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.

Investing

The financial education millennials aren’t getting

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And I find it appalling, but not surprising. Ours was not much better. However, we should have done better by the next generation, and as in all other matters of managing society, we did not. So I’m donating time to fix this by explaining the whole reasoning as clearly as I can.

Why it matters: this is how you get to retire. Without this, you work until you die. If that sounds fun, stop reading and prepare to embrace lifelong serfdom.

In retirement, the idea is that you aren’t working, but life will still cost money. Two ways one can afford that: have a big enough money pile that it lasts you to the end, or get income to replace a paycheck. Imagining any other outcome is fantasy, though it is reasonable to include cost-of-living cuts in that planning as long as you also think about unavoidable cost-of-living increases.

Therefore, in essence, your retirement planning means figuring out how to replace the work income, or how to save enough money to last you. If you do neither, plan to work until you fall apart, then eke out a living in poverty–and even that may be taken away. You can’t know what’ll happen forty years out. By now, you should be alert to the probability that the reality turns out worse than you were promised.

The two methods can work together. Your big money pile can generate income, which you then live on, with the money pile itself as some security against a real disaster.

You cannot trust Social Security (for income to live on) or Medicare (for affordable medical insurance, the number one crumple zone of retirement money disasters) to be there. That’s because my generation let the politicians steal too much, yet mine will demand that you sacrifice so that mine gets what it was promised. (We will then die off, sticking you with the bill, all the while grumbling about you. Aren’t we charming? This is why we, as a class, have no basis to look down upon you; we forfeited that right by talking a great game about your future, then doing absolutely zero to back it up. We didn’t bus the tray of our life.) But in the meantime, you need to look out for yourself, and it is safest to plan for the government to do nothing to help you in your old age. Then if they do, hurrah, but it’s a pleasant surprise.

Some employers will offer a retirement savings plan as a benefit. This is nearly always flawed, but far better than nothing, especially if the company matches some of your contributions. How you do this affects your Federal income taxes, so it’s important to understand the different kinds.

There used to be things called ‘pension plans’ that would give you retirement income someday, as a benefit of a long career with one employer. (Kindly stop laughing. My generation was the one from whom that sky-pie was yanked away.) Our precious corporations declared war on pension plans, and lacking all spine, my generation surrendered. We will be the last ones to get the last few of those, for the most part, and if it makes you feel any better about this, most of us won’t even get any. Our parents did.

Don’t get concerned about the insulting interest rates from bank savings accounts. That just means that bank savings are not the place for your retirement savings, because you retire on the money your money earns (and money in bank savings currently earns nothing of note), not on the money you save. That’s why an early start is most important: your $1 at 22 may become $10 by 62. The piddly savings you can afford in your early working years will be the dollars that work longest and hardest for you. But do bear in mind that things go in cycles, that your parents remember 7% interest rates on savings. They also remember 14% interest to buy a car. That sword always cuts both ways.

There are two basic types of retirement savings, both of which exist in employer-sponsored and private forms. You must understand these to have any potential for retirement savings. For ease of description, we’ll call them Trad(itional) and Roth. They appear both in 401k plans (work-sponsored) and IRA plans (something you usually do on your own without employer involvement). Salient difference: what you put into the Trad is deducted from your taxable income, up to a limit, but someday when you take money out, those distributions (withdrawals by you so you can live) will be taxable. What you put into a Roth is not deducted from your taxable income, but in retirement, withdrawals will be tax-free–or so they promise us now.

The skepticism you sense here is based upon three things: a long history of government ineptitude and evil, the fact that my generation will probably eat all the cookies (then blame you for not baking enough; aren’t we sweet?), and the bird in the hand outlook (once you get the benefit, it is too late to steal it back). I, myself, do not believe the Roth promises. I believe that when the time comes, government will renege on them, and count on a cowardly and supine citizenry to kneel and pay the tax. Because I do not believe the promises, I want my tax benefit now, so that it’ll be too late for government to take it away later. For me, that means that a Trad IRA is most sensible.

I also prefer the basic wager of a Trad IRA: if I retire with high income, yeah, those taxes will be brutal…because I am well off. Boo hoo. Whereas in case I retire with low income, my tax burden will be less than if I’d paid the tax up front, and in the meantime, I got many years’ use of the money to make more money.

How you feel is up to your confidence in the future and your own tax planning. Let’s say you take the Roth promise at face value. If you are low income, a Trad IRA’s tax writeoff would mostly be worthless to you. Only higher income people gain much from tax writeoffs, since tax rates are higher on higher incomes. The ideal Roth saver would be a person of low income who saves diligently all his or her life, gradually building up an impressive money pile from careful scrimping and smart investing. If you think that’s you, then by all means do so. The ideal Trad saver would be a person with higher income who accents that high income by taking the tax benefit now, ideally reinvesting the savings for still more gain, or a person who has zero faith in government promises. If either is you, then the Trad makes sense. (I wouldn’t say we are high income, but we are middle income, and I have zero faith in government promises. Advantage: Trad.)

But remember that you can do both, provided you don’t contribute to both in the same year. So if you decided to put money in a Roth while you were young and po’, and then in a Trad while you finally started to make real money, that’s fine. You just need to make a choice each year which to contribute to, and live with it. Both accounts would continue to exist, and if you handled them well, to make retirement money for you. That would also mean not putting all your eggs in one basket, a philosophy of which I approve with a mighty approving.

Okay. Here is how it works in real life practice, each of the four rough possibilities:

Employer Trad (usually also called a Traditional 401k): you agree to have your employer take money out of your paycheck. The employer may match the amount up to a preset limit. A financial institution holds onto these funds, though you remain their owner. The institution offers you a limited number of ways to invest the funds for gain. A few institutions offer great options. Most offer mediocre to lousy options. (Also, the institution gets a big fee for sitting on your money pile, and if you think you do not ultimately pay it, you are naïve. One way or another, no matter how clever the shell game, you always pay all fees, and the sooner you grasp that, the better.) However, even if the options are not great, they beat all hell out of no retirement account at all. And in a Trad, at least you get the tax bennie up front, in essence paying you a bonus every time you contribute. Always contribute at least up to the employer match, and if you can afford more, pour it on.

Employer Roth (usually also called a Roth 401k): like above, except no tax writeoff; you are planning to get to take money out tax-free when you are old. Other than that, same basic philosophy except that piling extra money in now is not getting you a greater tax benefit. Even so, you might still do it.

When you leave that employment, the vested percentage of your account is still yours. Hopefully you worked there long enough to become 100% vested. The sooner you get it away from your former employer, the sooner it is secure from some mismanagement or stupidity on their part. (That would be illegal, of course, but it happens all the time. If you saved $200K, and lost half of it due to an unscrupulous former employer, will it make you whole if the employer goes to jail? Of course not.) Because there’s a lot of stupidity and mismanagement in our precious corporate world, you want to take possession of your 401k funds at your earliest convenience. This is called a “Rollover.” In effect, it becomes (or goes into) one of the following, depending on what it was before:

Personal Trad (usually called a Traditional IRA): this is when you sign up with a bank or brokerage for your own version of the Employer Trad. You deposit some money, and you can invest it however the bank or brokerage allows. Short version: with a bank, you will make no money, so that’s stupid. A lot of people have these at Schwab, Fidelity, Scottrade, TD, or other discount brokerages.

Personal Roth (usually called just a Roth IRA): when you sign up for your own version of the Employer Roth. Same principles, different investing options. The most salient fact–the tax impact–is the same; the ‘Roth’ descriptor is key here. (Roths came along later than traditional IRAs, so if you speak of an IRA without Roth, people think you mean a traditional IRA.)

So when you leave an employer, and want to take your retirement money with you, you either have a personal account of the right type into which you can merge it (“roll it over” in industry lingo), or you will have to open one. The brokerages will be delighted to help you do that, and they’ll even go get the assets for you. Most brokerages have lower minimums for retirement accounts, because they find that profitable (since people rarely loot their retirement accounts). However, you will very likely first have to sell any mutual funds you hold. That’s fine, as they are probably subpar investments anyway. Traditional mutual funds typically are. Key thing to know: there is no salient difference between a Rollover Trad IRA and any other Trad IRA. They share the same tax issues.

You can convert a Trad IRA to a Roth, if you’re willing to pay all the associated tax on every dollar in the account. I’d have to have a good reason to do that, but everyone’s circumstances are different, so I can’t say no one would ever do that. For example, suppose you already had a personal Roth IRA, and you rolled over a relatively tiny Trad IRA, and this was a year of not very high taxable income. As a Roth believer, you might go ahead and pay the tax to roll the Trad IRA into your Roth, because this is a low income and thus a low tax year, minimizing the bite and simplifying your accounts.

Two paras ago, I mentioned mutual funds. If your mind generated the question “Wait. How is a mutual fund different from an IRA?”, and you then felt that you sounded dumb, relax; the question is natural. An IRA is at heart a form of bank account, like a regular savings account: it’s a money pile. A mutual fund is an investment option (like a stock, bond, CD, what have you) available to an account’s holder. Thus, your whole account is an IRA or 401k, in which you might or might not choose to own one or more mutual funds, depending on what you think is to your advantage. A mutual fund is basically a bunch of stocks and/or bonds bundled up together. Simplified further, it most resembles a single stock–at least, it resembles that more than it resembles a bank account.

Thus: I might say “I hold shares of the Fidelity Magellan Mutual Fund in my Trad IRA account.” However, I would never say: “I hold shares of a Trad IRA in my Fidelity Magellan Mutual Fund account.” Cart before the horse.

So how does one pile up this money? From a strategy standpoint, the goal is to make the biggest possible heap of money in the most tax-advantaged way. As my CPA has drummed into me, there is tax avoidance (which is legal), and tax evasion (which is a felony punishable by imprisonment and fines). Earlier, we went over the decision process between Trad and Roth, which is a very personal one; the math favors one or the other depending on how you forecast your life will unfold. Whatever you pick, if you’re twenty right now, I would guess that you’ll need close to $2 million to retire comfortably, but no one really knows. Safest way is to keep saving until you do know. It’s not possible to retire with too much money.

If your main retirement is with an employer, and you’re under 35, know this: conventional separately managed mutual funds (i.e., run by a trained professional with discretion as to what the fund will buy and sell) usually underperform the market. They get paid handsomely anyway, which I personally think is disgusting. Why pay someone handsomely to do worse than the market? I don’t need to hire ineptitude; I can supply all of that I might want, right, free of charge? (Gods know I often have.) There is usually an index mutual fund among the account’s investment options, which I consider nearly always the most sensible choice, because it outperforms the pros in a majority of cases simply by doing its best to achieve the market return minus very modest fees. It buys and holds the securities that are in the index, period. However, be prepared for some fluctuations in value over a lifetime, as you go through market crash cycles. Those typically occur when a lot of people are doing a stupid thing, which you can expect the public to do as soon as it forgets the lessons from the last fiasco. In my life, they were in 1987, 2000, and 2008; my guess at the next one is circa 2020. Every ten to twelve years isn’t a bad guess. The only certain way to avoid those market crash cycles is to invest so that you never really make any money, so that’s like saying the only way to stay out of the hospital is to commit suicide. True, but no way to plan your life.

If you have a retirement account that only you control–either rolled over from an employer, or started on your own–you have many options, including many that were not available to me in my callow youth. If I had it to do again today, with a full working life ahead of me, I’d put it all in several different index ETFs, and put new money into whichever was lagging the rest (on the logic that the laggard is most ripe to bounce back). It is therefore time to explain about index ETFs.

We covered my complaints about conventional separately managed mutual funds, and my preference for index mutual funds. While the latter are usually more sensible, both suffer from the outdated conventional mutual fund model. ETFs–exchange-traded funds–are technically also mutual funds, but unlike conventional funds, their shares aren’t created and destroyed daily as people buy and sell. A finite consistent number of their shares exist, one may buy those shares on the open market, and one can set a limit price. Index ETF fees tend to be very, very low–as they should be, because any non-moron owning a computer and subscribing to a market news service could manage an index ETF. An index ETF manager has the discretion/choices of a U.S. Marine recruit in boot camp.

What it means is that if a young person started a Trad IRA and put all his or her contributions into an S&P 500 index ETF, or other stock index ETF, and kept doing so all his or her working life, the following would be true:

  • That person would probably retire in comfort.
  • That person would probably not ever need any more advice from me.
  • That person would probably not stress much about it.
  • That person’s trad IRA would probably outperform any employer-ruled 401k s/he might also have.
  • I would be very happy for that person.

Oh, that person would deal with job changes and rollovers, sure; however, the rollovers would probably go to bulk up the existing IRA. The biggest issue would be the need to avoid going over one’s allowable tax-deductible annual contribution, because the limit is not per account–it is per person, per year, and exceeding it sucks. The IRS makes sure it will suck. Take whatever actions you must in order not to exceed it.

If that seems a little unfair, think on this: if your biggest problem is having to ask some questions and do some math to figure out how to put the max into your retirement portfolio every year, you are very fortunate or very thrifty. But if you already have enough basic savings to act as your crisis crumple zone, you could always just open up a taxable brokerage account (householded with your IRA for easy review and management) and invest that money however you see fit.

And some year, maybe the year you are out of work for four months and money got tight, maybe you’ll come up short of the max to put into your retirement. If so, you’ll have money in the brokerage account to move over and make the full contribution. In the meantime, if you have to sell a stock or ETF to raise that cash, you’ll pay tax on part of the gains (the dividend and capital gain part), but it’s rarely a big hit. Nothing like the three-finger shocker you’d get if you’d put it all in a conventional mutual fund that lost 20% that year, and then notified you in December that oh, by the way, here’s the amount of taxable income our realized gains and dividends will cost you. Yes. It really is that bad. Such a fund can lose a bundle, and due to tax laws, have to distribute capital gains and dividends so that the IRS can tax you on them. I trust you can see how miserable that would be. If you are wise, unlike me, you will opt out of receiving and paying that invoice.

Does it sound like this is a lot simpler than people make it out to be? I think it is. You can make it as complicated as you choose, but for most people I think simplicity and a mechanical investment discipline are best. There are no guarantees, just like there are no guarantees one won’t die in a car wreck tomorrow. Just as you maximize your odds of safe travel by driving defensively, you maximize your odds of safe and profitable investing by doing sensible things.

One last word on market trends. On any given day, you can find pundits writing articles ‘calling a top,’ ‘calling a bottom,’ predicting a crash, predicting a huge runup, anticipating a ‘correction’ (that’s marketese for ‘dropping a financial deuce’), and so on. They all have one thing in common: no one ever calls them to account when they are wrong. That’s why Jason Kelly, one of the better financial authors and a very good guide to the nuts and bolts of smart investing, calls them “Z-vals” (zero-validity predictors). They might as well be rolling dice. Since they are never fired or hanged when they are wrong, their opinions mean nothing, and should mean nothing to you. Don’t let them get you worked up or demoralized. They don’t really know; they just get paid to write articles.

And always remember: you retire not on the money you saved, but the money you made.

As for me, I’m your Robin Hood. I hate Wall Street, a snake pit full of entitled criminals that goes about buying and selling elected leaders like some cities used to sell and buy human beings. I hate all the people, and there are many, who have positioned themselves to take away more of your money than they deserve and earn. I don’t make any money from your gains. The only satisfaction I get is the moral joy from helping you game the system to your advantage.

My payoff is to sit here and do the mental math about the revenue denied to a class of criminals because of each person I tipped off.

Good hunting.

Book reviews

Formative books

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I think we all had our formative books: those that stayed with us, changed our young outlooks, made us who we are. I certainly did, and they have been on my mind lately.

A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine l’Engle): a book with a Christian theme, thus considered acceptable kid reading at the psychotic religious school I attended in Colorado. (Heritage Christian School, Fort Collins, CO, 1971-74, still haven’t forgotten you or the sadism. Have a good day.) At that age, I didn’t quite get it, but on a later re-read I did. There is a misfit character in the book named Meg, who is obstinate and emotional and doesn’t quite meet everyone’s lofty expectations. There comes a point where all the children are given gifts, and Meg is told: “Meg, I give you your faults.” Later on, she comes to understand and wield her obstinacy and passion as weapons.

Meg was my inspiration. I realized I would probably go through most of my life agreeing with very few people, constantly pressured to conform and fall into line, ridiculed when I would fail to do so, and never much of a group joiner. Meg also taught me that, as long as I was committed to immunity to peer pressure and okay with its consequences, I would right a few wrongs and get a few things done through simple obstinacy. I’d make a few enemies doing that, and I’d baffle people who would not understand why I cared, but that was why I had to get serious about rejecting peer pressure.

1984 (George Orwell): didn’t really get it in high school, but definitely got it in college. It was one of the texts for my modern European history survey with the late, revered Jon Bridgman, in the book’s actual titular year. At the time, I could see that there was a strong pattern of speech policing and suppression of ideas in academia, though they didn’t torture people for ‘wrong thinking.’ Then I saw that society offered the same thing, increasingly, over the course of my lifetime, though not always in the same direction. I saw mass hysteria and mass conformity, and I saw those become the social rule.

And I realized that no matter who Big Brother might represent in my world, for my own sense of self, I’d better commit to hating him all day long. Otherwise I’d be drawn into the mass conformity, and while a part of me would be happier, the majority of me would know I’d sold out.

The Gulag Archipelago (Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn): and here was the full tale of life in katorga, corrective labor in camps, for those who did not toe the Soviet line. I didn’t know what our best solution was, but from that I knew one potential solution that had an irredeemable flaw. That said, as I studied Russian in high school, Solzhenitsyn was a hero of mine. He had gone ahead with publication knowing what it would cost him personally. He may be Russia’s greatest modern writer. If I was going to despise authoritarianism, Solzhenitsyn showed me why one might.

Veeck as in Wreck (Bill Veeck with Ed Linn): I found my copy of this as a battered spine-split paperback among Gothic novels on the shelves of a house my family rented in northern Colorado when I was seven. The more I learned about Veeck, the more I yearned to have been born in a time when I could just travel to his operation and start picking up litter outside the ballpark until he finally gave me a job. Baseball can be stuffy, and that’s an insult no one ever directed at William Veeck Jr. He put clowns in the base coaching boxes. He invented the exploding scoreboard. Most famously, he sent a little person up to bat. Veeck was what the dictionary people are trying to describe when they seek to define the word ‘rollicking.’ We miss him terribly.

Ball Four (Jim Bouton): another great nonconformist book, for which the author paid the price. Bouton had risen so far as to win two World Series games for the Yankees, back when I was a tot. By the time I was six, he was throwing the knuckleball and trying to stay in the game with an expansion team. Bouton was a freethinker in the most resistant to change of all our sporting cultures, wearing a weird number, throwing a weird pitch, liking hippies and the players’ union, and all that made him somewhat of an outsider even before he wrote this tell-all book about the season. No one credibly tried to say that the book was untrue; the knock on Bouton was that he shouldn’t have written it.

As for me, I found it hilarious, bawdy, and invigorating. I was a teenager living in a small, stupid, brutal logging town, I didn’t fit in and never would, and Bouton was speaking my language. Later in life, when I went back to real baseball and was recovering from a serious injury with a new team, I donned #56–Bouton’s number, the symbol of the nonconformist and the comeback. I even learned to throw a good enough knuck to earn one start and one relief trip to the mound. Without Bouton, I’m not entirely sure I would have made it through my teens as a free adult.

They weren’t all nonconformist, though…

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (Howard Pyle): what many don’t realize is that there’s no single authoritative canon of the Robin Hood legend. To the extent that one takes it as fiction, the story can be what the author desires. Pyle’s treatment is the adventure classic I read until the covers began to fall off, and loved more and more each time. Comedy, good vs. evil, culture and history…just the thing for an early readers.

The Mad Scientists’ Club (Bertrand R. Brinley): kids, when we were young, what happened was the school passed around an Arrow book catalogue, from which we could order whichever books we could convince our parents to fund. It took weeks to receive them, but we did. As I remember, this was one such.

The book is about a group of young nerds with a lot of scientific ambition. It doesn’t set out to be comical; that was part of its genius. It told a good story, but it also told a story of gifted boys having adventures. It would be a mistake to call it ‘young adult,’ because adults are eighteen and over, and this is for teens and pre-teens. It’s worth the effort to hunt up.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain): this produced hilarious results. I loved it, of course, and for the record, the un-PC aspects didn’t imprint racism on my little brain; they showed me how it was back then, without sanitizing. However, my parents were Kansans, and in addition to the Kansas vs. Missouri rivalry that has its roots in eleven years of mutual atrocity and reprisal, there’s the fact that educated Kansans like my parents tend to recoil from the Cletus stereotype. So when I began talking like Tom Sawyer, you can imagine their horror. I didn’t understand the freakout; it wasn’t as if I didn’t know what was correct. I guess it’s the same freakout my second grade teacher had when I deliberately misspelled every word on a writing assignment. (Sorry, Mrs. Fulks. That really was disrespectful of me.)

Dune (Frank Herbert): for me, the impact was in the frank way it proposed viewpoints that held water, yet were unpalatable to speak in our own society. “We mustn’t run short of filmbase. How will the people know how well I govern them if I don’t tell them?” In two sentences, gone is the folly that the People are Wise; they are acknowledged as too foolish to discern the truth. The entrenched oligarchy without apologies: what we have, but what we are supposed, even ordered, to insist we do not have, and its ownership class expected to issue the usual pro forma denials. I have only so much patience for certain types of idealism, and Herbert presents a universe with very little.

No, I didn’t see the movie. Whatever movie you are asking about, I haven’t seen it.

Mr. Midshipman Hornblower (C.S. Forester): it was the first in a long series devoted to a flawed but mostly admirable semi-historical figure during the Age of Sail. It wallowed in British chauvinism while showing up all the weaknesses of the British system. It inspired. It made one wish to be able to say one had walked the decks with roundshot coming in through the side. And while it did so, it taught a great many lessons about leadership. Were it in my power, every midshipman at Annapolis and New London would read and write a paper on the entire series, of which the given title is the first.

The David Kopay Story (David Kopay with Perry Dean Young): growing up, I guess I was as homophobic as the garden variety small-town American boy, but that was already unraveling by my mid-teens. This book would help that process. Kopay, the first NFL figure to come out, was an alum of the dream school that I would later attend. His story filled me with admiration, because he had done two impressive things: he had made an NFL career out of hustle and desire and a little bit of talent, and he had taken a public stand for which there would be consequences.

I understood Kopay immediately: he had never set out to become an activist, though his actions pushed him into that position. Above all, he was a competitor. I would play sports into my mid-forties, always with a couple of ounces of talent and a whole lot of fight (at times arguably too much), and Kopay was among my inspirations.

 

Here’s a valid question that might occur to some in our control-oriented society with its schools like jails and its universal surveillance and its obsession with minor wrongdoings: could my parents have shaped my behavior through the books they provided?

I don’t think so, and here is why: so many of the books did not take. Yeah, I may have started a lamentable speaking habit after reading Tom Sawyer, but it didn’t stick. Treasure Island didn’t turn me into a pirate. The Bible didn’t stay with me long after my liberation from high school. The books that influenced me did so because they resonated with what I already was, even going back to toddlerhood. I read plenty of books that didn’t change me: Helter Skelter, for example, or None Dare Call It Conspiracy. No, I don’t think it has much targetable impact.

Thank the gods it’s not that easy.

Sports

Strat-o-Matic: my chronic illness

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No, it’s not as bad as diabetes. It only now and then costs me too much money for too little product which, even then, delivers me enjoyment out of proportion to the dollars spent. It’s probably not classified as an addiction, mainly because I can go for years without engaging in it. But it’s always still there waiting for the next outbreak cycle, like malaria or elective politics. I prefer to think of it as a chronic disorder.

The 1970s: a time when baseball cards were toys, not investments. The era in which kids read comic books rather than investing in them. The era in which we thought American government could not possibly get more corrupt or evil than the Nixon administration.

Even our adults had naive, childish notions, didn’t they?

Then again, in those days loaded open-end mutual funds were taken seriously as investments by persons who could do arithmetic.

In those days, if you lived in an isolated place, the Sears, Ward, and Penney catalogues were your nearest approximation to something like Amazon. Companies seeking kids’ money had to advertise where the kids were looking, and that meant comic books. The most common ads:

  • An offer to get catalog rewards by selling seeds. “Send no money…we trust you!”
  • Sets of cheap plastic toy soldiers in some theme: Revolutionary, Roman, modern, etc.
  • “Sea monkeys,” essentially brine shrimp, which in the flesh didn’t look much like the joyful anthropomorphic nudists in the ad.
  • BB Guns. I try to explain this to kids today, and they don’t believe me: we had BB gun wars. No aiming high–you could blind someone.
  • The Charles Atlas transformation exercise manual (I think it was a book), with the proverbial nerd getting sand kicked in his face and girls rejecting him until he kicked some ass.
  • Strat-o-Matic Baseball.

I have no idea what they marketed to the girls, but I’m sure it was sexist. Back then, life was sexist.

When I first saw the SOM ads, circa about 1972-73, I had no idea how the game could back up its brag. All major league teams, with players who played significant time, performing realistically? Before that, my sports simulation mind had involved spinners and kiddie games. Still, $10 (or whatever it was they wanted) was a hell of a lot of money, almost a couple months’ allowance. It would buy a lot of baseball cards and comic books, known quantities of enjoyment. I didn’t go for it. You couldn’t be too careful; you knew most of these ads were a load of bullshit.

We moved, and before he became a mortal enemy, I got to know the neighbor kid as sort of a friend. He had Strat-o-Matic, the 1971 season. Turned out it was completely legit: every player got a card, reflecting his performance. Half the results came from pitchers’ cards, half from batters’ cards, so that would average out. Sophisticated stuff, big-boy sports gaming. I absorbed the homebrew pen-and-paper scorekeeping method that I would desire to use (but not even dream of trying) when I would one day be an official scorer for a local baseball league. I had to have my own game, of course, and in 1975 I sprang for the current (1974) set. A few years later, my enemy sold me his 1971 cards for a song, one of the few times I got the best of him.

I didn’t buy or need any more annual card sets in my youth. I attempted ill-fated season replays with statkeeping, a ludicrous proposition with pen and paper solitaire. Even though I never even came close to finishing one, it kept me somewhat sane through seven years of hell. Between D&D, Strat, and books, I avoided doing all the retributory things that were morally justified but would be life-limiting.

Come the 1980s, I escaped to college, and my chronic SOM pattern continued: remission, outbreak, remission, outbreak. Remissions lasted a year or two. Then I graduated, and I had real money and was independent of my parents, and could buy whatever the hell I felt like. I bought the then-current cards, 1986. They still looked just like what I’d known as a kid: comforting, clean, often irregularly cut, black on white with blue on white reverses (the reverses were for if you were playing with the lefty/righty rules).

Here my memory gets a bit hazy, but sometime around 1990, Strat came out with a computer version of its baseball game. Adult time is different from kid time: even with my Atari ST and a pirated spreadsheet program to calculate batting averages and ERAs, it just wasn’t practical to replay whole seasons with the cards and dice. I lived in Seattle, worked six days a week, spent thirteen hours per day working or commuting, slept maybe seven hours a night, leaving four hours each day to call my own. When the computer version matured a bit, I bought a copy. I had assumed there would be Great Evolutions.

Nah.

I came to realize a thing about SOM, a mighty strength and crippling weakness all at once: it was hopelessly, comically, defiantly retro. When SOM wanted to make computer games, it hired a programmer. Not multiple programmers; a programmer. He’s still working there, same guy, all this time. Unfortunately, the game reflected a user interface only a programmer could love, but I had learned that was what happened when one let programmers design the UI. In the programming mind, if there is a way to do it and it doesn’t crash, that’s good enough; on to the next issue. In spite of an amazingly clunky setup relative to other computer games, I still enjoyed SOM’s computer baseball. I could replay past seasons and let the game record the stats. It had zero arcade quality, but arcade games were for the insufficiently hardcore.

The boardgame finally did away with a deck of twenty numbered cards, in favor of a twenty-sided die à la D&D, about twenty years after D&D came out. I marvel that they got around to acknowledging the Internet before 2000. Just. Barely. Before. 2000. But they did, fair’s fair. They liked it a lot better when it gave them a better form of copy protection, and Strat is all about the copy protection.

Came the CD-ROM era, and several years into it–when the CD-ROM had since became the norm on all DOS/Windows PCs, SOM breathlessly announced its great innovation: CD-ROM Baseball! It was sort of like being the last car company to market a hybrid vehicle, and making it sound as if they’d invented the concept. Now, this was a spendy game. If you didn’t want the cards as well, it cost about fifty bucks a year, two-thirds that if you kept upgrading every year. Past season disks cost about $20 each. Want modern color ballparks? That’ll be another $20. Want past season ballparks? Another $20, please. Buy both of those plus three past seasons, and you’d lay down $100.

About this time, SOM changed the cards’ basic look. Reverses got blue and red sides for the handedness. Ink on the front went a horrible dull navy blue, harder to read and uglier than a clutch of bigoted facial expressions. No more mis-cut cards–they came in sheets of nine, and you had to separate them yourself, though at least they were all the same size. I looked at these cards and realized my days of wanting new physical cards were over. These weren’t SOM cards, at least not for me. The ones I liked, they no longer would make.

How’s that for comedy? For once the ultra-conservative, change-resistant company makes a legitimate change, and now I don’t like that either? Honestly, I’d have been fine had the fronts stayed the same. As a kid, I’d only played with the fronts anyway.

I settled into a pattern that continues to this day. Every few years I’d miss SOM, and spend some money for a new copy of the game. As the Internet came along, SOM developed very stiff copy protection, requiring your machine to contact their server and authenticate the program and any features in use. I’d have to relearn the clunkiness of the whole UI all over again, at least for starting new seasons, but I would bull through to relearn it. Now and then something would go wrong, and I learned that what one did was write a real letter to Mr. Hal Richman, owner and founder of the company. I always received a fair resolution. SOM is old school in every way, including the potential to write politely to the top person and make one’s case.

Must I even mention that they’re still in the same building as ever on Lon Gisland? Don’t laugh. Every year, when the new cards come out, there are people who go to Glen Head, NY and freeze their butts off waiting in line for Opening Day–the day they can pick up their cawd awhdahs.

And yet for years, and I think still to this day, Strat refuses to fix its weaknesses, or to get with the times. The guy working shipping seems indifferent. They charge by the minute for phone tech support. You can email for tech support, but I didn’t get any answers either time. Worst of all, since seasons are installed from the current version’s CD or from the website, a legitimately purchased past season may become incompatible with the current game. That may force one to purchase that season again. Which may then force one to update the game, in spite of the cold reality that the annual updates deliver less value for the dollar than one can find outside Microsoft (where updates provide negative value and thus the company should actually pay users to accept them). The UI has only minimally evolved in all this quarter century. They were lauding the “VGA Ballparks” as a big deal long after VGA became a bare minimal display standard. If you hate change for the sake of change, fair is fair: SOM is your kind of outfit. It may teach you to ask yourself how much you really do hate change for the sake of change.

And I do. I’m change-averse enough that some of what I’m presenting, which sounds to most people like faults, comforts me. At least with SOM, when I have to relearn everything after a few years off, the everything I must relearn will probably not have changed much; it’s my memory that is the weak point. Far as I know, the arcade action is still limited to watching the flight of a ball in one of several designated azimuths/trajectories tailored to the ballpark image in use. If there is a company in this world that is not going to fix what is not broken (except for that horrible blue ink; that’s broken), it’s Strat-o-Matic.

I’ve still never had a no-hitter, never had anyone hit for the cycle. I read recaps of big tournaments where they talk how so-and-so threw a no-no and such-and-so hit for the cycle. Guaranteed one of each per recap, it seems. I don’t believe them. Never have. What do they take me for? Someone fudged, that’s what I think. It’s a shibboleth, but I don’t much care. What are they going to do?

So here we are, and after all these years I’m still experiencing the chronic condition that is Strat-o-Matic. In a couple of months, it’ll go into remission. By the next acute outbreak, I’ll have a new computer, which will mean I didn’t formally recall the authorization from my old one, which will mean I have to write to them and beg to have my codes reset, which will mean that by the time I install it, some of my past seasons will no longer work because they’ve updated them, which will mean I’ll be annoyed, which may or may not mean I decide to repurchase them, and which will at least shorten my outbreak because it’ll irritate me. Solely because it reminds me of youthful joy, with SOM I tolerate obstacles that would make me dismiss nearly any other company.

The core people at the company have been the same for so long that it’s hard to imagine life without them. Hal Richman must be 80. Everyone else has to be at least looking at retirement sometime in the reasonable future. And yet they’ve brought on some very worthy help. Glenn Guzzo, a fan as long as I have been and a really nice fellow, is working there now. So is Chris Rosen, a longtime secondary market vendor of SOM stuff, great reputation. One supposes that eventually the firm will pass into their hands, and that one day I’ll have my outbreak and find that the company has begun to evolve at a swifter pace than metamorphic rock formations. Both are historic innovators who got things done. I can see them doing that at Strat.

I had an attack earlier this morning, but it’s under control now. It’ll probably hit again this afternoon. I’m replaying the 1956 season as the Boston Red Sox, because I wanted to find out how hard it would be to manage a team whose shortstop (Don Buddin) couldn’t field, bunt, or hit in the clutch, and without one single legit pitching ace. The answer: it’s frustrating, especially when we lose to the Kansas City A’s, but I’m at least seeing what they went through, experiencing a variant of baseball history.

This is without question the most anomalous vendor relationship in my world. Forty years in.

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Murphy’s Law Enforcement

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You know the people that I feel worst for? They are the Murphy Police.

Murphy’s Law, as we all know, says that whatever can go wrong will go wrong. I obey this law. For example, I don’t get my hopes up too much on most things, and I don’t place a lot of faith in people to change or grow. If they do, wonderful. If not, once the pattern is displayed, I expect it will probably continue. A person who is normally late is not going to wake up one day, have an epiphany, and become timely. That person will always be late. A person who is prone to cancel at the last minute is not going to start caring about others. That person will always cancel, and it’s foolishness to expect or demand otherwise. People will be themselves, for better and for worse depending upon the trait.

Some, however, are in Murphy’s Law Enforcement. Everything goes wrong for them, and often it’s not their fault. I don’t know how they get by. A person who is in Murphy’s Law Enforcement has bad news and disappointment seemingly every goddamn day. Day was going well? Cat began throwing up. Just got cat vomit cleaned up? Kid began throwing up. Just got kid cleaned up? You began throwing up. Money was starting to ease up? Catalytic converter went south. Job situation looked good? The new boss is Osama. Just got over shoulder surgery? Right on time for a dental abscess.

It mystifies me how it all works. Are there people who just attract bad luck, real-life Schleprocks? I don’t really believe in karma, nor do I believe everything happens for a reason. In some cases, it can be traced to a pattern of negligence or procrastination, but not in others. I suppose one metaphysical explanation would be that some people are followed around by chaotic energy fields or somesuch. I have no way of knowing if there’s anything to that.

What I wonder most: has anyone ever successfully resigned from the Murphy Police Department? Is there anyone who has ever found a way off the force? Or is it a case where, once sworn, one’s fate is forever to uphold Murphy’s Law?

Editing/writing life

Being a writer’s nurse

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It may fall to me to doctor people’s books, but that really doesn’t describe my role. I’m more like a nurse. Doctors don’t actually do much hands-on; they mostly diagnose and prescribe, whereas nurses’ work is more hands-on overall.  This may explain why I so easily empathize with the many nurses in my world. If I just read mss and gave advice, I’d be more like a doctor. Since I fix them myself, I’m more like a nurse. It got me to thinking.

Nurses do a lot of work designed to help people in the long run, but some of it hurts, and some of it terrifies the patients. I think some of them come in with attitudes the nurse must also deal with. This is easy to relate to. Every time I make a change to the writer’s ms, there’s no getting around it: I’m saying it was lacking something. Writers who have never worked with an editor generally don’t know what to expect, and they choose various stances going in:

Defiance: “I will fight for my words!” No, you won’t, because I won’t fight back. I’ll make my point, then let you decide. If you value my guidance, you’ll take it into consideration. If you do not, then that’s your choice. If you ignore me often enough, I’ll ask not to be credited–which you should see as a very bad sign–and you won’t have to worry about whether or not to engage me next time. I want to work with writers I can help. Not every relationship is a good match.

Terror: fear of ‘red ink.’ Some writers are so fragile that a marked-up ms is more than their psyches can take. In those cases, no matter what I do, we count down to the day when I bump the wrong nerve, at which time I’ll become the most recent sob story told to the next candidate.

Pessimism: “Why do you need to read the whole thing to tell me how bad I am?” I mean it. I get this. And the answer is that I need to read the whole thing, in the form in which I would be editing it, in order to assess what it needs, how much work it takes. I have had potential clients who had great mss that interested me very much, about which I was quite optimistic, come in with this attitude. I think it’s like with me opening my mail, when I kind of brace myself for bad news. Except this is mail they asked for, and it’s supposed to do something positive, so I don’t understand the thinking.

Excitement: yes, I see it, and fairly often. Not always from the first contact, but once we discuss the types of editing and I offer an assessment of where I believe we should go. There is a point where the uncertainty yields to optimism, and we have a sense of common purpose.

I grant that the analogy seems flawed on the face of it, since the nurse is not the doctor…at least was not, traditionally. Now, quite often, s/he is in that role, and I welcome it. I have had much better treatment from NPs than from MDs, to the point where I’ll endure an appointment with an MD only if there is some compelling reason I can’t see an NP.

So, nursing. When you imagine the ideal nurse, knowing that such a person represents a theoretical ideal rather than a realistic expectation of anyone, what do you imagine? Here’s my list:

  • Someone finding that fine compassionate balancing point between emotional detachment and emotional involvement.
  • Someone finding that sweet spot of balance between enforcing rules for the sake of having rules, and paying no attention to any rules.
  • Someone tough enough to take a stand where it matters, and strong enough to yield a bit when that makes the most sense.
  • Someone whose care promotes optimism, without offering false optimism where it is not merited.
  • Someone who understands that, in the end, the greatest impact of the outcome is born by the patient, not the nurse.
  • Someone deeply skilled in the art, yet ready and willing to learn new methods.
  • Someone who knows when to get someone else involved, but doesn’t pull that trigger just to avoid the hard stuff.
  • Someone who is just accountant enough to consider costs, but not nearly accountant enough to think of nothing but costs.
  • Someone who knows that a patient may often disregard his or her advice, and doesn’t take the disregard as a personal affront.
  • Someone who can take an obstreperous or difficult patient and make him or her a partner in his or her own healing.

If we replace the medical terms with their literary equivalents, that might just gather up the list of everything I seek to be as an editor (and am not, oftener than I would like).

Let’s not take the analogy too far, though, lest my clients have nightmares about hospital gowns and enemas.

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Stuff you don’t know about me

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And might as well, if it interests you.

I was a disabled child. Since my parents never taught me to feel sorry for myself, or that I was disabled, I remember it only dimly and not with pain.

Very quietly, I provide proofreading services to my alma mater’s premier sports fan news site. It feels good.

One of my oldest and dearest friends advises me that I am living proof that Rasputin engaged in sexual intercourse with grizzly bears.

My skull seems to have the density of lead. I once hit a man with it by accident, full tilt, and I felt awful. He was such a nice guy, and he could have died. There is a bone ridge down the center of my forehead, like that of reptiles one normally expects to extend long forked tongues. Evidently, even a casual glancing impact from my skull feels like being hit in the head with a mallet. I’m sorry to anyone to whom I accidentally did that, especially my wife that one night when I was getting into bed and it was dark.

A formative event for me was the Monday holiday law. Until then, my birthday had coincided with a national holiday. When I was about five, the government made a law, and my birthday wasn’t a holiday any more. Before I attended first grade, I learned that not even one’s birthday was sacred, that government could violate it at will, without consequence.

I was raised by religious fanatics in an abusive household. None of that is any excuse for any of my mistakes, but if you ever wonder why attempts to push a religion on me can meet with such a chilly or even fierce response, now you know.

At twenty, I seriously considered whether I were redeemable or not. Thanks to some good influences around me, I decided that I was. The hidden tale of my life is living so as to show proper thanks to a number of people for their compassion and support and wisdom. You know who you are.

I was not an easy birth. I was an induced-labor and salad spoons birth. The first photograph of me shows a little potato-dented head and one eye swollen completely shut. I was born as obstinately as I would live, declining to cooperate with a birth for which my permission had never been sought, raising my battered little noggin for the first time to look about and vow to get even with everyone who put me through this. Given how difficult I was to raise, by age two I think the bill was paid with interest.

Growing up, my parents kept a lot from me. I have a half-brother somewhere in the Ohio Valley whom I’ve never met. The ‘rheumatic fever’ episode of my mom? It was a little more psychological than that. All growing up, I was presented with this fiction that we (our family) were exceptional, superior in morals and culture. Then I found out my father grew up in a brutal household and was now acting it out in adulthood, and that families that made fart jokes had love and fun and joy, and were not low forms of life. If anything, our pretensions–which we could not back up with reality–made us the low forms of life.

I have accumulated some damage over life. One ankle will probably always pain me. One achilles is shorter than the other. One shoulder bends in ways that it should not. I have hearing damage. My knee cartilage is more or less gone. And I’m luckier than I deserve to be, considering my years of hockey and baseball.

I was an amateur athlete, on some level, for thirty-five years, in which I never argued with an official on the field of play. I believe in automatic, immediate ejection for bickering. I’m in the minority on that and am fine with it. Arguing with officials on the field of play is for losers, and when I see someone doing it, that’s what I’m thinking. If they would take half the effort they devote to bawling and bitching, and direct it toward playing better, all the close calls would now go their way, and a whole bunch of new close calls would arise–of which they’d get more than their half, because they didn’t show up the officials. But no. They whine. Boo hoo hoo. Shut up and go to the box like a big boy.

Until forced by circumstances, I will almost never move to a new version of software. Most ‘upgrades’ bring no benefit. They move stuff around, add features no one wants, and ‘change it up’ so that some exec has ‘put his stamp’ ‘on the brand.’ All bullshit. If it works fine for me, and the new stuff gives no benefit, keep the marketing hype.

I bleed easily and quickly if cut. I used to sell plasma in my college days, until the day the needle gradually worked out and I didn’t notice the yard-wide pool of blood until it was, well, a yard wide. I’m a very easy stick for blood tests, but I hate being stuck in the elbow. I prefer to be stuck in the veins on the back of my hand. It eludes me why someone would, when other choices existed, voluntarily have a needle in a joint that would mean you could not dare move that joint.

Dumbest question I field in life? About my beard: “How long you been growing that?” And I get it mainly in checkout lines, from older men to whom life seems to have taught little.

Stuff I could eat daily for the rest of my life: all seafood, Kansas steaks, Stilton cheese, almost any sandwich on grilled sourdough, scrapple, Taylor pork roll, Caesar salad, the potato skins at Goodwood Barbecue in Boise, tirokafterí, falafel, dolmathes, my chorizo chile, and just about everything that constitutes the full Irish breakfast.

Stuff I’d have to be starving to eat/drink: coconut, cauliflour, lima beans, cole slaw, black licorice, ouzo, plain cooked spinach (looks like what I used to clean off my hook after I’d accidentally dragged my fishing lure in the muck at the bottom of a Kansas pond, and couldn’t possibly taste better),

It is true that I speak an above average amount of languages, but it’s not that impressive. In the first place, it wasn’t hard. I know people who can rummage through any random kitchen and, without visible effort, conceive and present incredible meals. I know people who can’t spell, but who just intuitively know the plant and animal worlds. I know mechanics who can’t write, but who feel auto repairs somewhere in a part of the brain I lack. My gift may be less common (or more likely less commonly discovered), but it’s no more special.

I am immune to a need to remain current with fashion, pop culture, etc. I lived in Seattle during the early 1990s, even doing accounting work related to some major artists, without knowing what grunge even was. On the day I was authoring this para, Alan Rickman passed away. My Facebook wall erupted in waves of grief, and I had to ask around to find out who he was. Several months passed between that day and today, when I am giving it a final once-over, and I have already forgotten who they told me he was.

I am also immune to the idea that some living combinations are so fundamentally odd that they are impermissible. Today is a good example. In sweats and a t-shirt, I pulled into a burger bar. I ate my cheeseburger and onion rings while reading a book about Mycenaean Greek culture, which was especially interesting to me because the author had worked with Michael Ventris. Michael Ventris was to Mycenaean studies as Einstein was to physics. The notion that I shouldn’t be reading a book while I eat lunch, much less a book on such a subject while eating that sort of lunch, is alien to my mind. Reading is allowed at any time when one is not operating a vehicle. Note that being stopped at a light does not count as vehicle operation until the vehicles begin to move.

I watch trashy reality shows. I intended to say that I watch the trashiest ones I can find, but that’s not true, since I don’t watch Jersey Shore or anything Kardashey. Just some of the trashiest ones.

My life was first threatened, with a weapon drawn, at five. It wasn’t that traumatic. Happened again in college. That also wasn’t that traumatic. I gain more PTSD from ten seconds in the dentist’s waiting room than I ever did from mortal physical danger.

I attended a grade school in which Biblical guidance induced the principal to lash us with a 1/2″ rod for misbehavior. It wasn’t that traumatic. Pisses me off, and if I ever find that principal still alive he’s due for a bad day, but it’s not like I need trigger warnings or other such nannying.

The worst job I ever had was cleaning up a basement full of dog turds. It was also my first full-time job in the working world. I had been told I was being hired to paint a house. Thereby was my view of employers formed for life.

I don’t remember learning to read. Reading was just something I had always known, or so it seemed. In reality, my mother taught me. When I got to kindergarten, and even first grade, it stunned my little brain to realize that some children could not read. I did not understand how it could be. Want to see me doff my hat to someone? Show me an older adult who grew up illiterate and now seeks to learn to read. I find the entire concept inspiring.

No matter how hard you try, you will be unable to imagine the sheer awfulness of some of the writing my profession has forced me to see. And that’s all right.

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An eyewitness account of the rise of the Internet, for millennials

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Why does everyone my age, the people who raised the millennial generation, now look to criticize the kids for being exactly as they were raised to be?

I hate it. My generation needs to take some responsibility for its choices, just one of which was the transformation of our society to a fearful, bubble-wrapped, constant-parental-supervision, hyper-PC world. Dodge ball is banned and yet school shootings skyrocket? Schools like jails? Crazy assloads of homework? Teaching to tests? At what point do we stand up and fess up to the kids: “We inherited a pretty good world, then got fearful and greedy, and screwed it up for you. We are sorry. We will stop giving you so much shit.”

Maybe, if we stop giving them shit now, they’ll pick out better nursing homes for us when the time comes. That, you realize, is the endgame. The vengeance of the elder is the calm understanding that the youth will one day experience arthritis, that one day Immodium will be more their recreational drug than ketamine. The vengeance of the youth is to make the elderly pray that their arthritic days end sooner. This cycle poisons us all. The kids need us: they need our support, our love, our examples, our wisdom, and our friendship. They need for us to share. And we need them: we need their liveliness, their change, their new outlooks, their ability to program the remote without wanting to throw it, their help with the physical tasks at which we are now semi-competent, and their friendship. We need for them to share. I can think of no more toxic way to spend my final years than in a gated community filled only with other old goats, who really buy into this ‘honored citizen’ and ‘senior citizen’ stuff, who leave miserly tips for harried waitresses they berate, and who do their best to hide from all youth, watching old Hallmark and INSP TV shows all day that reassure them how The World Ought To Be.

That world is gone. Be as nostalgic as you wish, but live in the now.

In the now, I just watched a video wherein teenagers attempted to use a typical twenty-year-old Windows 95 computer. I found their impressions fascinating. They did not intuitively grasp its basic functions, though some were very interested in the history. It occurred to me that many young folks, never having known a world without the Internet, do not apprehend how recent a phenomenon is this hyper-reliance on easy-to-use Internet. My generation’s harmful reflex is to ridicule them for this, which shows me that my contemporaries have lived this long without learning much. The proper response is not to make fun of the kids, and we ought to have developed enough wisdom to grasp this. If you’d like them to learn–if you would like some empathy and understanding from them–take time to teach them. Then let them teach you how their experience differs.

Speaking of which:

This comes from my own point of view as I lived it, now aged fifty-two, born in 1963, high school class of 1981, Bachelor of Arts 1986. When I was young, I reflected at how ancient I would be in the fabled year 2000: 37, practically a museum piece. I didn’t own my first computer until 1987, and it was a forgotten machine called the Atari ST. Of course, to use any form of Internet, one needs some form of computer, so it is essential to discuss the rise of the personal computer.

1980 (36 years ago): after striking a deal with Microsoft to bundle DOS (which in turn M$ buys off a fellow in the U-District who turns out to be like the guy who traded a winning lottery ticket for a caramel macchiato latte) with the product, IBM markets the IBM PC. At first, it costs about as much as a year’s public university dorm housing, or about 10% of an annual survival wage (at that time, one could almost eke by on minimum wage). The PC immediately wins, spawning a host of imitators (“clones”). Not much of anyone is on the Internet, which does exist in its ur-form, but is not for mere mortals.

1981 (35 years ago): That fall, I entered college at a major university which was as technologically current as any such institution. Very few students had personal computers, and none of them connected to the university’s systems, which were monsters that required entire rooms. PCs (to include all personal computers, including Apples and many long-deceased brands) cost several thousand dollars each, in an era where the minimum wage was around $3/hour. The university had computers for registration and other recordkeeping, as did large businesses. For computer science classes, there were ‘computer labs’ so people could practice fun stuff like Fortran programming. (Ask your engineer uncle about Fortran.)

1986: more students had PCs, but the Internet was still in its Arpanet ur-form, which had been around since 1969. This was a distributed network meant to operate by passing information through many possible paths to get from one point to another, rather than having to use This Dedicated Wire (which might be cut by an earthquake or the incineration of St. Louis, etc.). It wasn’t for us. I spent five years in college, as a history major, and wrote an inch-thick stack of papers. I typed and retyped every single one on an electric typewriter, typically three times: first draft, refinement and edits, final version.

By 1986 (30 years ago), a fair number of (the limited number of) computer users dialed into BBSes (bulletin board systems) in order to argue with strangers over common interests. It was like logging onto a web forum, but one had to dial in with a modem and phone line. Modems–little e-telephones which bore some resemblance to a DSL modem or cable modem in shape, size, and function–sounded bizarre when making the connection, like a bunch of springs boinging against a background of phone static. Maybe like a didgeridu played while tipsy. Of course, BBSes were never used as porn repositories or to share pirated software. That’s why we do not get the expression ‘l33t’ from ‘elite,’ which was not the term for a pirate BBS, because of course we would never indulge in warez (which was not the slang term for cracked pirated software). If the BBS was long distance, one paid through the nose in long distance charges.

1988 (28 years ago): PC ownership has moved well past IBM, which is showing an astonishing refusal to face facts. The Mac is the desktop publishing weapon of choice, but big companies still use ‘minicomputers’ (which could easily take up a whole room) or mainframes, a.k.a. Big Iron. IBM is cannibalizing its Big Iron business, trying to dictate to the PC industry, and the PC industry is listening to IBM about as much as you listen to your drunk uncle’s political and career guidance.

In 1988, I began a job selling computers, a foot soldier in the trenches of the IBM-Microsoft wars. M$ won, but it hadn’t yet decided to try and control the Internet. People who used modems to dial BBSes are now buying faster ones and signing up for Internet accounts; they still have to dial up. An always-on Internet connection, like your modern DSL or cable modem or fiber, is as affordable to average people as a yacht. Wireless is unknown. Windows is available, but it: runs on top of DOS, is buggy and cranky, and mostly sucks. This gives us a foretaste of what we can expect from M$ once IBM is crushed.

What did we even do with computers before we could dial up to the Internet and search? We wrote. We created art. We programmed applications, shareware, and so on. We compiled the code we wrote. We balanced checkbooks. We kept business books. We played games, oh god, how we played games. We used spreadsheets to automate calculations, letting do the heavy arithmetical lifting. We created databases to store large amounts of information, user interfaces to enable the research of the database, and report formats to present the research results. We drafted plans for building and bridges. We could look at the library’s card catalog, a voluminous wall of pigeonhole drawers we used to find books, and realize it would one day go away. So would the microfiche. There truly is much one can do with a computer that is not connected to a broadband network, and we did all of it.

1992 (24 years ago): The web will soon exist, and one will be able to browse it, but only with a text-based web browser. The dawn of the graphical user interface (which is how we elders describe the interactive front end of your Windows 10 or Mac OS whatever) is nearly at hand, ready to pave the way for unlimited porn. Windows is beginning to suck less. By this time, the PC has begun displacing both minis and big iron. Most people still get online with a modem, dialing in over a landline. Cell phones are uncommon and pretty spendy, and the idea of doing the Internet over your cellphone would have seemed like technological magic had anyone mentioned it. Laptops were big but not uncommon. Color inkjets were coming along.

1996 (20 years ago): a lot of PC office networks now ran on a thing called “Novell.” All you really need to know about Novell is that it was incomprehensible to normal people. By this time America Online–which had become one of the main ways people connected online (others were quaintnesses called CompuServe, Genie, etc.)–had unleashed its computer-illiterate, text-speaking “r u m or f?” and “ur a looser” hordes upon the Internet. That may have marked a transition point: until then, the Internet was sort of like a club that had unspoken rules and traditions, to which not everyone was willing to do the work to belong. It was rapidly becoming a free-for-all devoid of all standards (in other words, it was assuming a far more American character). For a while there, people like me got to enjoy a certain snobbish self-satisfaction, though I’m not sure how much good it did, since the AOL outlook took over. It was like one’s favorite pizzeria one day became a Chuck-E-Cheese’s–in mid-meal.

By 1996, the graphic web browser was king. The battle was between Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. The release of Windows 95, which you laughed at when you saw the video of the teens, marked a major turning point in making mainstream computing more stable and easier to work with. As you might expect from M$, it was doing everything it could to require the world to use IE, and the world refused. All that warfare against IBM, and it had learned not a single lesson about customers. There is no corporation that will not turn into a moron factory given enough time and success.

2000 (16 years ago): by now, broadband (DSL, cable, other ‘always on’ connections) was going mainstream, and phone modems were starting to look pretty dated. By 2000, most non-Luddites had some form of Internet connectivity; all companies worthy of the name had web presences. Also, at the false millennium (1/1/2000), there was a major scare because most of the remaining big iron software didn’t support eight-digit dating, and they had thrown away the source code. Much doom-and-gloom, much foretelling of apocalypse, and in the end, not much impact. But by this time, one didn’t need to watch the TV news to know about it. By this time, quite a few people learned about it on the Internet. I would say that around 2000 was the time when the Internet became like the telephone was to my parents, and the cell phone is to my nieces and nephews: “can’t function without it.”

Also around 2000, M$ followed up the very successful Windows 98 with Windows Me. Everyone hated it. Everyone. It was the Jerry Sandusky of operating systems. At that point, we began to realize that every other M$ operating system was going to be crappy, and the savvy among us planned accordingly. We’re still doing it.

By 2000, the Internet was an integral part of collegiate life. Our next transition would be Wi-Fi everywhere, and the decline of the PC in favor of the so-called smartphone, but you were around for those. I’ll let you figure out how to teach your grandkids about it, someday after I’m long gone. And if you do it better than I did, I’ll doff my spiritual hat to you, and wherever we go, when you catch up to me, we’ll have a single-malt.

Was it strange for me, having this enormous transition happen just a decade too late to help me through college? It was, but mine is not the first generation such things have happened to. It just is. We adapt as best we can, some better than others. (My mother is 75 and simply refuses to get on the Internet, and in her case I suspect that’s a pretty good thing.) Around 2000, too, Internet-based shopping and reviewing had gone very mainstream. That’s how I got into writing, through writing book reviews at Amazon, then product reviews at a now-moribund site called Epinions. I still keep in touch with a lot of people from Eps.

So. If you are twenty-five, by the time you were old enough to think about shopping, you never knew a world without the Internet; it was just something that had always been there, like oxygen or Abe Vigoda. (Like the telephone was for me.) And yet it wasn’t always there, and we did live productive and happy lives without it. I swear.

But one can never really go back, and for as badly as my generation has hosed down the world you live in, most of it knows that much at least. Even so, when next you take a look at one of those comical videos where teens look at Windows 95 and can’t even imagine how it was ever useful, at least you will know how it played out.

One last thing: lest the fogeys sell you a bill of goods, just as you look at a Windows 95-based computer and laugh at its abacus-level technology, your parents were doing the laughing in 1990. Only then, they were laughing at the people still using their pre-DOS CP/M machines, such as the Kaypro portable with its tiny green screen and floppy disks, the size of a briefcase. Or their old Compaq Portable, size of a hardshell suitcase, better known as the “Compaq Draggable.” They chortled at the elders still using cranky electric typewriters with worn-out ribbons, and at those who bought computers but still insisted on daisywheel printers (essentially, computer-driven typewriters) over the obviously superior dot-matrix printers. (That old, greasy printer at your mechanic’s shop with the word ‘Okidata’ on it? That’s a dot-matrix printer, with its rough images and its eardrum-tearing whine.)

As for our times, we can work together. If you’ll keep helping me figure out how to connect all these stupid new cords I don’t understand, I’ll be happy to reciprocate by helping you see how your parents’ world really was, and feeding you useful bits of data about their times to help you dominate them in debates.

Editing/writing life, Technology

Limping along with an eight-year-old printer

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It’s true. I’m still using a printer from the Bush II administration days, a Samsung CLP-300, and I’m immune to the idea that I should just replace it. It still works, and I’m a cheap bastard.

Well, maybe I’m not what you normally think of as a cheap bastard. I may just quietly donate to your charity and not say a word. I wouldn’t resent my taxes if I didn’t think they amounted to a donation to organized corporate crime with handy government laundering. I don’t mind paying for quality. I don’t mind buying you lunch and leaving a nice tip. I insist that my wife buy business attire without looking at the price tags, so that she gets what she needs rather than trying for false economy. I don’t mind spending, but gods, how I hate waste. I bought a quality printer, it still works, and it would therefore be wasteful to buy a new one. If I figure a charity for phonies or wastrels, they’re dead to me. If the lunch I buy you turns out to be lousy, my furious yet private embarrassment will assure that the restaurant has seen its last nickel from me. If her new clothes don’t hold up, we are shopping somewhere else next time. So when I buy something, I’m going to take good care of it, and I’m going to get every second of safe life out of it that I can.

That would explain why my pickup truck, which is half my age (it dates back to the early part of the Bush I administration), is still on the road. And I don’t want a new one. If you give me a free Ferrari, I’ll never even drive it just for curiosity’s sake. On the block it goes.

The way my mind works is that, since most people buy new trucks after five to eight years, and I have not bought one in twenty-six, every day of operation is pure value profit–that is, the value I gained exceeded expectations, and exceeded what most others gain, and is still racking up the wins.

I remember when color lasers were four-figure office luxuries and color inkjets became the norm. Ever since the first HP DeskJet, though, which retailed for $1000 (and people paid it), the purpose of printers has been to sell supplies, not to make impressions on media. HP was once the gold standard, but it lost its way, and now gives users Fiorinal headaches. Now I’d buy a Canon or a Samsung.

My CLP-300 has a parallel port. Before USB took over the connectivity of our peripherals, kids, printers required a big thick cable called a parallel cable. It was pins on the computer side and an oblong block on the printer side, and it clamped down there. I don’t think my computer even has a parallel port now.

Its power draw is so heavy that I couldn’t print without a battery backup. Absent this power source, the draw would cause the computer to power cycle, probably before the printer had all the data. When it fires up, the lights in my office dim for a moment, and I am once again reassured that my battery backup will work at need.

After about ten pages, as each new page feeds, something begins to clack inside. At fifty pages, the clacking gets louder.

When I send it a long and complex job, it thinks for about thirty seconds before it even begins to print, like an elderly man assigned a young man’s job. You think I should what? it seems to demand. If it’s a picture, it makes a passive-aggressive protest by leaving a few weak lines the vertical length of the image, just to remind me that I have inconvenienced its repose.

My printer jams now and then, for any reason or no reason, which will require me to pull the beast out and extract all the stranded paper by pulling with force. There is no other way. I suppose that the rubber takeup rollers have become plasticized from heat and age.

It has a collector cartridge that gathers up loose toner from inside, presumably with some sort of blower. When that fills up, there is no real signal that it needs dumping, but the beast won’t print. Samsung thinks I should spend another $20 on a new piece of plastic rather than just dump its contents in the trash. Of course, since inhaling a bunch of toner is toxic, dumping it poses challenges.

Depending on my printer’s mood, after a certain length of printing time, I will start to smell overheated plastic. Soon thereafter, the job will halt until the beast cools off. I don’t start long jobs and then leave the house; I stay close enough to smell any real smoke and hear the alarms.

After printing, it will protest for an hour with periodic power draws. Not strong enough to pop the battery backup again, but strong enough to cause a click and the lights to dim a tad.

The toner cartridges, size and shape of half-pop-cans, go in like torpedoes in a submarine’s tubes. When the light starts flashing to tell me that a cartridge is low, I take it out and perform a sort of rocking motion to distribute the remaining toner as evenly as possible. When the light goes solid red to tell me that the printer has had enough, and insists that I replace the empty cartridge, I rock it again while cursing it. About half the time, that gets me another fifty pages.

I’ll take ’em. They are value profit.

I don’t mind spending, but holy hell, waste is my enemy and I will war against it to the knife.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

Eat your serial: The Unusual Second Life of Thomas Weaver, Bowl 4, by Shawn Inmon

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No, you haven’t missed anything. I haven’t been announcing these installments, though I ought to have done so all along. This is the fourth of what will eventually be six installments, and I was substantive editor.

Shawn at times brings up story ideas just to troll me. I deserve this, because he has a thick skin about some of my margin comments. When he first brought up the idea of a middle-aged failure who commits suicide and wakes up back in his teenage body before life went south, I showed exaggerated patience in acquainting him with all the issues time travel brings into storytelling. That failed to discourage him, and he wound up writing a very good story anyway.

Now we’re on Bowl 4 of the serial, and what I like is that Shawn’s not afraid to wreck stuff. (Not often, anyway. Whenever he gets too attached to his characters, I heckle him about it, and we get some action.) He has thought through the metaphysics of his story environment, and in my view, has made good decisions and lived by them rather than taking the easy way out. When authors answer “why is it this way in your book?” with “because I say it is,” that’s usually code for “because thinking it through was work, and would have been icky, and I just wanted to write this, so I did, go to hell.” They never get by with giving me that answer, but too many are willing to give it to their customers. That’s what readers are, the customers, and authors need to remember that.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we can’t rock the readers’ world. Fairly typical conversation:

Shawn: “And then I’m going to kill off Person A, ruin Person B’s life, and leave them wondering where that leaves Person C.”

Me: “Your readers love Person C, and will think you’re a sick man for doing that to him.”

Shawn: “Yep! This is going to be great!”

The serialized novel, impractical in the pre-e-reader days, is getting more traction. As a form, it offers advantages:

  • The author has to hook people into the story early, or they won’t stay with him/her.
  • The pricing and revenue are spread out.
  • The author may later choose to combine the bowls into a full-length novel, which means a chance to correct anything s/he doesn’t like in hindsight.
  • It offers people quick reads, a thing I can appreciate as I wade halfway through a history of Argentina that’s got to be six hundred pages, half of them purely about economic data with a focus on cattle products.

In the case of this particular bowl, I had to help Shawn break his logjam. He no more believes in writer’s block than I do, but there are times when he finds his motivation and creativity at an ebb. When that happens, he does what he should do. He sends a shoutout to his hardworking and dedicated editor, explains his plight, and requests help. In this case, I took a look at the story so far and told him: “You are bored with your characters. Memorable characters are a strength of yours, and it’s time for you to inject a brand new one.” That’s a good method for most fiction authors when they find the writing in a bogdown phase: maybe it’s time to create a new character to play with. Shawn went to town, came up with someone fun and entertaining, and that gave him the creativity laxative he needed. (He will get me for that.)

This serial has exceeded my expectations, and I think readers are enjoying it as much as I enjoy working on it.

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