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Things many people say that are illogical

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I hear them all the time. It’s my belief that we should examine the things we tell others and ourselves. Maybe they just don’t make any sense. Many are mindless, some are untrue, and most emanate from the tendency to believe that a clever-sounding slogan acquires truth.

My abhorrence of these had its genesis when I was about eleven, watching All in the Family with what passed for a family. That show was one of the best sitcoms of my lifetime, because it combined some drama with good comedy and powerful social comment. Since some of my audience is younger, I should take a moment to explain. The stars were Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton, who played a row-house Depression-kids-era working-class couple with heavy accents in an eastern city, maybe in New Jersey. Archie Bunker was a pudgy working-class xenophobe. Edith was the matron of the era, self-sacrificing, trying to please everyone, pretending less than her full intellect. Their daughter, a standard issue baby boomer, was married to a guy with longer hair who didn’t get along with Archie on politics, social issues, or much of anything. Their debates and arguments were those of the day.

At one point, Mike (the son-in-law, played by Rob Reiner) was talking about a commune. “People who live in comm-unes are comm-u-nists,” snarked Archie. In those days, calling someone a communist was like calling him a terrorist today: it was the demon word, the thing we are all programmed to hate and fear. And my father said: “I guess that’s right.”

It wasn’t until college, a decade later, when I came to realize what a stupid statement that was. A commune is a group of people living together, pooling their efforts and resources. A communist is someone who believes in the abolition of personal property and the striving toward a utopian state where all wealth is shared. If used to define people who live in communes, it loses that automatic meaning unless the individual in question advocates actual communist change in society.

To understand the prevailing social hatred of the day, understand that my debating the point in such a fashion would have been tantamount to failure to confirm the demonization of communism, which in turn would make me suspect as a communist sympathizer or ‘com-symp.’ In the 1950s, that could get one an FBI file. It went so deep that in 1990, when the Warsaw Pact collapsed and the Cold War was over, our leaders had a temporary quandary: whom do we tell the people to hate and fear? Since most of those leaders weren’t bright enough to adjust, and intuitively knowing that we were (and remain) a people who must have an exterior enemy to distract us from our own leadership’s greed and evil, they just kept doing them. They picked on Russia, spiking the political ball in eastern Europe, helping create the climate in which a dictator like Putin would arise. Only 9/11 rescued them from the dilemma: at last, a suitable hate target to hand the people.

The day will come when the millennials have children, who will have no more memory of 9/11 than I had of Khrushchyov’s “We will bury you” shoe-pounding moment, and their kids will not understand why they are required to hate and fear all Muslims and Arabs but especially Muslim Arabs, and the divide of unshared experience will repeat itself in different form.

Archie’s statement was just a dogmatic snark, but it was a snark that sounded good enough for even someone as well educated as my father to swallow. Dad surely had no idea in the moment that he had planted a key seed of dormant discontent, one which would destroy his intellectual credibility with me. Once I began to deprogram myself from the obligatory religious and social beliefs repeated at me over and over growing up, I would question everything he had tried to ingrain in me, with the tendency to believe his views tainted by association with a tainted source. I would reject his religion, his bigotries, even his notions of love and family (which amounted to “Family is abusive, that’s just how family love is”). And for all my days, religious missionaries trying to lecture me about Christianity would have no idea what a hornets’ nest they were breaking, as they tried to promote a belief system that I had experienced as a blunt instrument of conformity and abuse.

Albeit lengthy, that explains why I despise stupid statements that people repeat without thinking. I associate sloganeering with cheap mind control, oppression, anti-intellectualism, and most of what I loathe about humanity in mass. Over the course of many months, I began to collect stupid statements and debunk their stupidity. When I had enough, it was time to publish this piece. Therefore:

“Change is good; embrace the change.” Okay. I had a tumor growing on my spinal cord. It was changing gradually, deforming the spinal cord and putting me in intense discomfort. By now I would no longer be alive without the surgery. The change of a growing tumor was not good, and it would have been pretty stupid to embrace it. The change of neurosurgery was great and I embraced it. Some change is good, some is bad; some is smart, some is the vision of nincompoops.

“If you don’t exercise your rights, you’ll lose them.” Evidently untrue, considering the many rights many people do not exercise, but do not seem to lose. A more sensible thought: if you abuse your rights, you might lose them, so exercise them with some sense.

“You can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your family.” Oh, yes, you can. Some family members need to be fired: to wit, anyone who considers the familial relationship a reason to be pardoned egregious wrongdoings.

“Tastes like chicken.” Why do people blurt this about any new form of meat, and think that it’s high comedy? Some things taste like chicken. Some don’t.

“It never hurts to negotiate.” Oh, yes, it can. If it’s already a good deal, and you’re just beating the seller up for more money, especially if the amount is piddly, he or she may just tell you it’s no longer for sale to you, period.

“If you don’t like the weather around here, wait [insert length of time], and it’ll change.” People blurt this even where the weather is so predictable that it is the preferred destination for meteorologists who flunked out of college. I used to live in such a place. They blurted it all the time. They were the same people who said that everything tasted like chicken.

“If you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” This is not always bad advice, but it’s terrible advice when the circumstances merit saying something that is not nice. For example, someone is being a jerk and needs to be called out. This is one of those platitudes often mouthed by people who think it’s more important to be nice to the bully than to the victim. When it is applied to situations where confrontation cannot help anyone, of course, it makes perfect sense: while in fact your child’s picture is deeply crappy, it will not help anyone for me to say so, thus I will shush and just say that she must have worked hard on it, even though I know that is probably not true.

“Hate only hurts you.” Not necessarily true. Anger, while it has its place, does take its toll. It should be rationed, applied only where it will do some good. Hate, on the other hand, I consider essential to an ethical outlook. There is a lot of evil out there. Loving evil does not cause it to stop being evil. If someone can’t hate evil, I’m not sure s/he and I can ever understand one another, because I do not see how one can have a functional moral compass without the extremes of judgment. We may not concur on the definition of evil, but surely we each must have one. The trick is to consider hate a judgment, a status, a consignment–something that just is, rather than something dwelt upon. The Ku Klux Klan, for example, needs and deserves to be hated. Hating them doesn’t hurt me a bit. If I ever stopped properly hating them, though, I’d hurt myself plenty, because I would compromise what matters to me. Frank Herbert said: “What do you despise? By this you are truly known.” Dune is one of the great marriages of subversive social comment with science fiction.

“If you don’t vote, you can’t complain.” Declining to participate in or validate a process is irrelevant to one’s right to speak one’s mind. One may say that one will not validate the opinion of a non-voter who complains, but not everyone wants or needs (or even values) such validation. Anyone wanting to tell me I can’t complain should first step up and offer to pay my tax bill.

“Everyone has a story to tell.” Nah. Take it from someone in the business of trying to fix stories: not everyone’s story is interesting or should be told. Some are, some are not. Writing and storytelling are different arts, and storytelling is the more difficult in my opinion. I’d rather review a ms written in atrocious English (which I can fix), that tells a great story, than an impeccably written but soul-numbing tale.

“Who are we to judge others?” I don’t think even the speaker ever believes that. Whether you buy into our social model (in which case you validate the right of judges and juries to judge), or you simply have a functional moral code (in which case you feel you have every right to make judgments as you see fit), you do believe someone has the right to judge, be it you or somebody else.

“Profanity is a sign of limited vocabulary.” Really? I have been accused of many things in life, sometimes with cause, but never yet a limited vocabulary. I swear now and then. It says nothing about my vocabulary and everything about how I feel right then, what I seek to convey. In any case, just because one has a substantial vocabulary does not mean one must show it off at every opportunity. To let vocabulary hinder communication is to miss the entire point of language. You’d think that those asserting expertise in this area would realize this.

“All children are precious.” No, they are not. There are children who are downright evil, just as there are adults who are downright evil. Not all of either will permit themselves to be salvaged, or have the capacity to permit it. That doesn’t mean we should be too quick to throw in the towel, but the statement itself is demonstrably false.

“Names can never hurt you.” This lie is fed to nearly every bullied child in this country, over and over. Names can only not hurt someone who is completely sociopathic, immune to all desire for peer respect. Tell someone that names can never hurt him or her, and you may get that exact outcome: a person who simply does not care how anyone else feels. As I remember it, those saying this are generally trying to persuade a victim to just suffer abuse rather than fight back. They are the enablers of abuse. The enablement of abuse, the siding with the harmful over the harmed, is morally bankrupt. And whether we admit it or not, siding with the bully is one of our cultural ethics.

Godwin’s Law. (For those unfamiliar with it, this arose in reaction to the tempting tendency to compare anything to Hitler or the Nazis. It states that whoever does so concedes the argument.) Its threat does restrain some of the more mindless and extreme comparisons, and it does serve a useful purpose in discouraging trivialization of the Holocaust. That acknowledged, in fact our observation of the rise of Nazi power is too valuable and pertinent to disallow as an analogical tool. If someone is twisting reality and manipulating simple people through hammering away at the same semi-truths and outright lies, that is exactly how Joseph Goebbels manipulated German public opinion. It is just fine to call that ‘Goebbelsian,’ for example.

“Everyone deserves [insert benefit or right].” Very few people believe this when they articulate it, no matter what the deserved item or condition or benefit may be. What most mean, but refuse to admit to themselves: “Everyone, except for a few people I happen to consider exceptionally heinous, deserves […].” As I see it, there are plenty of people who do not deserve certain things. Not every kid deserves a trophy. Not every kid deserves to graduate. Not every adult deserves a decent job. Not every [insert member of deified profession] is a hero. Do you think everyone deserves a decent meal? Great; when you hear of the next long-term animal abuser, looking at the pathetic images of the poor creatures, and you’re saying what should be done to him, be sure and leave starvation out of your proposed penalty. Do that for everything you believe “everyone deserves.”

“Two wrongs don’t make a right.” It just sounds so good, and our parents repeated it so often, that we forgot to ask ourselves whether it was dumb. Someone punches you. You punch them back, partly to show them that being punched hurts, and partly to defend yourself. You just used violence. According to this infantile saying, you are now wrong too. We don’t even believe it as a society. Unless, that is, we believe that attacking Axis forces during World War II–thus using violence to drive them out of lands they had conquered and begun to oppress–made us just as bad as the Axis, or even worse (since we dropped more bombs on cities, including two nuclear weapons). By this saying’s reasoning, all assholes should always be allowed to get away with all bad acts without being struck back in consequence. Now: is it always moral and suitable to respond exactly in kind to a wrong done? Of course not. There are times when it definitely is not. If a four-year-old stabs you with a fork, and makes you bleed, clearly you must not stab the child in return. There are times when it makes more sense to respond with greater force, such as when a woman’s date rape has begun and all he’s done so far is tear her blouse open. Suppose she can lay her hand on a screwdriver. Should she not then shove that thing into his neck, thus ending the rape before it reaches its logical conclusion? Don’t tell her “two wrongs don’t make a right.”

Society floats along on a sea of slogans and gnomic sayings we have heard so often that most of us no longer question them. If you do question them, you’ll become one of those weirdo freethinkers who does not fit into one of the accepted pigeonholes. Your intellectual life will be much more interesting, since media will daily serve you bowls of falsehood and bad assumptions. Full disclosure, though: only do this if you dread being invited to vapid parties.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

Reviews need to be more than one sentence long

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I don’t give a lot of advice on book marketing, and what I give is not much use. Like most writers, I’m bad at and hate marketing. It’s the number one weakness for authors. They want me to provide them with Golden Secrets, and the best I have are nickel-brass confidentialities. But here’s one from solid ground:

Our industry has a device called a “puff.” All those gushy comments on the book’s back cover? Those are puffs. One hand washes the other. Do you really think the authors read each other’s books? Don’t count on it happening often. It’s just how the game is played. When you see a book covered in puffs, either a lot of people would like to do that author a solid, or the publisher is large enough to hit up lots of authors for puffs. You can’t take most of them seriously. The best dust jacket puffs are brief, baroque in their gush levels, and inspecific. Specifics are hard when one doesn’t read the book.

Puffs also appear in book reviewing. Smart authors understand that they need a good initial body of reviews to help with sales, and first-timers don’t have very many contacts, so their friends and family pitch in. Some are guileless enough to use an account with the same family name as the author. A one-sentence gushy five-star review right after publication? The review is by Edna Smith, of Taylor Smith Newby’s dystopian eco-terror tale First They Came for the Vegans…? That’s a puff review. A certain amount of these are helpful, but reviews that carry water with potential buyers are more than one sentence long.

So: all those friends, family members, and so on that you buttonhole for early reviews? Do see if you can get some of them to write a full para, and give some specifics. A one-sentence review is borderline garbage, and too high a concentration of these stands out like a neon sign. Especially when the only couple of people who wrote in any depth did not like the book as well. The one-liners aren’t fooling anyone. Did those people read the book? Doesn’t matter, because they have so little to say about it. “I loved it couldn’t put it down Jill Authorness is a great writer” actually conveys to me a negative message: illiterates evidently love the book. I’m more interested in the views of people capable of articulating thoughts. Any “review” that looks very much as if the author wrote it from a sock puppet account looks the worst.

Not suggesting you have people write five-para dissertations, just that they maybe try to stretch it to a para that says something substantive. And as soon as possible, for the love of God, get some real reviews from people who are not so obviously giving you puffs. The sooner those puffs are overshadowed, the better for you.

Homeownership

The trash truck symphony

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In Oregon, and especially in Portland, recycling is all but mandatory. It is the path of least resistance. If I refused to recycle:

  • My tiny trash-trash bin would overflow.
  • I would surrender a significant annual sum in deposits. I hate waste, and especially the waste of money.
  • A lynch mob might eventually form.

I don’t mind. I consider it a good idea. In Boise, by contrast, someone who didn’t pour the used oil from his pickup truck on the weeds was something of an eco-freak. Here, by not being fascist about it, I’m questionable. I don’t mind that either. Gods forbid I too often agree with a majority, anywhere.

Since I am the only one in the house who much cares and is impact, I’m the one who gets to dig in house trash bins to get recyclables out of the trash can, trash out of the recycle bin, and glass out of both. When we have guests, it’s basically an exercise in shut-the-hell-up-and-be-a-good-host-and-just-fish-the-stuff-out. In fairness, it’s not realistic for those not living here to become conversant with the rules. If you’re at my house, and I look like James Herriot turned on his side, keep calm and, yes, you probably caused this, but don’t worry about it.

Every week, they come for the trash-trash. That’s one truck. Every other week they also come for the yard waste bin, the glass bin (a small tote-sized red thing), and the recycling bin (the largest of the tree, casting an appealing quantity of shade on hot days and offering tiny-house potential for those not too fussy). Today is every other Friday. Today is trash truck symphony day, when there nearly always seems to be a diesel monstrosity extending its tentacles to gather up a plastic bin. Each bin requires a separate truck, a separate diesel engine, and a separate godawful racket.

It creates conflict. My house is at the end of a cul-de-sac, with a sidewalk divided by my driveway. I just went out and measured, and only 25′ of the sidewalk fronts my property. Its center point is smack where we pull into our driveway. During my very first week, I received a snotty note from the postal worker, whining that I should keep bins 12′ away from mail boxes. This is completely unrealistic, but so typical of why average people come to hate government: common sense and reality be damned, these are the precious rules, and we will take any opportunity to rub them in your face just to have our moment of authority. His more sensible approach was to realize that his driving path is not the only factor in this equation, that it happens only once per week, and to just accept that he might have to…shift into reverse and back up a couple of feet.

I decided not to cooperate. I’m still not cooperating. The mailman hates me and engages in petty acts of spite whenever he thinks he can get away with it. I consider getting a box at a non-USPS mail station. I become a little less connected every day, every time someone does a petty thing to me just because he or she can, when I didn’t deserve it. (If I have it coming, I’ll take my medicine.) Credit to the trash truck guys: at least, at the very least, they do not weep openly about the best possible compromise space I have located for the bins. They seem to understand that their work is to pick up the trash without bitching, and that there is no perfect solution in this physical space. Hurrah. For my part, I place the cans as far out as I can without calling the Wrath of USPS, hoping to be helpful. Since they rarely spill any trash, I’m supposing they appreciate it. That or they could just be true professionals, which does happen.

The good news is that Portland trash trucks spill less garbage than Boise trash trucks. I shocked one Boise supervisor by asking: “Can you tell me what is the permitted quota of garbage dumped in the street by your drivers, on a per-house basis?” Of course, once these trash truck workers pick up the bins, they are happy to deposit them right in the middle of the driveway. I admit it: once, after a truly bad day in which I just wanted to get home without limiting future options, seeing that Nevada-sized recycle bin smack athwart my path, I lost it. I smacked down on the gas, rammed it (sending it bouncing almost all the way up the driveway to the garage door), then eased off the accelerator before I did something less recoverable. It was satisfying, watching that thing fly up the driveway. Sometimes you vent in the only way you can get by with venting.

But in the meantime, today is a relatively decent day, our postal worker could not think of any small spites he could get by with, I am home and thus got the emptied recycle bin before it blocked anyone’s path, and I may listen to the spasmodic, bellowing industrial rhapsody of the trash truck symphony.

Adventures, Editing/writing life, Homeownership

Where I read, and why I might wear a helmet

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Maybe this is not the expected answer, but I don’t do most of my reading in some deep-burnished law-library-looking place that screams “weighty matters.” I do have a library, but the space is more about a vista of historical and world travel books on Ikea-designed shelves, and a large leather recliner containing several heated massage devices. I can turn it up so high I can’t read even large print.

It’s beautiful there, but I find it inspires me less than do the great outdoors. Most of my reading is done in a cast-off Adirondack chair under two of fourteen lodgepole pines. I watch towhees forage, squirrels re-enact the Looney Tunes gophers, and chickadees dart about. I listen to the sounds of ravens, crows, and falling pine cones. And if I am fortunate, those cones do not hit me. (If it begins to rain, or there are excessive pine cones, I move to a plastic chair mostly sheltered by the eave.)

My back patio is about 10′ x 30′ of poured concrete, just outside the library window, looking at a back yard that is sort of like Chile. It slopes up a lot, has tall pines, and has one short and one very long dimension. I’d say my back fence is about 120′, but from my Adirondack, I could hit a badminton birdie off it. Except: if I wanted a shuttlecock, I’d probably just pick up a pine cone and use a tennis racket.

Every couple of minutes, the lodgepoles shed a cone. At that stage of their lives, the fertile cones are heavy, sappy, and probably weigh as much as a cell phone. I am tempted to counsel my patio guests to wear headgear. They may choose from an old US Army steel pot (with liner), my old lumber mill hard hat from back when I was a burly young cog in the workforce (supports pulled out for the suitable jaunty angle, crudely taped US flag image on the front), or if they ask correctly, my Russian Army chapka (which I can’t even wear unless it’s -5° F). I got rid of my hockey helmet a couple years back. They can have the steel pot or the hard hat.

Deb and I quit our most dangerous tobacco vices last Christmas, but I still enjoy cigars (not constantly, and never inhaled). It is not as safe as no tobacco ever, but if you asked your doctor whether it would be better to have a cigar now and then, or to chew daily, you can guess how she would answer. Same for huffing chem-laced mass-market cigarettes vs. a daily cigar: no one’s going to endorse tobacco, but less is better, and very little means less risk. So I get a big glass of iced tea, gather up my current book, pick out a robusto, and spend forty minutes of quality time with the towhees, re-enacting squirrels, ravens, and plummeting projectiles that would surely draw blood from my shiny pate. As I do it, I get a dandy read.

You should have seen it one time, cone hit the shed roof, bounced, landed straight in an empty aluminum bucket. Right next to Leo, the miniature Schnauzer, who does not handle sudden bonks well. Couldn’t call and make that shot in a hundred years.

Nothing against reading in the library, and in rainy Aloverton, Oregon, I treasure a comfortable place to commune with literature. But when weather permits, I find, I do some of my most thoughtful reading with ravens rawking, squirrels squirreling, towhees poking, and lodgepole pine cones passing through the branch bagatelle.

One of them will have to draw my blood before I’ll yield to the steel pot.

Homeownership

A real estate ad dictionary

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I did one of these for Craigslist ads some time back and had a lot of fun. Real estate advertising has one of the highest concentrations of known bullshit outside politics or corporate annual reports.

First, I put together as many as I could think of, from my own experience and by viewing about twelve current ads in my area. At that point, running low on damns to give, I deployed my secret weapon: my friends. That makes this part yours, so all of you please take your bows: Nick, Shawn, Mike, Candice, Chris, Jenn, Ragnar, Sonia, Ryan, Jane, Thomas, Susan, Laura, Patti, Keith, Marilyn, Tracy W, Jeff, Deb, Dobbie, Marcy, John, Dennis, Echoe, Linda, Tracy B, Buddy, April, Liz, Paul, Cindy, David, Mrs. K, Sharon, Russell, GDJ, Junko.

Here is our guide to cutting through all the bullshit in real estate ads:

  • “Amazing:” feature exists
  • “A must see:” devoid of obvious external damage
  • “Antique bathroom:” 1920s plumbing, enjoy
  • “A stone’s throw away:” provided you are equipped with a trebuchet, onager, or other ancient artillery device
  • “Back on market!” problem property where the deal fell through for reasons that say a lot about the sellers and their listing agent
  • “Bank owned:” abandon all hope of expeditious purchase
  • “Better than new:” ‘old’
  • “Blank canvas:” they took listing agent’s advice and painted white over the Crazy Cat Lady theme
  • “Boasts:” ‘has;’ we realize houses do not have the power of speech
  • “Bonus room:” ‘room’
  • “Boutique:” we ran out of adjectives and hoped you wouldn’t ask what we meant
  • “Bring your imagination:” and your wallet, because the seller refuses to fix this hovel
  • “Bucolic:” has an unpruned bush
  • “Cathedral ceiling:” bulbs changed by free rappel from beam, or surplus fire ladder
  • “Character:” wear and tear
  • “Charming:” weird and too small, or has hideous wallpaper
  • “Chef’s kitchen:” we’re confident you won’t know that this term has an actual meaning
  • “Classic:” last remodeled during the administration of a president no living person even remembers
  • “Close to bus line:” noisy
  • “Close to school:” enjoy frequent Vitamin Water bottles and Capri Sun bags tossed in your yard
  • “Contemporary:” starkly butt-ugly
  • “Convenient to:” somewhere roughly near
  • “Country living:” hope you don’t rely on the bus
  • “Cozy:” dinky
  • “Craftsman style:” fake Craftsman, wooden box with badly installed trim
  • “Creative touches:” inexplicable mistakes
  • “Cute:” too small
  • “Deferred maintenance:” abject neglect
  • “Desirable:” undesirable
  • “Don’t miss!” ‘exists’
  • “Endless possibilities:” endless liabilities
  • “Epic:” listing agent is under 30
  • “Expansive:” not exactly dinky
  • “Family friendly neighborhood:” usually has the peace and quiet of a grade school playground at recess
  • “Fixer-upper:” needs to be dozed flat and rebuilt
  • “Formal:” likely to sit unused
  • “For sale by owner:” for sale by cheapskate, or by control freak (often both)
  • “Fully updated bathroom:” had the disgusting tile grout redone
  • “Fully updated kitchen:” seller bought new, cheap appliances at listing agent’s insistence, to raise price
  • “Gem:” property for sale
  • “Gigantic ___:” feature is slightly above average size
  • “Good bones:” bad looks
  • “Good neighborhood:” has only “model” minorities, and not too many of those
  • “Gorgeous:” much like other reasonable houses have
  • “Gourmet kitchen:” ‘kitchen’
  • “Gracious:” overdecorated
  • “Granite and stainless steel:” if you can’t cook, at least you’ll feel snazzier failing at teh cooking
  • “Great investment:” not worth what we’re asking
  • “Great neighborhood:” no cars up on cement blocks
  • “Handyman’s dream:” homeowner’s nightmare
  • “Hardwood:” there is some wood in the laminate if you look closely and expand your definition of ‘wood!’
  • “Highly motivated seller:” this is the last step before insurance arson
  • “His and hers closets:” hers and hers closets
  • “Huge ___:” feature exists in average size
  • “Hurry, this won’t last long!” I want to create artificial demand, authentic demand being in short supply
  • “Ikea kitchen:” Euro-phone booth with everything folding out or hanging from ceiling
  • “Imagination:” ‘exasperation’
  • “Includes home warranty:” has visible issues that will make you uneasy
  • “Incredibly:” ‘somewhat’
  • “Instant equity:” will be generated by the five figures in immediate necessary repairs
  • “Large ___:” feature exists in some form
  • “Light and bright:” summer sweatbox with little shade, costs a mint to run A/C
  • “Lived-in look:” For Sale By Hoarder
  • “Location, location, location:” dump in otherwise decent location
  • “Low-maintenance lawn:” dirt, rocks, and weeds
  • “Lush natural vegetation:” bring machete, or if you can afford it, bush hog or even a herd of goats
  • “Make it your own:” paint job done by baboons, carpet reflects their influence and diet
  • “Many original features:” which barely work
  • “Mid-century modern:” all the flaws of mid-century, with a few semi-modern weaknesses thrown in
  • “Mother-in-law suite:” room for your adult kids who keep screwing up and having to move home
  • “Motivated seller:” seller has to be somewhere else by a specific date, or has already moved out and just saw the first bill for absentee homeowner’s insurance, or is fifty grand underwater and running out of money
  • “Move-in ready:” all problems are the sort no inspector will find
  • “Much bigger than it appears:” so small you’ll need a magnifying glass to spot the feature in question
  • “Multipurpose room:” space for the whole family to fight over
  • “Needs your touch:” ‘dump’
  • “Needs TLC:” money pit
  • “New carpeting:” cheapest available carpeting replaced incredibly nasty old stuff
  • “Old world charm:” old school electric wiring
  • “Once-in-a-lifetime opportunity:” and when you see it, you’ll see why once is a mercy
  • “One-of-a-kind:” ‘weird’
  • “Open concept:” room for children to throw things, and you can always see them doing so
  • “Open house:” listing agent is hoping to salvage some new leads from this dog deal
  • “Original:” looking beat-up
  • “Owned by handyman:” owned by bookkeeper who fancies himself The Great Renovator, and didn’t know what he was doing
  • “Peekaboo view:” sight of mountain or water obtained by standing on footstool in guest can, while leaning at odd angle and bracing against wall, on about three days per year if you’re lucky
  • “Perfect for the right owner:” perfect for about five potential people out of three hundred million, rest should run far and fast
  • “Photos don’t do it justice:” listing agent saves money on photographers by doing it herself, badly
  • “Possibilities:” ‘missing things’
  • “Potential:” none of the sane choices can work
  • “Priced to sell:” sellers are desperate; crush their souls with your offer
  • “Quaint:” ‘weird’
  • “Quirky decor:” sellers refused listing agent’s tearful pleas to paint over Early Crazy Cat Lady scheme
  • “Radiates:” could be said to have a little bit of
  • “Reduced:” seller has come down to Earth
  • “Remodeled:” owner took a stab at fixing flaws, with middling success
  • “Renovated from the studs out:” no longer smells of Sudafed, anhydrous ammonia, and burnt Drano, plus all cans are gone
  • “Secluded:” at least one side has some foliage that obstructs snoopy neighbors part of the year; far from anything
  • “Shady yard:” don’t even think about a nice lawn
  • “Short sale:” paperwork ass pain
  • “Spacious:” not quite average size
  • “Spacious lot with fruit trees:” messy back yard with ants, varmints, jays, magpies, raccoons, opossums, and hantavirus
  • “Starter home:” free-standing two-bedroom one-bath apartment equivalent
  • “Stop the car!” so that people offended by over-the-top verbiage can have a cookie toss before going inside
  • “Storage shed:” one of those cheap metal Home Depot sheds, still has dents where assembling homeowner kicked it in sheer frustration while issuing creative curses
  • “Stunning:” ‘for sale’
  • “Unique:” no one would make this mistake twice
  • “Unusual:” whose idea was this, and were they at least prosecuted by the taste police?
  • “Updated:” in general, cheap new-looking stuff put in to raise the price
  • “$___ in upgrades:” we raised the potential price by $___ x 120%
  • “Vaulted ceilings:” lots of unlivable space to heat and cool, perfect for spider webs
  • “Vintage:” inconvenient and old
  • “View:” if you squint just right at certain times of day
  • “Well cared for:” sellers finally surrendered, hired a landscape company and cleaners
  • “Wildlife:” feral teenagers
  • “Will go fast!” I want to create artificial demand

Thank you all.

Editing/writing life

What fills in the gaps?

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To look at my credits list, you’d think I rarely work.

As I was updating it today, it occurred to me that people might like to know what fills those gaps.

Alan Smithees: more often than you might think, I work on a manuscript with the specific proviso that I not be credited. This could happen for one or more reasons. Perhaps the author and I have a vast difference of opinion on the book’s overall quality, and the author would like a copy edit that does not address the fundamental (in my view) flaws. Perhaps the book covers subject matter with which I would rather not be publicly associated; perhaps I find its expressed viewpoints to be odious, or stupid, or paranoid, whatever. (Sometimes all three.) As a general rule, if I’m not proud to have my name in there for whatever reason, this is what will happen.

Tech editing: I do some tech writing/editing on the side. Not a large amount, but when it comes in, it is very intensive. It pays better per hour than anything else I do, which is a sign that I undercharge nearly all my clients.

‘Lancing: yes, I still do some small-time assignment writing. Most of it doesn’t pay enough to be worth my while, so I leave the majority to the starving English BAs who have discovered that we let their costs of college attendance balloon up above a typical engineer’s gross salary, yet let our precious businesses take away their gainful employment prospects.

Serials/short stories: most jobs shorter than a novella, I no longer pull up the credits page to update. This also includes small charitable projects, in some cases. As the list gets longer, I am more willing to prune out the less significant bits.

Evaluations: a good percentage of my career gets devoted to books I’ll never work on. Here’s what happens: potential client contacts me. Book needs a ton of help. I present critique and cost options. Potential client realizes that she has two choices: pay a lot of money for a book that will no longer sound like her (because her style is bad), or find an editor who tells her what she wants to hear. By and large, I am much patient with bad writing than bad story conception, because it’s easier to fix bad writing than to make a bad story worth reading. In 90% of such cases, the author either hires me for a pure copy edit without crediting (at my request), or sniffs in annoyance and seeks out one of the aforementioned starving English BAs, who understands that her paycheck depends upon telling that author what she wants to hear. The end result is nothing that winds up on the credit list, but it does occupy my time and energy. And no, I do not charge money to evaluate a ms, unless it’s…

Developmental editing: often the client desires a complete and detailed markup of the ms, with commentary. The idea is that the solutions are best supplied from the author’s creativity informed with sound feedback, and that I will substantively edit the ms after the author has reworked it based upon feedback. I get paid for each pass of this, but it doesn’t produce an immediate addition to the credit list.

Professional development: some of my days are taken up reading stuff I would not read for pleasure, or attending workshops or conventions, and so on. This doesn’t add a credit, but I consider it a priority to add theoretical learning to the practical expertise that develops in the course of regular work.

General reading: editors and writers must read as voraciously as possible. Most are addicts who can read during any bit of wait time, some even unable to wait patiently for anything without a book. There are days when I just have to open a good book to remind myself how it’s supposed to be done, and to remind myself what I should aspire to and will never become–and to be at peace with that truth.

In between all of that, now and then, a new credit hits the list.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

New Release: The Energy Shift, by Ritu Rao

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This self-help book is now available for sale, e-book and paperback formats. I was substantive editor.

Ritu came to me as a referral from client and friend Shawn Inmon, of Feels Like the First Time and Rock ‘n Roll Heaven fame. During our initial discussions, she mentioned that she’d already published one book. With a previously published author, my job changes. If the first book succeeded, then part of my job is not to screw up a good thing; we must preserve the aspects that made the author a success. Whether I agree with the earlier work’s editorial decisions is beside the point. No one hires me to reduce a book’s success.

Well, Ritu seemed blissfully unaware that she’d kicked large-scale ass with her first release, at least by comparison to most new releases. It had twenty-three reviews, most of them persuasive and articulate, exactly the kind that help sell a book. I read all of them, and they said great things along the lines of: At first I imagined it was going to be another fluffy self-help book full of the same stuff, but it was practical, realistic, smart, and has helped me a lot. Those are the kind of reviews authors crave. People read those reviews and buy the book.

I could tell Ritu would be coachable because she could already write. I can almost count on a thing, in my line of work: those who need my help most are most likely to refuse it. The worse the writer, the more appalling s/he will find the sample edit. “I liked my own version better, sorry” and “I need to find an editor who believes in my work” are the standard kiss-offs, and I’m okay with them. I only want to work with clients who want to work with me to improve their books. If the potential client is so bad s/he doesn’t realize how bad s/he is, and is unwilling to learn that, then I truly am not the right match. Ritu wasn’t one of those who needed to go back to remedial writing class. I could see areas for improvement, but her style was articulate, friendly, and unpretentious. We agreed to work together, and I got cracking.

Authing, as I call it, is the meeting point between storytelling (or whatever is at hand; exposition, guidance, memoirism) and writing. The first is the message; the second is how well one conveys it. I already knew that Ritu’s message made a good impression on readers, so I would focus on refining its delivery. In the ideal scenario, readers would like this book a little better, but most would not be able to say exactly why. That was the sweet spot.

I’m like the umpire. When you can’t tell I was there, and everything went well, I just smile and know I was on my game.

As I was editing, Ritu was in the process of selling her dental practice. Just as I finished, she went on a silent meditation retreat, so that delayed her digging into the edited ms. She came back with good questions, showing every sign that some of my feedback sank in. I like it when clients ask for my reasoning behind a change, because that’s a chance to teach. The end result, I think, you will like very much. Ritu is exactly as her writing style suggests: friendly, unpretentious, practical. I know that her approach to things works well, because I have used variants of it in my own life. Anyone expecting the typical cryptic, mystic self-help book tone is in for refreshment, because Ritu’s viewpoint reflects firm grounding in real experience. This book could help you get off the dime and improve your life.

Married life

Scarf pythons and ruined sweaters: doing women’s laundry

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If you are a man married to a woman, and your wife is not 100% the jeans and t-shirt type, and you have any sort of a conventional modern marriage at all (i.e. you are under seventy), you probably now and then have to do women’s laundry.

Well, a woman’s laundry, anyway. If there’s a chance that any other women’s laundry might show up in the laundry, and you do not have adult daughters living at home, you will soon have (and deserve) greater problems.

Nothing is so calculated to showcase for a man the complexities of women’s lives. Our laundry? Shirts. Pants. Shorts. Socks. Maybe a few other things. None of it is complicated. At most, we might once in a while need to exert ourselves with an iron. Women’s laundry?

Good lord.

My first challenge is always to determine what part of her body it goes on. Key discovery: where does the head go? My wife turns all laundry inside out by reflex, and if it’s the kind with some hidden liner, that part is sure to hang out. It can take me a minute or two to locate the head-hole. If it has a head-hole–and that has to be it, because I know her legs would not fit through those holes on the side, and in any case I’m pretty sure she would not want a large opening in her clothes right down there–then it could be a blouse or a dress or a tunic. None of it can be folded, as it is all sheer and comes in odd shapes. All of it must be hung up, and no matter how many hangers we buy, there are never enough. Women’s laundry includes an invisible creature that consumes clothing hangers, not enough to ruin us, just enough to inconvenience us. She also breaks a few over time, or rather, those inferior pieces of crap fail to give proper service.

The scarf python: a phenomenon of the dryer. Each scarf placed in the dryer increases the chances of a scarf python by 10%, so at ten scarves, a scarf python is automatic and certain. The scarf python, usually twisted together with whichever item of head-questionable clothing is most susceptible to wrinkling, is a combination of all the scarves in the load, braided as if to make a low quality battleship anchor rope. They do not get dry, and in a wet climate like ours (Portland’s annual rainfall is measured in fathoms), must be hung up to dry or they will mildew. One’s wife does not like mildew, thus one must disentangle and hang up the scarf pythons and their victims.

Bra hooks: if you put her bras in the dryer, you soon learn that bra hooks are as good at seeking out sweaters and knitted materials as she is at seeking out your porn cache no matter how you camouflage it. (You can zip it up and rename it as a Windows .dll, bury it in the system files, and she will find it.) If permitted, the bras will destroy all her sweaters, and it will be your fault. Just hang the bras up. Think of the pleasant thoughts they inspire.

Socks: you, of course, will either have ten pair of socks that match precisely, times three, or perhaps a lesser number, but your socks will always have matches and be easily told apart. Hers are unique, hand-selected because they were ‘cute.’ She would rather hang herself than own two identical pair. However, she is fine with having seven pair that are identical except under 10x magnification, or by use of a tape measure. Each load of her laundry will contain one of each pair, but never two.

Putting it away: you will only be asked to do this once. That’s because, despite every good intention, you will fuck it up so catastrophically that she will never, ever, ever want you to do it again. It won’t matter how honest your effort is. You will fail to understand her basic clothing categories, folding methods, where things go. It will take her longer to unfuck your work than it would have for her to put them away herself. So yeah, go ahead, step up, man up, put it all away and do your best. Even dump out her whole sock drawer, which is 80% singletons whose partners are long gone, and attempt to match up every loose one. This is the best way never to be asked to do this again. Since you will not learn from experience, at most, she might correct you, then ask you to do it again. She will soon learn that you are incapable of learning how she does it, much less keeping up with her monthly changes in organization, and will just be happy you ran laundry.

Fabric softener: I was once talking with a platonic female friend about my wife’s habit of using four fabric softener sheets at the very minimum. I did not see why this mattered. Her rejoinder: “You obviously have never worn a skirt.” Well, couldn’t really argue with that. Anyway, just give in on this and use however many sheets she wants. Never take the spent ones to the trash until you are done with all laundry tasks, because spent ones will continue to crop up to the very end. If you have one sock left to go, there will be a fabric softener sheet stuck to it. If you need a hose filter, or some other shop or yard filter, spent dryer sheets are pretty good for that.

Lint screen: this may vary, but if I didn’t clean that thing, all our houses would have burnt down at some point. Happily, the lint screen meets all of our masculine criteria for a desirable task: it needs frequent doing, it means not bugging her about it, it’s easy, the dust can be mopped up with the lint roll, and it counts as a silent, helpful thing that you just do, take care of, solve, without ever bugging her. It’s a thing she appreciates even when it never comes up. Just do it, glad to have this way to contribute, bearing in mind that you could instead be trying to identify one of her odder garments.

Colors: this is laughable, because she is not like you. You have clothes that are white, gray, blue, or black. At the very most, three color categories; more likely two. Biracial laundry. Hers is the U.N. Hers has all colors, and the instructions for each are kept on carefully hidden tags, all of which you cannot possibly be expected to read. Simple guess: if it’s real cloth, it matters. If it’s plastic cloth, not so much. Anyway, do your best, mainly avoiding putting white things in with dark things made of real cloth.

Folding: you will never fold anything correctly. Try anyway. Look at it this way: of all the things she could get mad at you about, she will get the least mad about your valiant effort to decipher her incomprehensible regulations as to clothes folding. You tried. Sometimes, wives even sort of find your clumsiness, stupidity, and learning disabilities endearing, as long as they don’t happen in the wrong situations. Folding laundry wrong = okay. Paying bills wrong = not okay.

Doing women’s laundry is like a syndrome. The best you can hope to achieve is a sort of high function. Even that will help you, because at the very least, you tried. And she will pardon one hundred errors before she will pardon a single bout of apathetic, entitled sloth.

And when you find yourself confronted by a scarf python twined together with four indeterminate garments, with singleton socks falling loose everywhere and towels that somehow never get dry, know that you aren’t the only one. Stay strong, brother.

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The interrogative customer service experience

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Have you noticed this?

Next time you call in for customer service, you will probably be asked to have a conversation with a disembodied voice recognition system. It may even refuse to help you unless you have that conversation. The days of being given a list of numbers to push may be passing, and I at least will lament them. I’m not interested in discussions with robots, but I will follow my way through a numbered menu.

When you do reach a human being, observe this: how long are you interrogated before the person gets around to asking the reason for your call? I find this trend amazing. For all they know, I might just want the company’s mailing address, which certainly doesn’t require them to validate my identity. And yet it’s the same machinegun barrage every time, just automatic, and we put up with it.

We are the customers. We call in. First our vendors expect us to tell our troubles to a robot. Then, reading from scripts, they expect us to answer a ton of questions before they will answer a single one. It isn’t the representatives’ fault, of course; it is how they are trained. But it is affecting my business decisions, because this isn’t all right. This is like being a suspect in a police investigation, where your questions are not wanted, and where you are the one expected to be answering the questions.

Why do we take it in silent acquiescence? Why do we let cable and insurance representatives treat us like the police treat suspects?

We are a supine people.

I’m not taking it in silent acquiescence any more. If that’s just “their policy,” then fine. I also have policies, and I have every bit as much right to set policies as any corporation. My policy is that I would rather pay more to a vendor that does not expect me to have conversations with disembodied voices, and that answers the phone by introducing itself and asking why I’m calling today, or how it can help. And if they don’t like it, tough, “that’s just my policy, ma’am.”

I don’t think Warren Buffett realizes how far from his ideals Geico has fallen, but pretty soon I won’t be needing my BRK.B shareholder discount any more.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

More Serial: The Unusual Second Life of Thomas Weaver, Bowl 5, by Shawn Inmon

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This installment, part five of six planned, is now available in e-format. I was developmental editor.

Shawn is proving to me that the serial form can be an effective way to release a novel and get paid along the way. It enforces a certain discipline, this form, in that each installment has to pay its way. One cannot decide that Bowl Four, for example, will be the dull downtime bowl. If one were to do that, Bowl Five and Bowl Six would be gutshot. This dynamic demands that the author continue to hold interest, and it comes with risk for him: if he doesn’t stick all his landings, the rest of the planned installments will lose significant portions of readership and sales.

As this bowl came my direction, the overall story was building toward some decisions. Some I expected to like, others not so much, but #5 out of 6 has an additional duty: it’s throwing setup for the closer. It has to prepare the reader for a conclusion many months in coming, and that reader deserves a very good one, because s/he has probably showed fidelity and faith in reading this far. One thing I like about Shawn is that he understands there is a limit to how much one should tease or troll one’s reader, because the reader is his friend. S/he is the reason he has a job; s/he deserves respect and affection; s/he may be teased, but must be able to take on faith the ultimate promise of literary satiation. More simply, Shawn likes and appreciates his reader, s/he knows it, and that’s partly why he sells so much writing. When they figure an author for a phony, he’s finished.

In this particular case, Shawn wrestled the issue of voice uniqueness. Simply put, when his characters have offended other characters and are apologizing, in first drafts there can be an almost predictable sequence to the sorries. I had to rake him over the coals about this, getting my message through: not everyone apologizes the way Shawn does. Some people half-ass it. Some left-hand it. Some can’t choke it out. Few make detailed confessions of fault, full of intensifiers and validations. Perhaps they should, but they do not.

The reason Shawn keeps getting better as a writer is that I can say something to him like: “*sigh* Okay, this is way too much Shawniness. Time to begin the de-Shawnification of this segment,” and he won’t wet himself. Trust me, if you said suchlike to most writers, there would be a new chill in the air; some would fire you on the spot as someone who “doesn’t believe in my work.” Shawn isn’t most writers. He won’t “fight for his words” (he has no opponent; I can’t force him to accept any change). He won’t take offense. He won’t bawl and threaten to quit writing. He’ll look over what I did, keep it if he finds it better than what he had, and learn from it. If he doesn’t understand what I thought was wrong, we’ll discuss it. And next time, he’ll probably write better.

The result has been a serial novel that has improved over the course of its execution. Not bad for a concept to which my initial reaction was: “Oh, for God’s sake, not another fucking time travel story.” (It’s not that I hate all time travel. It’s that I hate lazy time travel, and since we do not know of any practical means to travel in time, there is work to be done in postulating how and why, and some writers consider work to be very icky.) I’m getting very picky about anything paranormal or fantasy, not because I don’t like the genres (look, I edited a parenting book, and I never wanted to be a parent myself), but because most people are leaping onto the bandwagon and doing them wrong. And there’s a problem: the worse the writer, the less receptive s/he will be to growth. It has become predictive and tiresome. If the people who most needed help, truly wanted it, that would be great, but the people who most need help wish to be told they do not need help. I’m not their guy.

If you enjoy a good story by someone who isn’t afraid to break stuff, and who is committed to not letting you down, Shawn’s your guy.

Blogging freelance editing, writing, and life in general. You can also Like my Facebook page for more frequent updates: J.K. Kelley, Editor.