Leaf Blower

2009-03-03T20:40:00.000-08:00

I'm mixing things up this week. I've invited a guest blogger named J.A. Konrath to write about some of his most humiliating experiences with rejection. Konrath's blog, A Newbie's Guide to Publishing, has been named one of Writer's Digest's 101 Best Websites for Writers. And he will be posting tomorrow on The Leaf Blower -- so please check back tomorrow!

Case of the Mondays, Part II

2009-02-24T11:41:00.000-08:00

I got a real job. I've known this for several weeks, but I held off announcing it as long as possible. I start on Monday. I'm rejoining the real world two months earlier than planned—I'll have been off ten months instead of a year—but the perfect opportunity fell in my lap, and, given the economy, I jumped on it. I'm going back to my old biotech job, but as a consultant. So it's a short-term commitment, and I should have more flexibility to continue my writing.

I have mixed feelings about going back to work. I'm excited to be interacting with human beings again, but I still need a few more months to get my book into publishable shape. Overall, though, I'm very satisfied. I accomplished what I set out to do: I've transformed myself into a writer. I've experienced the life of a writer in a way that no school could've taught me. I've written alone and in groups, at the park, in a cafe, on the train, in the middle of the night. I've read a dozen books on writing. I've filled four notebooks and 400 computer pages. I've completed two short stories and drafted several more. And I've written 46 blog posts, and gained a mini-following (thanks readers!).

What did I learn from all this? I've learned that writing is hard. I've learned that writing is easy. I've learned that once it grabs you, it's always there—at work, on vacation, in the shower, at three in the morning. I've discovered that I write faster on the computer, but better by hand. Mornings are ideal for editing and revising, but evenings are best for pure writing, as if my brain needs to be a little tired and loose in order to drop its inhibitions and create. Most importantly, I've learned what happens when I stop distracting myself and just slow down and sit in the present with my thoughts, like I did as a child. Wonderful ideas come that way.

While I won't be writing full time, I have gained enough momentum to continue writing seriously for the rest of my life, and if that fire is the only thing I've taken from this journey, it was well worth it. And yes, I'm going to keep posting to this blog (I might have to change the name to "On quitting my day job to write for ten months and then going back to my day job while continuing to write"). It's one of my favorite times of the week. So I'll keep posting if you keep reading—and probably even if you don't.

Always be Closing

2009-02-17T11:24:00.000-08:00

We're always selling ourselves, the adage goes, and this has never been more true than at the San Francisco Writers Conference. The event consisted of three intense days of workshops, Q&A sessions, key note speakers, and book signings, but what it was really about was networking, networking, networking.

There's something paradoxically comical about writers trying to sell themselves in every breakout session, bathroom, and buffet line. If you want to feel like a god for a day, fashion a name badge that says "editor" or "agent" and stroll around a writers conference. Jesus himself could've floated through the crowd, and he would've been trampled on the way to the agent's table. Witnessing the milieu, I gained a deep respect for editors and agents, and a better understanding of what it's like on their side of the table. One agent told me he gets 600 emails a day, most of them book queries (proposals). 600 emails! And we're not talking about a "thx" message from Jim in accounting; these are emails with entire manuscripts attached.

As frenzied as the hallway schmoozing was, the scheduled pitch events were even more intense. I can't imagine what it was like for the agents and editors. They sit at a table for hours, and every three minutes, a bell rings and another eager-eyed scribe sits down to pitch a book. I would have bashed my head against the table after the first half hour, but these professionals remained engaged, polite and responsive. I was extremely impressed, and I'm not just saying that in case one of them happens to be reading my blog. Are you reading my blog? Anyone? Remember me... we met at the SF Writers Conference... I'm the biotech thriller guy... remember?

For me, the conference was a huge success, and well worth the price of admission. I connected with several writers and freelance editors. And I pitched my book to three agents and one editor, and all four of them liked my idea and asked me to send sample pages! Exciting... but remember they haven't yet seen the writing -- and that's what it's all about.

Speed Dating

2009-02-10T08:37:00.000-08:00

I'm going to a speed dating event this Sunday. Sure, I just got engaged and it's Valentine's Day weekend, but it'll be fun! Okay, it's not THAT kind of speed dating; it's an event called Speed Dating with Agents – part of the San Francisco Writers Conference I'm attending this weekend.

The event is just like it sounds: you have a dozen literary agents in a room full of conference attendees who, like me, paid an extra $50 for the hour-long event. The agents stand up and tell the attendees who they are and what type of work they're looking for. Then you sit down with an agent, and you have THREE MINUTES to pitch your book, including time for the agent's response. You give your spiel. A bell rings. You stop talking. The agent responds. Then – ding! – a second bell rings and you move to the next one. Pretty intense, huh?

The rest of the conference looks intense, too: lectures and workshops from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., then gala parties, book signings and open-mic events. It's my first writing conference and I don't know what to expect. What do I bring? What do I wear? What do I do? What will the agents and editors be like? Jerry Maguire with glasses? George Plimpton in tweed?

But I'm most excited and nervous about the speed dating. In preparing for this event, they tell you to imagine your book was turned into a movie. If your movie was on TV, what would TV Guide write about it? Mine would read something like this (imagine a voiceover from, say James Earl Jones):

An FDA physician, reeling from his wife's death, travels to Mexico City to investigate a fraudulent drug trial. There, he uncovers a horrifying scheme that threatens to destroy his faith in the American medical system – and forces him to explore the darkest corners of his grief.

Something like that. Needs some work.

I'm bringing along several copies of the first page of my novel, a synopsis, a full manuscript, and some business cards. From what I hear, it's extremely unlikely that anyone will ask to see your work, and if they do, they read one page and decide on the spot if you can write. Yikes. I'm trying not to take the whole thing too seriously, but it feels like that scene in Hustle & Flow when D-Jay is trying to get Skinny Black to listen to his demo tape.

So wish me luck. Because it's hard out here for a pimp.

Big Day, Big Year

2009-02-03T10:17:00.000-08:00

Amy and I got engaged on Friday! I picked her up from work, and with Chester in tow we headed to Fort Funston, a coastal wonderland of eroding sea cliffs, sand dunes and ice plant. It was one of those rare San Francisco miracles when there was no wind on the beach, and, although the sand was cool and it was twelve degrees in the shade, as long as you stayed in the path of the low sun, it felt like summer in San Diego.

Dogs of all shapes and colors were playing in the lazy whitewater, and the sun was setting as I got down on one knee and asked Amy to be my wife. Chester did his part by nudging his wet, sandy tennis ball against my bended knee.

Later, we went out for a fantastic steak dinner where we were treated like celebrities – literally. After dinner these two young English boys came up and insisted I was a famous gymnast. Our server intervened, and I swear she said the boys thought I was a famous gymnast who also happened to be named Brian Crawford, which seemed an extremely unlikely coincidence, but not much weirder than mistaking a six-foot-three skinny guy for any famous gymnast, and anyway we'd had a lot of wine, so I couldn't be sure. Nonetheless, I gave each kid my autograph and said, "keep practicing."

So 2009 is shaping up to be a huge year. We plan on getting married in August or September, so I can add a wedding to my list of big events, along with finishing my book, and getting a real job!

My name in The New Yorker

2009-01-26T16:23:00.000-08:00

It could be my only chance to get my name in The New Yorker: the cartoon caption contest. I've been submitting captions every week for the past month; once you start, it's pretty addictive.

Unfortunately it's got me thinking maybe my one-liners aren't that original. But the consolation, it seems, is that neither are anyone else's. Once the magazine editors choose the winner, they post all the losing entries. Perusing the entries, I was struck by how many of them were similar. For example, for the following cartoon, about one caption in ten made some reference to "the long arm of the law."

That's remarkable when you think of how "unique" New Yorker readers are supposed to be (the winning caption: "Please try not to stare at his disproportionately short right arm").

As far as I can tell, there are around 3,000-5,000 entries per contest. And when the three finalists are announced, you can bet that about 4,907 of those people–myself included–think, well mine was better than those.

I'm quite proud of the one I submitted for last week's contest:

"I'm gonna have to pay you in cigarettes."

And I think my caption for the previous week should've made the finals:

"Now the large bucket's got warm water, and the small one's got cold. If you don't start talking–well, let's just say you're going to be very uncomfortable."

I'm not holding my breath, though. When I think of the selection process, I picture this tired intern having to comb through 4,000 entries in an hour every Monday morning: skim... skim... no, no... no... NO... definitely not... no... no... maybe... no... no... no... what the hell?... no... whoops, dropped a page–no time to pick it up... no... no... NO!... no... no... I got an MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop for this?

Even with such a minuscule chance of winning, it's fun. I'd like to ask for your help on this week's contest. For the below cartoon, the best I've been able to come up with is, "Then she said, 'you tell me, Doc, does this hurt? How about THIS?'"

Readers, I'd love to see your suggestions–no matter how ridiculous (you can submit anonymously)–in the comments field!

A Writer in the White House

2009-01-20T12:21:00.000-08:00

Jon Favreau must be pissed. The actor/screenwriter/director of Swingers and Iron Man fame spent 20 years clawing his way to the top only to be upstaged by a young speechwriter of the same name. This morning, if only for a moment, Jon Favreau, the 27-year old leader of Obama’s speechwriting team supplanted Hollywood's Favreau as the top Google result for that name.

I love to see a young writer get so much attention. And it’s exciting that Obama himself is being called the best writer to hit the White House since Lincoln. In a time when everyone from Bill Clinton to Jenna Jameson commands a team of ghostwriters, it’s refreshing to hear that Obama wrote his literary memoir, Dreams from my Father, himself.

Obama will understandably be too busy to write much during his years in office, but one can assume the legendary control freak will ensure his own literary touch does not disappear from at least his most important orations.

Finally, it’s worth reiterating what a badass Lincoln was. He wrote everything himself. The guy had a few other things going on in 1863, but he somehow found the time to write one of most celebrated prose poems in American literature:

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

2nd Draft is Done

2009-01-13T10:05:00.000-08:00

I finished my second draft! This feels like a more significant accomplishment than completing my first draft. I now have a manuscript that reads all the way through; I can officially say that I’ve written a novel.

So, what’s next? I’m taking a week off to gain some distance from my story, then I’ll read my manuscript all the way through for the first time. Next, I'll start on the third draft, for which I may enlist some outside editorial help.

It’s the perfect time to take a week off. On Thursday I leave for a research trip to Mexico. The majority of my narrative takes place in Mexico, and I want to get some of the details right – the sights and sounds and smells of the places I’ve conjured in my head. I’m sure I’ll have a lot to write about next week.

Read one hundred books, write zero

2009-01-06T10:05:00.000-08:00

I'm entering the final stretch for my second draft. I've cut my original draft by half, but at least I will soon have a 50K-word standalone novel. Not bad for eight months' work, considering that when I started I'd never completed so much as a short story, and I had to take a few months to read books on how to write a book.

Lately I've been wondering where I'd be now if I'd taken a more traditional route -- like going to grad school and getting an MFA in Creative Writing/Fiction. Never mind that I wouldn't have been able to get in; you need to submit a quality manuscript to apply, and a year ago I wouldn't have had the time or the know-how.

Assuming I could've miraculously gotten into a graduate program, where would I be now? Well, I probably would have learned a lot about the craft of writing. I would've made some valuable connections with professors and other writers. And I'd be much poorer. But one thing is for certain: I wouldn't have completed a second draft of a novel by now.

You do a lot of reading and critiquing in MFA programs. One grad school has the motto, "Read one hundred books, write one." My worry is, what if I don't like, say, 87 of those books -- but I'm forced to read and critique them? That's a lot of time I could've spent writing -- or reading books I enjoy. Right now, I only have to read books I like, or at least books by writers I want to emulate. And I guarantee that all 100 of those books are "literary fiction." Since I'm writing popular/genre fiction (medical thriller), I'm not sure how much this would help me.

Furthermore, traditional schooling goes against the main point of my experiment, which is: what if I cut out all that extraneous B.S. and focused 100% of my time and effort on actually completing a novel?

Don't get me wrong, reading and writing literary fiction is a fantastic way to improve one's writing skills -- it's just not necessarily the route to completing a novel. Once I complete my first book and go back to work, I'll consider applying to a low-residency MFA program. I know I would learn a lot, and it would force me to keep writing in the face of work responsibilities.

Finally, in case you're wondering what the difference is between genre/popular/commercial fiction and literary fiction, David Lubar sums it up in his Guide to Literary Fiction:

"If you're ever in doubt about whether a story is literary, there's a simple test. Look in a mirror immediately after reading the last sentence. If your eyebrows are closer together than normal, the answer is yes."

The 10,000-hour Rule

2008-12-30T10:16:00.000-08:00

Ernest Hemingway famously said, "the first draft of anything is shit." If you agree with that -- and I most certainly do -- then you could say that the second draft of anything is "organized shit." I don't mean that in a bad way -- I'm quite happy with my second draft -- it's just that it is far from publishable quality. But at least the story is getting clean and organized.

I'm making great progress. I didn't write at all the week of Christmas, and by the fifth day I was freaking out about it. So when I got back into town, I worked my ass off for four days straight. It helped that everyone I know was out of town. Now, I'm caught up -- on schedule to complete my second draft by January 15th. And then I'll start on the third.

Meanwhile, I read a book called Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, the influential author of The Tipping Point and Blink -- and owner of really cool hair. I know, I recently berated y'all for reading too many nonfiction books, but I got this one for Christmas and I couldn't put it down. (In a previous post, I referred to Gladwell's New Yorker article, which highlights one of the same concepts as his book).

According to Gladwell, one of the main things that separates extraordinary successful people from others is PRACTICE. Tons of it. He discusses what he calls the 10,000-hour rule; essentially, it takes this many hours of practice -- about ten years of working nearly full-time -- to get really good at something. This holds true even for people we think of as prodigies or geniuses. He gives numerous examples, from Bill Gates to Mozart (Mozart actually developed "late"-- he'd been composing for over ten years before he produced anything good -- he just started really early).

But my favorite example is the music group, The Beatles. Everyone knows the story of how John, Paul, George and Ringo came to the U.S. in 1964 and took the American music scene by storm. But what's interesting is what happened before they landed in America. In 1960, while they were just a struggling high school rock band, a club promoter invited them to play in Hamburg, Germany. At the time, Hamburg didn't have rock-and-roll music clubs -- it had strip clubs. So that's were the Beatles played. The promoters wanted to keep this huge strip show going around the clock, so the group was forced to play up to eight hours a night, seven nights a week.

(sorry... distracted... wondering how I could get someone to pay me to write in a strip club for eight hours a night, seven nights a week...)

By the time they hit it big in 1964, they'd already performed live an estimated twelve hundred times. Most bands today don't perform that many times in their entire careers. Factor in offstage practice, and The Beatles had easily hit the 10,000 hour threshold by the time they arrived in America.

I could go on about this topic for hours, but I've got to get back to work. Just 9,027 hours to go...