Gridley Fires

The Change is here

For all the readers of this blog - - 

My time with Typepad is gone now, and I want to thank all of you who visited here regularly. You can follow me - and view my post history from Typepad - on my new Wordpress blog, also entitled Gridley Fires.

Thanks!

For all who downloaded my novella, The Blue Bicycle, yesterday, a most heartfelt thanks for your interest. I hope you're enjoying the read, and please pass along this offer to your reading friends. It's open until 11:59 pm, Pacific Standard Time, October 6th. It's available at this location.

What Is There To Learn From Writing?

image via karenswhimsy.com

 

Today, I'll finish the third edit of a historical novel I've written set in the Middle Ages, and this has me looking back. I started research on this rather obscure subject and personality some 20 years ago, and then came compiling and synthesizing the data. The story involves a man who rose from the French peasantry to the Catholic Church's papacy in a time of great social upheaval - not unlike the world-wide era we now live in. 

But to begin answering my question...

This quest began, rather obviously, with an adult dose of curiosity about this man, and the era he helped shape. This was a time in which singular personalities - rather than the masses - affected an era's progress - or its missteps. Fascinating to consider that from the viewpoint of life in the 21st century, isn't it?

Compiling data in such a quest - even ragarding an era in which few records were kept, and much of what is there holds conflicting perspectives, dates, accounts, etc. - is an exercise in organization, and this skill is planted firmly in my wheelhouse. 

But how to tell the story?

I'm discovering, especially with historical fiction, that this is a separate talent, and it concerns many challenges. First, the temptation is to make a historical treatise of it, but this isn't what fiction is all about. And for such a story to be readable and relevant, the characters must be there, must bring the history, which can seem overarching and distant, down to the personal level.

So I've taken a page from Scott Fitzgerald and created a second character to complement the historical one. Still there was a problem. Even these two characters couldn't make the story come full circle. The limitations of these two characters' experience was unable to close the deal, since both had to die, and so my structure required yet a third character. This one, of course, couldn't be simply a "throw-in;" he had to be an integral part of the story.

This called for much finagling and restructuring even before I began to write. I ended up then with a chancy structure,the story being told in the form of a book. A book within a book. Shades of J.M Coetzee!

I think I've done a decent job of telling this story, but is it too odd structurally? Will the casual reader be confused? Will readers of any stripe be informed and entertained by it? 

It absolutely begs for another set of eyes, and so a writing colleague will see it next. Then, depending on her reaction, I may submit it to an indie editor for opinion and advice.

So what's to learn in telling such a story? You'll learn that creativity goes far beyond wordsmithing. It involves proper use of history. Characterization that does justice to the history. An underlying structure to support all of that. And perhaps most importantly: the reader - have you made your story accessible? Story is the thing, as always, but there must be readers for the story to complete itself.

 

Visit Bob's Web Site here, and his FB Fan Page here.

The Ice of Winter

Winter Journal, by Paul Auster

image via npr.org 

 

You pick up memoir such as this one expecting...what? A life laid out chronologically? The failures of parenting - yours and that of your parents? Confessions and dirty linen? The titillation of romantic escapades? Saucy comments about other writers, editors, or reviewers? The summation of a life lived well or poorly?

Auster gives you some of that, but what stands out to you is the writing: the fluid, run-on style in which sentences can last half a page, paragraphs that go on interminably, but without boring, without allowing your mind to wander, making use of the first person tool of "you" instead of the usual "I,"which has that distancing feeling that a memoir deserves. A style with an affinity for lists (places he's lived, sweets he's eaten), a running rivulet of emotions regarding family, lovers, places he's been, people - good and bad - he's been related to or otherwise known. 

Somehow you expect such a memoir to rise slowly as the author encounters life's crises and victories, you expect it to end as fiction does, with crisis point and denouement, but that's not at all what Auster gives you. In places he does just that, though, but in the broader perspective he gives you things as he encounters them in memory, following their sixty-plus years.

 

image via guardian.co.uk 

 

Does he give you any reason to doubt this work's veracity, to say to yourself, "Bullshit, he's gilding the lily there?" Only over one subject do you cock an eyebrow in such a manner: his constantly interspersed romantic conquests. Yet even here he doesn't dwell on them, he depicts them on the run, all part of the stream of life coughing its way over its now smooth-worn rocks, until, finally, the ice begins to gather, the ice of - as he tells you on the last page, "the winter of your life," in which you see, with him, the sense of an American life's hubbub. 

As memoirs go, it's one you're glad you've read.

 

My rating: 18 of 20 stars

 See Bob's web site here, and FB Fan Page here.

 

Bucky Fuller's Vision and Why I Continue To Write

Last night the missus and I went to see a play, "R. Buckminster Fuller - The History (and Mystery) of the Universe." I'm not sixteeen years old, so I hesitate to use the word "awesome," but the play was, well, awesome. For several reasons:

• Playwright D.S. Jacobs synthesized thousands of pages of R. Buckminster Fuller's writing into a two-hour show.
• Actor David Novak was the only person on stage, and his talent nailed Fuller's mannerisms, even his coastal Massachusetts way of talking. 
• As serendipity would have it, the set for this local production was designed by good friend Sylvia Pierce, which incorporated tekkie bits, such as film, animation, and geodesic modeling - one of the best sets I've seen in years.

But can I synthesize further? Let's see...

image via essential-architecture.com

Fuller was born near-blind. Consequently he had to use his tactile sense to relate to early school projects. While we were all using building blocks (Leggos, maybe) to construct in a fledgling way what turns out to be a most inefficient and irrational "square" reality, Fuller's hands were creating things from triangles that were far more sound and efficient than our "square" cartesian world. 

He flunked out of Harvard twice, largely because he was already headed toward a reality that educating minds of his age weren't ready to accept. So he continued to go his own way. He joined the Navy. Shipboard life made him much more aware of the necessity of ultra-efficiency in sailing across "Spaceship Earth," as he came to call it.

After leaving the Navy, he quickly came to realize from his examination of the way nature works that the Darwinian, Malthusian model of scarce resources (that could only belong to the strong - and to hell with the weak and less capable) was wrong and would eventually lead us toward oblivion, extinction. His strategy, then, was to create a new mindset that would be so capable of doing so much more with less and less, hence eminently attractive, that the old divide-and-conquer model, enforced militarily, would be abandoned. 

image via scodpub.wordpress.com

 

But he didn't deal just in high-minded abstractions: he devised and designed - the geodesic sphere, the dymaxion cars and homes. Still, fear of scarcity and an infatuation with inefficient  thinking, building, and wealth, caused his creations to be all but ignored. But this play, and the continuing interest in Fuller's inventions and ideas testify to their endurance. 

But none of this explains why I continue to write:

Fuller left the old mindset - and his Navy days - and so did I. While he reached much higher, I chose a career built on constructing instead of destroying - devising and building road systems within the U.S. Parallel with that, and following those years, I began to write fiction and nonfiction. Still, why?

While Fuller persisted with the continuing ephemeralization (doing more with less) of technology, I chose the human angle. Humanity is all about story, and the stories of us humans are replete with both our foibles and our strengths. I learned early on, of course, not to editorialize or to rant - simply to tell human stories as best I could.

In this way, I can only hope my readers will be provoked to think for themselves. If they do, says Fuller, they will increasingly leave behind a mindset - one that worked for ages, but which humanity has now outgrown. And I believe that's so. Story is a manner of mirroring our ways, of providing essential human questions that must be asked, in hopes that we'll have that "Aha!" moment and - one by one - change our lives and the world for the better.

 

Visit Bob's Web Site here, and his FB Fan Page here.

Cereal and Serials

I wasn't aware this sort of publishing opportunity was avalable, but it certainly bears looking into.

With Kindle Serials, Amazon hopes to reinvent a format that already exists. Jeff Bezosdragged out the obligatory Dickens reference at the LA press conference, but serial fiction had a presence online before Amazon (and a presence offline after Dickens: Armistead Maupin’s “Tales of the City” and Candace Bushnell’s “Sex and the City,” for instance). The website Tuesday Serial compiles links to many online serials and offers advice about writing them. Authors likeClaudia Christian and Lyn Thorne-Alder have written online serials for years. And longform journalism site and e-singles publisher Byliner launched Byliner Serials last month.

 

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Visit Bob's Web Site here, and his FB Fan Page here.

What's a Writer To Do, Other Than Hope For a Print Book Contract?

I do have a print book soon to be out (honest), with an indie publisher. I really like the publisher - we e-mail back and forth regularly, and I really like our contract terms. Still, I've been exploring other publishing avenues than the traditional, even the increasingly popular, such as Lulu, Amazon's CreateSpace, and others.

image via ebookpublishing-digitalpublishing.blogspot.com

 

One site that's growing in popularity is Smashwords, and their site has a presentation on the growing emergence of e-books. Some of its pertinent points, some of which you may want to take exception to, particularly if you have a distinct love for the print book:

• Traditional publishing practices have ossified (no kidding! If you're a writer, just thumb through your rejection letters and try to find a succinct reason for the rejections)
• While e-books cost significantly less than print books, the author's  percentage on e-books is as little as 30% of the book retail price, as much as 80%. (You'd be lucky to get 15% in a trad contract for a print book.)
• Authors (even well-established trad ones) are in large numbers flocking to self-publishing in order to get books out there quickly. (Time to gain an agent and have him/her begin marketing: 1-3 years. Time to have a book out once it's accepted by a publisher: 1-2 years. So you're looking at 2 to 5 years to see the book in print, once you've completed the manuscript.)
• Between 2009 and 2010, e-books jumped from 3% to 8% of the total books published yearly. (This speaks to the emergence of e-book readers as well as to the growing popularity of e-books - driven, I think, by the lower e-book prices as much as anything else.)
• e-book publishers such as Amazon's  DTP (Digital Text Platform) and Smashwords have the ability to help get your books on numerous book sale sites. 
• Backlists, i.e., older books you've published become more important with e-books (they draw attention to your ability to be more than a one-hit-wonder)

You have to compete for readers' attention in ever-new ways with e-books, but you'd have to do that with a trad pub contract. E-books do seem the wave of the future - the only challenge is marketing them, but that's a whole other subject.

Body's Creativity

Gee...wow! I did it again! Six ten to twelve hour days of modernizing the house's interior a bit by putting up some crown molding and replacing the dippy little base molding with something that looks so much better. It's cost my aching body some lost sleep, a lot of physical discomfort otherwise, and not a few bucks.

 

So why do it keep doing it? I could live with things as is. Or I could always hire a trim crew, pour a brewski, sit back, roll my eyes at the noise and dust - and then simply write a check.

It's creative, that's why. 

I expend a lot of my creativity in writing and playing music - a lot of things that may never see the light of day in the conventional sense. And they're mostly mental exercises of one sort or another.

But my mind needs my body. I can be creative in some fey world all I want, but sometimes the body craves it's own sort of reality. And so I can now look around at my garden, my pond, my berry vines, my house's increasingly pleasing interior, and I see that physical creativity already rewarded, a perhaps perfectly egoistic mirror of who and what I am. It's at times like this that I begin to understand why Tolstoy used to work in the fields with the serfs.

 

Ahem. Tomorrow I'll rub on some liniment and get back to writing. Maybe there'll also be an hour in which I can get reacquainted with one of my guitars. But when I go back upstairs for a second cuppa, I'll pause for a moment to note with great satisfaction what wood, tools, nails, paint - and a few drops of blood - have wrought.

 

Visit bob's web site here, and his FB Fan Page here.

Paul Krugman and the Economics of Books/The Atlantic

I have a feeling that this assessment will mean the end of traditional publishing. 

Paul Krugman is a Nobel laureate in economics, a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton, and a provocative columnist at the New York Times since 1999 with over 850,000 Twitter followers. He is also a bestselling author, most recently of End This Depression Now. Writers like Krugman are prized in the world of publishing -- possessing gravitas, while remaining sound investments because of their substantial popularity. The future of their work serves as a bellwether for the industry.

 

 

The Atlantic

2012 shortlist announced | The Man Booker Prizes

The books shortlisted this year should be encouraging to new novelists and those published by indie presses. Read on:

11 September 2012

The six books were chosen by a panel of judges chaired by Sir Peter Stothard, Editor of the Times Literary Supplement. The shortlisted books were selected from the longlist of 12 announced in July. 

The shortlist is:

Author, Title (Publisher)
Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists (Myrmidon Books)
Deborah Levy, Swimming Home (And Other Stories/Faber & Faber)
Hilary Mantel, Bring up the Bodies (Fourth Estate)
Alison Moore, The Lighthouse (Salt)
Will Self, Umbrella (Bloomsbury)
Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis (Faber & Faber)

ManBookerPrize

 Visit Bob's website here and his FB fan page here.