Month: June 2026

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!”