Cheeky little bastard, doesn't like e-readers

Funny thing about the ol’ interwebs. Every week or so, it’s Let’s Beat Up on (FILL IN THE BLANK) Day. A little ways back, it was Paula Deen. Seems after years of peddling recipes like Deep-Fried, Chocolate-Covered Cheesecake Twinkie Gravy Soup, she came down with the diabetes, but kept right on pimping her southern fried delights for a few years before copping to it. Copping to it right after signing some deal to pimp a diabetes pill instead. Or as well, I’m not clear. So it was open season on Paula Deen for a bit. Even saw some breathless screed a week or so ago about how she’d been SPOTTED EATING A CHEESEBURGER!

I dunno. First, I’m not a Paula Deen watcher – I mean I’d heard of her, I had a vague idea of what her shtick was, but I’d never seen her show. Before the diabetes shit hit the fan, I couldn’t have picked her face out of a line up. But seriously, didn’t everybody already know that pretty much everything she cooked was unhealthy? Didn’t we already know that, if you ate that stuff on a regular basis, you might develop diabetes, or heart disease or some other bad shit? Still, you have days when something like country-fried steak with biscuits and gravy on the side feels like a magic Band-Aid, like it’s the only thing that’s gonna make you feel better after the world’s scraped all the skin off your knees again because your mother’s dead and she can’t kiss it make it better anymore, and so fuck the cholesterol and pass the Crisco.

I don’t watch a lot of cooking shows, but when I’ve tuned in, I’ve never seen anybody making fiber-coated tofu with B-12 frosting. Usually, whatever it is they’re whipping up, it’s something the FDA would stick way up at the don’t-eat-this-more-than-once-a-decade pointy little tip of its food pyramid.

Anyway, today I guess it’s Beat Up on Jonathan Franzen Day. He said some stuff about e-books, and how they feel impermanent to him, and wondered maybe if technology isn’t engendering a sense of impermanence, an addiction to change, that’s at odds with the solidity that a printed book offers. He said that, for him reading something on a screen always leaves him feeling like it could just get deleted. And so, today, people are lining up to take shots at him. He’s a Luddite. He doesn’t understand the technology. He’s too stupid to be one of the cool kids.

I dunno. Franzen and I were born about three weeks apart. And I get it. I have a Kindle, I’ve bought lots of stuff on it, read lots of stuff on it. But the stuff I have on my Kindle, that’s just stuff I wanted to read, not stuff I wanted to own. Books I’ve been waiting for from authors I love? I still buy those hard copy. I like to have them on my shelves. I like to open them and turn their pages with my actual fingers. I like, sometimes when I pull out an old book and I find this smear in the corner of a page and I remember I was reading that by the fireplace one night, and we’d just made cookies, and that smear, that’s a little bit of the chocolate from that evening, and it’s still there and the page is still there and the book is still there, even if that long ago evening is equally gone with all my yesterdays, filling up the far side of the balance that’s dipping lower and lower, hoisting my ass up toward heaven or hell or the void. I like to think that maybe one of my kids might open that book someday and see that smear and think hey, that looks like chocolate, Dad was such a slob, but he was a slob with a book in his hands. I guess I could leave the kids my Kindle, but it would just be a device and the stuff in it would just be files. There won’t be any chocolate stuck to the pages.

A screen is different than a page for me, too. It does feel impermanent. Maybe it’s a generational thing. I didn’t type words onto a screen until I was well into my twenties. I still print out hard copies of stuff when I think it’s final, just so I can read it on a page, read it in its most “real” state. I’m no Jonathan Franzen – you can’t go find me on the shelf of a bookstore anywhere. I’ve had a few short stories published here and there, and I have a collection coming out in a few weeks. It will be an e-book. I tell people about it, but I always feel a little apologetic, always feel I have to preface it by saying “it will just be an e-book.” Because, in my heart, that’s not the same.

I want to have copies to hold in my hand. I want to see it on shelves. I want to be able to sign it and give it to people I know. All I will be able to do is send them a link, same thing I do when I see a good joke about the Kardashians.

In the basement somewhere is a big plastic box filled with samples of my work – old newsletters or brochures or such that I’ve written in the various iterations of my day job over the last three decades. Used to be, if I was pitching a new freelance client or looking for a job, I’d dig through there, pull out the most pertinent stuff, show it to whomever I was trying to impress. I don’t have a printed sample of anything I’ve written in the last five or six years. Even stuff that ended up printed – some of our firm’s collateral, some articles – the way they handle that now, it all goes up on a server and the local office that wants to use it pays to have it printed on demand a couple copies at a time. Sure, it’s more efficient. We don’t end up throwing out gobs of outdated junk. But I have to save PDF files down to my hard drive every so often, before the things go out of date and get deleted off the server. Sometimes I forget. Sometimes I think I should add something to my sample library, but when I go up to the server, it’s already gone.

It may just come down to the yawning maw of the grave. I’m going to be deleted off the server someday. I hope, when I am, somebody has some samples in a box somewhere. Or on a shelf.

Nobody wants to be all the way gone.

P.S. — I hadn’t thought of Thanatopsis in years, then that literate bastard John Hornor Jacobs goes and uses it as a throw-away line. So, a little audio bonus.  Thanatopsis by William Cullen Bryant

Damn, I'm like halfway out of the state.

The Tread-Desk Diaries, Day 9

Miles walked – 7.3

Speed – 2.2

Incline – 3%

Total miles – 43.8

OK, so I bumped my mileage goal up toe six a day this week, and I’ve been cracking seven the last couple of days. Here’s the thing. My daughter’s home, and she’s a delicate little princess who can’t stand the thermostat being down at 65, so she keeps turning it up to, I dunno, 80 or something. So I’m getting sweatier, which, aside from some additional laundry, would be no big deal.

Except for this. As the clothes absorb the sweat, they start to bunch up and such in some, eh, sensitive areas. And that leads to the “C” word – chafing. Once you get a good chafe going, you can kiss walkies goodbye.

A few ways to address this problem. First, avoid cotton – that whole “cotton is rotten” thing, ask any runner type, and they’ll wax poetic about it for a bit. Seems cotton absorbs sweat and just holds it there against your tender little dermis instead of wicking it away to join the atmosphere. Problem is, try finding some undies that ain’t cotton, without paying through the nose for them.

OK, you could always go commando, but usually I wear jeans, so still cotton, but now cotton that’s sort of abrasive to begin with, and that’s before I get a good ass-sweat going.

The solution? What I learned on the Twitters are called “lounge pants.” Near as I can tell, it’s just a fancy name for PJ bottoms. Nice fleecy things, soft enough that the boys can play in their unchaperoned, and they don’t get too wet and sticky. Problem is, I’m gonna have to either wash them every day or get a few more pairs, ’cause, round about 5pm, they do get a tad stinky.

TMI, I know. But hell. I’ve committed to blogging about this shit pretty much every day for a year solid. You signed up for TMI, so shut up.

In my period costume

Yesterday, I did the office tour, which brought up the treadmill desk thing again, which got me thinking. And not happy thoughts.

See, the treadmill desk, when I first set that up, I was walking my ass off. Literally. Dropped close to twenty pounds in the first few months.  And then?  Shit happened, life intervened, inertia set in. For whatever reason, I got out of the habit. I’d hop back on now and again, but what had been a daily exercise became a desultory charade. Most of that twenty pounds is right back where it started.

So I look like shit. Well, big deal. With my face? So what. But I’m 52 and I’m obese. I know, we don’t like the O word. We say big, we even say fat. But the fact is, if I don’t change my ways, I’m in for an early and probably unpleasant death. 

I’m going to try to blog my way out of this. On this very blog, the weight of public accountability and the threat of public shame got me through two online novels, so maybe I can use those same tools to save my own life. Sounds dramatic, I know, but that’s how I have to think about it. 

This isn’t about writing, though, and that’s what I’m reserving this blog for. No, this is about editing. It’s about cutting at least 20 percent off my person before that 20 percent cuts off a good chunk of my life. So I’m documenting this business on its own blog, GOING NOWHERE FAST. If you want to join in the fun, I could use your support – or, if I fail to keep pace, a good, swift kick in the ass.

Thanks.

The desk and The Writer Gym

Guess there’s some kind of web meme going ’round, all us writer types are supposed to show off our offices.  John Hornor Jacobs started it. Yes, THE John Hornor Jacobs – author of the acclaimed SOUTHERN GODS, the soon-to-be-acclaimed THIS DARK EARTH,  an upcoming YA trilogy. The man has more book deals than Carters has liver pills. Don’t know what that means, exactly, my mom used to say it, but I took it to mean a lot. 

So then Peter Farris jumped on board, and then Keith Rawson got in on the act, and since I sorta needed a blog post anyway and was fresh out of ideas, this seemed like a swell way to waste your time.

So, the tour.  Here’s the whole set-up, desk to the right, my revolutionary bookshelf-cum-treadmill desk dead ahead.  Gonna rename that The Writer Gym (soon to be TM) and work out some kind of endorsement deal with some hot-looking hard-body writer, make me a fortune.  Hmmm . . . that leaves out Jacobs and Rawson, I don’t really know what Farris looks like.  Wait, I’ve got it!  Joelle Charbonneau! Let me make a note here . . .

My Little Friends from the Old World

Back by the door, there’s an 18th century map of North America surrounded by my little friends. My late Aunt Mary Ellen and Uncle Bob were tireless collecters of Mexican folk art, and the masks are from their collection. Seem in pre-Columbian days, masks were a big deal in Aztec and other Toltec cultures, so when the missionaries showed up, they tried to piggy back on the trend by incorporating them into their passion plays and what not. The red guy on the right, that’s Old Scratch himself. Not sure what’s up with the rest of them.  The map was Bob’s – he loved maps. More fine people, also gone, but who, through their infectious enthusiam for, well, almost everything, were the coolest people a curious young lad could know.

Grandpa Bart's Persuader

Over on the bookcase, we’ve got Grandpa Bart’s billy club, official Chicago PD issue, and he carried that puppy through the Capone days right up until the early years of the Daley era.  I like to think there’s a story behind each ding and dent, and I would have loved to have heard them, but he died when I was in fourth grade. I remember a gentle man with white hair and a soft smile, and sometimes you hear a line or two of Yeats out of him.  Lots of hats up on top of the bookcases, too. My dad had the largest head in the western world, but he loved his hats. The ones I can wear without them falling down around my ears, I do.

Dad, didn't you already have a cigar this week?

My African Writing God, Billy

There’s the Daja, guarding the humidor. And we have my African Writing God, Billy Shakes-His-Speare-at-You -and-Says-Write, Goddamnit.

Day job, night job, same office

My squirrel and my Ogden seducer

We got some awards I won for writing about taxes and such like. That’s the day job, and this is also my day-job office, so some of the book piles are a little, well, diverse.  There’s the stand-up lamp, where I keep my recording gear for whenever Sabrina Ogden needs an aural fix, and where you’ll also find a stuffed squirrel, a Christmas present from one of my smart-ass nephews to commemorate the day a squirrel tied to kill my by jumping into the front tire of my bike. 

A few things you’ll usually find in my office – a bottle of Diet Cherry Dr. Pepper, my big-ass Tweety-Bird tea-cup, and my Billy Williams bobble head doll,  Sweet Swingin’ Billy, the hottest stick on the team when I was a lad, back when the Cubbies broke my heart in 1969. Broke it for the first time, I should say. They’ve made a habit of it. And, of course, Dante the Hound, my faithful companion through most of the day.    

Caffeine and Cubby, a still life

Dante, my faithful hound

OK, I showed you mine . . .

Thing is, I know bullying. I started to leave this story over at Shotgun Honey as a comment, but it got a bit long, so I just linked it to here (that still counts as a comment, Pluck, so cough up.)

I was born six weeks premature and with congenital hip and leg defects that had me in leg braces and ortho shoes through third grade. I was also, as my family tended to be, the biggest kid in the class. Since I was pretty much immobile, there was a cadre of kids who thought it was some kind of badge of honor to count coup on my ass — they’d run up and shove me or hit me and then take off, knowing damn well I couldn’t catch them.  With all that shit on my legs, my balance wasn’t great, so I spent a lot of time on the ground listenting to kids laugh at me while I watched some little fuck run off. Had some bad days over that, but I have to credit my parents, especially my mom, for helping me keep perspective and for not letting me descend into self pity. She’d give me a little space to whine about it, but then would cut that shit off, telling me that these were the only legs I had and, god willing, they’d work better someday. She also signed me up for swim team early on so that, despite the fact that I couldn’t run and could only sort of walk, I was staying in good physical shape. In a pool, I was fast and graceful and whole – I was everything I couldn’t be on the ground 

I was fortunate that my dad was a doctor and was able to recruit some outstanding medical care – actually revolutionary-at-the-time medical care – care that almost completely healed my issues (my feet still point out a bit, and my left leg is still a tad shorter than my right, and they had to irradiate the growth plated on my right leg or I would have ended up 6’4″ on one side and 6′ on the other, but all and all, things worked out great. I actually went on to be a jock through my school days). 

So, the treatments worked and the first week of the summer between third and fourth grade, the braces and ortho shoes came off, the tennis shoes went on, and I was given the go ahead to test my legs. I played baseball for the first time. Basketball for the first time. Football for the first time. I ran my ass off all summer. I remember walking up really early one morning and feeling restless. I put on my new PF Flyers, went out in the back yard and just ran back and forth across the yard until I collapsed in the grass, exhausted. I guess I was crying, because my dad was watching me from the kitchen and came running out, thinking my legs had gone out on me again. I told him I was just so happy.

I went back to school in the fall with a shit list — not every kid who’d ever taken a shot – I mean even some of my friends had – but that core group, that asshole tribe of punks that had made me their regular bitch ever since Kindergarten. Because now, in my PF Flyers, I wasn’t just the biggest kid in the class, I was also probably the fastest. I caught up with three of them the first day, another one the second. On the third day, I was called in to see the principal — Sister Mary Roselle, with whom I’d always gotten on well.

“Danny,” she said, “what’s going on? We’ve never had this kind of trouble with you before.”

“I could never catch them before,” I told her.  She knew about my history.

She looked at me a moment and then held up a single finger. “Once each,” she said. “Any more than that, then you’re just a bully, too.”  Then she smiled a little. “Besides, I know those boys. it would do them all good to get taken down a peg.”

I nodded. That made sense. That was our deal. Once each. I’d caught up with everybody in the first couple weeks, everybody except this one Jeff kid – he was fast and he was careful. But that also meant he was living in a kind of exile. He couldn’t be on the playground, he couldn’t hang with anybody at lunch. Finally, about the middle of September, he turned himself in — just walked up to me and said “Get it over with.”

With him just standing there looking humiliated, his head only coming up to the middle of my chest, and with everybody watching with that same atavistic Lord of the Flies expectation I used to see on their faces when those punks used to surround me, suddenly I felt like a bully. I should have just let him go. I should have made some kind of speech about how this was all bullshit – I mean I could feel that inside me, but I was 9 and i caved in to the expectations. I hit him once, hard, in the stomach, and he went down in a fetal heap on the ground and lots of the kids laughed at him, mostly his friends, the ones that used to help him torment me. 

Looking at him on the ground and listening to his goading friends, I felt something I never had before – at least not in association with anything like this. I felt ashamed. Jeff and I got to be pretty good friends eventually.

That was it. That was the end of my list. But for the rest of my years in school, if you were some big kid who got your rocks off by picking on some little kid and if word got back to me, your ass was mine.

Not that it matters once you have a knife through your frontal lobe. Dead is dead.

In the early 1950s, a portrait of what is now believed to be Marlowe was discovered at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where Marlowe was a student. I was taken by the motto – Quod me nutrit me destruit (That which nourishes me destroys me). Taken against the frantic and chaotic backdrop of Marlowe’s life, one imagines meanings as varied as Marlowe’s tastes. He indulged his intellectual appetites. He was a free-thinker, quite probably an atheist, and not shy with his opinions. Even today, when the only risk of such thoughts is to reputation (a 2010 poll found that more Americans would vote for a homosexual or a Muslim or a convicted felon for public office than would vote for an admitted atheist), I think that many people hold such beliefs in private but are loathe to admit to them in public. Marlowe embraced these thoughts in an age where such ideas could get you burned at the stake. He indulged his sexual appetites. Marlowe caused a bit of a contretemps at Cambridge, choosing to translate Ovid’s Amores, which are unabashedly erotic, as part of his studies – putting an even more erotic spin on the material. Marlowe was also likely homosexual, or at least bisexual at a time when the consequences of that orientation were as dire as those associated with his theological beliefs. Marlowe was a drinker and a brawler, proving his appetites were not confined to only finer thoughts or biological imperatives. He was a spy, a leading dramatist and, in his fashion, a scholar – all by the age of 29, all by a man of common birth, a cobbler’s son, at a time when birth was destiny. He should have spent a long, dull life making shoes. Instead he spent a short, bright one making history.

Shakespeare, too, was born a commoner and, in his way, overcame even more. Marlowe went to Cambridge at a young age on scholarship, the BA and MA he earned holding a weight that PhDs from even the most august institutions today do not hold. The annual matriculation at Cambridge in Marlowe’s time was a couple dozen in a good year, so just holding those degrees made him a full-fledged member of the Elizabethan intelligentsia and lent a weight to his authorship that Shakespeare, who held no academic credentials, could never claim. Yet Shakespeare went on to become the cornerstone of the English literary canon. Marlowe was a brilliant comet across the same Elizabethan sky. How long he might have shinned we can only guess.

Quod me nutrit me destruit. Perhaps Marlowe meant that in reference to the joys and consequences of his the voracious appetites he indulged in pursuit his own vision of a full life – indulged in the face of a moral climate that then, even more than today, would preach curbing those desires in the service of probity, of chastity, of God. But there is a longer thought, one that Shakespeare echoes in Sonnet 73, and one that holds a lesson for us all, particularly on the cusp of this new year.

          In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire

          That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

          As the death-bed whereon it must expire

          Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by

Time is both the fuel of that fire and the flame that devours it. Time feeds us. It is the essential stuff of life, the thread of mortality with which we each weave in such days as we are allotted. But it consumes us, too. Each day is another bite out of a finite meal at the end of which awaits either death or dessert. Many of us pretend it will be the later, but I think we all know in our hearts it will be the former.

Marlowe chose to make that meal a feast – to gorge on every morsel life offered him, even knowing that every indulged appetite held out the promise of both sustenance and destruction, but knowing too that, however carefully we may choose to pick at life’s meal, the same grave awaits us each on that day we scrape our plates clean.

I’m closer to the end of that meal than to the beginning and have spent too much time already picking at my food either out of fear of insulting imagined gods or in pretended service to a society that I thought somehow better served by my restraint than by my action, or, in a harder and sadder truth, in plain sloth, in too many days and weeks and years where the simple effort of reaching for another joint of mutton seemed too much work when balanced against the myriad banal distractions that also litter life’s table. A promise to change is easy, but it is my intent to be more greedy of those morsels I desire, to recognize that my joyful gluttony has more to offer the world than my dour restraint, that the table is laid rich and full and that I cannot possibly hope to exhaust its bounty. To gorge at this table costs no other man a single crumb. To sit at it empty-mouthed, thinned with guilt or shame or sloth, that costs us each everything. The waiters are standing in the corner waiting to take your plate away.

Eat hearty and damn the consequences. Dead is dead.

You’ve heard the basic arguments, I suppose.

Independent booksellers are the guardians of our reading culture – local businesspeople who care deeply about the titles they stock, staffed with book lovers that will hand-sell deserving authors. They provide the local chapels where those of the literary faith can congregate.  Try scheduling a reading/signing gig on Amazon and see who shows up.  You can commune in the flesh with both the books you love and your fellow readers – snuggle up in a comfy chair with a cup of Joe and sample pages to your heart’s content.

Amazon breaks down the brick-and-mortar walls separating authors from audience. With no space constraints, they can carry virtually every title and in every format – trying buying an e-book down at Mom and Pop’s House of Books. They democratize the review process, letting all readers weigh in, not just Kirkus or the New York Times. And their business model means you’re paying less, sometimes a lot less, than you do at your local independent.

Both arguments have merit, but there is one disingenuous element that needs to be addressed. On the price front? Part of Amazon’s advantage stems from their joyful exploitation of an outdated tax loophole.  When you shop at Amazon, you don’t pay sales tax. What that means in dollars and cents depends on where you live, but the average sales tax rate in the US is 9.64 percent.  That’s a record high, by the way.  That means, on average, almost 10 percent of the price advantage that Amazon attributes to its superior business model actually comes from starving state and local governments of their tax revenue.

By the way, those sales taxes you don’t pay when you shop on line?  You still owe them, you know.  They are actually called sales and use taxes. In cases where they aren’t collected as sales taxes by the vendor and transmitted to the appropriate taxing jurisdictions (such as in interstate internet transactions) they are still owed as use taxes by the buyer.  That’s right. You are supposed to keep track of your non-taxed purchases and remit the appropriate taxes to your state and local taxing authorities. 

You aren’t, of course. Nobody is.  And there is no practical way for state and local governments to make you. That’s part of Amazon’s argument – that they aren’t cheating anybody out of tax revenues, it’s you, their scofflaw customers that are doing that.

Sales and use tax laws were written and adjudicated decades ago, when something like the internet wasn’t even a gleam in Al Gore’s eye.  The key to sales taxes was and largely remains nexus – a seller has to have a physical presence in the state or local taxing jurisdiction where a purchase is made before it can be required to collect taxes on that purchase. The fact that sales taxes aren’t collected on mail order purchases has always been an irritant to brick-and-mortar businesses, but mail order never approached the level of commerce that the Internet now sees. 

So what, you say. So I save a little scratch and the swollen Leviathan of government hasn’t figured a way to get it out of me. What’s the problem?  I suppose I could make a civic duty argument, that, as a citizen who freely partakes of the goods, services and infrastructure that these taxes pay for, you have a moral obligation to pay your fair share, but civic duty isn’t much in fashion these days. So I’ll make a practical argument instead.

Remember how I said that 9.64 percent average is a record high? Part of the reason is the shrinking base of sales on which those taxes are collected.  As more and more business avoid collecting sales taxes via the Internet, and as more and more consumers take advantage of that situation by not stepping up and paying those taxes themselves, the sales tax base shrinks. When tax bases shrink, tax rates tend to go up.  It’s not like you can avoid sales taxes everywhere, not unless you’ve found some way to buy your gasoline and groceries on-line from out of state vendors.  So you save on sales taxes by buying your books from Amazon, and you end up paying higher sales taxes when you buy your milk at your local grocer. If sales tax revenues drop further and stop providing the funds state and local governments need, then they will turn to income taxes or property taxes. One way or another, you’re gonna pay.

I understand that a lot of people have a bug up their butts about taxes. I get it. I think of the trillions of dollars flushed down the Iraq toilet and I wanna puke. But sales taxes don’t go to boondoggles like that. Sales taxes tend to go to things like fixing potholes and paying teachers and mowing parks and having libraries – they go to the nuts-and-bolts local stuff where the citizen rubber meets the government road. That’s a road we all have to help pay for or we won’t have one to drive on. If you’re one of these off-the-gridders who doesn’t think you should pay any taxes anywhere, well, you probably don’t read anyway, so I guess you don’t much care about local bookstores. Oh, and by the way? Fuck you. 

States have been trying a variety of tax law solutions to get the Amazon’s of the world to play fair on the sales tax front, which attempts have met with varying success. Fortunately, a few cases are wending their way up toward the Supreme Court where, hopefully, the judges will rule in such a way that outdated nexus standards are replaced with something more befitting our increasing virtual economy.

On the business model front? Hey, we can all make our choices and we can all live with the results. But the sales tax issue unfairly tilts the table in Amazon’s direction.  Consumers who think they are benefitting from this tax dodge are kidding themselves, because they will end up paying in the end. They only ones benefitting are Amazon and its fellow on-line retailers. 

That makes them bad corporate citizens and it makes us dupes for putting up with it.    

Nothing to do with self-publishing, but hey, it's the holidays

I’ll be clear up front. I’ve got nothing against self-publishing per se. I’ve seen examples of kick-ass writers who couldn’t break through the traditional gatekeepers, but who built huge audiences online and either then have continued down that route to a new kind of publishing fame and fortune, or who then have signed blockbuster deals with the very houses that could have had them cheap early on. So maybe self-publishing is now a legitimate new entre for those with the skill to pull it off.

I’ve also seen an explosive proliferation of absolute crap, a nauseating cesspool of poor storytelling, badly written and rife with spelling, grammatical and formatting errors, usually offered so cheap as to be practically free. So maybe self-publishing is an exercise in unbridled narcissism through which marginally literate hacks are furthering the reputation of self-publishing as the last refuge of the talentless while simultaneously creating unrealistic pricing expectations, thus twice-poisoning the well for real writers with actual talent.

There’s the good and the bad. Pretty much like anything else. But I won’t be playing.

I’ve got three novels with my agent now, one that’s been shopped a good bit, one just getting shopped now, and one that will be heading out to the usual suspects shortly.  Even if my novels don’t sell, though, I won’t be self-publishing, not now and probably not ever.  Here’s why.

Read Chuck Wendig’s post today on all the moving parts you’ve got to consider if you want to get serious about the self-publishing business. You’ve got to learn the ins and outs of the various platforms and their comparative benefits. You’ve got to decide whether your soul is worth more than Amazon is offering to pay for it. You’ve got to figure out how you’re going to sell your work – and then invest a lot of effort pimping it. You’ve got to track results and tweak your approach to capitalize on what works in a constantly evolving marketplace. You’ve got to up your technical game so that the material you put out has the fit and finish to distinguish it as a professional product in what is often a pretty amateurish crowd. 

In other words, you’ve gotta do a lot of fucking work. And that all takes time.

If you’re a full-time penmonkey like Chuck, and you’ve got his energy and enthusiasm for the ins and outs of the business, it makes a lot of sense. It’s another revenue stream to divert into your wallet.

But I’m not one of those. I’ve got a job – a job that eats up fifty hours of my time on a good week. And I don’t have Chuck’s passion for the business side of this. I’ve got time to do three things: My day job; the sundry accumulation of housework, TV watching, drinking and marital goodwill maintenance that comprises most of the rest of my life; and writing.

 If having any kind of career as a writer, other than the one the day-job people pay me for, is going to require mastering the vagaries of self-publishing, then I’m not going to have that career. That’s just how it goes.

And it’s too bad, in a way.  Because if that’s how it ends up going; if, as an increasing chorus of people claim, traditional publishing is hearing the sound of self-publishing’s winged chariot drawing near and is soon to be crushed beneath its wheels, I fear many good writers will be lost. Because, to succeed, you’ll have to be as much a self-publishing entrepreneur as you are a writer, and the former skill set may end up being more important than the later.

Whine all you want about agents, editors and the rest of the traditional publishing establishment castigated as gatekeepers – and they certainly weren’t and aren’t infallible – but they did keep most of the crap out of the system. Now, anybody with an internet connection and an ego can flood the virtual book market with a shitstorm of, well, shit.

It isn’t just making it more complicated to be a writer; it is making it more complicated to be a reader. Sometimes the universe of choices in the marketplace when I fire up my Kindle drives me to despair. Truth be told, I often default to what’s offered by the traditional publishers anyway – it saves time, and it’s a little like having that UL tag on my Christmas lights. I may not end up loving the book, but I’m pretty sure it won’t burn my house down.

So, self-publishing? I don’t have the time and, truth be told, even if I did, I don’t have the temperament. So I’ll plug along through the traditional channels and I’ll make it or I won’t. The self-publishing craze will just have to carry on without me.

Back around Thanksgiving, Gerald So put out the call for holiday crime poems. Huh, I thought. Never did a crime poem. So I wrote a Thanksgivings Day crime poem.  Gerald, in his gracious rejection, said he had some Christmas ones that were a better fit for his next issue, which is coming out on December 26, (that was probably code for “stick with prose you tin-eared troglodyte and leave poetry to the professionals, like Steve Weddle.”)

But that means I’ve got spare buffalo parts lying around and a blog entry to fill. So here you go, my Thanksgiving crime poem.

A word due gods

Thanksgiving like love is

a word due gods eroded to

lazy poverty by common

tongues making gratitude

too freely for the

banal the material the transitory in

thoughtless ritual at  

countless tables

I thank God for . . .

and then the trivial litany

 . . . my family

. . .  my job

. . . this meal

in a rote prelude to

thankless gluttony as they imagine the

biological accident of their

existence is a blessing

a cardiganed father

standing priest at the lardered

altar of their table the

knife communing with the

insufficient offered flesh the

first slice along the breastbone the

way the YouTube video said to do it

The first slice along the breastbone

at my altar too but my blade is

not corrupted by holiday feasting

is instead blessed with the

sweat of the effort to

cut through the

joints of costal cartilage

separating the ribs from the

sternum and then

spreading that injury open

I was going to say like a flower the

surrender of a bud to the

sun’s seduction the prisoned

petals straining to their destined

glory but this is the

harder work of mammal birth

life’s insistence forcing wide this pelvis

of ribs the heart crowning in

the mouth of this womb crowning

in the mouth of

my holy appetite

and to the favor of Gods well

pleased that I am

thankful for this

thankful for this

thankful for this

You know what we need? Writing pants.

I golf a bit. Not as much as a few years back, but it’s still a good time when I get out.  Golf courses are pretty places – flora, fauna, quiet usually.  And you walk around or ride around and tell dirty jokes, drink a little beer, hit the occasional good shot.  Four hours or so of camaraderie in funny pants.  It’s relaxing.

Or it is for me. 

But I know some guys.  They agonize over every stroke. They’re pissed when a twenty-foot putt comes up three inches short. They get upset about stuff like “short-siding” themselves on their approach, whatever the hell that means. They are crushed when they leave their tee shot on the wrong side of the fairway.  I’m pretty happy when I can find mine.

Of course, I’m lucky to break 100 these days, and even back when I was playing regularly and I was a little younger and a little stronger and a lot more flexible, breaking 90 was the best I could hope for. And who cares, really? I’m just out for a good time.

These other guys? These are your 70s shooters, your scratch-golfer types. They aren’t out there for fun. They are out there to win, to perfect their arcane art, to reign victorious in a battle with an unseen inner vision of perfection that’s always just beyond their grasp.

That’s swell, Dan, you say. But who gives a fuck about your golf game? (You fat-ass, one-percenting Republican bastard a few of you mutter under your breath to punctuate the sentiment.)

But this isn’t about that. It’s about this.

The last few weeks, I’ve read a few blog posts about how tortured we writers are. The hours and days and weeks and months of research and drafting and re-drafting and re-re-drafting that go into each work. All the unseen travails our benighted souls endure in lonely silence so that you lucky readers might one day bask in the light of our genius.

And it’s all true, I guess.  This writing shit, once you decide you don’t just want to break 100 anymore, it can wear on you.    

But then I think of some of my golfer friends, the ones who can’t smile on the links, who can’t relax a little and just have fun. The ones that, when you tell them “Nice shot” after they’ve split the fairway with a 350-yard drive that leaves mere mortals gaping in awed wonder, say “Yeah, well it’s about time” and stomp angrily and without celebration to the recalcitrant white sphere that had, until that swing, defied the perfect vision of their will.  I always think hey, nobody’s got a gun to your head here.  If you aren’t having fun, go home and screw your wife. Or your mistress. Go do a line of coke of the dashboard of your Beemer. Life’s too short.

And I guess I feel the same way about us tortured writers – and I’ve fallen into that trap myself.  Unless you’re under contract (and if you are, good for you – that’s a problem the rest of us would kill for) nobody’s got a gun (or a lawyer) to your head either.  Enjoy it a little, willya?  That chunk of copy you just wrote, the one that flowed through you as if you were a divine conduit for the verbal music of the spheres?  Take a second, give yourself a pat on the back, print it out and hand it to somebody and say “Look what I did!”  When you hit a nice shot, celebrate a little. 

Because life’s too short.  Not just metaphorically – really.  If you aren’t having any fun, what’s the point?