My moviemaking skills are crude indeed, but sometimes it’s a stimulating creative change to move your mediums around. I’d seen on Derek Halpern’s blog that he was soliciting videos from his audience on the subject of their business needs. Derek’s focus has some overlap with Dan Pink’s and perhaps Dan Areily’s work in motivation and behavior. But Derek’s work—combining research in motivational psychology directed toward growing an online audience and growing sales of your products—is interesting on its own. And his half-manic personality probably helps win converts to his causes.

Derek’s video contest guidelines were to reveal in 60 seconds what the creator might hope to gain from his expertise. He’s going to choose a few winners to join him at a two-day workshop in Seattle (with CreativeLIVE) using tools to expand online business. I thought the metaphor of the empty chair was a good one to suggest that I wanted to use an improved online presence to drive more clients, and seeking counsel on how that presence could be shaped to a more focused audience.

I doubt if my purple plea will notch me a win, but I had jolly fun in quickly putting together the idea and the video. The satisfying part is to play—here in working with video and voice—somewhat far afield of my normal comforts. I want to push those kind of far-field buttons (though with more deliberation than my effort here) in the future, and see if I can trigger any high-voltage sparks.

As Magritte might have said, this is not a martini. This is the future.

My parents offered me a sip of a martini when I was seven or eight years old. I recall recoiling in disgust from its sharp, medicinal tang: “How can you drink that? It’s terrible!” Yet a crisp, cold martini on a Friday at five now seems the ideal reward for a week’s labor.

It is always amusing to remember the heated declarations you make in earlier days—”When I get outta this house I’m never going to cut my hair, ever!—and to consider the cooling of those declarations when they’re set out for a stretch on time’s countertop. That’s why I had to laugh when I saw the term “Future in the Past” in a grammar book the other day. Let’s relate it to the martini: who wants to read a grammar book for pleasure? Think of squirming away from grammar lessons in grade school; it would have been a difficult decision to determine whether you’d rather have a toothache or listen to someone prattle on about grammar.

Grammar: It’s Funnier Than it Tastes

But I’ve been in the writing trade for a while, and I think it’s good (and even fun) to continue to sharpen your tools. So, I’ve been reading Grammatically Correct: The Essential Guide To Spelling, Style, Usage, Grammar and Punctuation. Yes, you’re right, I’m a riot at parties. Anyway, in one of the sections on tenses (stay with me, people), there’s a discussion of some tense variants that are little used, and the one that seemed delightful to me was “future in the past,” described as expressing the idea that an an earlier time point, there had been an expectation that something would later happen.

Dig that! So, if you say, “I had a feeling that you were going to bloat like a dirigible if you ate that entire cheesecake,” you are using the future in the past tense. I also liked the further explanation that it doesn’t matter if your future/pasting was correct or not. So, we can all shoot to be soothsayers, but if that doesn’t work out, we can go into accounting.

Yeah, I guess you had to be there. But just to push it further: over time, with different editions of yourself, you learn a bit more of who you are. That kid who spat out that martini would never have dreamed that something in a grammar book would delight him years later. He might have said, “I knew that Tom was going to hate martinis and grammar when he grew up.” And he would have been wrong, but he would have crafted a fine future-in-the-past utterance. You live, you learn.

And continuing to learn: that’s a crisp, cold martini to me. I’ll take two.

PS
Anchor Distilling’s Junipero Gin—delicious!

And you can also use it to bash rodents

For the past 30 years or so, I’ve kept a hardcover dictionary, usually a Merriam-Webster’s, near my bed. Reading in bed at night has long been one of my delicious pleasures, and because words themselves are the savory nuggets of that deliciousness, I’ve never found it tedious to pause in the narrative to look up an unfamiliar or unusually wrought word. Quite the opposite. True, sometimes throwing a rock under the wheels of your reading journey can be disruptive, but I’ve more often found that considering why an author might use a particular word helps me parse the narrative all the better, and thus roll more smoothly through it.

However, once you pick up a dictionary to sniff out one savory nugget, your word-stimulated appetite might hunt out all the more, so your reading attentions turn from the original story to that herd of words corralled by the alphabet. So, grabbing the weighty word-cage from the bedside table is less an annoyance than a pleasure. But I do wonder how much longer such a big box of words will come in that container: a couple of weeks ago, I read that MacMillan, one of the larger reference book publishers, would be printing its final physical edition this year, becoming instead an online reference source for language arts.

Death (or at least gone to the hot tub) of a salesperson

That’s not any kind of shock: the stalwart Merriam-Webster Collegiate at my bedside is published through Encyclopedia Britannica, which ceased the print edition—after 244 years of publication—of its 32-volume set in 2010, to concentrate on its digital assets. And the most venerable of the dictionary publishers, Oxford University Press, also dropped the curtain on the 126-year print publication of “the definitive record of the English language” in 2010. The third edition of the Oxford, which will be available exclusively online, won’t be release until around 2037, which tells you that cooking with words takes a sweet, slow simmer.

I’m sure if there are any surviving door-to-door salespeople who used to trundle the Britannica around, they would issue a world-weary, “It’s about time.” That’s probably just as well: According to a 2006 report by Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, Britannica’s own market research showed that the typical encyclopedia owner opened the books just once or twice a year. They undoubtedly provided more of a touch of intellectual window dressing for many families.

Not to bury Webster, but to praise him (Er, it. Or them.)

However, this is no lamentation for the death of the physical tome. For me, I’m often as not starting the engine of that big Webster’s tank because of a wiggly word I spotted in my Kindle reading. I love the page-by-page presence of books, always will, but I have no quarrel with the e-readers of the world; I am one of them, I have one of them—there’s much to recommend them. As Seth Godin says, in many ways, the physical book is a “souvenir”—with information being instant, the physical book is more of a trophy of sorts, though one I hope isn’t designated as wallpaper like those old Britannicas.

Here’s to the book, long live the book (but I’ll be peeking at the Kindle I’m hiding behind the book cover as well).

You ought to see my flask collection too

As a postscript to this bookish bender, you may be amused by the video that graces my About page, which shows me wrestling with a portion of my collection of reference works. Books, can’t live without them, can’t get good gas mileage if you fill your trunk with ‘em.

Being short, you’ll never have to worry about seeing all of that guck that’s on the top of your refrigerator. Me being the long, lanky type, so shamed am I when I spot that accretion of grime that I have to stop the speechwriting I do for the American Graham Cracker Collection Society, and clean it immediately. But here I’m referring to length, not height, where bigger isn’t necessarily better—in writing.

There’s a situation that brings this to mind: I’m going to the Writer’s Digest West writing conference in LA in late October, and there I’m going to engage in a frolicsome thing called a pitch slam. A pitch slam isn’t where you test your curveball to see if you can strike out Albert Pujols; it’s where a hoard of peevish, underfed literary agents listen to your strangled proposal for your book, and then press a button that puts you in a trash compactor, while you hear the waning sounds of their maniacal laughter.

The slam part is this: you have 90 seconds to pitch your book. Ninety seconds: that’s easily enough time for me sit in front of the agent, swallow my tongue, fall to the floor and writhe spasmodically. I have scanned the agents who are available for this particularly torture, and I see that I will have at least five chances to pitch—a fit—in front of them. Thus my writing exercise for the next month will be to put the novel I’ve just finished into a readily digestible pill: sweet, vivid and utterly condensed.

Brevity Is the Soul of Lingerie

I’ve written before on how challenging (yet oddly freeing) it can be to be forced to write with brevity. It’s refreshing, like ice in your underwear. For ballast, I’ll be checking out some information on pitching and synopses from the Guide to Literary Agents blog, where I’ve gleaned good information before.

Writing short is a useful art. A couple of months ago, I won a great MediaBistro Literary Festival conference pass just by tweeting what I judged to be the best sentence I’d ever written. (Never mind, with counting the hashtag, that my first three choices were longer than Twitter’s character count allows). As Dorothy Parker said, “Brevity is the soul of lingerie.” Thus, to display my lingerie, I just entered the Gotham Writer’s Workshop 91-word memoir contest, where you are supposed to deliver your biography in 91 words. Here’s my first half:

A Cardboard Fort, Conquered by Language
At six, long backyard hours in cardboard refrigerator-box fort, alone with clock, dinosaur books and languid time. At twelve, graduating to Hesse, Twain, Steinbeck, and hearing the sweet siren call of language. At twenty-four, English-degreed, writing crabbed copy for catalogs, questing.

You’ll just have to wait for the rest; I don’t want to reveal the part about my secret marriage to Doris Duke while the contest is pending. Have to run—have to figure out how to squeeze my multi-points-of-view tragicomic opus into 90 seconds, without including all the sighs, cries and lies.

(And hey, if any of you agents happen to read this, I don’t really think you are peevish or underfed. I will remember all your children’s birthdays forever.)

Bonus Material! Missing Teeth, Dangerous Drugs and an Unsober Man

And for a little comic relief, of the not-so-short variety, take a look at my guest post on the charming aspects of hysteria experienced in the dentist’s office. That minor play of neuroses is courtesy of Dr. Richard Wilson’s Bite Point blog; Doc Wilson is the author of many a toothsome tale, including the forthcoming epic, The Man Who Wore Mismatched Socks.

Let’s imagine you were hungry for some syllables, so you walked over to your yard’s word tree. Word tree fruit always hangs in clusters of three, so you pick a triad with your left, and one with your right. You gobble the first cluster, discovering only after you chew that those three words were “rectal,” “putrefy” and “termagant.” Spitting the half-eaten leavings of those words onto the ground, you pop the other bunch in: they are “shimmer,” “honey” and “moonlight.” You chew with appreciation, because we taste words by their sounds. The sounds of the first bunch were sour, and those of the second sweet.

Sleazoid Tactic #1
Hah! You word-hungry hounds are probably hankering for the continuation of this fascinating tale, aren’t you? Aren’t you? (For the sake of my rhetorical flourish here, just say “yes!”) But instead of feeding you your nourishing bowl of words (with skim milk), I’m going to send you where the article is published in full: the grand confines of Upmarket magazine.

Sleazoid Tactic #2
And just to show that one insult can be quickly followed by another, I’ll pronounce one of those sad phrases that’s now part of our commercial culture: if you like the article, click on that cussed Like button on that Upmarket page, and I will feel a special tingle.

Or you can ignore this article and go ahead and finally clean the grout lines of your tile shower with bleach and a toothbrush like you’d been putting off for the last seven years. It’s up to you, but don’t say I didn’t give you a choice.

This past couple of weekends, I’ve been pruning the trees on our property. We’ve got six or seven fruit trees, many of them upwards of 50 years old, a good percentage of them showing the wear of years. I use various tools, but the one that’s most reliable is the tree saw in the photo above. It’s a simple device: a long serrated blade screwed to a five-foot pole. The serrated blade curves toward the sharp tip, so you can insert it at an angle into the tight crotch of a branch and if need be, cut in short, quick motions.

One interesting thing about this saw is that it’s at least 50 years old too, but it whistles through the branches of the varied trees, no matter the wood’s hardness or bulk. The saw was given to me by my girlfriend Alice’s farmer father, a bit before his death. He also gave me a much more modern tree saw, a nice lightweight aluminum one, with a telescoping height-adjusting pole. That one I gave away. The old one is so balanced, so sound and so fundamental to its purpose that it made no sense to have the fancy one.

Pruning this weekend made me think of the tools I use more often than saws: the software tools I use to prune words. I was a copyeditor in the mid-80s for a big software company, and they had developed their own word processor. It was DOS-based, of course; the earliest, miserable versions of Windows had recently come out, and there was a DOS-based Word, but the owner of my company hated Microsoft, so he had to develop his own program to spite it. But I’d never used a word processor at all, so using the clumsy keyboard-defined field codes for headlines, bolding and italics still seemed amazing to me.

Word Fattens Up, Walks Sideways Like a Crab
But six months later, the company sprang for Macintosh Plusses for the editors, and using the graphical interface, pulled into place by a mouse’s tail, made words on the page work so much better for me. I worked for other software companies in the 90s, when Windows and Word became entrenched, so I moved through the various iterations of Word, both Mac and Windows, because that was the tool within the world I worked. I tried a number of word workers through time—Wordstar, WordPerfect, WriteNow, and other simpler text editors—but because I worked in corporate environments, with seemingly invariant and unmediated corporate standards, Word was the de facto player.

So habituated was I to using Word that even when I became a full-time freelancer, many years ago, I continued to use Word, though by this time, it had become a lumbering code-monster with nine heads, coming in with zillions of templates, add-ons, graphical-handling (and crashing) features and menus with endless sub-menus—kind of like the Cadillac that Johnny Cash sang of, that was composed of the parts of twenty Caddies from twenty different years.

Having to Use a Sled to Lug Your Word Processor Around
Now, there are multiple opportunities to shed myself of Word: many other programs, like OpenOffice, can save in Word’s old .doc format (though the newer .docx can be problematic). But I’ve become so used to Word’s ways, bloated as they are, that I haven’t wanted to spend the time in learning a new program, and I don’t want to worry about possible conversion problems for my corporate clients. So I continue to muddle with Mac Word 2008, itself an aging tree.

But for blog posts? I always use the quick and easy TextEdit, the text editor that comes with the Mac OS. It’s clean and lightweight, like that pruning saw, and does simple tasks squarely and reliably. There’s no aluminum involved.

PS Any of you weaned yourself off Word, if that’s what you were raised on? Let me know what you use to work with words.

Yeah, thought I'd put my novel onscreen. Sneaky, eh?

Books, ugh, repellent things. The fluttering of pages, the implicit mockery of cold text, the muscle- and mind-straining weight of ideas. Better to corral all those meandering words and their unseemly punctuation into an electron pool, where you can sip from modest, reduced-page cups of their content, where you can make type sizes wiggle to your wishes, where you can search and highlight and transfer and connect and criss-cross and cannibalize and—whew! [Daubs fevered brow.]

Actually, I love books, those creaky old antiques. If you drop hardcover books on eggs, they make a satisfying squish. If you argue with their authors, you can fling them across the room with a cascade of curses and get a resounding “bang!” from the wall opposite. But the reason I’m even blithering about books is that before I left for a recent two-month stint in the Bahamas, I was given a first-generation Kindle, a discard from a fellow who now is proudly armed with an iPad.

The Salt Slime of the Ancient Reader
Taking a pile of books to the Bahamas was a no-no, mostly for weight issues. And because, having lived in the tropics before, I knew that all things material are subject to the insidious insistence from nature that solids return to goo. For instance, my host in the tropics had vast shelves of great books, which I eagerly scanned. But picking one (and another and another) to leaf through—ahhgggh! All covered with that strange salt-slime that adheres to anything that is stationary for a period in the humid climes. Most unpleasant.

Thus, I Kindleized my reading, and I admit to the pleasure of summoning up multiple books for chunky savoring in one reading session. All those good free Domino Project works, Poke the Box, Do the Work, Self-Reliance and more. And because I am a dweeb, Grammatically Correct and Portable MFA in Creative Writing (even more portable on a Kindle). And a mystery story collection. And my own novel, pictured so promotionally in the image above.

The Palm V—Looking Back Through Time’s Cracked Screen
But I’ve never been the Luddite sort regardless, railing about ereaders being the death of the printed word. Publishing is evolving in crazy, lurching ways, but I think it’s mostly to the good. I’ll frequent (and buy in) bookstores till the day I go blind, happy with the serendipity of the shelves, the sense of discovery and promise the stores afford, and the fine feelings I actually get from the fluttering of pages. But I wrote a newspaper piece, sometime around the Ice Age of 1999, about having jolly fun reading Mark Twain on an airplane with my Palm V. Petrol-based ink, soy ink or e-ink—it’s the ideas therein that make one think.

One disclaimer on this particular model of Kindle: Steve Jobs would have had the designer drawn and quartered. You can barely hold the damn thing without accidentally turning pages, backwards and forwards. Set it down at an angle, set it down on something soft, lift it to move it—your place is whisked to the next electronic edge. I know the newer models have corrected this egregious inelegance, but I can’t callously throw this thing against the wall like I might the printed Portable MFA.

One small coda: today, we renewed our subscription to the Sunday paper. I read a lot of news online (discounting whatever mind rot news-noodling provokes), but no matter the readily available onscreen/Kindle/iPad/ version of the paper, there’s still something about flipping through the physical sections of the newspaper, in bed with a second cup of Sunday coffee …

C. Wainwright, Sans Locks but w/Lots of Love

Quick updates: I’d posted here earlier about Colleen Wainwright’s leadership in trying to raise 50K for WriteGirl, the L.A. program that instructs high school girls in the love and practice of good writing. Colleen set out from nuttin’ to raise the dough, and promised that she would shave her industrious head if her project made her milestone. Yes, with 10K to spare. Thus you see her beaming, polished pate in the photo above.

Check out Colleen’s video on all things head-shaving here, and about the post-fundraising sort-outs. Huge round of applause and appreciation for Colleen demonstrating that a single person (with the help of many) can drive an idea home against strong odds. She believed in her project, and shared its strengths in a way that others could connect with. Well done!

Literary Agents Liberated—We Have a Winner
In another fascinating recap (hey, slow news week), the stirring contest to see who would come away with the free copy of the 2012 Guide to Literary Agents is over, and Laura Stanfill came away with the prize. Laura is a writer, of all the damnable things, and is giving away books on her blog as well, so check it out. (I am going to start giving away talking eggplants—this book giveaway stuff is too conventional.)

In the Bread and Circuses Vein
I can’t provide any writing advice in this episode other than letting you know that writing badly over and over again is painful, but less so than childbirth or living near a Brussel sprouts farm. But writing badly on a regular basis can lead to writing better. Now that we’re finished with those sententious pronouncements, here’s an opinion poll: which means of having your cocktail mixed would produce the most palatable beverage:

I got a lot of writing encouragement when I was young. Being given a lovely little cloisonné pin that said “Best Writer” in my Catholic grammar school at age 12 might have been my writing Olympus. [Note: never let nuns pin anything on you.] Without encouragement, a writing seed might never sprout, and perhaps an Alice Munro would have become an accountant instead.

So, with trumpeting fanfare (turn up your speakers), I encourage you to contribute to the 50-for-50 program! Here’s what it’s about: WriteGirl is an organization “for high school girls centered on the craft of creative writing and empowerment through self-expression. Through one-on-one mentoring and monthly workshops, girls are given techniques, insights and hot tips for great writing in all genres from professional women writers.”

That’s a very good thing. Even better is that Colleen Wainwright, who is spearheading (ouch) the 50-for-50 fundraising, has promised to shave her happy head should the fundraising reach its $50,000 goal, which will happen on her 50th birthday. Go to the 50-for-50 site to see her hilarious video on the subject.

If you contribute, you can receive lovely gifts too—I got a download of TextExpander, which is a nifty piece of Mac software. So lay out a little dough for a great cause, and push Colleen a little closer to air-conditioning her head. There is less than two weeks left!

Yeah, yeah, any excuse to drink bourbon. Since Gary Vaynerchuk just retired his great Wine Library TV and Daily Grape, I had to pay him a little tribute, and also answer the pressing question about whiskey and writers.