White punks on dope

This weekend I’m tending to the sick (impaired mobility) and rewriting a story that never went anywhere (impaired narrative). When you’re not on top of your game, life is about as workable as stale Play-Doh. So I’m taking a break to flame a big fat piggy target. No, not Donald Trump, Pam “Smooth Operator” Bondi, or the alarming idea that people might actually want to vote. I refer to the plight of the white male writer as described by Jacob Savage in “It’s Hard Out There for White Male Writers” in Compact, March 21, 2025.

“Over the course of the 2010s, the literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down,” Savage claims. Normally, I wouldn’t bother with this self-righteous effluvium, but Savage was quoted by columnist Ross Douthat in our paper of record, The New York Times, so I say let’s grab this fucker by the pussy.

(Note: E-ffluvium sounds like my dotcom, where I was going to become a millionaire. However, the first recorded instance in English of effluvium, in the sense of an emanation or a release of something toxic, was in 1651. A shame that William Shakespeare died in 1616. Bill would’ve given effluvium to either Dogberry or Falstaff and he would’ve thought up a hilarious 17th-century rhyme that we’d still be writing papers about today. What that man couldn’t do with six flights of stairs and a runaway harpsichord!)

“White male millennials, caught between the privileges of their youths and the tragicomedies of their professional and personal lives, understand intrinsically that they are stranded on the wrong side of history—that there are no Good White Men,” Savage whines, and in way too many words. Unfortunately for Mr. Savage, his essay appeared a couple of weeks before White Male Millennial Andrew Martin, author of two novels and a short story collection, published a story in The New Yorker.

As I understand it, The New Yorker is the Great White Whale for writers. It certainly is for me. Perhaps the Great White Male Writer still has some lead left in his pencil.

Thus Savage (who, among other things, proves that he knows next to nothing about science fiction, which he calls “a deep authorial remove from the real world”) joins the ranks of white male writers who yearn to be free of some unnamed, unidentified oppression. James Patterson, who has sold more books than anyone since King James and who is about as white and male as a white male can get this side of Mickey Spillane, complained about the same amorphous shit in 2022, a year when only a sad sliver of all books were written by white males: a microscopic 75%.

I’m sure this Tenth Avenue freeze-out was news to three of Patterson’s white male contemporaries, Andy Weir, Chuck Pahlaniuk, and Stephen King, all of whom seem to be coping just fine with the current literary environment despite whatever it is that’s trying to diminish them or cancel them or kidnap them and fly them to a distant planet for nefarious purposes that somehow involve breeding.

Has literature changed radically since Patterson’s privileged bitching in 2022 and Savage’s in 2025? My unscientific research says Yes! Since my last name begins with a B, I looked at the letter B in the list of Knopf Doubleday’s authors. I also threw in a few writers at the end of A and the beginning of C, because reading these things was like eating potato chips. There are 235 of these creatures, and judging by their first names and photos, 135 are white guys. That’s only 57%. Avengers assemble!

And this fortress of white male fortitude is even smaller than it looks because some of the white males on the Knopf list are dead: Richard Adams, Harold Bloom. Some of them are really dead: James M. Cain. Two of them were photographed with their dogs, two wore stupid hats, and one was Bono. Plus Nicholson Baker looks exactly like Frank Herbert and George R.R. Martin. Join us next time for: More white guys.

White males once ruled publishing. They wrote most of the published books, because they were Ernest Hemingway but also because most of the editors were white males. We have many people writing and publishing books today who are not white and not male. If this diverse atmosphere is too competitive for you, perhaps you should try another line of work, like high desert nudist or sub-inspector of nuisances. Or maybe you should work harder and write better? That’s what I’ve always assumed my rejections meant. Just a thought.

Spoilers: I’m white, I’m male, I’m good (or good enough), and I didn’t become a millionaire.

Thank God It’s Monday 3

Masking is how you block part of a rubber stamp’s image. The simplest way to achieve this is to place a thin sheet of paper (the mask) on the work surface, then stamp partway on, partway off the mask. Tracing paper works best, but pages from The New Yorker also work well. Your biggest challenge is alignment.

There are other ways to mask an image. You can stamp it onto a Post-it, then cut the image out of the paper. For the Giant Breaker Robot below, I used tracing paper to trace the breaking wave and the rocks and cut out the outline. I positioned the outline on the postcard, then stamped the robot. Most of his legs and one hand (appendage?) stamped harmlessly onto the tracing paper.

Mr. Robot (if he were a she, she wouldn’t be caught dead with hair like that) was made by Namz Rubber Stamp Co. He is one of my most useful stamps. He takes colors well, even if you just want to dot his eyes with red. But after I saw how he looked in the breaker, I left him alone.

This postcard of a generic surfside scene was published in the 1920s or 30s. Collectors call this type of card a linen, as it’s cardboard but with a textured finish. Linens are the most desirable cards for defacing. They take stamp-pad ink, colored pencils, and markers well, and they usually have vibrant colors because they started out as black and white photos that were then hand-painted. Linens are cheap. That’s good, because you’ll ruin plenty of them.

Footnote: If you’re not happy with a particular stamp, consider altering it. I had a stamp of a hair dryer trailing wild loops of wire. The hair dryer could’ve been any hair dryer, but the wire looked evil. I finally carved the hair dryer off with an X-Acto knife. Then I had a high-tech snake. Perfect.

First down and forever

Dear Readers: The Seattle Seahawks won their second Super Bowl on Sunday, February 8, defeating the New England Patriots 29-13. To honor this occasion, I am reprinting (with some light editing) what I wrote after the Seahawks’ first victory, back in 2014. This appeared on my old music blog, Run-DMSteve. My thanks to the Hawks for giving me an easy post this evening!

Years and years ago, when I worked at Seattle Weekly, when there were still wolves in West Seattle and humpback whales in Elliott Bay, when the grunge scene was an ordeal because it was always raining and the flannel shirts we wore soaked up the wet, before the motor car, before the wheel, before light rail, before we had to worry about the oral-sex requirements of sitting presidents, or reclining presidents, the editorial staff of our brave paper took turns writing the calendar section. For me that meant three tours of duty handling the sports listings.

My first tour was in the summer of 1989 and that went all right because I only had to work with baseball and I know baseball. I made fun of the Mariners (“When the meek inherit the earth, the M’s will be out of town”) and various college squads, reported on bike treks and road races and boat shows, encouraged people to play more chess, and ran a trivia contest that was won by a guy who used to work with my wife’s ex-husband.

My second tour, in 1993, was more of a challenge because baseball season was ending and football was beginning. I don’t care for football. I’ve been to one professional football game, in Boston, when the New England Patriots were still the Boston Patriots and they played in Fenway Park, home of the Red Sox. (This was not my idea – my Cub Scout pack dragged me along.) At one point during that icy afternoon I was handed a hot dog, which tasted as if it had been cooked in Nova Scotia and mailed to the ballpark, and like Charlie Brown I desperately wished there was a baseball game in front of me.

What was I going to do with football? Fear not! I had three advantages:

1) A book of football quotes I found at the library that I could use to fill valuable column inches. (“Football combines two grim features of American life, violence and committee meetings.” – George Will)

2) The Seattle Seahawks had an abysmal season in 1992, winning a total of two games. They were not poised to set the world on fire in 1993.

3) My trail had been blazed by a feature that ran in the 1980s in the Big Papers called “The Bottom Ten,” which focused on, if memory serves, the bottom ten.

Yes, the script wrote itself:

8 Sept. 1993: “The Raiders take time out from vacationing in Seattle to slice the Seahawks into lunchmeat. Next loss: on the road vs. the Patriots. At home vs. LA, 9/12 at 5. Catch the action on TNT or, if you have some consideration for your family, listen on KIRO-AM 710.”

15 Sept. 1993: “In Massachusetts, the Seahawks visit ‘Old Ironsides,’ Bunker Hill, Lexington and Concord, and, eventually, the stadium where the Patriots have gathered to shoot them full of holes. Next loss: on the road vs. the Bengals.”

Seahawks fans (the few who bothered to read this drivel) (the few who knew how to read) occasionally protested what I had to say, usually through an angry, anonymous fax. I wish I’d saved them. They had all been scrawled with felt-tip markers.

I should mention that I regularly lauded our basketball team, the consistently excellent Sonics (“The Sonics chase the whores of Babylon out of LA, then fly to Phoenix to extinguish the Suns”) while stick-checking our minor-league hockey team, the Thunderbirds (“The underpowered Thunderbirds are towed onto the ice to start the second half of the season”).

My last turn at bat, so to speak, was in 1994. In my final appearance in the sports pages I wrote:

“What have I learned? Chiefly, that if society is up to its neck in sports, it’s because sports answer a profound need in society. However, if an intense interest in the Seahawks is part of that need, then society is, without doubt, sick.”

Perhaps society is just a little bit healthier this morning, because yesterday the Seattle Seahawks reversed 38 years of misadventures and won the Super Bowl. It’s taken them forever, but they’ve taught me a lesson: that back then I should’ve volunteered to write the sports listings every football season. I didn’t know how good I had it.

In December of 1993 I wrote of the Seahawks, “And now, a team that needs no introduction, mainly because no one wants to meet them.” What can I say post-Super Bowl except that it’s the Seahawks, our very own oceangoing raptors, who now fly the highest. They are at the top of their profession and the top of the world, or at least that part of the world that plays U.S. football. Congratulations to them and to their fans, who God knows have endured much. I certainly didn’t help.

Thank God It’s Monday 2

I admit that it’s Tuesday and not Monday. Why didn’t I post my next postcard yesterday? “I hate Mondays.”

This week I continue my seafaring theme with a very useful stamp produced in 1993 by A Stamp in the Hand Company. In the tradition of most rubber-stamp companies, they seem to have disappeared.

What makes this stamp useful is that it’s mostly an image of a glass bottle. If you stamp it over a postcard, the features behind it will show through…exactly as if you were looking through a real glass bottle. It looks real, or as real as a giant glass bottle on the horizon can look.

It also helps that the sails are black, as if seen in shadow.

This card is a black and white image that was hand-tinted in Germany before World War I.

Happy belated Monday, everyone. Stay safe out there.

Eight reasons why you shouldn’t be a writer (and the one reason why you should)

Alice Mattison is the author of The Kite and the String: How to Write with Spontaneity and Control—and Live to Tell the Tale. I’ll bet her publisher saddled her with all the promise in that subtitle. But I can promise you that Mattison has some pertinent, honest, off-the-wall things to say.

About expectations:

A piece of writing may begin with what’s personal, but by the time we offer it for publication, we had better think of it as a work product….Your writing is not your child; it’s work, but unfortunately a kind of work that is often unpaid, badly paid, or weirdly paid: writers who make lots of money are often as baffled as the rest of us….The money, though there may be some, will never make sense.

About revision:

To read your work objectively, it’s helpful to surprise your piece of writing into thinking you’re someone else. To do that, put it aside for anywhere from a day to three years, the longer the better (up to a point). Then take it to a part of your house where you never write, or go elsewhere, and wear something unusual so it won’t recognize you—a cap, perhaps, or a jaunty scarf, especially if you are not jaunty.

About persistence:

Someone who has been unable to publish three or four novels and is on the third draft of her current novel may still have to start over, and even that doesn’t mean she’s hopeless or the book is hopeless. On the contrary, she may finally be on the verge of learning to write a novel—yet that often seems to be the moment when she decides to give up.

Mattison also gives us her eight disadvantages of being a writer:

  • No money
  • No respect
  • No response for a long time to what you’ve written
  • No structure helping you to get started
  • No structure warding off interruptions (no guardian to say, “She’s in a meeting”)
  • No guarantee that you’ll ever write anything that does anyone any good
  • No guarantee that, even if you do, the particular piece you’re writing right now is worth your time
  • No colleagues

And the one advantage, which outweighs the Evil 8: “The pleasure of it, the pleasure of words, the pleasure of telling a story.”

I admit I didn’t finish The Kite and the String; I tend to skim writing books looking for what speaks to me. Mattison is a teacher of literature as well as writing, and much of her book reads like a tour through English lit. She can be an amusing tour guide. She sums up the plot of Moby-Dick as one question: Where is that whale? The chapters everyone skips, which are about fish, she compares to an Amazon driver having to divert down several cul-de-sacs before it can get back on the highway.

“Being a writer is a profession, not the last scene of a romantic comedy,” Mattison writes, as she tackles the wide world of misconceptions. As one of my coaches used to say, though usually not to me, “Boy you got that right.”

This book is fun for veteran scribes, particularly the chapter “Rethinking Our Thought Bubbles,” and informative for rookies. Four paws up.

Thank God It’s Monday 1

Jeff Goins wrote Real Artists Don’t Starve. I’m not recommending this book. But Goins does emphasize that you should never create for free. I haven’t always kept to that plan–there was one story I desperately wanted to publish, and no paying market would touch it–but I’ve tried.

Goins relates an interesting statistic. The majority of people who take unpaid internships never get offered a full-time job. The majority of people who take PAID internships do get offered a job. So when someone offers you exposure instead of cash, ask yourself how much coffee you can buy with exposure.

Goins, in describing artists we can all emulate, for instance Michelangelo, notes that they didn’t confine themselves to one art form. So every Monday for the rest of 2026 I’ll expand my portfolio by sharing my altered postcards.

I don’t know if I invented the art form of rubber-stamping on old postcards, but I may have been the first person to write about it (Rubberstampmadness, 1993). Today’s card was published in the 1920s. I used extra thin paper to mask the ship’s hull. I only wanted the sails and rigging. Any resemblance between this image and my government’s economic policy is coincidental.

The sun climbs high in the garbage pail sky

In the United States, we are living through the most sustained stretch of violence since 1968, when the North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive and blacks rioted in American cities because they wanted their fair share of the American Dream. I was young and I didn’t understand. Stop, children, what’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down. Now I’m older and I still don’t understand. Why is my country at war with my country? How long will it take to repair all this damage, from Minneapolis to the rest of the world? Longer than my lifetime, and just to warn you, everyone in my family lives to a hundred.

Life is certainly upsetting, and as a small example of my mindset these days, I offer my recent trip to the emergency room. I drove myself, but before jumping in the car I pulled Dark Side of the Moon off the shelf, popped it into the CD slot, and as I backed out of the garage I turned the volume to 11. If I was going to die, I wanted to make sure that Floyd would be the last thing I heard.

(Spoiler alert: I’m fine.)

As Donald Trump continues to transform the United States into a garbage pail (lyrics courtesy of Beck), here in my little corner I find it difficult to write a blog about writing. Who cares what I think? But I keep reminding myself that even in Wold War II, the greatest catastrophe to hit humanity, people wrote books. They sang songs, they recorded music, they acted in plays, they directed movies. They bought tickets to baseball games. There were chess tournaments in Germany and Russia despite the ongoing slaughter of millions by air, land, and sea. I’m still writing. I hope you are, too.

It’s a challenge to end on a positive note. The true positive note will come when we rid ourselves of this soul-suckin’ jerk (again, Beck). But I’ll try.

In December, while waiting for the first draft of my novel to cool on the windowsill so I could carve it up for the second draft, I launched my Word Purge. As I examined all the flotsam and jetsam I had created and abandoned, I found a 900-word fragment about a retired baseball player and his dead mother, wife, and dog. As I read, I realized that this man was recording a podcast and that his house was full of history but not life and the story took off. I found his father. I found his agent. I found his post-baseball career. I found his quest. I now have 7,500 words and a glimmer of where it’s all going.

Where the United States is going is another question. When I listen to Beck, sometimes I think he’s a god and sometimes I think he’s a goober, and sometimes I think both in the same song. His album Mellow Gold captures the times we’re coping with today. Not bad for a record he waxed 30 years ago, when the only music formats were vinyl, cassettes, and CDs, when we didn’t have mobile phones, and when Republicans thought Bill Clinton was a threat to democracy because he cheated on his wife just like they cheated on theirs.

Alex Pretti, murdered by agents of the U.S. Border Patrol, Minneapolis, 24 January 2026. Rest in power.

Greetings from a man who is not stuck in a Birmingham jail

Hello to all my readers. I know you are rockin’ all over the world. Shout-outs to members of the Greenland Defense Force. (Bundle up!) Also to the kind Royal Canadian Navy sailors who showed me around their frigate when they visited Portland, Oregon, for Fleet Week. (When I asked how fast this thing could go, one of them said, “We can get a real rooster tail going!”) And I can’t forget the soldiers, sailors, and airmen of NATO, since I will soon be at war with them. Watch out, NATO, I have most of my hair and I can do as many as one (1) chin-ups.

Here in the United States we are celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr., Day. There is no mail service. The banks are closed. And our homeland has been invaded by our own Homeland Security.

Donald Trump’s attempt to refight the American Civil War doesn’t seem like a good time for the trivia I deal out in this blog: Observations on writing, reports on birthday parties and New Year’s Eve outings, and photos of my corgis, one of whom is relaxed and asleep under my desk. I know this because a few minutes ago, Lucky reached his relaxation release point. Like the Greenland Defense Force, I am ready for noxious odors from bad actors. I lit my emergency three-wick candle. Flame on!

I can only hope that what I write in here gives you a break from what is going on out there.

On Sunday I will present the 8 Disadvantages About Writing and the 1 Reason You Should Ignore Them, as enumerated in Alice Mattison’s The Kite and the String. I’ll also bring you up to date on my book and my Word Purge.

On Monday I’ll introduce a new art feature, because I spent 45 minutes today with Jeff Goins’ Real Artists Don’t Starve and he says I should expand my portfolio. His examples include Michaelangelo, Dr. Dre, and John Lasseter, the director of Toy Story. (Right. I am just like them!) Then I’ll stick to that Sunday and Monday schedule.

Stay safe, everyone. Pray for peace. Donald Trump: Don’t disturb NATO. As your eloquent SecDef phrased it, fuck around and find out.

Optimized for Arctic warfare.

Word Purge

You have to write around life. Sometimes someone is sick. Sometimes your government is sick. You can still find 15 minutes every day to do the work you love. What you can’t do is to retreat into silence. I don’t know who wins if you do that, but it certainly isn’t you.

I’ve tried to comfort myself lately with the thought that, given the immense sweep of geological time, humanity is barely a finger snap and all human misery will soon be forgotten, but somehow that hasn’t helped.

So today I’ll tell you what I’ve been doing on my summer vacation, by which I mean since I finished the first draft of my novel in October.

I knew I had to forget the book I’ve been living with since time began so I could someday return to it fresh. I turned instead to the numerous scraps, starts, and dead ends I’ve accumulated in my files. Honoré de Balzac would call these scraps & etc. evidence of my “itch to scribble.” I call what I’m doing now my Word Purge.

The first thing I did was to consolidate all the fragments in one file where I could keep an eye on them, even if it was just a teensy idea (John Muir’s “An Adventure with a Dog” set in space) or a reminder about a mental-health professional I met with twice and fired (Sandy the Self-Absorbed Psychotherapist).

The second thing was to examine the longer pieces in their individual files and see if any of them sparked anything or should I give up and shut them down. One of them must’ve been channeling Cthulhu because it immediately called me. It was 909 words long and I had abandoned it in 2022. I took it up again in December and I am surprised to say that I now have 4,200 words. Will this be my second novel? Will it be about a dog in space or a tough-love look at a man in the wrong profession? William Zinnser said it best: “Don’t worry about labels. We’ll figure out what it is after you’ve written it.”

I’ll return to my first novel on Feb. 1. And I’ll keep scribbling, no matter what happens in the world.

Tango will never retreat into silence.