I went to a memorial service for a young man several days ago. My connection to him is peripheral: he was the son of my girlfriend Alice’s cousin, and neither of us had met him—and I’d only met Alice’s cousin once, long ago. So my going to the service was basically to support Alice, grieving for her cousin and her loss.

The service was held on the college campus where Al had been both a student and an employee, and the campus cafeteria was filled, mostly with people in their twenties, befitting a man who only lived to 25 before bone cancer cut him down. And that cutting was a long way down: Al was a big, strong guy, an athlete, which as the slideshow of photos demonstrated, a guy who filled the room with his body, but filled it even more with his personality.

I thought I could be nothing more than an outsider at his service, feeling the general sympathy for his friends, wife and relatives, sympathy for the inconceivable notion that a life that showed great promise was over. But as a succession of his friends and admirers spoke, I started to lean in, because what was expressed—such hurt, such pain, such shock—was profound.

Speaker after speaker told their stories of how Al coached them, encouraged them, laughed with them. How his great size and strength were intimidating at first, until the giant smile that always came with that giant strength disarmed them. How this guy, who seemed to combine goofy casualness with an intense dedication to achievement and to self-betterment, influenced anyone who spent even a short time with him.

Many of the college’s athletes spoke of how he was a role model, someone who showed them that they could always work a little harder, make a bit more effort, draw on their reserves to get a distance further. So many young people, men and women, choking with emotion spoke of how his personality and drive made them want to be better people. There was lightness too, with many accounts of college pranks and crazy escapades, the laughter mixing with the tears.

The Truth of Tears

My tears too. I work with language every day, and know its power, but sometimes language is just words on the page. These were life words, words appealing to our higher instincts. Men breaking down; more than one saying that Al made them want to be a better man. And such a wonderful, striking diversity in the crowd, the people recounting Al’s life Asian, black, Hispanic, white, his friends, his teachers—and all giving his young wife, there with their daughter, who might have only been two, a long hug after they spoke, everyone breaking down.

I was stunned at the depth of the tributes, to a fellow who had just begun to stretch out, to live the rich life that seemed so promising before the illness, to fulfill the full unfolding of the magnetism of the big smile and the strength and the warmth—to live a normal life in the tight circle of family and friends. But sometimes the book is closed before it’s even written.

I went away from the service shaken, thinking that sometimes words are all we have to try and work through the unimaginable. Of course, they are inadequate, they can’t quite parse the mind-cracking shock, the desolation after life’s earthquakes, the utter emptiness of loss. Inadequate yes, but sometimes all we have.

So on this Mother’s Day, a warm message to mothers everywhere. And to those mothers who have to face the abyss of losing their children, I hope you can find some way to assuage your grief. I doubt that anything can make up that loss. But there is no small comfort in knowing that the child was loved, and deeply.

A comma, a period and a semicolon walk into a bar … oh, wait! I can’t finish the joke; I forget how it’s punctuated.

Wow, tough crowd.

But punctuation’s no joke, my friends—each punctuation mark has a grave (or acute) purpose: sometimes bearing a serious slant, sometimes swinging a strong, straight shoulder to torque the weight of words through thought rivers. Think of the cymbal crash of the exclamation point, the yearning intrigue of the question mark, the potential hidden menace of the semicolon.

But behind the sober, workaday faces of those little bits of pause and check, it’s not so black and white. Every punctuation mark has its own personality, much more idiosyncratic than that of a bland worker wielding the traffic signals of sentence flow. Like any of us, they appreciate the anonymity of a job well done, but at the same time, they don’t mind letting on that there’s a purple sash under the white cotton shirt …

But if you want to fully know the compelling reasons why you should take your favorite punctuation mark to lunch, you’ll have to go over to Writer Unboxed, where I finish up this exposé on both the sappy and the sordid aspects of those tricky lines, dots, slashes and dashes.

Note: Book Does Not Include a Map

A month ago, I wrote about the death of my neighbor, and how mutton-headed I’d felt about never having even thought about discussing writing with him, a retired professor of American literature. Recently, my gal pal Alice and I were invited by James’ widow, May, to look though his big book collection to see if there was anything we wanted before she donated the books.

There were many works that I would have greedily grabbed in other days, but as it was, I just selected a few Scott Fitzgeralds, an old volume of Proust’s Swann’s Way and the sweet book you see pictured above. I’d read Captain Stormfield long ago, but hadn’t known it was the last story published before Twain’s death in 1910. The long story was serialized in Harper’s Magazine a year or two before its publication by Harper and Brothers in 1909. It’s a nicely bound volume, in great shape, still with the intact tissue paper before the title page. I didn’t realize it was a first edition until Alice pointed out its copyright page.

Cranberry Famers: Heavenly Experts

So, I get my first first edition of Twain from a Chinese professor of literature who taught on Taiwan. Twain himself would have found that amusing. The work is nothing short of amusing, much of it a conversation in heaven between the good captain and a cranberry farmer, who disabuses Stormfield of those quaint notions that heaven was all piety and angelic song. It’s a nice counterpoint to Twain’s Letters From the Earth, which was published posthumously by Twain’s estate, when the world was perhaps more prepared for some its hot-pepper views on religion. Here’s Satan speaking about man from one of the letters, and also on God’s view of man.

Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very, very best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm.

He took a pride in man; man was his finest invention; man was his pet, after the housefly . . . .

It pleases me to think that James left behind that slim volume of Twain’s, and that it’s now moved into my hands, an unexpected neighborly connection where my long-dead favorite author makes the link live. I do hope that whatever version of heaven James moved to doesn’t have a lot of off-key singing.

PS George Jones, RIP

In consideration of people who could probably only get into heaven if they snuck in in the back of a potato truck (and would surely then make vodka out of the potatoes), George Jones died the other day. I’m more inclined to rock and roll for my daily diet of noise (and in country, more toward Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson), but you can hear more angel and devil in George’s songs than pretty much any singer. Jones probably never saw a drink he didn’t like, but he made some music that had a whole lotta soul. Here’s looking at you, George.

Stand Aside, Literary Poseurs!

I suppose I can forgive Hugo and Dickens for being ahead of me, because they are dead, after all. But man, did I stick it to that Bronte gal! (And her sisters aren’t even here to defend her.) I’m referring to that bit of pictorial whimsy above, where I got to sit at the reading table (even if I had to use a high chair) with a pantheon of literary greats. The whimsy is that this is one of those deceptive snapshots in time, where if the photo is taken at just the right moment, a sedentary couch surfer might be seen to be leaping onto a moving stallion. In the case of my recent Amazon book promotion, my stallion never really left the stall.

The reason my novel, All Roads Are Circles, is seen rubbing shoulders with these writing elect is because of my recent promotion through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing’s (KDP) Select program. I won’t go into deep details about how the Select program works, but here is a pointed post from Jane Friedman (excellent comments too) about the premise behind the program. One of the questions that’s examined is that because of the proliferation of free books, is KDP of much use to authors today?

One of the basics of the program for your enrolled ebook is that you give Amazon exclusive rights to sell your book for 90 days, and in that time you can designate 5 days of free downloads for the book. One of the alleged spurs behind this largesse is that it circulates an author’s work to a wider audience, some percentage of which might be induced to write a positive review, and thus boost actual sales.

Promotion a Go-Go Goes No-Go

I took my first novel, published a couple of years ago, off of Smashwords and B&N to put it in Select. My hope in using the program wasn’t to later sell copies of that novel, but indeed to induce some positive reviews, in the hopes that might promote the sale of my newer, small-press published short story collection. People who have used the program successfully have noted that it’s often helpful in the selling of other works; you will see many authors sell a novel for .99 as a loss leader, while their other works are priced much higher.

I was quite successful in my recent promotion in NOT selling copies of the promoted novel (I’m apparently quite good at that), but not very successful in getting reviews, and not successful in getting new sales of the short story book. Broken down, my recent 5 days of free KDP promotion—which ended on April 24—garnered 3,288 downloads. I had registered it for free on a number of free ebook downloads sites, and on some Goodreads and Amazon free promo forums. You will see in current online discussions of KDP Select that Amazon is no longer giving these sites that advertise free downloads as much latitude and support as they had in the past.

That Stallion Really Was Lame

It’s been almost a month since the promo ended. In that time, there were 0 post-Select sales of the novel. There was probably one sale of the short story book, maybe two. I did get one review of the free novel: it’s titled “Lame,” and its one-star designation says nothing happens in the book except some x-rated language. Wow, I’m going to have to go back and read my own book. I’m almost sure something happens, but I didn’t realize there was so much shitty language.

Granted, literary fiction isn’t a big seller (particularly short-story books), and Oprah and I never dated, so I don’t have that cachet, but them results is slim pickin’s. Other writers report much different results. Author Joe Konrath, who writes extensively about traditional publishing and all the variants of self-publishing, spells out his own profitable experiences with KDP Select; he has an extensive publishing history, which served him well in his promotion.

However, if anyone does need advice on how not to sell books, I am apparently an expert. I’m not sure how well that Dickens guy did on his actual sales after his promo, but as you know, he has a lot of ghosts working for him on his behalf. I’m thinking of engaging the Ghost of Christmas Future to work on my next book promo …

Tiny but mighty: stand back—this is a sharpened word sword!

I had a tiny piece about the Las Vegas Hangover Heaven bus published in Draft magazine the other day. Draft is highest-circulating craft-beer magazine, with a frothy lineup of stories about breweries, industry personalities and innovations in the brewing world. My little article is just a whisper of words, but I’m still happy to have it published, for a number of writing reasons.

Many magazines today, from Smithsonian to Seventeen, have lots of small articles and light pieces in their brightly designed front (and sometimes back) pages. It speaks to the reading tastes of the Internet age: colorful and chunky. For writers, and especially ones trying to break in to a magazine, these areas (called “front of book” or FOB) can be a quick keyboarding to good money and wider opportunities.

Many magazine editors don’t have the time or patience to try out an unknown writer on a feature piece, but query them on a 200- or 300-word filler article, and they will more often acquiesce. And those appetizer articles are often a way to set the table for a full-meal article later.

In the case of Draft, I’d written a long feature piece on moonshining for them a while back, so I know the editor. I pitched the Hangover Heaven piece as a feature, but was still happy when the editor came back with the offer to make it a short FOB article. Happy because those articles often pay .50 to $1 a word (the case here), and more so because it kept me fresh in the mind of the editor. I’m about to query her with another feature pitch this week because I’m fresh in the magazine and fresh in her mind.

Short Articles Can Pay the Long Green

Short is also sweet in terms of demonstrating that you can consistently carry a certain kind of article to completion. I just wrote my fourth FOB piece for The American Scholar, for a section called Works in Progress. These articles have all been 250-word pieces, which again pay well. Better, after having written a few of these, the editor now inquires if I have any ideas for the next quarterly issue. I’m in good stead with that editor for stories to come—possibly longer stories to come—and potentially with editors of other good magazines, because the Scholar is a national magazine of high caliber, focusing on public affairs, literature, culture and more.

One other consideration on short pieces: you can often use the research done for a longer piece as the basis for another short article. I just wrote an article for Airstream Life magazine on Edward Tufte, the professor who is famous for his work in rendering complex information into a comprehensible whole. He also is a designer of very fanciful sculptures, among them one that uses an Airstream in a most improbable way. After I wrote the Airstream Life piece, I realized that some unused info and quotes from the interview could be shaped into a short piece for The American Scholar. Bingo, a twofer! (And I’m grateful that the editor of Airstream Life now brings potential stories to my attention as well, since I’ve written for him for years.)

So, don’t think writing small pieces for magazines diminishes their stature. If they are big enough for a byline, they are big enough to stand on their own. And they can lead to bigger things down the road.

James Fu, Holding the Harvest

“What might have been” can seem like the saddest words. They are kin to “If only” and “I should have” and other regrets that any person might muse over, founded on moments like not asking out the attractive girl in high school, not speaking up in the meeting when your idea is stolen by your rival, not reconciling with your sister over a long-dead argument—and not having a chance to reconcile when she herself dies.

I am reminded of those sad words because my neighbor James, the fellow in the photo above, died suddenly the other day. We’ve lived next door to James and May for 14 years, and from the earliest days, they have fulfilled the blessing of the term “good neighbors.” May is the orchid cloner who has given us many strikingly beautiful plants, James the retired professor, with whom I had random discussions about things in the neighborhood and other forgotten trivialities.

We often saw the couple when they walked through our rural neighborhood, and always exchanged good greetings in brief chats. Though elderly and not in good health, his death was a shock. And only afterwards did I realize that for years, just next door was a retired literature professor, and I’d never once spoken to him of books, of my own love of words. Why had that never occurred to me?

A Trailer Full of Writers

If I look out my kitchen window, I can see an old yellow trailer in their yard. It’s big: it is probably 35 feet long, up on concrete blocks. It’s filled with James’s collection of books. Of course, most of them are probably in Chinese—he taught on Taiwan, where he was raised, and where he met May. His English wasn’t great, but it was good enough to ask him, “What writers did you love? Did you write fiction yourself?” I love many writers, I write fiction—it amazes me now that I never thought to ask.

So, this isn’t a prescription for right living, me pointing my finger and saying “Mark my words: speak up, take action, make the call—before it’s too late.” No, it’s more a soft cloud of regret, mixed with a little surprise—why had I never asked?

Rest in peace James. You were a good man, and I am honored to have been your neighbor, and I hope, your friend.

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.

 Careful—this lawn jockey can bite

Last week a cousin of the fellow above flew into my neighbor’s field. It’s not that unusual to see herons in the general neighborhood—after all, I took the photo of this sharp-beaked beauty just a few miles from my house. But he was near a watercourse, where there are all kinds of wiggly things for him to eat. My neighbor’s field is weedy, scraggly land where no fish worth its saltwater would venture. So, seeing the heron fly onto the property and strike one of those heraldic heron poses was noteworthy.

Any excuse to abandon my work, I scuttled over to the window nearest the bird in my old Airstream office to watch him work. If you’ve ever watched herons at play in the fields of creation, they’re often pretty deliberate about their doings. They might neck-jut a few feet or so into some shallow water, and then fix that acute-angle head for minutes at a time, undoubtedly trying to come up with some heron haiku. This featherhead did his kind proud by freezing in place.

But then he chicken-footed forward toward our wire fence and started doing a fascinating bob and weave, his long neck shimmying from side to side, cobra-style, while he simultaneously ducked up and down. I thought for a moment that he was sick, and was about to collapse in the field. Not quite. On one of his swinging swayings, he shot that head forward to the base of the fence and came up with a big lizard in his beak. I didn’t have time to even gasp before he flipped his head a bit and swallowed him whole.

Galvanizing Readers with Electric Characters

That moment was shocking and unexpected—I was agog. The bird sauntered out of sight of the Airstream—probably to see if there were any armadillos around to play poker with—and when I came out a few minutes later to check on him, he had vamoosed.

Now, you’re going to think that I’m bending a stiff bird to make a point, but honestly, after my head had returned to my body after watching that lizard slurping, I immediately thought that the bird’s behavior was a good illustration of an approach to working with characters in stories. You can give your reader a good clap on their forehead by making a character do something astonishing once in a while.

You have to be careful here: I’m not talking about having a character spontaneously speak Swahili when they were raised in Brooklyn. I’m referring to having a character do something that’s possible (and that indeed might be integral to that character’s nature), but that’s not probable, that breaks boundaries. Something that expands the character’s potential or place in the reader’s imagination. That kind of developmental concussion can push a story, or shape it in new ways.

The Frogs Are Not What They Seem

The second nature lesson—and one that again relates to writing—is something I’d learned earlier, but was reminded of again because it’s the beginning of croaking season. By that I mean that this time of year, the frogs that do their philosophizing near our water garden start to do it more boisterously. And they are loud.

When I first heard this resonant chorus years ago, my city-boy background prompted me to think it was the loud-mouthing of some large toads, maybe even bullfrogs. I’d look all over the place for the source of the croak-storm, but I could never see the buggers. It took me many searches to finally spot one. No wonder: Pacific tree frogs, the wide-mouthed worthies that comprise this orchestra, are only a few centimeters long. But when they are soliloquizing about their romantic talents to any lady frogs in the vicinity, they give it their all. They are Danny DeVito with an aggressive hangover.

As with the heron, the frogs nudged me in a writerly direction as well: work with characters that aren’t quite what they seem. You might have a scrawny, wiry guy who turns out to have extraordinary strength, or a reserved little sister who later turns out to wail skronking bebop sax in a secret band. Stick some herons and some tree frogs in your writing—it will give it a stronger pulse. And this isn’t just for fiction: God knows that business writing could use an phrase that’s on fire or a trapdoor opening and swallowing up the beautiful bride. Wake the audience up.

Oh, you probably should stick a swallowed lizard in there every once in a while too; some characters turn out to be the eaten, not the eaters.

Any animals making mischief in your writer’s mind?

PS Psst! If you’re looking to compel your customers, I write blog posts for businesses as well.

There’s Something About Harry

Before I had heard that this dog had been lost, before I’d heard that his owner was lost without him, I felt a pang myself. That’s the power of an image—or more accurately, the power of an emotion. My sister had sent me this photo, telling me that it was a picture of Harry, her friend’s dog that had gone missing that morning. But I didn’t even get to that point in Harry’s sad story before I felt my own loss.

What looking at the picture did was take me immediately to a memory, one I hadn’t thought of in years, of a German Shepherd that my family had brought home from the pound when I was eight or nine. I think my brother and I were supposed to share responsibility for the dog, but I do remember that I was in the lead in begging to have a dog. Our dog, Champ, was a beautiful shepherd like Harry, and he was friendly and fun, but he had a “flaw”: he could easily jump over the five-foot fence that bound our yard, and he did it regularly. We had to hunt him down, all in a frenzy, over and over.

I don’t recall how deep the discussion and if many other solutions were offered, but my dad decided, perhaps only after a month or so, to return Champ to the pound. I was crushed. I remember driving to the pound with the dog in the back of the station wagon, hating my dad at the wheel, my face burning. It’s strange to still have the salt active in a wound from so long ago, and stranger still the mix of emotions, because it makes me miss my dad, who died a couple of years back.

Emotions Jump Without a Net

But this post isn’t exactly about dogs, nor about losses, as an adult or a child. More so that some emotional grounds, though they might be covered, are never actually buried. People’s emotions can jump from their bodies without any chance for their cerebral side to intervene. And that’s where we as writers, whether of business or essay or tale, should open a gate. Not as manipulators of emotion, but encouragers of it. Post the pictures in readers’ minds of lost dogs, stern parents, the gleam of future dreams.

No matter if you are writing about email marketing programs or the electricity of your first kiss, try to open the gate so the emotion comes through. (Now you might grant me the kiss part, but email marketing? Believe it, there’s a charge and a current in everything—you just have to plug it in.) So yes, the Internet has changed the game—at least on this side of the digital divide—but before the first packet, before the first link, before the first tweet, there was the human heart. It leaps.

Oh, by the way: Harry? Harry made it home. Good dog!

Flesh and Blood Are We

I had a post at Firepole Marketing a short while back that runs its fingers through a few of the things discussed here. Check it out: Flesh and Blood, Meet Flesh and Blood.

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!