A Little More Privacy, Please.

I know, that's funny, coming from a public blog, but there it is. My writing life lately has been a mostly internal affair and, to be honest, I'm pretty happy with it. Hence, no posts since March. Used to be (way back then) I'd chime in on twitter or facebook to roust some eyeballs for this page, but it's just not terribly important to me lately. Lately I'm content to surf a couple of days a week, log the session in my journal, tinker around with a manuscript I've been tinkering with for the past year, and read a lot. I think it's a reaction to what seems to be the hyper-monetizing of every aspect of modern life. It's sickening to me, really, and I feel no need to get anyone's attention. In fact, it's a pretty magical feeling to create a really nice work of art (poem, story, drawing, whatever) and share it with just a few people, for their own private enjoyment. That's something you can't discount, much less put a price tag on.

Holy Mahabharata, Batman!

Sometimes you finish a book, and the overriding feeling you get is of accomplishing a feat of endurance. Just so with the Mahabharata, the great Hindu epic of India. Now, the work in its entirety is eighteen volumes, so my one volume summary and translation is more like the Mahabharata Cliff's notes, but at 800 pages requiring over a month of dedicated reading, it was still quite a bit more substantial than a mere gloss. It was, to be frank, an effort to read it. Worth doing once, to be sure, but work nonetheless, and an effort I wouldn't have undertaken fifteen years ago, having in those days no tolerance for countless digressions and highly exaggerated and nearly interminable (even in summary) scenes of battlefield carnage.

In all honesty, it's an effort I probably wouldn't have undertaken now if not for another work: comic writer Grant Morrison's 18 Days, a retro-future (or more correctly, futuristic deep history) re-imagining of the eighteen day Bharata war, full of jaw-dropping illustrations by Mukesh Singh. 18 Days is, in a word, rad, and it's radness is such that it manages to infect the original with an apocalyptic relevance that makes it seem somehow less overblown and more accessible to the 21st century reader weaned on Science Fiction. If this seems trite, be assured that's not my intention. The Mahabharata is a great work, and certainly worth reading in summary with selected translations. The characters are astounding, particularly the incomparable man/god Krishna, and there are passages of incredible humanity and day to day relevance scattered like precious gems throughout. But it's not a casual read by any stretch of the imagination, and your mileage will vary with your patience.

An Irate Looks At Forty

Not quite a week ago I turned 40 and for the past several days I've been trying to figure out if it means anything. The only real conclusion I've come to is that if I haven't figured it out by the end of the year, I'm letting it slide. I've learned this much in 40 years - You can't know everything, you can't control most things, and you shouldn't have to finish anything that's wasting your time. Also: Platitudes come easier with age, but they still smell like bullshit.

Hell, I'm not sure I'm even a grownup yet, or what that means. Just look at my birthday gifts: A trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium (a shared present with my son and my wife), a Wave caster-board (a two wheeled device that's ridiculously fun but mostly ridden by eight to twelve year-olds), and a copy of the Mahabharata (abridged at almost 900 pages). I can't make sense of any of these things in combination and I suspect I shouldn't try. Better just to let it slide and go surfing instead.

The Slim Margins Of Magnificence

I haven't been writing much in this new year, but I have burned through four or five books in the past three weeks- a survey on popular crime, a book on presidential sex scandals, a biography of Muhammad Ali, and the biographical segment of a book on Leonardo da Vinci. On the surface they don't seem much related, and I suppose they're not, not really, but one thing that struck me after reading them is a sense of the temporal brevity of any one person's fame (or infamy, in the case of crime and scandal). That a book of two hundred to four hundred pages can contain the significant instances of a man's life (several men usually), hold him in essence like a specimen in a glass jar, is incredible, humbling, and terrifying, all in one big burrito.

It also says, to me at least, that even the best of us, leading the most eventful of lives, have spent an incredible majority of their time doing utterly mundane things. I suppose that could be depressing, knowing that we're all in thrall to the inescapable ordinariness of life, but it also means that any one of us on any given day is only ten minutes of determination and luck (good or bad) from transcendence. It means too that even the greatest in our midst are still ninety nine percent human being, godlike for the blink of an eye, but no more. Time runs away, my friends, even if you don't bother to chase it.

Reflections On A Recent Fan Letter

If you want to be a successful (fiction) writer in this modern age, it is simply not enough to have a vibrant imagination and a talent with words. This is a truism. It has been repeated over and over, by the people who pay the bills (commercial publishers), by the people who serve the people who pay the bills (editors), and by the people who allegedly connect the writer to the people previously indicated (agents and Famous Friends of the Author). Even those people who pay their own bills will affirm that this is true, and any writer with an internet connection and a passing familiarity with this foolish business can clearly see it.

To this I say, So what?

In writing, there are greater truths (believe it or not) than those written in a publishing contract for a 5 to 50k copy print run, greater than Amazon sales rankings and long tail earnings, and much greater than the platform that many writers feel needlessly compelled to climb atop and do a silly market dance. I don't know what these truths are (Well, I know a few) but you do. So get them out of your head and into the world and share them, however you can. I swear, touching even one reader with the personal power of your hard work will make it all worthwhile.

I'm Sorry For Not Being Sorry

This blog was going to begin with my love of Robert Graves and segue into Siegfried Sassoon, whose The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston I'm currently reading. Then I was going to mention an article in the Surfer's Journal regarding Felipe Pomar and a tsunami (!) and an excellent editorial by Ed Lin in The Believer that eviscerates the practice of putting human bodies on display for commercial entertainment. I would still encourage you to follow the links because they're well worth checking out, but, to be quite honest, my heart just isn't into producing a long post for its own sake. And that's all right, because as a doggedly amateur writer I am under no obligation to perform for anyone but myself. So enjoy the links and I'll be back whenever I have something I think is worth reading. And speaking of something worth reading, here's a link to a post from Levi Montgomery's excellent blog: The Write Rants that encapsulates perfectly the way I've been feeling lately. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a(nother) novella I need to be working on.

DIY Horrorshow: A Self-Pubbed Writer's Halloween Bestiary (abridged)

Let's start our scary tour with:

ISBNs- I have some. I've even used them on three of my books. Still, they're ugly, unwieldy, and mostly unnecessary at my level of publishing. If this were a horror movie, my ISBNs would be named Renfield, or Igor (It's pronounced eye-gor. And one other thing- They're ISBNs, not ISBN numbers. International Standard Book Number numbers? Automatic Teller Machine machines? They're acronyms for Christ's sake; you're not supposed to add redundancies to them. It makes them go crazy and eat flies.)

Barcodes- Hey, do you think that guy in the jackass costume- No, not Kanye. The other guy, the one who referred to Kindle books as "crematoria lit"- do you think that guy realizes that his book and nearly every other carries the most widely accepted fascist tattoo in the history of modern civilization? After all, we gotta move that product. Arbeit macht frei, and all that. Oh, c'mon, lighten up. What's a horror list without Nazis?

The Em Dash- Seriously? Em dash? Why can't I just use hyphens? Ctrl what? I don't see it. Where? OK, this is getting creepy. No, I'm telling you it's not there. Wait, who turned out the lights? Hello? Oh crap, it's behind me, isn't it?-

Word Count- Just like being buried alive, without the mercy of suffocation.

Agents and Editors: Known best by the bloody limbs (occasionally a head), severed with sharp knives, that they leave littered on the ground. As in any entertaining horror movie almost everyone runs towards them, even when they should know better.

Money- The lure, like sex, fame, and rockstar status, that leads us back to Camp Crystal Lake every time. Like survival, it is largely illusory.

The Devil- If you write, and you don't know him (I'm looking at you, Nicholas Sparks), there will come at least one time that you wish you did.

A Platform- That place where you dangle from the noose, for the amusement of:

The Audience- That's you. I mean, what's the point of this whole little Danse Macabre without you? I hate you all.