And you may ask yourself, “Where is that large birthday cake?”

My birthday season is in full swing and I couldn’t be happier. We ate dinner in our favorite Italian restaurant, where the food was fab and the waitress was stoned. “May I have a knife?” I asked her, because she had neglected to bring one. She replied, “Yes, for your chicken,” as if congratulating me for understanding utensils. Deborah, as if foreseeing this difficulty, had ordered something vegetarian.

We have a picnic with excellent old friends lined up for the Fourth. I have a writing conference lined up for mid-month, a sort of fantasy baseball camp where I won’t have to depend on my eye-hand coordination. Our main activities will be a) talking about writing, and b) complaining about money.

Meanwhile, look who else is having a birthday: The United States of America! Good work, everyone!

In honor of our nation’s birthday, and because I immigrated to this country from the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, I want to spotlight my favorite boat, the Constitution, as seen in this 1960s postcard from the Charlestown Navy Yard:

Like most things that were built in another century, it’s a miracle that Old Ironsides still exists. It is the oldest active-duty warship still afloat, in our navy or anyone else’s. (HMS Victory, Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar, is still a commissioned warship, but the British moved her ashore after she was damaged during the Blitz.) For this miracle we can thank Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and a poem he wrote in 1830 when he heard that the Navy planned to decommission and scrap the Constitution:

Oh, better that her shattered hulk
Should sink beneath the wave;
Her thunders shook the mighty deep,
And there should be her grave;
Nail to the mast her holy flag,
Set every threadbare sail,
And give her to the god of storms,
The lightning and the gale!

In 1830, this was incendiary stuff, and the public rallied to save what was quickly becoming a sacred relic.

On July 4, 2024, the Constitution appeared in the WordPress blog wwiiafterwwii. You may wonder why a sailboat launched in 1797 would appear in a blog devoted to 20th-century war junk. OK, it’s a stretch, but the blog’s creator, the anonymous jwh1975, used his post that day to celebrate our nation’s birthday by profiling the Coast Guard cutter Eagle and the Constitution. The Eagle was formerly a Nazi ship, so that’s her connection to the war. As for the Constitution:

On paper USS Constitution was the flagship of Rear Admiral Felix Gygax, commander of the 1st Naval District which had its GHQ relocated to Boston during WWII. Quite obviously it was not a suitable flagship for commanding the high-intensity, long-range conflict against Germany’s u-boats and was not used as such.

During WWII, the Constitution served as a brig and a storehouse for foreign flags and ceremonial swords. We all have a part to play in this life.

Today, the Eagle is used to train sailors in teamwork. The Constitution, however, simply exists:

USS Constitution is a fully commissioned, active-duty warship. The 83-persons crew are active-duty officers and enlisted sailors. Unlike USCGC Eagle which retains a utilitarian training function, USS Constitution has no mission of any sort. Congress funds its continued active service simply because American voters want this.

Happy birthday, everyone, whether it’s your birthday or not, and remember that telling your stoned waitress it’s your birthday usually results in a free dessert. Smooth sailing to you in the coming year. I’ll be back on Sunday, July 26, somewhat older but hopefully wiser. But I’ll still complain about money.

Thank God It’s Monday 14

Some postcards are bizarre. There is no point in altering them. They are perfect:

This card preceded the Mary Poppins movie by approximately 60 years. I call him Marty Poppins. I considered stamping springs under his shoes or adding fireworks, but why? The publisher said it all.

At the time this card was mailed, it was illegal to write anything on the blank side except for the name and address of the recipient. People did it anyway, so the law was changed. Jack, the man who mailed Marty, was a law-abiding citizen.

Other cards cry out for alterations…except for this next one, because whoever mailed it, all those decades ago, added a message that will live forever:

I bought each card because I loved them as they are, not because I thought I could improve them. I can’t improve them.

Things that go clack in the night

The last time I took a typing test was in 1985. I was seated at an IBM Selectric and given a sheet of text to reproduce. I rolled a sheet of blank paper into that humming power plant and started typing. After the timer went off and my errors were deducted, I had hit 120 words per minute.

I may be off a bit in the year and the score, but you get my point. I was fast, even on the incredible hulks I grew up with. When I was inspired, I could produce a rolling thunder that drove my family to exile me to the basement. I tried a typewriter here in adulthood. I was already in a basement. My wife suggested the garage.

Computers make us all fast (the internet makes us furious). Here are the top three word-processing time-savers:

“Don’t think. Type.” I’m paraphrasing Ray Bradbury, who said “dream.” On a computer, you can type forever without stopping. On a typewriter, when you reach the end of a line, a bell sounds and it’s up to you to whack a lever so you can start the next line. We worry that computers train us, but look what a typewriter did with one little bell!

The magic of the backspace key. Changes cost nothing. “I can’t write five words but that I change seven,” Dorothy Parker lamented. If you could’ve given her a laptop, she would’ve given you the chair next to her at the Algonquin Round Table.

Global search and replace. With a computer, if you decide some paragraphs are in the wrong place, you highlight ’em, cut ’em, and drop ’em somewhere else. Easy. With a typewritten manuscript, you cut up the pages, throw away the extraneous parts, do some rearranging, and tape the thing back together. Want to get fancy? Run your taped-together monster through a copier to make everything cleaner so you can start cutting and taping all over again.

Does all this sound like I am dancing on the grave of the typewriter? I’m not dancing on anything unless you’re playing Duran Duran. And anyone who has ever corresponded with me knows that I love typewriters. The monthly Typewriter Afternoon at our library leaves me quivering with antici…pation. I am in awe of the intrepid woman who lets the public use her machines.

Typewriters: Letters, yes. My novel, no. Writing fiction is slow enough.

Historical note 1: The science fiction writer Frederik Pohl claimed that he wrote a story in 1936, sold it in 1937, saw it published in 1938, and was paid in 1939. This is not too far off from the experience of writers today, except for the getting paid part.

Historical note 2: In 1990, I took my typewriter to my regular office-supply store in Seattle. It was the last place in Seattle that serviced typewriters. They turned me away. They were done with typewriters. The improbable typewriter renaissance was still years in the future. I sold my typewriter at one of our yard sales, to a college student who wanted to live in a garret and starve and all that other writer stuff. The black plastic carrying case had some of my best stickers on it.

I sometimes think of my Smith-Corona. If I had kept it, by now it would’ve racked up decades of hibernating in a closet. As much as I love typewriters, I would consider it a life-changing inconvenience if I had to return to one. But I can’t deny the joy of hopping from one typewriter to another, from an armor-plated behemoth that has survived the journey from the 1940s to a svelte greyhound from the 1970s.

“To this day I think my best work came from the Selectric. Like others, I would plan an article in my mind or even outline it on paper. Then I would type it in one fell swoop with almost no changes. Today I stare at a screen and then start typing, go back, and edit and edit. I am more apt to try to proofread on the screen rather than the printed page as I used to. I know I caught more problems the old way. The new way may be flashy and modern, but the old way was better.”

This quote is from the essay “Requiem for a Typewriter” by Frank Romano. It appeared in Electronic Publishing in September 1995. I can’t find the essay online (Requiem for a Typewriter is a 2024 album by Bad News), there are many Frank Romanos who write (the Wikipedia listing is for a bass player), and Electronic Publishing is no longer publishing. Robert J. Samuelson wrote a similar essay with a similar title in Newsweek in the same year. It was an inevitable topic back then.

I understand Mr. Romano, but if we could ask him today, would he still claim “the old way was better”?

It wasn’t better. It was just different. And, at least once a month, incredibly fun.

But if you really want to talk Old School: There’s nothing like pencils.

Thank God It’s Monday 13

In 1935, e.e. cummings self-published a book of poetry. Because 14 publishers had said no thanks, he called the book No Thanks and dedicated it to the 14 of them:

cummings, who was very concerned about how his poems were displayed on the page,  produced this image on a typewriter. I know how to do that. You count the letters and spaces in a line, divide by two, and backspace backspace backspace from the center of the paper. It helps to only use lines that contain an odd number of letters.

There’s a lingering bitterness in what cummings did. Bitterness is useless. I get aggravated but I try not to be bitter. The 47 editors who rejected the story I wrote about in yesterday’s post might have done so because it wasn’t the sort of thing they publish. It was too long. It was too short. It was too Jewish. It was not enough Baptist. They had already read three similar stories. They were dealing that day with an audit, a toothache, or a bad love deal. Maybe they just didn’t like it. Whatever the reason, there’s nothing I can do about it…except copy e.e. cummings!

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then give up.

I just published a story called “Waiting for Mishy” in a magazine called Uncharted. I mention this for two reasons. First, I’m thrilled! Second, I want to briefly tell you the story of this story.

I started writing it in 2022. I finished it in 2023. I sold it in January of 2026. Uncharted posted it last week. By literary standards, that is faster than a speeding bullet.

And in the three years I spent trying to find a home for “Waiting for Mishy,” it was rejected 47 times.

Obviously, there are three things you need as a writer:

  1. A place and time to write.
  2. Persistence.
  3. An armor-plated psyche.
  4. When I first started writing, this list included typewriter ribbons.

You can do your life’s work in 30 minutes a day. You can do it in 15. You can write in a room of your own, at your kitchen table, at a coffee shop, in a library, or, like one writer I knew, in the back of a car.

You can write for a few years and then give up because everything is moving at about the same speed as a cat sleeping in a sunbeam. You can give up because you fear the rejection the way you fear the Reaper. Or you could follow Robert A. Heinlein’s fifth rule of writing: You must keep what you write on the market until it is sold.

[Note to the ghost of Heinlein: In 2021, I sold a story called “Schmitt Takes the Night Off” to The Buckman Journal (it’s behind a paywall) (not a problem for you, since you’re a ghost) that was rejected 69 times over 11 years.]

Rejection, I must remind you, is the river in which we swim. “You will write many more failures than successes,” Richard Bausch said. “You never ask yourself anything beyond, ‘Did I work today?’ ”

Or, as Jeff Lieber put it, “Write every day about something you give a shit about.”

Be patient.

Thank God It’s Monday 12

Here’s a useful rubber stamp. What’s up, Office Man?

It’s been a long time since I went to work in a suit and spent the day writing things on paper. But Office Man’s expression, that of a man who can’t believe his boss just threw another stack of invoices at him, is universal. We’ve all been that tired. We’ve all stood on the edge of the despair. Like Talking Heads, I’d rather stand on the edge of the stage.

Office Man is a team player:

Falling Woman, by the way, is welcome everywhere:

I am thinking of Office Man because I’m revising the first draft of my novel, and I feel a bit beleaguered with all the feedback I’m working with. Beleaguered as in this photo from the May 11/18 New Yorker:

This photo is by Eli Durst, from an article about high school debate clubs and debate club prep (“Resolved”). If you’ve ever tried to revise a book, this scene will make you feel right at home!

How do you keep readers reading?

Brandon Sanderson is an insanely popular author who gives talks on writing. You can find them on YouTube, the home of all contemporary learning. Although I am unlikely to read any of his books, the important thing to me is that Sanderson has a knack for punchy summaries of how fiction works.

In one of his talks, he said that the characters people love and want to follow generally share three characteristics:

  • They are proactive.
  • They are capable.
  • They are relatable.

But not equally so. A protagonist, in Sanderson’s view, is good at one, so-so at a second, not good at a third. Mr. or Ms. Protagonist might even believe he or she is good at something when, in truth, they suck the phone.

I’m not sure I buy this, but it’s as good a place as any to start a discussion. I have two examples, one for, one against. Let’s see how they stack up.

Fails the Sanderson test: Aragorn, the heir of Isildur.

Proactive: Are you joking? Aragorn, when The Fellowship of the Ring opens, is not a king, he’s a Ranger. His only job responsibilities are smoking a pipe and hanging in pubs. When he’s finally kicked into motion, he can’t even find a clean shirt or a barber.

Capable: Yes. He’s the greatest fighter of the Third Age of Middle-Earth, capable of defeating orcs, ghosts, witch kings, Uruk-hai, octopi, and various other beasties.

Relatable: No again. The man is not only handsome, he’s invincible and irresistible. If he wanted to, he could have not one but two girlfriends: Arwen, and, as a back-up singer, Éowyn. The man who is wary of commitments will always attract the women who want one.

Aces the Sanderson test: Me!

Proactive: Yes. I’m a chess player. I wanted to get better at chess, so I studied with a chess master.

Capable: After two sessions my teacher told me, “You have no shortage of ideas, all of them bad.”

Relatable: I am admitting this.

So would I make a better protagonist than Aragorn? Despite my good looks and my boyish mop of hair, the answer is no. Tolkien humanized Aragorn by surrounding him with a team of dimwits, wannabes, and party animals. (Except for Legolas, Aragorn’s sexless, elven shadow. Why not one of the half-wild, funky elves who join the humans for the Battle of Helms Deep? Those elves rocked.)

If I were your protagonist, you’d have to go the other way and surround me with a team of people who know what they’re doing. For example, my wife and our dogs. I don’t know how many people would read such a book. I know my wife would refuse to be in it.

I mention this because I have begun the revision of the first draft of my novel. My first task is to do something about my hero. Critics from the American Federation of Protagonists have described him as “insufficiently involving,” “an emotional mystery,” and “what the heck was he thinking?”

While I was writing the first draft, this thought from Jane Smiley pulled me through:

“Every first draft is perfect because all the first draft has to do is exist. It’s perfect in its existence. The only way it could be imperfect would be to NOT exist.”

Now that I’m working on the revision, I am holding to these words from Judy Blume:

“I’m a rewriter. If I died during a first draft, nobody would know what I was trying to do, including me. I’m learning with my first draft.”

Remember: The rewriting is the fun part. As Crash Davis tells Nuke LaLoosh in Bull Durham, “Let’s have some fun out here! This game’s fun, OK? Fun goddammit!”

What grasshoppers have to do with fame

Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women marches on. The story of Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy has not been out of print since it was published in 1868 and no one can get enough of it, even though Laurie married the shallow sister, Amy, rather than the exciting and weird one, Jo. Laurie was not the first man to be hypnotized by a great pair of legs.

Alcott lived for another 20 years. Little Women’s instant success transformed her from a scrabbling, scribbling freelance writer who had to support her family and her parents into a writer who never had to worry about money again. She still had a publisher, though, and, like all publishers, they demanded a sequel: Little Men, which appeared in 1871. Little Men was my introduction to the March family. I found this treasure in the attic of my grandparents’ house, left behind by one of my aunts (five sisters with their own book club). Being a kid in 1871 was not like being a kid a century later, and yet the story immediately engulfed me.

[Heretical intrusion: Little Men aims lower than Little Women and it’s never going to gather a fan club, but it’s a better piece of writing overall. Nobody in Little Men spends a hundred pages swanning around Europe, falling in and out of love with idiots.]

In 1886, Alcott’s publisher prevailed on her to write a third book. She didn’t want to. She never set out to write a trilogy, and she was sick of these people, particularly Amy and Laurie. The result, Jo’s Boys, is what critics thoughtfully term “dreadful.” I read it in 2004 because I had given myself a reading theme of 19th-century American novels. I read all three books. I’m glad I didn’t start with Jo’s Boys because reading that one killed my theme. I rinsed my brain with someone’s memoir of their sex life.

“It is a strong temptation to the weary historian,” Alcott writes in Jo’s Boys, “to close the present tale with an earthquake which should engulf Plumfield and its environs so deeply in the bowels of the earth that no youthful Schliemann could ever find a vestige of it.”

After a brief rundown of how everyone turned out, Alcott concludes:

“And now, having endeavoured to suit everyone by many weddings, few deaths, and as much prosperity as the eternal fitness of things will permit, let the music stop, the lights die out, and the curtain fall for ever on the March family.”

Even in a doorstop like Jo’s Boys, Alcott’s talent is evident in three consecutive chapters, “Emil’s Thanksgiving,” “Dan’s Christmas,” and “Nat’s New Year,” in which she easily and convincingly handles a murder, German high society, and a shipwreck. What all those situations are doing in the same book is another issue.

A star is born, and she’s not happy about it

I’m writing about Jo’s Boys because of an early chapter, “Jo’s Last Scrape,” in which the author shows us what life was like for Jo Bhaer, the celebrity, in 1886—Jo of course being a stand-in for Louisa May Alcott. Her fans adored her. They sought her autograph, her advice, her money, her attention, her heart. “Strangers demanded to look at her, question, advise, warn, congratulate, and drive her out of her wits by well-meant but very wearisome attentions.”

Jo, trying to write, was beseiged in her own home, and it didn’t help that her kind-hearted but dimwitted family let these people in. She hid behind curtains, disguised herself as the maid, climbed out the window. Her own husband, Professor Bhaer, the most useless man in the literature of this country, brought home a troop of 75 young men from the YMCA in the middle of a rainstorm and they had to be entertained, too, because this was 1886 and good manners prevailed. (This being 1886, when the rain stopped, the young men gathered in front of the house and sang a song of farewell.)

If you’ve ever wondered why the McLean House, where Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, is a reproduction, it’s because the souvenir-mad soldiers of both armies ripped the place apart after the surrender was signed.

I don’t ever expect to find super fans collecting sticks or grasshoppers from my yard or asking for an old scrap of my underwear they can weave into a quilt or a rug or reporters spinning fabrications from whatever bit of my life they spy through a half-open door. (All of which happened to Alcott.) I don’t have to disguise myself as the maid we don’t have or jump out a window and land on something in the garden that I’ll hear about later. But these pages from Jo’s Boys are a reminder that a good writer can make a good story from almost anything, and make me laugh 140 years later.

Thank God It’s Monday 11

“There isn’t enough televised chess,” David Letterman said back in the 1990s the night he had a young Garry Kasparov on his show. Everybody laughed, but this is the NBA now. Times have changed.

You might think it’s difficult to integrate rubber-stamped chess pieces with the images on old postcards. Think again. It’s easy.

This card is from the early 1900s and shows hundreds of costumed Normans doing the Safety Dance at a wedding in Morbihan. This is a crazy way to dress for a wedding, but it works well with the antiquated design of the chessmen. Everyone is looking in every direction so naturally some of these folks appear to be looking at the pawn, rook, and king.

If Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” has popped unbidden into your head, it’s because she rhymed “apricot” with “gavotte.” Yes, I think that’s crazy, too.

Bauhaus (the German art movement, not the British band) influenced the chess set depicted on this modern postcard. I dressed it up with my friend the cowpoke.

Bauhaus the band has a 28,800-word Wikipedia entry with 282 footnotes, which I believe exceeds the entries for the Seven Years War, the Great Wall of China, and David Letterman.

Stop chasing that muse. She’s too fast for you.

Like everyone who drives a car fueled by gasoline, I just topped off my tank and paid more per gallon than I have ever paid in my life.

Will the price I just paid look like a bargain by the end of the summer?

By the end of the summer, will the government force us to pay for gas using crypto?

I miss life when crypto was a dog.

We could all use some inspiration right now. To help myself and other writers, I’ve gone looking for words of encouragement from people who aren’t writers. Borrow from the best!

First up is the mistress of mail art, Melissa Hughes, who works with rubber stamps:

People often tell me they are waiting for inspiration or worse waiting for a “good idea,” as opposed to just an idea that maybe could be made good if it was allowed to be born, but we try to edit in the thinking stage and all that does is shut one down. I used to wait for inspiration, but that is kind of like waiting until it rains to get water to drink.

Don Carr, who died in 1993 and left us with his dreams, was a master of rubber stamps and colored pencils. Don was not afraid of showing up at his desk, grabbing his tools, and going for it. Go in the wrong direction? So what? “The mistake is sometimes more interesting than the intended impression,” he once said.

Babe Ruth would’ve known what Don meant. The Babe believed that every swing and a miss brought him closer to his next homerun.

The fear of error

This brings us to the late Chuck Yungkurth, an engineer by trade and a lover of trains, who wrote an essay with that title for Model Railroader in January 1978. Yungkurth had noticed something he couldn’t understand at his model train club: Armchair modelers. These men claimed they were enjoying the hobby in their own way:

I am skeptical. The stacks of kits and equipment are bound to be depressing. The number of times these would-be modelers turn up disposing everything at the annual auctions in our club leads me to believe that is the ultimate end for these people. The solution is to plan and theorize to a point—and then start construction.

But what if you screw up? Guess what, you will screw up. Babe Ruth knew that strikes are just part of the game. “Model railroading is a hands-on, learn-by-doing business,” Yungkurth wrote. “All really fine modelers can tell horror stories of early blunders…yet all consider these part of the learning process.”

I have to include one writer in this post, so I’m cuing up Garrison Keillor. According to our man Yungkurth, “there are almost no errors or mistakes that cannot be rectified, nor are there any real penalties for failure.” Keillor agrees: “Be bold, thrust forward, and have the courage to fail. After all, it’s only writing. Nobody is going to die for our mistakes or even lose their teeth.”

“Do something—do anything—and don’t be afraid of making mistakes,” Yungkurth wrote. Stop waiting for inspiration, my friend Melissa says. Mistakes might be interesting, and they’ll certainly teach you something, Don Carr knew.

The only secret: Show up at your desk.

  • Fifteen minutes a day.
  • Two hours a day, two days a week.
  • Early every morning or late every night.
  • “Daily writing and one day off”: One of my teachers, Merridawn Duckler.

There’s a schedule that will work for you. You’ll know it when you find it.

Chuck Yungkurth: “Better small than not at all.” This is Tango’s interpretation of me revising my novel. I type; she chews.