Author Archives: Michael Greenwald

You Mean I Have To Sell T-Shirts?: Richard Nash, The Candide of Publishing, and the Glorious Future Ahead

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Reading IS fun!!!

By: Michael James Greenwald

Welcome to the Sunday confession on PLC, People!

This week, we’re talking about self-publishing.

YIKES!

I know.

To be honest, I know very little about the industry of publishing.  My wealth of knowledge may eclipse some of you out there, but more than likely most of you are more versed than I.

You might be thinking: great, Doofus, so how did you get a blog, again?

And the answer would be: I paid Amy Nichols 500 buckeroos!

This morning, I was made aware that Bob Edwards, of “Bob Edwards Weekend” on NPR, was doing a three-part series called: The Future of Book Publishing.  In the first part of the series, Bob interviews Richard Nash, former publisher of the independent Soft Skull Press from 2001-2009 and founder of the new social publishing house Cursor.

The Candide of Publishing

I just finished listening to the interview, and have to say, I’ve never felt more excited about the future of publishing!

I urge you to purchase for $2.95 the interview in it’s entirety here.

But I’ll provide the Sportscenter, news-crawl highlights.

Nash’s platform for the future of publishing (and his rationale for the publishing industry’s decline) centers on what he refers to as the writer-reader connection business, which is analogous to the publishing version of eharmony.

“Books are…tremendously idiosyncratic,” Nash says.  ”Unlike a half hour sitcom where everybody laughs at the same three jokes, they’re fifteen hours of one other person’s voice inside your head.  [Publishers] need to have a fine tune sense of the idiosyncrasies of a writer and the idiosyncrasies of a reader to make that matchmaking.”

That's Borders and B&N on the top. Bye, bye!

This week, my fellow confessioners have been talking about self-publishing.  Nash’s vision of the future publishing marketplace involves an annihilation of the out-of-touch, dystopian publishing structure that exists now; a hammering away and eventually chipping off of the top tier of the publishing industry pyramid.  This begins (or has already begun) with the failed state of chain retail book-sellers.

“Borders and Barnes and Noble,” Nash says, “basically they’re going to go out of business.  The Internet is going kill the chains, because all the chains offer is selection and the Internet can offer selection.  And that will create the space…for the Independent booksellers.”

Nash’s vision of the futurama publishing industry involves boutique booksellers in your neighborhood being, “really, really good at what they do.”

And what that consists of is, “not just selling books published by publishers, but running literary workshops, running cooking workshops centered around cookbooks and as with the case of a couple interesting booksellers, becoming publishers themselves, offering marketing resources to self-published authors.”

His vision does center around the Internet.

“The Internet in a certain sense,” he says, “is getting rid of the very kind of narrow, uniform, blockbuster, mass-market aspect of things, giving us the opportunity to restore a more artisanal and idiosyncratic way of connecting with one another.”

The prime example of this idea is his online social publishing website Cursor, which could become the Facebook for writers and readers (Bookface, anyone?), creating communities of writers and readers.

“The book is a conversation,” Nash says.  ”And that conversation creates an enormous amount of cultural value, and what [Cursor] is focused on is trying to gather all that value for the writer.”

Nash says he foresees the publishing industry copying the model laid out by Hollywood studios, where the big publishers, the ones that remain after some of the Big Six Publishers are lopped off the pyramid, will publish very few books, 200-500 a year, and they’ll focus all their budgets on marketing those books.  It stands to reason that most of the 2-500 will be established authors, like James Patterson, Stephen King, Jodi Piccoult, due to the fact it costs precipitously less to market existing authors than new.

The positive of this though, is that Nash expects the whole rest of the market to be made up of hundreds of thousands of small presses, who will publish,”a much more interesting and diverse set of writers.  The people who are referred to as mid-list writers that may only sell five or ten thousand copies, maybe only sell two thousand copies, but change the lives of the people who read their books.  [Writers] who are also teaching…who can connect in the future with their readers in ways that…look a little bit more like singer-songwriters.”

Nash says many writers approach him, throw their hands in the air, and complain,

“Wait, you mean I have to sell t-shirts?!?“

And those writers, Nash points out, will be, like sing-songwriters have been since inception, required, in some sense, to sing for their supper.

But he does provide us with five songs to sing.

1) Participate in your community

2) Publish in literary journals

3) Go to readings

4) Hang out in bookstores

5) Get to know other writers

About his five suggestions, Nash realizes writers will, “do them in part for the sake of serendipity, because maybe you’ll meet an agent or an editor through that particular process.”

But then he zeroes in on the future reality of publishing, and it’s not a type of publishing, self or POD or traditional, it’s a mindset, a philosophy, that needs to be changed; because after so many years of publishing the same way, top-down, the writer solely responsible for creating the widget for the big publisher to publish, package, ship, and market, writers must realize we’ve been conditioned to think a certain way, which sacrifices our individuality and sheds our artifice in the face of the pressure to push units, to sell.  In the end, books and reading is about connectivity, expression–a story-telling instinct that has been a part of the human fabric before paper and pens.

“The real reason you’re doing,” Nash explains, “is that it will make your happier to be part of the community of writers and serious readers.  That’s the end.  We’re looking to be read, to be recognized, to connect to people. Figuring out how to “monopize” that is the second part of that.  But if you can figure out how to be happy, that’s what really counts.”

I wish good words to y’all.

–MJG

When not clinging to every damn word that comes from Richard Nash’s lips, Michael James Greenwald is a student at Story Studio Chicago, applying for a Ragdale Residency in the fall, and considering allowing UT, Austin a second chance at deliverance (Corporate-sponsored education institutions here I come!!!), by accepting him into their MFA program for 2011 (HOOK ‘EM HORNS!!).

For now, he works in his family business of owning and operating bowling alleys in the South Suburbs of Chicago. He is also a fiction writer, with a short story collection Stories from a Bowling Alley and a novel The Rainbow Child due to be published in the next several years. You can read his blogs at sleepsunshine and his confessions every Sunday on his group blog at parkinglotconfessional.com. Venture to his Facebook page or feel free to email him with any comments or suggestions for further topics, or if you had any interest in being a guest blogger on either one of his sites.

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Parlour Games, Part Four

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WOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!

By: Michael James Greenwald

We are bringing a new feature concept, this week, my PLC peeps: Round Robin Fiction, Confessional-style.

Gather around the campfire, skewer a marshmallow on a stick, hold your loved-ones close and get ready for…

Oops.  Wrong clip.  Wrong genre.  ”The wrong night, the wrong road; one wrong turn.”  Yeah.  Just…wrong.

To catch up on what’s transpired in our round-robin story:

Click here for Amy McLane’s PART ONE.

Click here for Amy K. Nichols PART TWO.

Click here for S.C. Green’s PART THREE.

And without further ado we move to PART FOUR, the dramatic conclusion of the Parking Lot Confessional’s Round Robin Story, “Parlour Games.”  (We join the story; already in progress)…

Tensen kept talking as if the words wouldn’t come out fast enough.  ”I swallowed it and she waited for me to change.  She told me she needed an active pill to turn her back.  I started to glow.  She pinned me down.  I grabbed the plate and it shined too.  I swung it at her head.  I just wanted her to stop.  Not to hurt her.  I don’t want to hurt anybody.  I caught her head and burst.  She fell on me.  I pushed and pushed.  Something fell from her mouth into mine.  I choked, and the green was gone.”

“It’s okay, Tensen.”  I tried to move closer again, but she stood up.

“No.  It’s not!”

She turned around with a glowing fist-sized stone raised above her head.

“I need my wings, Shishi.”

“But we’re friends!” I scrambled backward across the cobblestone alley, talons tearing up bits and pieces of stone like one of the sentry’s skid loaders, making that horrible scratching sound I’d woken up to that morning, which was really four years, yet seemed like eons ago.

“We have orders to take your house,” the lead sentry had said, not even providing my father the dignity of dismounting from his perch in the cage of the skid loader, just flinging the written documentation at my father, then whistling and yelling, “Let’s go, boys!” to the platoon of skid loaders and cranes and bulldozers lined-up behind him, as my father scrambled for the papers in the dirt.

“But wait!”  My father paged through the three stapled pages, but I know he couldn’t read them, not without his seeing glasses.  ”You have to let us get our things out.”

My mother, the twins, and me stood about halfway up the driveway as the lead sentry peered at my father so peculiarly you’d have thought my father had asked him for a ride on his back out of the Artificial Levels.

“I don’t have to let you do anything!” the lead sentry roared.  He shifted his gaze to his platoon.  ”Can you believe the knocks on this Double-Eye?”

“But I work for the government.  I’m a scientist.”  My father held the pages in the air, shook them, as though the papers somehow justified his claims; and they might have, for all he knew, for all my mother knew, for all the one-eyed sentries knew–the later born without and the former passed the age of natural sight.

“I don’t care if your the cragging Lady Cadbury-Heinz!” said the lead sentry, belly-fat shaking with laughter.  All the sentries by this time losing it, one of whom laughed so hard he jammed the shifter on his skid loader and nosed into the dozer.  ”Now, look what you’ve done.  Get back!  Get back!”  The lead sentry spit at my father’s feet.  My father stumbled backward and the lead sentry spit again, my father backpedaling, lead sentry lofting spit balls, until my father collided with me.

“Ouch.” I clutched at my chest where he’d knocked me.

“I’m sorry,” my father mumbled, putting a hand on my head.

“Onward!” yelled the lead sentry and the platoon of destruction rolled forward.

We stood in our driveway all morning and watched them demolish our house with all our things inside.  It wasn’t until the equipment and sentries rode away that my mother began to weep.  My father slung his arm around my shoulder, “Oh, it’s going to be all right.  Don’t cry, honey, don’t cry.”  He held the stapled documents inches from his nose.  ”They wouldn’t have done that if we didn’t deserve it.”

A smack to the back of my head drew my concentration back to the present, where I quickly realized my lack of focus and desperate scrambling had led me down an alley with no opening. A dark brick wall stretched higher than I could see.  Water dripping from a non-visible ledge into my hair, down the bridge of my nose and over my lips.  Some moisture seeped through and tasted foul.

Tensen rounded the corner and her whole bright body flashed brighter when she saw my predicament.  She opened her jaws wide and snapped them shut, stepping forward, evidently in no hurry to advance upon me.

I turned to the only rationale I’d thought of so far, bleating out, “But you’re like my best friend!”

“This world won’t suffer friends,” Tensen said, her voice, hollow and dim, as her features were bold and iridescent; nearly beautiful even–if the alley hadn’t reverberated a clanking sound from her gnashing sets of metallic teeth.  ”And when I have my wings, I’ll be so famous, everyone will want to be best friends with me!”

“Like Lady Cadbury-Heinz?”

Tensen aura dimmed.  ”Don’t you talk about her, Shishi.  Don’t even mention her name.”

In the dim-light, I became aware of the walls that surrounded me on three sides.  They were stone in some spots but in others I could see brick, sections of which, were decrepit and crumbling.  I stared at my chisel-hands.  It wouldn’t take much.  But Tensen appeared to decipher my thoughts, her body illuminating even brighter and hotter than before.  The walls around me faded to black in the glow.

“But that’s what she wanted, wasn’t it?  Wings.”

“Shut your mouth.”

“And think of the irony there, too, the woman who merged the two oldest old-money families in the world.”  I grinned.  I was enjoying this.  ”And birthed the brainchild of the Ketchup Cadburry Bunny, too!”

Tensen’s body grew brighter and brighter, her circular aura growing wider, like a green bubble around her, growing and growing, and a voice, no longer recognizable as Tensen’s, deeper, darker, sinister, emitted from her mouth.  ”Don’t.  You.  Say.  One.  More.  Word.”

I thought about shutting up, I did, I swear, but the truth of the matter, the green matter, is I no longer felt much like myself.  I didn’t know much about transing.  I was a transing virgin up until this afternoon.  And I don’t know why I took it.  Transing was highly illegal.  If caught the punishment was harsh.  Tensen told me stories about people she knew, other runaways, addicted transies, who’d gotten caught on the trans by the sentries and been sent away to concentration camps.

Shutting up was certainly in my genetic disposition, but as I clicked my talon-hands together, I didn’t feel much like my father’s daughter anymore.  So, I grinned and said, “Yeah, Tennie, I see what you’re saying, cause Lady Cadburry-Heinz was the most famous woman in the world, right?”

Tensen’s orb grew brighter.

“She couldn’t have made up the whole wing theory.”

Brighter.

“She couldn’t have been transed out of her mind and crazy.”

Even brighter.

“There was no way that Lady.  Cadburry.  Heinz.  Was just some scum-sucking transy.”

There was an explosion and a beam of light shot up from the ground like a neon green lightening bolt through Tensen’s body and out the crown of her head.  Her limbs jerked horribly, as though skewered on the electric charge, and I smelled a smell like pancake batter; then Tensen’s head snapped so her eyes were facing straight up, and she smiled.  I ran my eyes up the beam’s upward trajectory, seeing the green beacon extend into the swirling black clouds of our atmosphere, piercing them, appearing to burn them away in a ten-foot circumference around it, then rising even higher, where the sinister clouds retreated and for the first time in my life, for the first time in anyone’s life that I knew, I could see a blue sky, white clouds, and a sun.

“Beyond A.L,” I whispered, then darted my eyes around, as though wondering who had just said something so insane.

This view sucked the air from my lungs.  I’d only heard about Beyond A.L.  Bed-time stories my father told me.  Someday, honey, you’ll find a way to fly up beyond the pollution, to a world with blue sky, white clouds, and sun, he’d say.  When I was a girl I believed him, when he said the man in square caught by the sentries wouldn’t have been taken if he hadn’t deserved it, I believed him.  The sentries destroying our house, and our family wandering the country-side, squatting in house-to-house, digging in long-barren fields for morsels of food, began the building of disbelief in my father, in my parents, in all that they promised had once been good and would be again.  So much so, that, after months, when we’d finally made it out of the mountains to a shelter for displaced people in the city, I’d waited until the second night, when we’d all laid on our cots to sleep, before rising in the dark to the sound of my father’s snoring, and without hesitation, without a look backward, slipping out into the night, away.

Tensen’s eyes hadn’t left the view of Beyond A.L.  ”Isn’t it so pretty?” she gushed, in the little girl voice I’d first heard while scrounging through the scrap pile in the alley behind a butcher shop.  ”Isn’t it, ShiShi?  Isn’t it just super gorgeous?”  Inside the crackling and spitting green orb around her, I saw a fleshy tone return to my friend’s arms and legs and round face, chubby cheeks with the dimples in the middle like two mini belly-buttons on her face.  She tilted her head to the front and looked at me through her soft gray eyes.  Tears trickled down her cheeks.  ”I’m sorry,” she whispered, sounding far-away and frightened.

“I know.”  I wanted to hug her, hold her hand even, but with my chisel-hands I’d hurt her, and I was afraid to even touch what could be some kind of electrified force-field surrounding her.  ”I’m sorry I said those things about your mom.”

Tensen looked up again.  Maybe, a realization settling on her that even if she killed me this would be as close to escaping an Artificial Level as she’d ever be; or, if I were a more optimistic person in this pessimistic world, maybe the realization had to do with what great friends we’d become, meeting on the street, looking out for each other.

Tensen nodded.  Agreeing with one of my assumptions, or both?  ”She would have really liked to see this.”

“You’re mom?”

“Yeah.  She really believed, you know.  That the world wasn’t such a bad–”

But the rest of what she said was drowned out by a scratching noise.  Distant.  Soft.  Tensen’s mouth continued to move but all I could hear in my ears was that scratching noise.  Coming closer.

“Tensen,” I hissed.  ”Shut up.”

She appeared hurt.  The green glow around her snapped and spit.  From her neck up, her face began to flood green.

“Tensen!  No!  Stay with me!”  I charged toward her.  Wielding my chisel-hands like swords, I struck at the green field, but as soon as I touched it, a surge shot up my arms and into my brain, like two ice-picks had been jammed through my skull, and I lofted into the air, staring down at Tensen’s beady-green eyeballs, then I spun in three-hundred-and-sixty degrees and hurtled across the alley, crashing hard into the brick wall.  I lay on the stank ground, chips of the wall raining down upon me.

“Never!  Touch!  Me!”  The voice was back.  Tensen possessed.  My brain felt scrambled.  I blinked, but my vision wouldn’t clear; I tasted metal on my tongue.  And in the background the constant scratching, getting louder, closer.

“Tensen.  Your mother.  A.L.  Tensen, listen to me!  They’re coming.  The sentries.  Put out your light!  Tensen, please, put out your light!”

It was then that inside that green forcefield my fleshy Tensen appeared for the final time.  She looked at me like some dumbstruck child.  ”But I can’t, Shishinnie-Anne.”  She tilted her head and stared up at the path burned through the clouds by her beam of light, into the blue sky and white, wispy clouds and yellow sun of Beyond A.L.  ”Isn’t it so pretty?”

In my head I heard my father’s voice:  They won’t take you if you don’t deserve it.

A piercing scratch and I saw the auger appear at the end of the alleyway, then one front wheel of the skid loader.  I spun away from Tensen, toward the wall, jammed my chisel-talons into the weakened bricks.

And began to dig.

<THE END>

When not biting off more than he can chew, Michael James Greenwald deals with a daily dose of depression by getting dragged (kicking and screaming, people!!!!) into speculative, sci-fi, fantasy fiction. He’s a student at Story Studio Chicago, applying for a Ragdale Residency in the fall, and considering allowing UT, Austin a second chance at deliverance (Corporate-sponsored education institutions here I come!!!), by accepting him into their MFA program for 2011 (HOOK ‘EM HORNS!!).

For now, he works in his family business of owning and operating bowling alleys in the South Suburbs of Chicago. He is also a fiction writer, with a short story collection Stories from a Bowling Alley and a novel The Rainbow Child due to be published in the next several years. You can read his blogs at sleepsunshine and his confessions every Sunday on his group blog at parkinglotconfessional.com. Venture to his Facebook page or feel free to email him with any comments or suggestions for further topics, or if you had any interest in being a guest blogger on either one of his sites.

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Creative Cycles: The Path to Learning About Myself, The Writer

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The Author, Vacationing in Arizona

By: Michael James Greenwald

I’ve got another Confession to make (Dave Grohl evidently isn’t the only one), which is apropos, considering this week is an Open Confession Week. Timing, I guess, in life, is everything.

I haven’t written this week.

EEEEKKKKK!!!!!!!!!

It’s true.

Welcome to the Sunday edition of the Confessional, my peeps.  I’m writing these words fighting off frustration, for those of you who know me, know my greatest weakness might be impatience and my foremost adversary could be my own perfectionism.

We here at PLC dedicated a whole week to the discussion of writers block.  If you missed it, or to revisit (always a good idea), Amy N. probed into the stylistic issues of WB, Amy M. described WB as analogous to depression and listed psychological strategies to combatting WB, and S.C. took the hard-line approach of not making excuses (maybe I need to fly Drillmaster S.C. to Chicago to do an intervention) and getting the work done.

I’m not going to talk more about WB.

Before this week, for a good month, I had a nice writing roll going.  You know the one, where before you go to sleep the night before, you dream about fixing your morning cup of coffee and sitting at your desk and typing your way into the next scene.  Every sentence, every paragraph, every scene reads like magic.  Your fingers, at times, seem to operate without the consciousness of your brain.  Beautiful phrasing, metaphors, imagery, appear on the page in bunches.  You know those days, right?

Ron Carlson says simply, “the writer is the one who stays in the room.”

Easy to say when things are going well.

But those days inevitably arrive when it’s as though you’re writing with recently fractured fingers (hmmm, that’s the best metaphor I’ve developed in seven days), and typing each letter is excruciatingly painful.  Sentences are clunky, containing no arcs, and read as emotionless as a Wall Street Journal article.  Single scenes, which at times, were written over the course of an entire day of work lay flat and listless on the page.

Terrible.  Horrible.  Writing.

That’s been my past week.  The kind of writing that if I’d show it to my mother, she’d frown and ask, “Wait, why didn’t you go to law school?”  Or to my girlfriend, “Honey, that’s…honey…you know I love you…but…well…maybe I should be the writer and you should bartend four nights a week to pay the mortgage.”

So, now it’s Sunday, and the Confidence that swelled over nearly a month of Boom Writing has deflated to levels where I am having difficulty typing this blog (and think it sucks monkey balls, at that).

My father is bipolar.  I don’t bring this up for sympathy, but to build toward my point.  I am my father’s son (see, that could be the best incite I’ve developed all week).  So, though, I do not believe I am bipolar, I do (and my friend’s will attest to this) have bipolar tendencies.  I have cycles–not the cavernous depressions that my father suffers through, nor the hysterical mania I know other people with the disease struggle with.  But I do have cycles.  Some weeks my confidence in my work and my choices is really high.  Other weeks I know I’ll struggle to work at all, struggle to live sometimes.

Boom and Bust Writing.

(An analogy that works on even more than one level when it pertains to writing being comparable to mining for gold…hmmm, maybe I am poking my head above the depressive, gray cloud)

But I know that wherever I’m at, in terms of productivity and mood, next week (next month, tomorrow) most likely will be different.  When I’m having a Bust week (like this one), that’s a solace; when I’m having a Boom week (like hopefully this upcoming one), it’s fear of an upcoming regression.

The point I’ve been building to (if I was having a better week I’d have been able to disguise this thesis statement more skillfully) is as a writer, you must KNOW YOURSELF.

You must know your weaknesses and strengths, know techniques to keep your motivated over the length of a novel, learn from hiccups and Bust Writing days, Bust Writing weeks, Bust Writing months, and most importantly: KEEP YOUR HEAD UP.

I’m learning to deal with my Creative Cycles.  To not get too elated when I’m in a Boom and not beat myself up when I’m in a Bust.  To use Busts to prep for the next Boom:

1) Spend time with family, friends, kids (spending time in my real world)

2) Observing this real world we live in (which we neglect when we are in Booms in our fictitious worlds)

3) Reading a lot (spending time in other writer’s worlds)

4) Listening to a lot of music

5) Researching

6) Working out dialogue, setting, scenes in my head

7) Thinking about my characters, my story, my world

8 ) Working on another project: a short story, a blog, poetry

9) Organizing submissions, MFA app materials, query letters

These are some of the things I do during Busts.

May I make a suggestion?  Okay, I will.  I want, when you’re finished reading this blog, to take a moment, maybe a sequence of moments, if you are a list person get a paper and pen, and figure out what are your weaknesses, your strengths, techniques you use to buoy your writing productivity.

Write your own writing Confession, if you will.

If you’d type your Confession in the comment section of my blog, that would be even better.

I’d find it helpful to know I’m not alone; as would, I’m sure, the other three people (two of whom I pay and the other one I sleep with) who read my Sunday Confession.

But really, in all the truth I can muster in my exhaustive state, use this exercise to know yourself.

KNOW YOURSELF, PEOPLE.

One of the fifteen…[crash]…uh, ten commandments of writing.

:)

Okay, go…

–MJG
Michael James Greenwald fights off his sometimes daily dose of depression with his fingers. He’s a student at Story Studio Chicago, applying for a Ragdale Residency in the fall, and considering allowing UT, Austin a second chance at deliverance, by accepting him into their MFA program for 2011 (HOOK ‘EM HORNS!!).

For now, he works in his family business of owning and operating bowling alleys in the South Suburbs of Chicago. He is also a fiction writer, with a short story collection Stories from a Bowling Alley and a novel The Rainbow Child due to be published in the next several years. You can read his blogs at sleepsunshine and his confessions every Sunday on his group blog at parkinglotconfessional.com. Venture to his Facebook page or feel free to email him with any comments or suggestions for further topics, or if you had any interest in being a guest blogger on either one of his sites.

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When Creating Your Literary Brand, Don’t Forget Your Woods: How to Market Yourself Like a Tiger

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Thought I'd get into the Easter spirit for the Ladies.

By: Michael James Greenwald

Happy Easter Sunday, for those of you of the Christian faith.  And for those peeps of the Semitic origin, Happy Chinese-Food-Take-Out-Night (What is it with Christian holidays that drives us-Jews to kung pao chicken?).

This week, I believe, is a Writer’s Choice week, and that is usually a scary prospect for my fellow confession-ers, due to my tendency to allow The Weird out of his cage, but luckily for them (and probably for anyone who clicks on PLC on Sundays to check out what diatribe I’ve pulled out of dark nether-regions, this Sunday) I’ve had a topic brewing for a couple days now, which my fingers have been twitching to share it with y’all, and considering today honors Jesus Christ, undoubtably the most famous man of mankind, or as this pertains to this PLC confession, undoubtably the most affective brand ever developed, I believe my topic for today is, well, quite topical.

TIGER WOODS

Tiger needs an outlet to release all that anger...hmmm, what to do? what to do?

I know, I know (I know, I know, I know), I’ve just lost my blogger-cred (he’s leaching onto the Hot Topic of the Moment in order to draw traffic to his blog!!!).  Oh, come on, come on…that’s (exactly) what I’m doing.

Please listen, my interest in the Tiger Wood’s story has absolutely nothing to do with golf (I’d rather watch reruns of the Rosie O’Donnell Show), zero to do with how many fuggly girls he sexted (though, Tiger might want to consider an erotic fiction writing career, post-golf), and notta to do with his Return To The Masters, next weekend.

The question we must as, as writers: how can we study Tiger Woods’s rise, fall, and impending return to greater notoriety than Tiger Woods Inc. had ever achieved before?

In today’s marketplace, there is nothing more important than your brand.

I wish it were different.  I wish I could type: in today’s marketplace, there is nothing more important than your product.  But that would be dishonest.  We all know it.  Books, magazines, newspapers, words, language, reading are all cash cows, sans the cash.  We are more than sixty years since the image of an American family gathering in the living room after dinner, all reading a book or magazine or newspaper.

Sending books to troops in 2010? Decidedly UN-American.

I don’t have to tell you this.  You all know.

But how, as current and future published authors, compete?  How can we use the tools of the modern marketplace, which buoys celebrities and reality TV to epic stature, to capture an audience?

March 28, 2010′s Sunday New York Times Magazine contained an article by Jonathan Mahler titled “The Tiger Bubble.” In it, Mr. Mahler discusses the impact the global, celebrity-athlete Tiger Woods had on the popularity of golf.  The article led me to think about the industry I work in, and the similarities in the golf industry and the book industry became hard to ignore.

Mick Rooney (not Mickey Rooney)–Irish author, editor, and publisher–talks about branding in his blog “Branding and Publishing Strategies” on Publetariat:

“Good marketing and branding starts out with absolutely nothing, and ends up with something glorious and unique. Bad marketing starts out with something and tries to make it something it will never be. Bad marketing will never separate the wolf from the pack, nor the gem that sits amongst the stones at the bottom of the sea.”

Now, in the case of Tiger, creating a brand is quite easy.  He was a golfing phenom at twelve-years-old that matured into a clean-cut, polite, classy, respectful man.  Of course, we discovered recently that wasn’t exactly true, and those of us who’ve observed Tiger’s antics on the course for his entire career–throwing clubs, swearing, chastising himself and others–were less than surprised that the man, Tiger, ended up being quite different than the brand, Tiger.

But that’s really beside the point, isn’t it.  What remains is Tiger Woods is one of the most powerful brands in the history of history (still can’t hold Jesus’s loin-cloth).  And how was this brand created?  Through careful, meticulous strategy.

Let’s switch this conversation to the publishing industry.  When you think of books, who’s the first author who comes to your mind?

The Brand, herself

Stephen King?

James Patterson?

Dan Brown?

Stephenie Meyer?

All good answers.

Mick Rooney highlights Jodi Picoult. “Picoult has deftly rattled off novel after novel about family and relationships, posing moral and philosophical dilemmas for many years—what if I gave birth to twins and they turned out to be reincarnations of Jesus and Lucifer? Would I love them both just as much? That’s Picoult signature and brand and she is wonderful at what she does.”

And if you check out Picoult’s website, you see a carefully organized strategy to convey her brand (even down to the color choices: bright, energetic, feminine).

Okay, so most of us aren’t the Tiger Woods of literature.  We aren’t Mozart.  But does that mean we can’t develop a brand?

Heck, no.

WHAT IS A BRAND?

A BRAND of Humiliation

Fair question.  Let’s avoid the AMA definition, strictly because, as with most textbook definitions, it’s too generic to be useful.

Mick Rooney believes your brand is along the lines of/the same as your tag line.  15 words or less, coveys the message of the book and author.  He cites Jodi Picoult as a prime example (See above).

Founder and president of Calliope Content (a literary development firm based in Chicago) Sara Wolski talks about how brands grow organically out of writers understanding of their readers, their point of view and what they desire from their product.  Readers of Chelsea Handler have very different goals when they pick up Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me Chelsea than readers who buy Courage and Consequence, by Karl Rove.

Think about your book?  Why do you think readers will buy it?  Entertainment?  Humor?  Information?  What do your readers look like?  Twenty-something college graduates?  Sixty-something retirees?

Now that I’ve incited panic attacks, let me take a moment and put your mind at ease.

“Branding one book can be difficult,” Mick Rooney says. “I think it gets easier the more books an author writes.  And so, it should if the author is making defined and progressive development in their books and writing style.  I am lucky in my time to have met and even befriended a great many authors.  One thing is clear when we discuss branding for an author and their books.  It takes time.  There is no author I know of…who writes full time and managed to achieve it after a book or two.”

Deep breaths, peeps.  There you go, it’s going to be all right.  My advice: don’t worry about your brand.

Focus on writing about something impassions you, and be prolific–I.E.- finish manuscripts.

Then your brand will grow from that.  Just as a novel’s theme generally pokes its head up as you’re writing.

Take Tiger.  It took years and billions of dollars to develop and nurture the brand he became, using the qualities and morals he’d been raised with (which he abandoned for a temporary time) but first and foremost, he needed to practice chipping and he needed to play in a bunch of tournaments.

HOW DO YOU DEVELOP YOUR BRAND?

Now, this, you can start at now…this second…go.

Sara Wolski provides five steps to develop your platform (and brand) on her website.

1) Every author must have an active website and blog

2) The more publications in newspapers and magazines, the better

3) Networking is a must

4) Keep writing

I’d like to add one more to her list (hope that’s okay, Sara).

5) “Perform” at author readings

I’m just going to talk about #5 for a second (for expanded coverage on steps 1-4 please go here).  Several weeks ago I attended an arts festival at Story Studio Chicago and a fellow author and student, Molly Backes read the prologue from her upcoming novel.  Let me just put it this way.  Her prologue was so entertaining and funny, and her delivery was so powerful, even though I don’t read YA novels I’m interested to read her book when it comes out.

That should say something to every writer out there.

Get out of your writing rooms!

Un-hinge (or unlock, it’s safer) those doors!

Venture out!

Share your words, characters, settings, wit with the world!

You don’t need to have a published book.  You don’t even need a published story.  Just have fun.  And entertain the best way you can.

I recommend bringing cards or leaflets that list your website, blog, Facebook page.  But the goal should be to thrust yourself in the limelight and begin to create a local buzz, so when you do finish your novel, when you do have a product to sell, you’ll be ahead of the game in terms of sales and notoriety.

"No, he did-n't!"

So, get out there, enjoy yourselves…work on your brand…

GO ON.  BE A TIGER!!!!

(I couldn’t help myself, sorry)

Thanks for reading.

–MJG

Michael James Greenwald is a outspoken proponent of monogamy and does not support extramarital affairs with fuggly woman.  He works in his family business of owning and operating bowling alleys in the South Suburbs of Chicago. He is also a fiction writer, with a short story collection Stories from a Bowling Alley and a novel The Rainbow Child due to be published in the next several years. You can read his blogs at sleepsunshine and his confessions every Sunday on his group blog at parkinglotconfessional.com. Venture to his Facebook page or feel free to email him with any comments or suggestions for further topics, or if you had any interest in being a guest blogger on either one of his sites.

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To Be Blunt

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Gearing up to write. (There's a pen in my other hand, I swear)

By: Michael James Greenwald

“You can’t put a value on sweat equity.”

–Jonathan Sehring, President of IFC Entertainment

Hello, PLC peeps. I’m back after my vacation/business trip and to be truthful, I’m feeling more ornery that usual. I don’t know if this has to do with the sabbatical or the fact that Sarah Palin’s high-pitched (I mean, really, someone please kick her in the nads), dumb-ass, Tea Party voice is coming through my radio, but, regardless, brace yourself…

This week we are talking about goal setting.  I believe my three counterparts said about as much as can be said about goal setting.  I find it my goal (see, it’s everywhere) to hammer it home.

Screw goal setting.

Uhhhhhh????????????

Yeah, I said it.  I’ll say it again.

SCREW GOAL SETTING.

Great Goal: Specific Aim and Strategy to Reach It

Listen.  Let me be real with you here.  I know people who wake up every morning and write numbers 1 through 5 in a pocket notebook next to their bed and list Daily Goals (“Organize those taxes!”, “Take Fido Baggins to dog park!”, “30 Minutes on the Eliptical!”, “Buy Acne Cream!”), then check a bulletin board behind their desk where they’ve tacked Monthly Goals, color-coded by category (Work: “Create Your Monster Job Profile!”;  Family: “Get Little Mikey to Poo-Poo in the Potty!”;  School: “Finish Those MFA Apps!”; Religion: “Get to Church Every Sunday!”; Personal: “Book That Cruise for Louise’s Birthday!”…), and into their bathroom to wash their face and there, by God, are Yearly Goals taped to the mirror (“Find the Love of Your Life!”, “Get that 10% pay raise!”, “Pick out your dream house on a lake in Michigan!”), and into the kitchen where they open the fridge to get milk for their coffee and find a sticky note on the milk carton (“CHOOSE TO BE HAPPY!” :) ).

Is there anything wrong with this approach to life?

In my opinion?  No.

Come out, Come out, Wherever You Are!!

But, as writers, you and me (unless you haven’t “come out” of the literary closet, and if you haven’t I urge you to add that to your Daily Goal List), we need to keep our eye on the damn ball.  Making lists of goals takes time, time that some other writer in the world is using to write, and say what you want about writing being a congenial community of artists, reaching out hands to each other to lift each other up, help each other out, motivate one another, THE PROFESSION OF WRITING IS A COMPETITION.

That is worth repeating.

THE PROFESSION OF WRITING IS A COMPETITION.

While you are sleeping, while you are eating, while you are watching “Dancing With the [MF-ing] Stars”, while you are stooped, (bio-degradable) poopie bag stretched over your hand, picking up Fido Baggins’s dog crap; another writer is writing.

And trust me when I tell you that this wielder of the pen will take your publishing deal.

Because, as much as you think your, romantic comedy centered around a formerly-unknown troll sect, convenience store Shakespearean allegory, homo-erotic detective noire/ghost story, dying coal town triopic, is a unique concept, there’s a twenty-three-year-old writer on a farm in what had been Prussia sneaking out to the donkey enclosure in his parent’s barn to scribble, on parchment in his own blood, his romantic comedy centered around a formerly-unknown troll sect.  And he’s out there every damn morning, while you’re sitting at your desk writing “I’LL DO WII FIT AEROBICS FOR TWENTY MINUTES EVERYDAY” on a pink sticky note.

Where All Boris's Magic Happens (Oh, don't be an a@#).

Boris Stensky will take what had been your publishing deal at Harper Collins.

And on January 1, 2011, you’ll write on the bulletin board displaying your yearly goals: “FINISH MY NEXT MANUSCRIPT (a fable about a sequined-tutu wearing spider who only wants to qualify to be a dancer on ‘Dancing With the [MF-ing] Stars’!”

So, my point this morning (besides letting off some steam…thank you very much) is to remind you how many writers there are in the world, and writing down goals are all well and good, following all the steps to excellent goal creation laid out by my Confessional Compatriots is super-fab, but remember, the idea is to keep your damn butt in the chair (or in Boris’s case, his stomach on the donkey stall hay) and DO YOUR WORK.

Ready? Go!

You best believe I will.  I’m sitting at my desk right now.  And (“FINISH THE REWRITE ON ‘THE RAINBOW CHILD’”) is number 1 on the list of SUMMER GOALS tacked to my bulletin board.

Catch me if you can.

–MJG

Michael James Greenwald works in his family business of owning and operating bowling alleys in the South Suburbs of Chicago. He is also a fiction writer, with a short story collection Stories from a Bowling Alley and a novel The Rainbow Child due to be published in the next several years. You can read his blogs at sleepsunshine and his confessions every Sunday on his group blog at parkinglotconfessional.com. Venture to his Facebook page or feel free to email him with any comments or suggestions for further topics, or if you had any interest in being a guest blogger on either one of his sites.

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Sir Carlson Writes A (My?/Your?) Story: All Righty Then

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By: Michael James Greenwald

Captain’s Log, Stardate 23.9, rounded off to the…nearest decimal point.  We’ve…traveled back in time to save an ancient species from…total annihilation.  So far…no…signs of aquatic life, but I’m going to find it.  If I have to tear this universe another black hole, I’m going to find it.  I’ve…got to, mister.

Okay, I’ll admit it, caught Ace Ventura: Pet Detective on USA at 3AM, and I forgot how hilarious Jim Carrey is (Lois, your gun is digging into my hip!).

Anyway, this week, which is an open week, (Why do you care about Snowflake?  Do you know him?  Does he call you at home?  Do you have a dorsal fin?), I’m going to highlight an exceptional writer and his helpful writing “How-To” book.

Most of us (especially those Arizonians in our blog-dience) know-of Sir Ron Carlson.  Some of us may have even had the privilege of being a student of his when he taught at Arizona State University.  Now, he directs the graduate program in fiction at the University of California, Irvine.  His latest book, The Signal, is a typically Carlson, pared-down, rustic adventure, set in the stunning mountains of Wyoming, involving a reunion of Mack and his soon-to-be-ex-wife Vonnie, forced by the author to accomplish a task, a very Carlsonian literary construct (“When you have stilted lovers, give them a task they need to accomplish”).

In Ron Carlson Writes a Story, Sir Carlson takes us through an in-depth examination of how he created one of his most revered short stories “The Governor’s Ball.”  He reveals the germ for the story began when a mattress fell off the back of his pickup truck, goes through paragraph-by-paragraph of the story, talks about his thought processes at each moment and how he accomplished his primary tenet, “the writer is the person who stays in the room.”

Yes, Sir Carlson provides the usual writing technique book suspects.  Chapters titled:
  • writing character: an inventory
  • writing dialogue
  • the purpose of a scene
  • the idea of the story idea
  • do you have an outline?
Not to take away from these chapters–where Sir Carlson does breath several original thoughts on topics hashed over in “How-To” books since Ug showed Ig how to carve an active rather than passive buffalo onto a cave wall–there are other chapters that enlighten wanna-be writers in fresh ways:
  • the big boat
  • these guys were hammering on my house
  • going over to her window
  • coffee
  • potshots
One of the most helpful aspects of the book is Sir Carlson’s admission that in a lot (if not most) places of his writing process he had absolutely no idea what he was doing or where his story was traveling (And people, if Ron “F-ing” Carlson is human, then heck, I’ll subscribe to the humanity of us all).

To highlight what I’m talking about, I hope Sir Carlson wouldn’t be too offended if I include an excerpt from page 65 of his book.  When he began the story, he had two pieces of information: a water-soaked mattress will fall off the back of a pick up truck, and the narrator needs to be going to the Governor’s Ball with his wife.  At this point, the Governor Ball pressure has been established and in the last paragraph the mattress on the back of the truck “rose like a playing card and jumped up, into the wind.”

Carlson talks about where he was as the writer at that point:
“By now in ‘The Governor’s Ball’, I’m terrified.  I’ve done all the easy stuff, written my little event following the outer story as best I could, the way you follow a marked trail through the forest, and I’ve come to the end of that trail and I feel a lot like standing up and heading out to the kitchen, which is to say like lying down there in the woods until grim death lays its cold hands on me.  But I have one more little crumb in my knapsack, that is, I know I continued to the landfill, so I can write that tiny episode and then lie down an wait for gruesome failure to grace my with his icy touch.

“The traffic all around me slowed, cautioned by this vision.  I tried to wave at them as if I knew what was going on and everything was going to be all right.  At the Twenty-first South exit, I headed west, letting the rope snap freely, as if whipping the truck for more speed.”

“That’s all I can do.  Is it great?  No.  But it is that other blessed thing: serviceable.  It is writing that takes me in its way from one place to another.  Quite simply, it is the next thing.  It serves–I’m still alive.  I have had the opportunity to quit, and I have declined.  For now.  I was still in the room.”

For a writer, the usefulness of this book is tied to the fact that Sir Carlson has a perspective on his process and is able to dictate blow-by-blow how he survived the story.  I’d compare this to the extras a lot of DVD’s provide now, where viewers can go through episodes of TV shows or scenes of movies with a director voice over in the background, revealing information about process and technique in real time.

Sir Carlson produces this resource for writers.
At the end of the book, “The Governor’s Ball” is included in its polished-from, which is fascinating in itself, as you can examine what an author produces in a first draft and the kind of tweaking an author must do to have a publishable piece.
In Mystery and Manners, Flannery O’Connor said, “If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader.”
Sir Ron Carlson in Ron Carlson Writes a Story proves O’Connor’s theorem.
Thanks for reading.  See y’all next Sunday.
I have exorcised the demons…this, house, is clear.

Go to de writing room, go to it…
;)
MJG

If y’all want to get to know me a bit better, check me out on FACEBOOK, follow me on Twitter, or at my personal blog.

Kicking You When You’re Down: An Interview with Writer Michael James Greenwald

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NOT Michael James Greenwald

By: The Parking Lot Confessional

Hello, and welcome to the Sunday edition of the Parking Lot Confessional Interview Series.  Today, Amy K. Nichols, S.C. Green, and Amy McLane (PLC) will be tossing questions at the sometimes-cagey, chronically-complicated Michael James Greenwald.

We met him on a sunny Sunday morning at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on Indian School in Scottsdale, Arizona.  Michael showed up twenty minutes late wearing a blue “I’m Like a Superhero Without Powers or Motivation” t-shirt, ripped jeans, and dark bug-eyed sunglasses.  We were sitting at an outside table and he walked right by us into the coffee shop, emerging at least ten minutes later, with a medium chai, one pump vanilla, latte and an odd grin on his face.

“I knew that girl in there.”  He took a seat, sipped from his hot drink.  ”We took a writing class together at ASU with Ron Carlson.  She wrote these amazing sci-fi stories.  Stuff that would just blow your mind, man.”

He took out a pack of Parliaments, lit one with a skull&crossbones Zippo.  ”You don’t mind if I smoke, do you,” he asked, exhaling a cloud away the opposite direction from where we sat, watching the grey cloud shifting and shaping in air. “She said she applied to like nine MFA programs, got universally rejected. Send out over three hundred short stories and got back three hundred rejections.  Ran up ten grand on her credit cards and ended up crashing at her sister’s apartment until her sis married some real estate tard and they ditched the apartment for a house with a pool in PV.”

Michael shook his head.  ”Now, she works here on the weekends, temps at an office during the week.  Taking classes at Scottsdale community for criminal studies.  Hasn’t written word one in two years.”  He shook his head.  ”Man, if you let it, the writing life’ll kick you when you’re down.”

“Any suggestion for writers in our audience?” we asked.

“Yeah.  Don’t fall down.”

Michael James Greenwald’s novel-in-progress, Haply, first in his Worthington Series, is one-part family-saga, one-part ghost story, spotlighting a young family dealing with inevitable loss.  His short story collection, Stories from a Bowling Alley, catalogs lives of working-class people from and around his hometown in the south suburbs of Chicago.

He has a family house in Scottsdale, that his grandfather bought thirty years before, where he escapes “the pressures of societal life”, as he put it, in Chicago.  He took his sunglasses off to reveal eyes creased beyond his thirty years.  Well into his third smoke, we began the interview.

PLC: Let’s start out with a softball.  How long have you been pursuing a writing career?

MJG: My conscious self has been pursuing a writing career for four years now.  I had moved to Arizona to go to law school and in the 11th hour realized if I took on 100,000 dollars in debt I’d never be a writer.  My subconscious self has always wanted to be a writer.  I guess I’ve been a closeted writer since I was really little, but I was always very athletic and my mother pushed me into sports.  I found sports was a mainline route to coolness and girls, which at the time were the most important things for me.  But now I’m perfectly happy with be uncool, alone, and poor.  And if you believe that I have some land for sale in Utah.

PLC: Utah, huh.  My cousin has a house there.

MJG: Then he can literally use that line.

PLC:  He does.  Trust me.  Thinks it’s hilarious.  Anyway, back to work, do you have any totemic writing subjects?

MJG: Fathers and sons is a subject that I am drawn to.  And mental illness.

PLC: Why those?

MJG [shifts uncomfortably]:  What happened to those softballs?  Okay.  Well, both subjects, I guess, derive from the tumultuous relationship I’ve had with my father, who suffers from bi-polar disorder, and my constant fear–and my siblings’, too, I think–is that someday our brains will short and we’ll end up just like him.  I guess you didn’t ask about my biggest fear, but that would be one of them–I’m flush with fear– to end up suffering and struggling as much as my father has.

PLC:  I’m sorry about your father.

MJG:  It is what it is.

PLC:  Any other subjects that grab you?

MJG:  Well, I’m fascinated by the inner workings of family and children.  I guess that biological clock is really ticking.  [chuckles]  My current novel and my next novel both center around young families, struggling with finances, balancing career and family dreams, and dealing with events which threaten the delicate connection between husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, and siblings.

PLC:  What is the worst story you’ve ever written?

MJG:  I just mentioned them.

PLC:  All of them?

MJG:  Yep.  I have a big-time loathe-love relationship with all my work.  I’m the kind of writer who requires an audience to justify my work.  That could be because I’m still learning how to write for an audience, or what works and doesn’t work in my own writing, or because I have been using such an intuitive approach to my work, so I really don’t know what’s funny until a reader laughs, what’s sad until a reader cries, what’s dramatic and interesting until I see a reader’s engagement.  I’m hoping I’ll get much better at knowing what works and what doesn’t as my career goes along, because I’ve found that there is a fine line between writing for an audience and pandering to an audience.

PLC:  Can you explain that last point for our readers?

MJG:  What I mean is, you can’t please everyone.  No matter what you do, what you change, a good cross section of readers will not “get it”, will not be able to engage, will outright hate your work.  And if you are reliant on external justification in your creative process, you could find yourself in a constant state of editing to try and address every readers’ concerns.  As a writer, I warn you to not fall prey to the please all, please no one trap.  You need to be like a stomach and become very adept at knowing what criticism to break down into proteins, what criticism to chemically alter for the body to use, and what criticism to just push into the small intestines for excretion–to use a crude analogy.  You’re body–in this analogy, your manuscript–can’t use everything.

PLC: Okay, lets switch gears here, a bit, and move from focusing on you–

MJG: Thank you.

PLC: What?  You aren’t comfortable with talking about yourself?

MJG [shrugs]: It comes with the territory, I guess.  I’d rather my work speak for itself.  This, of course, flies into the face of a lot of my goals beyond writing, though, so I don’t know.

PLC: What would those goals be?

MJG: Well…I don’t know if I should be revealing this here.  Someone could steal it.  I want each of my books to be linked to a cause.  For instance, I have a novel which really directly probes a relationship between a son and his bi-polar father and I want a portion of the book sale proceeds to go to either research for mental illness or to organizations that in some way provide support for families debilitated by brain disease.  I want to build a platform, both through speaking arrangements and book discussions, to both serve the needs of people in the world suffering in silence through this issue and hopefully raise awareness and make a difference in people’s lives.

PLC:  That’s very admirable of you.

MJG:  Yeah, well, don’t downplay the marketing potential of it, either.

PLC:  Is there a book you find yourself re-reading again and again?

MJG:  Cormac McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses has some kind of hold over me.  I can’t quite explain it. It’s just an amazing book.  There are paragraphs of writing in that book that leave me breathless.  There’s one page in that book, where Cormac describes this girl riding a horse and there are no sexual words on the page but for some reason the words he chose elicit a physiological sexual reaction I cannot quite explain.  He captures a mood in that book, a masculinity, that is so powerful to me.  Other people I’ve talked to say, “yeah, it’s a good book,” but for me, somehow that books taps into my soul.  Brilliant piece of work.

PLC:  We really enjoyed No Country for Old Men.

MJG:  Don’t forget about his earlier work.  Early on in my career, my best friend gave me Child of God to read, a book about a Lester Ballad, a murderer and necrophile–half your audience just decided they’d never read that book–which only McCarthy can reveal a depth of the humanity we all know is in there, but fear to bring it out, hold it in our hands, and try and figure it out.  And only he can make a character like Lester sympathetic to the reader.

PLC:  So, what are you saying, deep down, we’re all necrophiles?

MJG:  Well, you three are [Laughs] for sure.  No, I’m saying there are really dark, darker than most of us can even imagine, parts of ourselves, which most of us will spend a lifetime ignoring, denying its existence, and McCarthy forces his readers to see the evil in his character and at the same time maybe recognize the evil within ourselves.

I mean, for example, lets take Stalin, Idi Amin, John Wayne Gacy, or Osama Bin Laden.  They’ve been branded mythic-like creatures of evil, but really they are all human beings, who need to digest food and water, breath air, just like we all do.  We have that commonality, too.  And to say we also don’t have, somewhere within us, similar depths of evil, is flat-out denial and fear.  We recognize their evil, Lester Ballad’s evil, in whatever form it projects, in some way, because every human being–even Mother Theresa, Gandhi, Jesus Christ–possessed and possesses that same evil, projecting in specific forms for each of us, which we either have the ability to control or not.

Evil is evil, is my point.  And McCarthy, through Child of God, forces us to look at the evil within ourselves.

If you can create your work to force your audience to examine something they may had been too fearful to see in themselves, force them to examine their life and their world, you are doing an amazing job as an artist.

PLC:  What is the best opening of a novel you’ve ever read?

MJG:  The greatest opening for me would be Charles Dickens’s magnum opus Tale of Two Cities:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…”

PLC:  Why do you like it so much?

MJG:  It’s just a beautiful set-up for the novel. It really captures the period in a brilliant way. I recall being completely floored the first time I read that introduction.

I really love: “Suddenly it was June and there were strange towels in the house.”  From Ron Carlson’s short story “Towel Season.”  It’s a wonderful thing when a writer can spin your world on it’s side in the opening line.  Something about the strangeness of this line, how the words collide in this sentence.  Something about the immediacy of this opening line really sticks with me.  Right away, you feel like you’ve missed a whole lot and instinctively you’re called to attention to try and catch up.  Brilliant.  If you want to go to school on opening lines, look no further than Ron Carlson U.

PLC:  What about an ending?

MJG:  ”The End” always seems to do the trick.

PLC:  Really?  Seems bland.

MJG:  Bland can be good.  If you don’t have bland how can you appreciate flavorful?  No, but I think the best endings, the ones writers strive for, are final lines that propel you to pop the book closed, take a deep breath, then open the book at page one and begin again.

“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

That might not cause you to begin to read “The Dead” over again, especially because if you’ve made it through Joyce’s story, you’re probably exhausted, but this line takes the story and raises it up to another level.  This end sucks the air out of your lungs.

PLC:  Speaking of the end, we’ve reached the end of this interview.  So, thanks again, for sitting down with us.

MJG:  Sure.  Not like I had anything better going on.  Except drinking, and there’s always time in a day for that.

PLC:  We look forward to reading your finished novel.

MJG:  So do I.  So does my agent, for that matter.  I’ll just keep plugging away and see what happens.

PLC:  Famous last words?

MJG [grins]:  Sure.  Any questions?

If y’all want to get to know Michael a bit better, check him out on FACEBOOK, follow him on Twitter, or a his personal blog.

Characters on A Wire: A Study of HBO’s “The Wire”

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My boy: Omar Little

By: Michael James Greenwald

Well, Happy Sunday Funday everyone!!  And Happy Valentine’s Day to those who celebrate and Happy Anti-Valentine’s Day to those that don’t.  For my topic on this glorious Sunday in Chicago, I was going to select love…love, love, love.  But love is theme, love is emotion, and this week, my pets, we are discussing characters, and I had a revelation on Thursday night while watching my favorite show of all time, “The Wire”, which really folded nicely into this week’s topic, CREATING SOLID CHARACTERS.

Today we will be studying the enemy:  television writing.

I will present a short sequence in two episodes from season 4 of The Wire (Episodes 46 and 47) then we’ll talk about some of brilliance in the writing and how we can steal from it.

THE SHOW:

Basically, the show is about the law and the street in the inner city of Baltimore.  Cops on one side and highly organized drug organizations on the other side.  Characters are either on the side of the law or the side of the street, though lines are blurred throughout.

THE CHARACTERS:

Chris

Chris Partlow: Mid 30′s, enforcer for drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield, cold, calculated killer

Michael Lee: 14 year old “street kid”, who takes care of his little brother Bug, has a drug addicted mother, and is wary of adults

Michael

Cutty

Cutty: Former enforcer for drug kingpin Avon Barksdale, did prison time and came out to build a boxing gym for disenfranchised inner city youth

Bug: Michael’s little brother

Michael’s Step-Father: Bug’s dad, not Michael’s, has been in prison for a long time

Snoop

Snoop: Chris’s partner, a female enforcer for the gang

THE SITUATION:

We follow MICHAEL as he deal with pressures at home (his mother, who sells their groceries for drugs) and pressure from the street (the drug dealing game).  He’s a quiet and shy kid, but has taken over a parental role for his little brother BUG and begins boxing at CUTTY’S gym and shows an aptitude for the sport, yet for no good reason, he balks at all attempts by CUTTY to assert himself as a father figure role in his life.  For instance, he bolts CUTTY’S van when he drives him and another boy home from a boxing fight rather than be alone with his boxing coach and whenever CUTTY puts his arm around MICHAEL, MICHAEL shrugs away and appears very uncomfortable.  No explanation is given, yet we wonder.  In addition, as his peers fall into roles as drug dealers, MICHAEL refuses to do so, even going as far as to decline a sizable cash present from CHRIS and the drug kingpin Marlo, even though every other kid takes the money and standing his ground could very well lead to violence upon him.  Seeing his boldness, CHRIS tries on multiple occasions to recruit MICHAEL into the role of his protege, yet MICHAEL spurns all his advances.

We follow CUTTY as he struggles to teach hardened street kids boxing skills and keep them away from the violence that surrounds them.  He reaches out to MICHAEL, in what appears to be a parental way, but when MICHAEL spurns him for no good reason, we begin to doubt CUTTY’S motivations.

We follow CHRIS as he basically kills anyone who stands in the way of his boss building a drug empire in Baltimore.  He’s cold and calculated (watching him, you shiver, trust me), yet when it comes to killing his victims, he takes care to execute them in a way where they feel the least amount of pain, shooting them in the head.  He has spotted MICHAEL and seeks to recruit him as his protege.

THE CONFLICT:

MICHAEL’S step-father returns home from prison, and though MICHAEL’S mother promised her two sons she’d never let the man come back to them, he moves back in.  He acts very friendly to the boys, picking BUG up from school and helping the young boy with his homework, yet MICHAEL acts very coldly toward him and begins to have trouble in school.  MICHAEL’S step-father tells MICHAEL that he has returned home to take everything over and he wants MICHAEL to pay him money that MICHAEL earns from the street for living in “his” house.

MICHAEL is provided several options to deal with his situation.  He can talk to his teacher in school, ask CUTTY or CHRIS to help him.  The first two choices are obviously the correct ones, but ultimately MICHAEL goes to CHRIS and asks him to help him.

In this scene, CHRIS and his partner-killer SNOOP stand in the shadows as MICHAEL points out his step-father, who’s buying drugs on the corner.  In three short lines of dialogue, MICHAEL and CHRIS’S characters are developed more than they have ever before.

MICHAEL: I just want him gone, away from me and Bug.

SNOOP [Incredulous]: Why? What the hell he do to you?

MICHAEL opens his mouth to say, but can’t.  CHRIS and MICHAEL look at one another.  MICHAEL lowers his head, obviously ashamed.  CHRIS’S facial features tighten.

CHRIS: We take care of it, boss.

In the next scene, CHRIS and SNOOP lead MICHAEL’S step-father down a dark alley, guns drawn.  CHRIS is drilling MICHAEL’S step-father about whether or not “he likes boys.”  MICHAEL’S step-father denies having ever touched the kids.  At the end of the scene, CHRIS pistol-whips MICHAEL’S step-father in such a vicious, horrifying way, even SNOOP, a hardened killer herself, stares on in shock, as CHRIS beats the man unrecognizable.

ANALYSIS

What can we, as writers, gain about how to build characters from these two short scenes (and, I realize, the episodes before these which laid the framework)?

1) Situations must always, always place incredible pressure on your characters.

As people, we learn the most about ourselves when placed in pressure-filled situations.  Do we run away?  Do we drink malt liquor?  Do we stand tall and face the pressure directly?  Do we create to-do lists?

Putting a character in a situation where they must choose a direction will illuminate depths of characterizations that can never be reached by saying: MICHAEL was molested as a kid so adult male attention makes him leery. Showing MICHAEL shrugging CUTTY’S arm off of him and bolting from the van to not be alone in the van with the man reveals this character depth in an impacting way.

The more pressure from the most angles will create a tension the reader will feel.  I mean, MICHAEL has pressure at home from his horrible mother, pressure from having to raise his brother BUG, and a constant lure from the street.

2) Good ambiguity is your friend.

Question: Do we know MICHAEL was molested as a child?  Do we know CHRIS was?

I don’t think so.

But we think there’s a pretty good chance one of them or both of them were, and we salivate with the idea of not knowing, don’t we?  We want to know!  We need to know!  But the writer is not giving us the satisfaction of knowing, and this drives us crazy…in a great way.  I watched this episode three days ago and find myself wandering off in the shower, while munching on a bologna sandwich, or before going to sleep, wondering: was CHRIS molested?  was MICHAEL?

This is good ambiguity.  Don’t feel like your readers need to “get” everything.  Present credible situations which give your characters opportunities to react and see what happens.  Life is not cut and dry, black and white; life is blurry and gray.  Your goal is to present your scenes in this fashion.

3) Be so very specific

This is actually a Jim Sallis mantra, which I listened to, when in his class, and believed I understood it, but now realize it takes a lot of practice to be as specific as you need to be.

This is what I mean.  If we hadn’t been presented the way CHRIS usually executes his victims–promises of pain-free death followed by a professional double-tap to the head–then we wouldn’t have been able understand the impact and reasoning when he pistol-whips MICHAEL’S step-father.  The depth of character only opened up once we understood context.

Same with MICHAEL.  Writers took care to present MICHAEL as an amazingly responsible older brother, great friend, skilled boxer, intelligent student, tough kid, so when his step-father was introduced into the mix and he lost his brother, withdrew from his friends and boxing and school, we understood, without the writer saying, MICHAEL is having difficulty dealing with his step-father being home because the man’s a big jerk and quite possibly might be a molester.

As Jim Sallis always said, “We don’t need that.  We got it; we’re there.”

4) Make your characters walk-the-wire

Philipe Petit on a wire between the Twin Towers in NYC

You ever see that doc Man on Wire, about Philippe Petit’s high-wire walk between the Twin Towers in NYC in 1974?  Well, take a look at the picture on the left.  See, Philippe?  That’s where you want to place your characters.  On a wire, nearly 1400 feet from the ground, teetering to the left and to the right, dealing with high winds, birds, rain, balance, on a quest to reach the other side.

What is at stake for the Philippe Petit?

His very survival.

The stakes couldn’t be any higher, could they.  How about those stakes for MICHAEL and CHRIS.  The same, aren’t they.

And that’s not to say every writer needs to write a gritty, inner-city crime drama.  Because there are stakes just as frightening as death.  And it is up to you to determine what those are for your characters.  Loss of love is pretty horrifying to some.  Debt.  Marriage.  A child.  Abandonment.  Loss of powers.

Whatever the stakes are for your characters, place them on a wire 1400 feet from the earth and toss every obstacle at them you can think and see what they do.

5) The past is the present and future

Everyone of our characters has lives before we discovered them.  They were all babies, children, teenagers (AYYYYKKKKK!!!), maybe mothers, college students, acne-covered wizards…

We might begin a story when a character is 80 years old, but whatever happened before our readers join our characters on whatever journey will place them on a wire, is vitally important.  As writers, we must know what our characters childhood, high school years, college dorm time, was like.

Now, do we need to provide a timeline?  No.  Do we need to have like forty flashbacks to when our 80 year old character was being spoon-fed plums by their now long-dead Aunt Carol?  Probably not.  But we, as the writer, must know how the past shaped our characters into the decision-making people they are now.  So when we show the specific details of their lives, put them on the wire, put incredible amounts of pressure on them, we’ll have a much better grasp on what they’ll do, and we can then see their decisions better.

MICHAEL may or may not have been molested in his youth by his step-dad.  But something sure happened to make him wary of adult male attention.  Something happened to cause him to go as far as to succumbing to the gang life he’d spent all his energy avoiding when his step-dad comes back.  We don’t know anything about CHRIS’S childhood, but something drove him to become the psychopath he becomes, and something even more terrifying must have happened to drive him to react out of character to even the suggestion MICHAEL’S step-dad touched him.

I hope this blog will drive you to think a bit more about your characters, because I don’t care whatever anybody says, characters, not plot, drive stories.  The Wire writers created characters so riveting I stayed up late at night thinking about them, and as writers, there isn’t anything we could wish for more.
I wish you all good words!!!!!

Where all the magic happens...

MJG

If y’all want to get to know me a bit better, check me out on FACEBOOK, follow me on Twitter, or at my personal blog.

Taking Stock of Maryland Crab Soup: Life and Work

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By: Michael James Greenwald

Happy Super Sunday, everyone!!  For those of you who care about the football contest this evening, enjoy yourselves; for those of you who are in it for the commercials, they’ve been disappointing the last couple years but here’s to a couple new ones that’ll make it all worth it.

For those writers out there, GET YOUR WORK DONE EARLY!!!!!  Superbowl Sunday is not an excuse for skipping work.  Stephen King writes on his kids birthdays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, St. Patrick’s Day (ST. PAT’S DAY PEOPLE!!!!), he and Tabby’s anniversary…  Say what you want about the quality of his work, you cannot but respect the dedication the man displays to the professional nature of authorship.

This week’s topic is our second: WHERE AM I AT.

Before I get into where I’m at in my work, I’d love to hear where you are at with your work.  If you feeling uncomfortable with posting this on our site, I urge you to shoot me an email (jonah14646@gmail.com) or Facebook message (Robot With Dreams) and share your progress.

Not for me, but for you.

It’s cathartic to spend a half hour every now and then taking stock in where you’re at.  Where you’ve been and where you’re going.  Just like in writing itself, where you create slower, introspective scenes every now and then to allow the reader to catch-up and your character to catalogue what’s at stake for the reader, it is crucial to do this in life too.

Like this morning, when I opened up all my cupboards, pantry, fridge and freezer and to see what foodstuff I have (removing the bag of rotten apples, yuck; smelly, spoiled lettuce, oh my God, yuck; and the clumpy, two-weeks over-due-date milk, sour cream?), what food needs to be donated (but would even starving people want Weight Watcher’s Maryland-style Crap Soup?), and made a list of what I need to buy at the grocery store.

My greatest weakness as a writer is a microcosm of my greatest weakness as a human being.  I have a terrible time focusing.  My brain likes to work on five things at once, which makes it very hard to make the best out of each thing.

Look at it this way.  You have five oranges sitting on the counter and you want to make five glasses of orange juice.  Most people, I think, would take the first orange and squeeze it into the first glass until there is no more juice in the fruit and move onto the second.  What I do is squeeze a bit on the the first orange, get bored, and move onto the second orange, get bored, and move onto the fifth orange, get bored, and return back to the first orange.

It’s a different strategy, for sure, but is it less affective than the person who dedicates all his energy to squeezing every little drop of juice out of the first orange before moving onto the next one?  I don’t know.  What do you think?

Several weeks ago, I revealed to y’all that I realized the novel I’d been working on since last summer, Haply, had reached a point where I needed to scrap my 122,000 word manuscript and begin again.  I wrote that manuscript by sitting at my computer everyday, working my brain into a scene, into my character’s heads, and basically (if I was a good day), looking up a couple hours later to realize I’d written a couple thousands words.  This strategy provided me with a lot of words, and some extremely daring, captivating scenes, but when editing the manuscript I realized the novel took the shape of a marching band with world-class musicians all playing their own songs.  I needed to form the scenes into rank and file and get them all blowing (strumming, beating…) a universal tune.

As I related in a blog a couple weeks ago, I set about learning my characters wants, needs, rationale, motivations, etc…

But learning these important details wasn’t enough.  My mind works like this: out of sight, out of mind.

So, I created a visual, that would stare me in the face everyday, in order to keep me on task.  As you can see on the left, I bought notecards, wrote all these discoveries down, and tacked them to a cork board, which hangs in my office.

As Far As My Anal-Retentive Hypocrisy Will Allow

Next, I created a variation on a storyboard (Go here for an example of a traditional storyboard).  Those of you who are TV or movie writers, you know what I’m talking about; for those of you who are not, it’s just a visual depiction of the scenes in your movie, with the purpose of taking-in your entire story in one look.  I created mine a bit differently.  I wanted to make my storyboard as formulaic as possible, so the top row lists the ACTS of my novel (I, II, III, IV), which in the actual novel are PARTS (I, II, III, IV) and in the columns I listed crucial sections, culminating with the final scene in each act, which builds to a HOOK.

Yes, it’s formulaic, yes, it very well could bely the novelty of a novel.  But it’s what I think I need to focus my story.

So, where do I stand at present?  12,000 new words into my rewrite in a week.  Not bad.  Thanks to Amy, I finally came to grips with the fact I began my novel in the incorrect place.  And with eyes that the first fifty pages must catch and hold my future agent, publisher, and, ultimately, reader, I sought to create a first ACT which is both unique, captivating, powerful and drives readers into the second ACT.

So, he’s growing, you might say.

Well, lets not go that far.

What I will say is I love to write, want to do this for as long as I live, and now that I’ve identified one of major stumbling blocks to ultimately having my work published and feeding my family through my keyboard rather than feeding them the actual keyboard, I’m closer to my goals that I was a year ago.

I can’t ask for more than that.

What are your stumbling blocks?  What have you done to compensate?

As always, even on this Super Sunday, I wish you all good words!!!!!

Where all the magic happens...

MJG

If y’all want to get to know me a bit better, check me out on FACEBOOK, follow me on Twitter, or at my personal blog.

The State of Our Literary Union

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By: Michael James Greenwald

Hello, again, PLC blog followers!!!  It’s your Sunday slice of lemon meringue pie.  Tastes cool and delicious, use that sugar rush to be productive (possible side effects include acne, obesity, diabetes, and death).

Last week, I talked a bit about “Making Time” for writing, related a current literary disaster in my writing life, discovering my 122,000 word manuscript had a torpedo hole the size of Pandora (the Na’vi’s home planet not the music genome project) in it’s bow and my efforts to plug it with duct tape and seances to Herman Melville (“I’ll take Mixed Metaphor for 500, mustache-less Alex Trebeck”) had been futile–duct tape being less than affective in slippery marine conditions and Herman Melville subscribing to the Terrance Mann, post-literary-success attitude.

So, after having the Greatest Freak Out Ever!!!!!!!! on Monday, I strapped myself to my desk chair at 7AM Tuesday morning and began again.

This week, PLC followers, we’ve been talking about “Kick Starting Your Writing” and on the heels of Barack Obama’s first “State of the Union” I thought I’d talk a little about the state of our literary union.  So, here we go…

“Madam Speaker Harper Lee, Literary Vice President F. Scott Fitzgerald, members of the Literary Congress (Dickens, Poe, Twain, Sallinger…), distinguished guest authors (Chabon, Lethem, McCarthy, King, Sallis, Nichols, Green, McLane…), and my fellow American writers:

Our Constitution declares that from time to time, I shall give to the Literary Congress information about the state of our literary union.  For thousands of years, our literary leaders have fulfilled this duty.  They’ve done so during periods of writing prosperity and tranquility.  And they’ve done this in the midst of character war and personal depression; at moments of great strife and great struggle.

Again, we are tested. And again, we must answer history’s call.

Years ago, we became writers, amid very different expectations from our parents, personal severe recessions, finances on the verge of collapse, and credit cards revealing deep debt.  Experts from across the friendship and family spectrums warned that if we did not change our minds about becoming writers, did not go to law school, did not sell car insurance, did not sell our bodies for money (it happened once, let it go), we might face personal depressions.  But we acted, didn’t we, immediately and aggressively.  We fought our fear and sat in on a workshop at our local library, fought an even greater fear and introduced a short story to be workshopped, only cried a little when it was torn to shreds, yet showed up the next week with another story and cried a little less following the second time.  We met other writers who mentored us, encouraged us to continue, told us we had talent, and if we could just work at it, it would happen for us.  Then we signed up for a class, maybe at a community college, maybe with a down-to-earth writer who frightened us at first but soon had us elevating our skill level higher than we ever thought possible.

And maybe a year or eighteen months later, we had several short stories we actually didn’t hate and bought manilla envelopes and bookmarked duotrope.com on our computers to sit down one Sunday morning, following a Jameson shot (okay, a couple…fine, I drank half the bottle and filled my query letters with death threats–if you don’t publish my story I’ll MURDER you!!!–misspellings–I kan’t see there toes–and pleadings–please accept my short story submission so my mother can quit telling her friends her son works at Arby’s and writes “cute little poems”) and licked the gluey envelopes closed, addressed them to Harper’s or North American Review or Playboy Magazine and waited patiently for fame and fortune to follow.

But the devastation remains.  We sent over two hundred short story submissions and only received a nibble, one time, from a tiny University press out of Alpo, Texas (which wanted to put our story on their dog food cans).  Then our Dodge Stratus died, credit card debt swelled, cash from our Aussie-chain restaurant bartending job could not keep up with our expenses, and subjecting ourselves to wearing twelve boomerangs on our bushman shirts drove us to a cocaine habit.  Our recession has also compounded the burdens that we have been dealing with for a decade–the burden of working harder and longer for less; of being unable to save enough to buy a house, start a family of our own, or touch the special parts of any sober girl/guy.

For us, change did not come fast enough.  We’ve been frustrated; we’ve been angry.  We don’t understand why it seems like bad behavior from those James Patterson types and reality stars is rewarded, but hard literary work isn’t.  The promise of the literary life we’d for so long dreamed about seemed like only fiction another writer, a capable writer, could come up with.  Our depression and financial pinch even drove us to fill out that Aussie restaurant chain’s management training application, three times.  Late nights, staring at the agave-soaked worm wriggling around in the bottom of our Jose Cuervo bottle represented the death rasps of our literary dream–and even then, with that beautifully original metaphor right there waiting to be plucked, could we go home and replicate it on the computer screen?

No siree, Bob.

But tonight (or today, this morning, this afternoon, next week, 7:30 in the evening Australian time, because you’re up for the Federer/Murray final…), tonight I’d like to talk about how together we can deliver on that promise.

It begins with kickstarting your writing.

Our most urgent task upon deciding to become a writer, is to write.  And if there’s one thing that has unified sci-fi writers and fantasy writers, and every writer in-between, it’s that we all sometimes hate to write.  I hated it — (applause.)  You hated it.  It’s about as popular as a root canal. (Laughter.)

But when we decided to become writers, we made a promise to ourselves we wouldn’t just do what was popular–we would do what was necessary.  And if we don’t write, we’ll never be published authors, will we.

So, how do we do this?  Well, once again, experimentation works the best.  For me, I’ve learned four things kickstart my writing the best.  1) Reading a book that in some way captures the voice or emotion I’m trying to create, 2) warming up by writing a blog (which I’m doing right now),

3) listening to Gillian Welch (love me some Gillian Welch), and/or 4) taking a shower (don’t ask, I don’t know, my mother refers to me as her Womb Baby, as in I never wanted to leave the womb).

Currently, I’m writing a family saga with a ghost story element, but I’m seeking to capture the raw emotion, the stripped down realism and noire feeling of a western. I’ve found if I read about one scene from Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses I’m able to capture that voice in my head and by using this key everyday I have a good chance of replicating it. Flip Gillian on repeat on the iPod, write a short blog, and dump a bucket of water on my head, and baby, I’m SET TO WRITE!!!!!

Okay, you get yourself in the chair, put on Gillian Welch, warmed up with a blog and dumped a bucket of water on your head, but the writings still not coming.  I give you a free pass to get up out of the chair and leave the office (“no, he di-idn’t just say that”–”uh, yeah, I di-id”), go for a walk, either in the forest where you need to really listen and feel nature’s vibe (hell, hug a tree, man, smell the thing, you never know when you’ll have a character pushed up against a tree–whether salaciously or axe-murder-ly– and you want to inject a little sensory tree smell) or go to the mall and be the creepy guy sitting on the bench near the penny pool eating a charro staring at people…I’ll bet dollars to charros that creeper guy in the mall is a wannabe writer, so why couldn’t you be that creeper?

My point is, always be working, even when you’re not “in the room.”  Remember, another writer in the world is putting in the work (and will steal that publishing deal) while you’re watching TLC, taking your dog for a walk, or sleeping, so you damn well better be researching dress styles on “What Not to Wear”, working the kinks in your dialogue out with Fido, and letting your subconscious come up with some wacky plot twists.

I don’t know about you, but my writing career has had some literary setbacks this year, and some of them were deserved.  But we should wake up every day knowing that they are nothing compared to the setbacks all writers have faced.  And what keeps us going — what keeps us fighting — is that despite all these setbacks, that spirit of determination and optimism, that fundamental decency that has always been at the core of the American writer, that lives on.

The spirit that has sustained this profession since cavemen scrawled on walls lives on in you, its writers. We have finished a difficult year.  We have come through a difficult career so far.  But a new year has come.  A new decade stretches before us.  We don’t quit.  You don’t quit.  I don’t quit. (Applause.)  Let’s seize this moment — to start anew, to carry the dream forward, and to strengthen our profession once more. (Applause.)

Thank you.  God (insert your favorite writer here) bless you.  And God bless the United States of American writers.” (Applause.)

Okay, and that’s it for the State of Our Literary Union this year.

Please tune in Monday for Amy McLane, giving up her Progress Report (uh, oh, Amy, pop quiz time!!!) and I’ll see y’all next Sunday, same spot, same time, with an extra piece of lemon meringue pie just for you.

I wish you all good words!!!!!

MJG

By the way, if you all want to get to know me a bit better, check me out on FACEBOOK, follow me on Twitter, or at my personal blog.