Writing

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.

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.

Conan, you nut

I thought “geography is destiny” was a quote from an ancient and revered book, such as The Prince, The Art of War, or the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I was surprised to search for its source and discover an Ethopian-American writer named Abraham Verghese who is very much alive and writing.

Do the Tibetans read any fun books?

I bring this up because my editor and my wife have both said that my book lacks specificity. Meaning, why did I make everything up? Where are we really? What state is this?

There are several stories about Robert Louis Stevenson’s inspiration for Treasure Island. Here’s the one I prefer. RLS was painting the walls of a bedroom with his stepson when he was caught by the shape of one of his paintbrush doodles. He expanded it and reshaped it and it looked to him like the map of an unknown land. Next thing you know, we’ve got the books and the movies and one-legged buccaneers with parrots and everyone declaiming “Arrr” and speaking like a Welshman.

Deborah and I have painted many rooms and we’ve done plenty of doodling, including the time we were painting a basement when we realized, wait a second, this is a basement, who cares, and we stopped taping things off and we started rolling into and out of corners and racing around and right over unlucky spiders.

But that’s not where my book began. My book began on my sixth birthday when my father and my Uncle Morry gave me an Lionel electric train set. That was the first step. The second might’ve been right here:

This is a map of the Hyborian Age, invented by Robert E. Howard. It was accompanied by an essay on the civilizations of that time and I found it in the front of a Conan book I read when I was 12.

I soon gave up on Conan, as the formula was too predictable and there were so many writers listed on these things that they felt like a committee or a football club. I’m fairly sure I read Conan the Freebooter and probably Conan the Bootscooter. Howard’s writing was serviceable, certainly on a par with Andre Norton, though I note that Ms. Norton wrote her own books and didn’t require the 14 relief pitchers listed in Conan’s Wikipedia entry. But I never gave up on that map (and that essay).

My point is that, no matter how old you grow, you will never outrun your childhood.

My book is set, not in Hyperborea, Earthsea, or Middle Earth, but in the mythical kingdom of Colorado.

How to revise your novel in 10 simple steps: I’m lying

Do you really need 10 steps to revise your novel? Can’t you do it in three? Or is the true number 127? I have written 74,083 words of my book and the last two words were THE END so you’d think I’d know what I’m talking about. I don’t.

Here’s where I am so far, and I hope something I’m about to type will be of use.

1) I took the 5,000-word critique my editor wrote and the feedback from my wife and a trusted friend and combined them in one file. I don’t agree with everything they said, but most of it was worth considering and some of it was eye-opening.

2) I organized that file into something I could read. Blocks of text like Roman columns would be impenetrable. 500 bullet points would give everything equal weight, like potato chips.

Fortunately, Word has all the tools I need: Paragraphs, indents, boldface, borders, italics, underlining, and symbols for geometric shapes, musical notes, and my favorite, harpoons. Warning: Don’t make a craft project out of this. The idea is to create a hierarchy, not a hairstyle.

3) I sat and thought. I walked and thought. I napped and thought. This is also called procrastination.

4) Since the only way to tackle a large project is to take it one step (or bird) at a time, I’ve chosen characters as my first step. The consensus seems to be that I have too many, approximately enough to reenact the Battle of Hastings. This was never a problem for Dickens, and when I read Balzac last year I was impressed that he was still inventing characters in the final pages, but it seems that my skills are pitched a bit lower than those boys. For me, less is more…attainable.

My immediate goal is to figure out what each character is doing in my story, or what they think they’re doing. They may have wandered into my book from someone else’s. I will evict some. I will combine others by running them through the transporter during an ion storm.

My long-term goals are to finish revising this first book and begin writing my second book while staying hungry and keeping it real. Live my best life; fuck some shit up. More next time.

Plot twist!

My first blog started at a Lady Gaga concert in 2009 and deteriorated from there. Eventually I started this blog so I could write about writing, which is the one thing I know a lot about and probably more interesting to people than a blog about picking up after your dog.

In 2013, I participated in the Clarion West Write-a-thon, which I could safely do from the basement of my home when I wasn’t at work, at the park, at the supermarket, trying to maintain a relationship with my wife, etc. My goal for that six-week ultra-marathon was to write 50,000 words. As we neared the end, I opined that this goal might have been “a wee bit optimistic” while trying and failing to kick the nearest dog.

“I do wish I wrote fiction faster, but I don’t,” I admitted in a post dated 23 July 2013. “Marketing writing—that I can do fast. Advertising, editorials, web copy—I’m a speed merchant. These blog posts? Warp factor 6! But when I have to invent characters and situations and see how they play out, I move one. step. at. a. time. Sort of like the way the first primitive Mariners played baseball.”

But I did find that, as with anything you practice, the more you write, the more you will write, and the more you will think about what you’re writing. “There’s a kind of tautness that you should feel within yourself no matter how slow or fast you’re spinning out the reel,” John Updike said.

All day long that summer, and sometimes in the dawn before the alarm exploded, something in the back of my brain was working. I could quote Pink Floyd here (“There’s someone in my head/but it’s not me”), but every practicing writer reports what I reported then: “Objects and actions bubble to the surface, things I can use on a page I’ve already written or one I have yet to write, like a bird finding the right-shaped stick for its nest.”

Yet another reason why employment is bad for you

My years-long training in writing marketing and communications copy made me fast, but it also made me impatient. Know what we think about in Marcom? Tomorrow. Know what we don’t think about in Marcom? Yesterday. I wrote the first draft of a novel. Now you’re saying I have to go back to it? What about the next thing! The newest! The greatest! What about all these leftovers and scraps and ideas I’ve been working on since December?

And so with some difficulty I have returned to the manuscript, which feels as if it spent the winter in the same orbit as Pluto, and to the feedback I have received from three insightful people. The re-entry process is not immediately appealing, but I know what it is, and it’s simple:

Show up.

Return to your pages every day, preferably at the same time every day. Your fingers will unfreeze. The words will arrive. The tautness and the bubbling will return (sorry, I’ve tried on both metaphors and I can’t decide which one to take home). You’ll remember that revision is the fun part. And whatever objects and actions pop up in my brain in the dawn hours, you can be sure I’ll welcome them, right before I grab the alarm clock and throw it across the room.

Thank God It’s Monday 7

I try to post on Sundays. I wasn’t able to post yesterday, so today’s effort will be a bit longer.

Literary scammers continue to target me. The pace of incoming emails has increased, which I attribute to the war in Iran. The scammers’ language often sounds like something a Donald Trump fund-raiser would say:

“Your book will be displayed across our platform and listed as an invited title on our website, which receives up to 1.7 million visits every year.”

“Your book collection caught our attention and passed our review process with distinction.”

Today I received two messages from organizers of global book clubs with tens of thousands of members:

Elaine Louise, Literary Adviser and Book Selection Specialist for “The Elite Book Club,” invited me to be part of their “Spring 2026 Global Spotlight.” “Our readers specifically highlighted how your work captures the kind of emotional resonance we look for as we head into this season of renewal.” Tell them that in Tehran, Beirut, and Kiev.

And Sherry Organiser, Organiser of “THE Book Club (TBC),” also wants to hook up. “Our readers are deeply interested in stories that explore complex characters, moral dilemmas, and thought-provoking themes, exactly the kind of discussion your writing inspires.”

Sherry Organiser is a good name, but not as good as the scammer who signed one as Fanbase. And how many of you are members of book clubs that report up a ladder to people who control book clubs?

The only new wrinkle lately was an invitation to spend a base fee of $1,100 on audio book production (they don’t usually mention money right away) and a note from the “Literary Bureau” telling me how much they love my book. Which, as readers around here know, I haven’t finished. It seems that this book I haven’t finished, which they claim to have read, “closely matches the types of stories currently being explored for potential screen adaptation.” Wow!

They like my book so fucking much—you know, the one I haven’t finished and that they claim to have read—that they asked me to send them a copy so they can review it because they already fucking loved it. “If the project appears to be a good fit, we may then invite you to present your work and discuss the story further in a Zoom interview with a Netflix representative.”

As Margaret Atwood said recently, these scams are cruel. They take advantage of people’s hopes and their lack of understanding about publishing. It’s spam, my friends. Delete it. And pray for peace.

Some art now, please

Right. A book I thought was about steam railroads turned out to be black-and-white glam shots of steam locomotives, most of them captured in full throttle. I can only handle so many smoking wedgies. Soon I was ripping the book apart. Turns out that book paper from 1960 takes ink perfectly.

Sometimes you lift the stamp and you see the image is incorrectly placed. Sometimes you lift the stamp and it’s perfect.

Too bad the brakeman on the back porch isn’t more visible, but I love what I can see of his expression.

Say yes to your opportunities. You never know who is listening.

Loyal readers (all three of you) know that I finished the first draft of my novel last October. I waited a couple of weeks, then spent several days at the library reading my masterwork and ducking out for coffee. I finally handed the manuscript to two readers I trust:

William, who is a friend and a veteran book reviewer.

Deborah, who is a veteran wife.

While they chewed through the text, I inspected all the wreckage I’ve abandoned over the years. I turned a 900-word fragment into a 10,000-word story. I guess something clicked. I took a sledgehammer to a 2,000-word conglomeration of plot lines and now it’s one plot and 5,000 words. An old story caught my eye and I made it shorter. Writing a novel may have unhinged me, and several managers from my past might attest that I was not particularly hinged to start with.

My readers gave me invaluable feedback. My book reviewer friend wrote his as a book review—my first! And yet, I knew it would be a good idea to find a reader who wasn’t my friend and wasn’t my wife. Someone who wouldn’t hold back because they never had to see me again.

Readers, I found her.

A flyer appeared in our coffee shop from an editor looking for clients…a week or two after I wrote about a son recalling his mother’s advice: “Say yes to your opportunities. You never know who is listening.”

(Note: I loved my mother and my mother loved me, but this is not something she would’ve said. Opportunities carry risk and risk made her nervous. She was more likely to suggest I zip my jacket because it’s cold.)

After some back and forth on email, I learned that the person behind the flyer—to preserve her privacy, I’ll call her Maxwell Perkins—was a college student pursuing a career in publishing. I worked for a newspaper and I’ve observed many editors, and I know that how you communicate with your writers is half the battle. You can send Ms. Perkins up to the majors, because she has nothing left to learn at this level.

I hired her to read my book. Actually, I was going to put her off until I had returned to the first draft and revised it into the second, but Deborah informed me that I was—what’s the word? Oh yes. WRONG.

Three weeks later, my new editor sent me her 5,000-word critique and a Google doc with 177 comments on my manuscript.

I have plenty of work ahead of me, but this is revision and revision is the fun part. This is going to be a much better book. Thanks to Deborah, William, and Maxwell Perkins.

Thank God It’s Monday 5

Sometimes I can’t think of what to do to a particular postcard and sometimes the rubber stamp jumps from its drawer and says “Pick me! Pick me!” These 1920s views of the U.S. Southwest are plentiful and painterly. They are fun to stamp because they usually give you a vast expanse of sky to play with.

Looks like an economics chart. This unfortunate lady is heading for the intersection of a supply and demand curve!

Thank God It’s Monday 4

Cape Cod, Massachusetts, was always quaint in these linen postcards of the 1920s and 30s. When the word quaint entered English in the 12th century, it meant clever. We use it to mean old-fashioned. Cape Cod a hundred years ago was considered the headquarters of everything old and out-of-date: windmills, Colonial houses, crusty Yankees, lonely beaches, every Model T left in America, and simple fisher folk playing checkers. These cards go for pennies. As you can see, they take ink wonderfully well.

My stamp of Saturn (manufacturer unknown) was mounted on a square of hard transparent plastic. That makes it a cinch to position the image. I don’t remember what I paid for it, but if I paid something extra, it was worth it.

Rubber-wise tip of the week: The only stamp pads you need are the primary colors: red, yellow, and blue. Minus the yellow. Ink from your other pads will muddy the yellow quicker than you can say “On Olde Cape Cod.” Substitute black.

As for the secondary colors, orange might work. Purple is close to red and can look pink. A forest green is good; a pale green gets lost.

White, silver, gray, and gimmicky “rainbow” pads are likewise out. All the way out. The rainbow pads will look like a blur soon enough, you’ll never use white and silver unless you only stamp on black paper, and gray, once it’s stamped, looks as if you were too cheap to buy a new stamp pad.

Don’t forget to send me one!

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.