Writing

Thank God It’s Monday 18

It’s still summer, so here are two vacation shots.

Falling woman goes anywhere. Literally. To match the birds in flight, I used a black market to color her in. I love these silhouette cards, which are always from the beginning or the end of the day.

A typical wife at the beach. She’s about to turn to take the relay from the outfield. Stamping on photographs is tricky. I got lucky with this one.

I’ve been asked what stamp pads I recommend. For black, Versafine or Ranger. Versafine, made by Tsukineko, bills itself as “the longest lasting pigment inkpad available.” Ranger, from Ranger Industries, calls its pads “archival.” I’ve had excellent results with both. Versafine and Ranger pads are thick enough to stand above their plastic frame. That means you can ink up a rubber stamp image that’s larger than the pad itself.

Do NOT spend your money on stamp pads that are advertised for school or office. They don’t last. Even the U. S. Postal Service, which is not exactly a champion of technology, uses self-inking stamps.

At a recent estate sale I ran across a picnic table of art supplies. I picked up stamp pads I’ve never seen before: A deep-sea blue from Inkadinkado, a teal from MementoLuxe (also made by Tsukineko), and three weird colors, including “pesto” and “pool,” from Sea Brights and Adirondack (both made by Ranger).

I also bought a letter set, but as usual I was disappointed. Searching through a letter set one letter at a time to find the one you want is like hunting and pecking on a typewriter. At least on a typewriter you get the little bell at the end of the line and when you’re done you don’t have to put the letters away.

I’m in love with this thing, which was made in the 1950s and is surprisingly quiet. I haven’t convinced anyone to buy it for me…yet.

Can’t anyone here play this game?

Once upon a time, a recruiter contacted me about a communications job at a financial services company. I was unemployed and happy to have an advocate, but I returned from the interview with some concerns. My chief concern was my co-workers. They were mostly women, which I thought was a good idea, but mostly a year or two out of college, which I thought was not. Why would they hire someone as old as me?

My recruiter, who was my age, was shocked, shocked, that anyone would discriminate against older workers. “We are not going to play their game!” she declared. What game we were going to play, she didn’t say. Baseball? Battleship? If she had said chess, I would’ve been all set.

I didn’t get that job, but the male founder and CEO was eventually accused of inappropriate behavior toward his largely female staff, so I guess it all worked out.

I was reminded of this blip on the radar screen of my career when I thought to apply last week for a fellowship.

If you’re a writer, your money comes from publishers. (If you’re self-published, your money comes from your friends and relatives and your more generous connections on Linkedin.1) But you can apply for free money: grants and fellowships. The United States is chock-full of organizations that want to fund your writing.

Most of this money is not exactly free. Even if you outrun the competition, you might then be required to teach a class or organize a community event. That kind of stuff I understand. What I don’t understand, and what stops me, is when they want you to describe your project and provide an artist’s statement.

I am not going to play their game.

Describe my project? Your grant period doesn’t begin for four months or more. I don’t know what I’ll be into by then. What if I finish what I’m doing and start something new? What if I get excited or bored or end up in a cul de sac? What if I follow Hemingway’s suggestion that I start with something I know and go to something I don’t? Hey man, don’t box me in.

My artist’s statement? Does that have something to do with intersectionality or interiority? Using these words makes me feel like a freakasaurus in a clothing store for teenagers and somebody’s mom just spotted me and called mall security.

I like to write! Writing is fun. Sometimes I write something serious. Sometimes I write about my family, or a job, or sex. One of my goals is to write something that includes all three. This paragraph is as close as I’ll ever get to a statement. And I’m choking on the word “statement.”

Sometimes I think these magazines would benefit from a little more oomph. Like…can’t there ever be a murder? Or a sci-fi story? Or just something fun! Like somebody falling in love! Or somebody having an affair! (Naomi Kanakia on The Yale Review)

I’m happy that these arts groups exist. They help a lot of writers. Acknowledgements pages often mention these benevolent institutions. Perhaps if I had spent a chunk of my adult life in academia, I might feel differently about this process, but I haven’t touched the stuff since Watergate.2

Alicia Jo Rabins said, “If you aren’t rejected from 90 percent of the things you apply to, you aren’t aiming high enough.” Rabins wrote a musical about Bernie Madoff, so she’s probably someone we should listen to. I aim plenty high. I’ll let someone else apply for these things. But if someone out there is handing out free money…I hope they’ll think of me.

My title today was of course uttered by Casey Stengel during the New York Mets’ traumatic first season. If Stengel could’ve traded a couple of infielders for some arts administrators, he would have.

Next week: Where my novel is. That’s a game I do know how to play.

1 You indie authors are too easy to pick on. Did you know that half of all self-published books today have been written (I mean, generated) by an artificial inteligence?

2 Just to say something positive about academia, my journalism instructor, Boston Globe columnist Jeremiah Murphy, taught me how to write an obituary and how to meet a deadline, two skills that have served me well in almost every job I’ve ever had.

Thank God It’s Monday 17

Some postcards are as common as crows. The Tacoma Totem Pole was erected in downtown Tacoma in 1903. This postcard, published in the 1920s, shows up again and again at postcard shows, usually in the bargain box. This has given me multiple opportunities to deface it. Here are two:

The pole, by the way, is no longer the world’s tallest and in fact is no longer in this world. It was removed in 2021 in consultation with local tribes, as it

  • doesn’t represent them
  • is carved in no known style
  • was probably carved by whites, and
  • was stuck there in the first place because Seattle had already stolen a pole from a tribe in Alaska, set it up in Pioneer Square, and bragged about it.

Tacoma wanted something to brag about, too. At least they didn’t steal it.

Writing my way out of the penalty box

Last month, I spoke with a journalist who told me that journalism was hard to leave. She was attracted to the fast pace, “the quick hits,” and the rewards of daily or weekly publication, “As if someone is handing you cookies.”

I understood what she meant. I enjoy the combination of relief and excitement when I hit a deadline. And I have always enjoyed cookies.

I worked in journalism, where stories were often held up by the race to find one last quote or check one last fact. I also worked in software, where projects were held up by the engineers, who spent most of the day chasing each other with shotguns and starships before finally writing the #@$!&* code.

Now I set my own deadlines. Last month at the Port Townsend Writing Conference, I set one in public. On Tuesday I accepted the challenge of one class with four prompts and on Thursday I read what I’d written at an open mic.

From this experience I deduced that I needed more deadlines in my life. Quick hits, not the long march through the hundreds of pages of my novel that I must revise. So I started revising a story I wrote a few months ago and that I’m unhappy with. Surely I could do this in a week! And surely it would read like that, too.

If I were playing fútbol, the referee would’ve held up a yellow card, pointed at me, and cautioned me for time-wasting and deliberately delaying a restart. Which brings me to Henry Miller’s advice from way back in 1964: “Work on one thing at a time until finished.” Don’t rush off in different directions.

Miller knew what he was talking about. Everything he wrote was banned in his own country until he was 70, but he never stopped writing.  

“Forget the books you want to write,” Miller said. “Think only of the book you are writing.”

And so I return to the book I am writing.

I still want cookies, though.

Can writing be taught?

My answer is no. Last month, at the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference in Fort Worden, Wash., I was prompted, challenged, and possibly transformed. But on the day I arrived, I already knew how to write. I doubt that any of my fellow students, all 150 of us, came to the conference to learn to write, either.

But let’s hear an opposing point of view.

The Famous Writers School of Westport, Conn., was not an MFA program or even a low-residency MFA where you do everything online but meet in person once a year. The Famous Writers did business only through the mail. The school imploded over shady business practices in 1972 but lives on in a lengthy entry on Wikipedia.

Those of us who were reading magazines in the 1960s (I was young and precocious) remember their ads, usually featuring an authoritative, mature white male, under headlines such as “We’re looking for people who want to write” and “I FIRE WRITERS…with enthusiasm!”

The 12 famous writers who lent their names to this enterprise did not prepare lessons or grade homework, though that was the promise. A bunch of second-string drudges did that. The true story was broken by Jessica Mitford, who has her own lengthy entry on Wikipedia.

(Among the Infamous 12 were three writers I respect: Bruce Catton, Max Shulman, and Rod Serling. Everyone has to eat. Oh, also Bennett Cerf, the co-founder of Random House and a long-running joke in my house because of the title of his book Try and Stop Me.)

The Famous Writers School was a hustle, and yet somebody learned something. I recently found one of their flyers inside a book I bought at a library sale. The flyer, from about 1969 or 1970, offered these testimonials:

  • Sells fourth book: “Your training has paid off! I’ve sold my fourth book to the New York publisher, Abelard-Schuman.” Eileen Panowski, Los Alamos, NM
  • Sells 11 stories in 6 months: “Just received a check from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. That’s 11 stories in six months.” S. Novak, Wayne, NJ
  • Lands job as society editor: “Thanks to you, I was recently hired as society editor of our local newspaper.” Mary Neatherly, Hardin, Mont.
  • Cracks science fiction market: “After two years of trying, I sold to Fantasy & Science Fiction a few months after enrolling.” R. Lory, Richmond, VA
  • “I can see the good life now,” says a former police officer, William W. Blanks of LA. “Recently I sold three more articles, which means that so far I’ve sold everything I’ve written since enrolling in your School!”

Who were these folks?

Eileen Panowski (1920-2011) wrote six mystery novels for “teen or intermediate” readers. The Apache Gold Mystery (1965) was an Edgar Allan Poe Award nominee. (Source: Nebraskaauthors.org, where they misspelled Allan)

Mary Jean Neatherly (1920-1989) worked as a secretary for the Hardin Herald, now the Big Horn County News. There’s no mention in her obituary of being the Herald’s society editor, but that might be because of the era. The paper didn’t value her contributions because she was a woman writing for other women and she performed this function while also serving as a secretary. She was a member of the Poetry Writers Association of America. (Source: Findagrave.com)

S. Novak received a check from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. I’m sure it wasn’t a subscription refund. Unfortunately, EQMM does not maintain a public database of its authors. There’s a Steve Novak writing today, but he is way too young to have received a check from anyone in 1970.

Robert Lory (1936-2020) graduated from the Famous Writers School in 1964. He wrote dozens of novels in the 1970s, including the nine installments of the “Return of Dracula” series. (The title that intrigues me is Dracula’s Brothers. I love an involving family saga.) But check this out: His story “The Star Party” was selected for World’s Best Science Fiction: 1965. His neighbors in that book included Fritz Leiber, Philip K. Dick, Thomas M. Disch, and John Brunner. “The Star Party” is the story Lory mentions in his testimonial. (Sources: Wikipedia, the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, Library Thing)

William Winfield Blanks (1928-1989), the former cop, wrote two episodes of the 1976 TV series The Blue Knight, based on the novel by Joseph Wambaugh, a former cop. (Source: A poorly written site called Prabook and the Internet Movie Database)

To judge from the Wikipedia write-up, the Famous Writers School failed almost everyone. But a few writers were able to say that they could see the good life. The people pinch-hitting for Bennett Cerf, Rod Serling, and the other authors of this authorial scam really did teach them how to write. Or did Eileen Panowski, Mary Neatherly, and their colleagues already possess that superpower? Maybe all they needed was some acknowledgement.

We will never know.

Don’t any of you send me your copy of Dracula’s Brothers.

What I did on my summer vacation

I go to a writing conference every 20 years. So when I go, I had better make the most of it. The Port Townsend Writers’ Conference at Fort Worden, Wash., was the most.

It’s going to take me awhile to digest this experience. All I’ll say this evening is that my week at the conference was inspiring and surprising. I wrote something I never thought I’d write and made connections with people I never thought I’d meet. Fort Worden is a state park, and I walked six miles a day, over a hill, along a beach, out to a lighthouse, through a cemetery, and many laps around the former parade ground.

I spent so much time with the deer that they stopped running from me. In another week, they would’ve invited me to dinner. Fiber. They know.

Fort Worden was once part of a series of forts that guarded the United States against seaborne invasion. This was a good idea when Capt. Horatio Hornblower was trading broadsides with Napoleon. It wasn’t so good after the invention of the aeroplane. But the Coast Artillery Corps built Fort Worden anyway, along with its friends, Forts Casey and Flagler, a “Triangle of Fire” that would destroy any fleet that menaced Seattle.

The only thing that ever menaced Seattle was Tacoma. The Coast Artillery Corps disbanded all three forts by 1953 and then itself. All that’s left today of the mighty CAC are the empty gun emplacements overlooking Puget Sound and the Coast Artillery Museum at Fort Worden. The museum is closing in September. Budget cuts.

I bought this shirt for half price:

Below is one example of what they built in the 1900s to hold off unnamed enemies. The rooms beneath the fortifications are open to the public. How many teenagers have been deflowered in there?

It’s about a mile around the parade ground. In the next photo, the barracks I stayed in is on the right. The cloud in the gap between the trees, to the right of center, is actually Mount Baker, far to the north of Fort Worden and just east of my hometown of Bellingham.

My barracks at night:

The cemetery, established with the fort, is still in use, for veterans and civilians:

I wrote a lot, learned to refrain from snacking because the cafeteria was closed between meals, talked poetry with the professionals, bantered with best-selling novelists, rocked the room on open mic night, and won the hand of a proud, aloof beauty named Willow. OK, the paw. Willow is a King Charles spaniel, though she might be part Pomeranian. There appears to be some disagreement on this point. I accept her as she is.

I’m happy to be home and ready again to dispense more half-baked wisdom!

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.

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.

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.

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!”