Tag Archives: editing services

Editing/writing life

Literary collaboration: adversarial?

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I have a friend who’s a real smart fellow.  Can’t see his blind spots, but is fundamentally a good man and a capable writer.  Some years back he was thinking of publishing a book about this or that. I talked to him about it a bit. He was eager to work with an editor so that he could fight with the editor. Evidently my friend was not so excited about printing his book, but about engaging in debate with his editor. He was eager to be toe to toe, at drawn blades, battling for every word.

Pardon me.  What the hell?

I thought about that recently as I entered into a proofreading project with a first-time author. His work was unpolished but honest and passionate.  Early on, he expressed a strong ability to withstand harsh criticism. Bring it on, he basically said. Good attitude. (It’ll stand him in good stead when the Amazon reviews arrive, and people totally miss his point, saying mostly stupid things, and he has to refrain from answering them at all, much less with “You vacuous cretin…”.)

That writer lacked much ego, and had a desire to improve. Respect for that. But having not really worked with a lot of editors, evidently, a part of him assumed that the critique process would be serrated and twisting the blade. At least that’s what I made of his statement.

The author had a surprise coming. Why would I do that? Only very weak literary professionals hurt your feelings for fun, and thus are questionably even professionals. I never had a real editor treat me that way. I had them send my stuff back for rewrites, ask for clarification, bluntly tell me what I needed to fix. I never had a single one set out to hurt my feelings. Pros don’t have a need to stomp on your soul. They’ll just tell you, this must be fixed. That’s it. If asked, they’ll explain why. They know their trade well enough that there isn’t going to be a bunch of debate.

His surprise: literary collaboration wasn’t adversarial. It was fun. Everyone wants the end product to be its best; if not, they don’t belong on the job. Everyone wins when the end result is something great. Trust builds through working together. You can have a good time while writing a good book. You can banter, kid, laugh, jest. That’s not unprofessional. That is simply making work fun. Writers should like to write. Editors should enjoy editing. Proofreaders should adore catching typos. The relationship should be congenial and collegial. A relaxed attitude is simply the literary equivalent of the special shine on weapons that are obviously in regular use by people who get paid to pull their triggers. If you’re really capable, you can do it without sweat beads popping out on your forehead. You can take time to smell the red ink.

If anyone’s pissed off, You’re (plural) Doing It Wrong.

Homeownership

Firing DefectiveTV

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That, of course, is my name for DirecTV. We can choose between DoucheNetwork (DishNetwork), Cheater (Charter) and DefectiveTV.

We are not big TV watchers, which makes sense because much of what’s on there doesn’t interest us. The ‘History’ Channel is torn between antique dealers and paranormal research. The regular networks are a big faaaaaaaaaaa, except for my trashy reality shows. A&E is bearable. ESPN thinks poker is a sport. Half of what’s on is infomercials, especially late at night.

Here’s what I hate. At any given time, some channel(s) that we paid for and expected to receive are not available. If one navigates to them, one gets a DefectiveTV-slanted pitch as to why. Basically:  “The mean people of this channel want to raise your price to the stratosphere, but we, your defenders at DirecTV, stand firm to protect your lower prices! Write to them and tell them to cave in to us and stop being unreasonable!”

Yeah. I don’t think that’s credible. My prices for DefectiveTV keep going up. When they are bickering over prices, I never get any refund for the content I didn’t receive. The end result, therefore, is that DefectiveTV engages in a lot of pissing matches, but they don’t keep my prices down, and at any given time I’m not getting some of what I pay them for. I think it much more likely that DefectiveTV demands a much bigger piece of the pie, and the content provider balks, and DefectiveTV says, ‘fine. We’ll stop carrying you. Let’s see how your advertisers like that.’ I think DefectiveTV is playing the Wal-Part in this production, and I do not like it. Another good example is the brand new Pac-12 networks. Out here, failure to carry these is not allowable. What is DefectiveTV doing? Bickering with them, of course. What else do they know how to do? Maybe we’ll get them, maybe not. Maybe by the time that’s resolved, I won’t give a damn. Even their satellite reception is crappy, often cutting out just when we want to watch something.

Suppose you are dealing with a child. Daily, the child has a tale of woe. Every day, something goes wrong. Child’s explanation: this person did this, that person caused that, someone dropped this, she is a big meany, he is a jerk. At some point, if the child does not say “I caused this. I messed up. This is my fault,” we tend to think that the common factor in all problems is this child, and s/he is not taking responsibility. DefectiveTV is starting to look like the child.

I think I’m ready to spend my money with adults. I’m sick of second grade recess messing up the few programs and networks I care to watch.

DoucheNetwork isn’t a viable option. I hate going back to regular cable, but so far as I’m aware, Cheater doesn’t spend all this time fighting over content. It’s time to do some research.

Here’s an analogy. I have a grocery store. You shop there. You get used to the products I carry, but now and then there’s some item you cannot find at all. One week, no coffee of any kind; I’m putting the squeeze on my wholesaler. The coffee section is covered over with a large screed pleading my case as to why I am defending your low prices by failing to sell you coffee. Next week, no dairy; I’m bickering with the cow-milkers. Big poster explaining why this is actually to your advantage that you can’t buy sour cream and yogurt. The week after, it’s salsa: none on our shelves, just a large placard blaming the salsa manufacturer for trying to make you pay too much.

But wait: there’s more. You sigh and buy your groceries, minus whatever I was having a bitchfight about. You pay your bill in full. The cashier reaches into your grocery bags and randomly yanks out some of your merchandise, returned to my store’s inventory. No refund. Sorry. This is our policy. You pay for things that you sometimes don’t get. You complain. My employees explain that we do not guarantee that you will get anything at all for your money, therefore we have the right to take back any or all of what you paid for. You call this larceny. My store doesn’t care.

How do you like my business practices?

If you didn’t shower me in vile language, condemning my ancestors as the obvious products of canines fornicating with swine and camels, you either have no passion or weren’t paying attention, or are a nun who doesn’t use that sort of language. One might argue that you should come back to my store and rob me at gunpoint. After all, I robbed you. I took your money and stole back your merchandise. You’d just be getting your money back.

So that’s where we are at with DefectiveTV. We are sick of being robbed. We tire of explanations transparent in a seven-year-old troublemaker. We think the Robin Hood spin is a crock of crap. When we see our DefectiveTV bill go down, when we see a monthly rebate for the content we are denied, we might believe the spin. Until then, it just looks like DefectiveTV waterboarding its content providers for maximum profit, happily hosing its paying customers.

Everyone hates cable companies, but I am hard pressed to divine how they could be more scrofulous than this. I think it’s about time to vote with our wallets.

Editing/writing life

My proofreading jackboots

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Current gig, a small but enjoyable one: proofreading again. (I can talk at length about the book once it’s published, but until it is, it’s my basic obligation to keep any comments very general.) I like proofreading, as it appeals to my closet fascist.

This book is a true-life love story, one to which I relate on numerous levels. It begins in small-town Washington, in a time when I was also in school in small-town Washington. It passed through UW, enabling me to offer obsessive nitpicks on places, distances and such. The author and I had some similar youth pastimes, such as Strat-o-Matic sports games. The connections often border on the eerie.

What is eerier: I’m seeing the very intimate details of the histories of people I will likely one day meet in person. It makes me feel a little creepy, which it should not. I’m hired and paid for this, and it is work. It’s not like I set out on my own to compile a dossier of two people’s lives I’ve never met; I just read the dossier provided by one of them, and provided feedback. Even so, I can’t escape feeling like I’ve somehow stalked them. I know much of them and their lives; they of me, in one case a modest amount–in the other, far less. It was above board, with full informed consent, even invitation. I still feel a bit as if I have been nosey. I shouldn’t; it’s unjust to myself. I do anyway.

It makes me marvel at the author’s  guts in publishing the story. I had never before considered that, despite all the autobiographies I’ve read. Be it Churchill, Malcolm X, or a relative unknown, they had the sand to put their lives’ details out there for public examination. I certainly haven’t done the same (and there is no way). This has brought me close and personal with the question. If I feel voyeuristic just working with the author to tape, mud, sand and paint the drywall, how must he feel knowing that my reading is one of the first few of many? I may just be such an intensely private person that this rocks my world more than it would other people. (So naturally, what do I do about that? Why, blog it to share with the world! That’s like worrying about Treasury defaults, thus fleeing to a financial safe haven–Treasuries! D’oh!)

The project has gone beyond simple proofreading, which is fine by me. Someone comes to you and says, “I want to work with you because I think that will make this the best possible book.” Are you going to cruise idly by something you know is incongruent with that goal? I don’t see how anyone can. I can’t. It’s one thing if I’m ordered to: “I’m happy with every word. Just catch the spelling and punctuation, doubled words, missing words, and so on. Otherwise shut up.” I’d comply. However, only a very foolish first-time author would give that direction, and my client is not a fool. As a result, I’ll walk away from the finished job feeling that it’s better for my input, and that’s my real payoff.

One perception my client had, I think, is that I’d spend a lot of time skewering him. I think most people who have never worked with editors or proofreaders have the vision of us as people you argue with, people with whom you’d better have an alligator skin because they’ll cut your work to doll rags, people who wield their eloquence like a hot poker against your psyche. Maybe in some cases that’s how it goes down. I never had an editor treat me that way, not a single time. I had them send back things I didn’t feel they should; I had them ask me to rewrite things; I had them ask me dumb questions; I had them screw up their own recordkeeping and then send me snippy messages asking if I was ever going to turn in any work, when I’d been patiently awaiting assignment. I never had one critique me in a way that was meant to discourage me.  I never even got a rejection letter that was meant to harm. I had some tell me they didn’t like my material, but I’m still waiting for the first literary professional to make a deliberate effort to be a jerk. Fact was, I came to like most of my editors. Literary collaboration–described here as any process where two or more people are actively contributing input to a publishable work–should be as fun as you can make it.

If not, I think someone’s doing it wrong.

Investing

GESA Credit Union shows us the Stipper

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If you get the reference, then you at least once played BaFa-BaFa. The latter is a cultural awareness game that divides a group of trainees (in my case, dorm resident advisors) into two cultures. Both are briefed on their cultural norms, which they are expected to roleplay. In one culture, anyone who breaches the accepted social rules is shown a card called the Stipper, meant to convey disrespect. (In our game, the women naturally resented the sexism of that culture, and began to show all us males the Stipper.) If you think this sounds stupid, consider this: of those who played the game that day, one is very highly placed at Starbucks today. Another is a successful film producer, another a pediatrician, another a captain of police, and so on.

As thrifty people, Deb and I keep savings reserves in multiple banks. We had a low five-figure sum at GESA Credit Union for some six or seven years, a relationship that ended this morning. Like most savings accounts, it had low activity–simply the periodic pittances of interest. That was fine; its purpose was to act as a reserve, not earn money. A few days ago, we received a mailed notice containing this text:

Dear Member,

Our records indicate that there has been no activity in the above referenced account for a period of 24 months or more. Gesa Credit Union’s policy states that an account that has been inactive for a period of 24 months or more is considered dormant and subject to a dormant account fee of $5.00 per month for notification of the status of the account and for continued maintenance of the account at Gesa. Accordingly, if your account is still dormant on 08/31/12, we will begin to impose the $5.00 per month dormant account fee as required by our policy.

This fee will continue until you either initiate a transaction to re-activate the account, or until the account reaches a zero balance and is closed.

Sincerely,

Deposit Operations Department

Well, we’d hate to burden such a fine institution with our inactive money if they don’t like it. Business is business and we understand that; they have to do what they have to do for the firm. If they aren’t satisfied with having our money laying around, for them to lend out so people can buy Hondas and pay them interest, the last thing we’d ever want is for them to suffer. So, after closing the account, I gave the assistant branch manager a letter to forward to her CEO:

Ms. Christina Lethlean
President and CEO
GESA Credit Union

Re: mailed notice re account #4xxxxx

Dear Ms. Lethlean:

We have for some years maintained slightly over $10,000 in a money market account, plus just over $460 in a savings account, at GESA. This holding was a cash reserve, earning us minimal interest (but certainly funding some lending by GESA). We had no intention to touch it except in an emergency.

This week, we received a frigid notice in the mail from your Deposit Operations Department. It advised us that our account was dormant under GESA’s policy, having had no transactions for twenty-four months. If we did not initiate a transaction by 8/31/2012, the account would be charged a $5/month dormancy fee. To comply with GESA’s policy, we have withdrawn both balances and closed both accounts.

This transaction will avoid the $5 dormancy fee for August, and in fact for the next twenty-four months. Our household’s policy states: never reward a vendor for a policy or action so comically ridiculous that it has us laughing too hard to get suitably angry.

Thank you for your institution’s service to us over the years. We wish the best of success to you and GESA in the future.

Sincerely,

J. K. & D.M. Kelley

The assistant branch manager’s explanation was that this was not GESA’s fault, but the state’s. You see, if accounts go ‘dormant’ for a certain period, the credit union is required to package up the money and send it to the state treasury. I didn’t bother answering her with the obvious: if that is so, the logical action is to send a notice advising of this and blaming it all on the state. The illogical action is to threaten a $10K depositor with a $5 monthly fee if s/he doesn’t come in and perform a transaction. She warned me that it would be this way at any institution. I didn’t bother arguing with her about that, either, because it really doesn’t matter. If it is, we’ll see how it’s handled when the time comes, and if it’s handled stupidly, we’ll leave. If it’s handled intelligently, we’ll stay, as we would have stayed had this situation been handled with the intellect of at least a fern.

Of course, I neglected to mention to anyone that it was going onto the blog.

I too have a Stipper.

==Ps., 17 August 2012==

Credit where credit is due. Ms. Lethlean picked up the phone and gave me a call herself. She told me that this sort of ‘culture’ had been a problem at GESA in the past, and that she had worked to change it, and was disappointed to find that it still had pockets of resistance. I didn’t inquire about specifics, but my own guess is that the culture was one of ‘stupid policy.’ From speaking with her, I believe she was more than mildly annoyed at whomever authored that letter, and that someone had a bad day over it. It turns out that there doesn’t even need to be a transaction, just some sign of motion, respiration or at least a pulse from the consumer. I didn’t take our money back to GESA, but we had a cordial conversation and I’m satisfied that someone had her bell rung over this, so I won’t rule them out in the future.

Married life

Waxing my ears

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No, I don’t mean the stuff that gathers inside them. I’m talking about the plague and annoyance of male middle age: not that your hair falls out your head, but that it takes root in your ears thereafter.

You can’t really shave the inside of your ear.  You can use a clipper, but it’s annoying and imprecise.  I can’t stand this stuff, and after watching a few shows where people had large amounts of hair ripped from their bodies, I thought: why couldn’t I wax my ears?

I fiddled around with the idea quite a while before I took the plunge. At the grocery store:

“Dear, where is the wax stuff women use to take hair off?”

“Over here somewhere,” puttering past the toothpaste.

“But you’re a woman and this is a woman thing.  How can you not know where it is?”

“I don’t use the stuff, you goober!” In a few minutes, we found some Nair face wax strips.  Cost about $6.

I waited until everyone else was gone before I decided it was time to give this a whirl. I didn’t want any help, or if it came to that, any witnesses; I was going to do this my way, without any wisdom. Went into the bathroom with the Nair stuff, opened it up. It said that I was supposed to use it on shorter hair, and that when I pulled the strip off, to rip against the direction hair was growing. What direction is hair growing in your ear, for gods’ sake? I read the instructions, deciding which ones to heed (rub it first to soften the wax with warmth; wash the ear first) and which to ignore (most). Soon it was wax or die time. The effort at washing my ears was a moderate success given that it’s not that easy outside the shower.

The strips came in pairs, which one pulled apart: great, one per ear. (I think the ones I chose were the ones intended for women’s mustaches, not their chin hairs.) Of course, the transition from inside the ear cup to the outside is anything but a flat surface, so I somewhat pinched the strip in there. How long do I leave this on? Evidently not long at all once it’s slicked down. Okay:  rippppppppppppp! That hurt, leaving my ear bleeding a little. The strip left a gummy residue all over my ear, and didn’t get all the hair (especially the long tresses). By the way, this is not wax. Wax is what drips down a candle, or you use to shine your car. This was stickum, about like duck tape. In fact, I think duck tape might do a better job.

Fine, I decided, let’s scissor off the flowing locks and see if a second pass will work. Disregarding the admonition never to do this to the same skin within 24 hours, press, ripppppppppp. It got more of the hair this time, though there were some whiskers left. Now time to apply the lessons to the other ear. Trim dainty curls, press on strip…rippppppppppppp! You know, ears are pretty sensitive. I saw no need to make a second pass, since the second ear went rather better. Only then did I note that you could use a given strip several times, so for fun, I put it on the moderately furred back of my left hand.  Rippppp. Slick as a whistle.

My ears felt traumatized, but not horribly so, so I passed on the ‘soothing wipes.’ That may have been a bad decision, especially if they would have taken off the excess glop. I certainly wasn’t going to GooGone my ears. I guess they worked, imperfectly but maybe as well as one could hope for given the terrain.

Since I was using a female-specific product, I waited all evening for Deb to notice the Tremendous Change and give me Lavish Compliments. Nothing! Crushed that she failed to notice. I finally showed her, including the bloody part. Her reaction:  “Oh my god! You are such a fucking dork!”

Always there for me.

Investing

Selling at Alibris: why it’s pointless

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One suspects that most people who flop selling at Alibris didn’t do their homework, or had unrealistic expectations. I can give you a better reason why.

The whole thing is geared to make money only for them.  You are far, far better off just taking the books to your used bookstore for credit, or to your library, or just recycling them.  Seriously.  Unless they are rare, that is.

Alibris has two tiers of sellers.  For the one, you pay $20 to get started, so you are already in the hole.  For the other, you pay a monthly fee, so you are already in the hole on a monthly basis.  Let’s walk through selling a typical hardback book in Fine condition.

Your shipping costs are:  $2.80 for media mail, $1.50 for the bubble mailer, net $4.30.  You will get paid $4.00 for shipping.  So far you are down ($0.30).  Okay, but you should take that into account with your pricing, right? Go ahead. You will also pay Alibris $2.25 (cleverly split up in the description of their pricing scheme so you won’t add the $1.00 and $1.25 together) for the privilege, plus $0.50 as a commission, net loss there ($2.75).  So your total costs are ($3.05). This accounts for every factor here except the price tag you put on the book.

There are 100 of the same book in Good condition listed for $1.00, and some in Very Good and Fine.  If you sell for that you will lose ($2.05).  Suppose it’s in Fine condition and you say, well, I have to get $3.05 for it.  If it sells for that, you break even, but Alibris gets its $2.75. You can’t win.  Price it higher than that, and you wasted your time listing it–no one’s going to pay more for it.  Price it lower and you may well sell it, losing money.  The one constant with every such transaction is that Alibris makes money and you can not.

Notice we didn’t even discuss the actual cost of the book.  It is, you know, an item of merchandise that once had a cost? Clearly, you will never get back a fraction of that; this is accepted.  However, the above model considers the book to have zero cost value. Assign it some form of basic cost of goods sold, even a pittance of 10% of original price, and you’re even further in the toilet.

Okay, but some books are surely worth more? Yes.  A few.  A very few.  For that same reason, they won’t sell very often.  Plus, the higher the price, the pickier the buyer, for which I don’t blame them.  There is a good chance of a return, which puts you in the hole, or a nasty comment that damages your seller rating.  You could miss some flaw on the book when describing it, though you tried your best. If the book has that much value, why not put it on eBay and really see how much you can get for it?

Their seller service is friendly and responsive enough. Well they should be, considering that you’re handing them pure profit and doing all the work. If you come over to my house and perform work at a net cost to you, from which only I profit, I promise you, I’ll treat you very courteously.

The other two major competitors are Amazon and Abebooks. Why not them? Not only is there less money to be made at Amazon, they themselves will directly undercut you. They’ll give people free shipping and charge them $3.99.  You will only get $3.99 shipping reimbursement plus a minimum price of $0.01 for the book. You can’t win. Abebooks has a monthly fee, I think $20, which it would take a lot of books sold to cover.

The model is useless. You can’t make any money. You donate your labor to a for-profit entity.

I’m just going to start taking them to Adventures Underground for store credit, a box at a time. I’ve shut down my operation at Alibris.  Two hundred thirty books, all described with careful honesty and listed with great pains taken to assure a representative image and the right edition, probably forty hours of effort, all for nothing but profit for Alibris.

Live and learn.

Social comment, Sports

The ‘Water Follies’

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This weekend is what we in Kennewick call ‘Boat Race Weekend.’  It’s official name is ‘Water Follies.’  What it is, okay, is an air show and hydroplane races on the Columbia.  It’s the big annual event here, and happens in Columbia Park, which is one of the few things that was done right from the city’s earliest development. Our entire river shore, all 5-6 miles of it, is a park.  Some is nearly undeveloped, despite the best efforts of corporations to turn it into a profit center, and the best efforts of certain Distinguished Statespersons to permit this.  However, Boat Races isn’t really much happening anywhere else in the Tri-Cities, except on the opposite (Pasco) river shore. It’s fairly easy for most of us to avoid, long as we don’t have to go over the blue bridge at the wrong time.

“So what, J.K.? In what universe do we care?”

Credit to thefreedictionary.com:

fol·ly  (fl)

n. pl. fol·lies

1. A lack of good sense, understanding, or foresight.

2.

a. An act or instance of foolishness: regretted the follies of his youth.
b. A costly undertaking having an absurd or ruinous outcome.
3. follies (used with a sing. or pl. verb) An elaborate theatrical revue consisting of music, dance, and skits.

4. Obsolete

a. Perilously or criminally foolish action.
b. Evil; wickedness.
c. Lewdness; lasciviousness.

Well, we may certainly assume there will be a lack of good sense exercised. Why this should be a civic virtue eludes me. Then I look at the way the city runs, and maybe it’s just a frank moment of civic intellectual honesty. All right, but why celebrate foolishness? Why call these ‘follies?’ Aren’t we supposed to put our foolishness in the closet with Uncle Fred, not out on the lawn with the Travelocity gnomes for all creatures great and small to see?

I suppose it is a very costly undertaking, and does have ruinous outcomes. It somewhat ruins my weekend, for example, if I had hopes of going to the park.  Boats blow over, people get drunk and sunburned, and all this for the sake of a sport that has to rig itself; that sounds ruinous. As I understand it, if you win too often, the sport’s organizers nerf your boat so it doesn’t get boring. (Even though this is limiting, it’s technically called ‘unlimited’ hydroplane racing. Oh, okay.) Imagine requiring Michael Phelps to swim with ankle weights on. Essentially, though, hydro racing is Nascar on the water, in nearly every sense but the duration of action. Nascar takes a lot longer.

Okay, very well, there’s another meaning: a vaudeville show or its modern incarnation. Saturday Night Live is mostly ‘follies.’ Tony Orlando and Dawn also was. (And you had blocked them from your memory until this moment, hadn’t you?) That one doesn’t apply at all.

There will be perilous and criminally foolish action, such as young people drinking too much, and boats blowing over. Someone could break his neck, drown, etc. Evil and wickedness? Seems pushing it to me. There’ll be a few boat race pregnancies, and probably someone will end up in the ER for being drunk, but neither of those are evil or wicked, just folly. Lewdness and lascivious used to be the order of the day, where (I am told) “What happened at Boat Races, stayed at Boat Races.” Yeah.  This from most of the same people who call east Kennewick and east Pasco ‘bad areas.’ I do not really believe them. I think they remember it through a lens that imagines the event more bacchanalian than it really was. Populations are very capable of a collective dementia in which they distort the past perception.

In the end, though, the title ‘Follies’ is unintentionally candid. A bunch of people will get together and some of them will show great folly. They will watch a sport that meets a couple definitions of folly, though not the ones the event planners intended. About the only thing not a folly is the air show, which is cool.

Best of all, I can watch that from my deck, go nowhere near Columbia Park, and stay out of the way of folly. But if you like that stuff, hey, party on.
Adventures

I watch lightning

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I watch lightning.

For all of my life, few natural phenomena give me such a thrill as lightning and thunder. Its fundamental randomness renders it superior to any fireworks display, that and each bolt’s brevity; each gives you half a second or so to absorb, as you begin to count down the distance. After that, the bolt is gone, as certainly as a wave is gone once it surges ashore. It is a thing, created in an instant and lost without trace when the sound rumbles away.

I sit or stand, choose a likely area of sky, and stare.  Sometimes it comes with a mild or distant flash. Other times it comes bright and nearby, a sudden white crack spreading and forking across the heavens, as if they were giving way at a line of fracture. The imminent thunder confirms the sensation, at times rumbling, at times booming. All our works, all our technologies and engineering, and still I must disconnect my computer from the wall unless I want to risk my primary writing tool.

I watch lightning, and it feels as though an angry divinity were pitching a colossal, god-sized temper fit. I can stand out in the midst of it without fear, without feeling chill from the acute soaking rain and its bald-spot-seeking drops. The last thing I desire is to take cover; not only are statistics on my side, if one has to go, I can think of few more sublime ways to pass on. If I cannot feel the rain and humidity of the storm, I did not truly experience it.

We get not so much lightning here in eastern Washington, but back in Kansas it means business. I recall a visit to my grandparents when the storm was loud and bright enough to jolt me out of bed at 2 AM, lightning and thunder alike both constant. It occurred to me that I could easily read a book to this display without turning on a lamp. For two hours I did just that, one of the redolent old tomes from my grandfather’s western-inspired library.

I find that with any climatic situation of extremes, there are two reactions: huddle against it, or soak it in.  Sip it gingerly as if forced, or tilt your chin toward the skies and pound the whole thing, yelling for more? Huddle and shiver against the cold, or breathe deeply and feel the ice? Shake one’s fist at the flaming star, or bask in it and battle on? Hiss curses at the downpour, or splash through it? They relate to our ways of living life, and in rather too many aspects of life I sip gingerly. In all those aspects, I take more harm and discomfort from my gingerness than from what I forced down my throat. In those aspects where I guzzle the whole quart and give a cheer, I do better. I emerge from them somewhat more bruised, and gods know what I did to my system, but exhilarated and suffused with adventure. We might liken life to trying a series of drugs. Do you split the tablets, just try a bit, or do you just swallow the stuff and hang on?

The stream of thought reminds me of the words of an ancient woman, in her nineties, asked what she would do different were she to take the walk of life again. One line:  “I would have more real worries, but less imaginary ones.”

Well said, ma’am.  Well said indeed.

Book reviews

Current read: Kosher Chinese

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Kosher Chinese, by Michael Levy, tells the story of his two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Guiyang, PRC.  Guiyang is in the southern Chinese interior–east of Tibet, northeast of Burma, north of Vietnam.  Even though it’s a city of four million (larger than Seattle), it says a lot about China’s population that I’d never heard of Guiyang before now.  Guiyang has about the same population as New Zealand, and Levy spent two years teaching English in its schools from 2005-2007. I am sort of reviewing Levy’s book, and sort of adding my own observations as influenced by and derived partly from it, so I admit this isn’t a strictly disciplined book review. That’s why it’s free.

You’d figure that a semi-observing American Jew might have an interesting take on a country that doesn’t have many Jews, and as Levy makes clear, understands Judaism mainly through stereotypes.  In fact, the statements Levy reports hearing about Jews jumped out at me early on. If they came out an American mouth, we’d call them anti-Semitic. Racism evidently doesn’t carry the same fundamental stigma in China, and most of the stereotypes recited to Levy about his culture weren’t meant to offend, but put admiringly (which would not excuse them here).

Very good travel/adventure writing, as I see it, tells the story and lets the reader discover the comedy. Levy does a fine job of this. A small example:  some Chinese studying English, lacking a bit of context, are prone to choose English names for themselves that aren’t even actual names. When two female students introduced themselves to Levy as Shitty and Pussy, we got an amusing example. Must have been interesting for him to try and call on them in class with a straight face.  He was able to write about it with a straight face, and I’m not sure I’d have had as much discipline.

The rise of PRC economic muscle hasn’t reached a lot of the population, including areas like Guiyang.  When Maoist semi-socialism became ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics,’ what that meant was ‘all the corruption, none of the safety net.’  Since corruption happens in all types of government, we may interpret ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ as ‘capitalism.’ Authoritarian one-party capitalism, of course, but capitalism. Levy gives us a good look at how it’s working, with one’s connections and influence completely trumping merit or need.  If you’re connected and influential, you get taken care of, and you might be able to get rich.  If not, good luck.  I wonder if or when the Chinese will realize how deeply American their system has become; quite ironic when their education presents the U.S. to them as the ultimate exploitative capitalist plutocracy. (I take exception to ‘ultimate.’ )

The whole book was entertaining. If I had to pick the most informative and revealing aspect, it would be the central reason for Levy’s time in Guiyang:  education. The Chinese students Levy taught and spoke with affected (outwardly, at least) to believe everything they read in a textbook. The notion of critical thinking, to doubt or question textbooks or teachers, was more alien to them than Passover. We hear about this in the West, but it’s educational to have some firsthand description. It’s tempting to think that China’s demonstrated proclivity for copying, counterfeiting and imitating (rather than inventing, which was once a signature national quality) has a connection to this concept of education as indoctrination. I’d be wary of asserting it without broader reading, but it’s certainly got me thinking.

I think this book would get most people thinking.  Well worth the read.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

On Stephen King

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Reading on Salon today, I came across Stephen King: You can be popular and good. Author Erik Nelson is much perturbed by another article by a chap named Dwight Allen, which Nelson considers…well, let’s let him say it:

“Allen’s article isn’t just a bile-drenched, meandering hatchet job, it is a hatchet job with a rusty, dull blade, devoid of insight into anything other than the insecurities of its writer.”

Careful when you drop the gloves. The disagreeing side also has guys who don’t hesitate to do so. I had to learn that myself, writing reviews at Amazon. Nelson is good on his skates, has a good jersey grab and throws hard. Plenty of accepted adventure classics were not great successes in their time, and did not grab the literati of the day. It is later generations who start ‘rediscovering’ your literary merit after you are gone, in some cases. I like that Nelson got this hacked off; he writes like he means it. It’s a fun read if you like this sort of thing.

This voracious reader is not enamored of King’s books. We have a good percentage of the full set (all but one volume now for sale on Alibris) and I have only been able to finish one Stephen King book in my life. That does not make him a lousy writer, merely means his genre and style do not attract me. It’s possible to write bestsellers and truly suck as a storyteller (hello there, Dale Brown and Fatal Terrain). We can bring up all the old stuff about how you do not make money writing to please literati, but rather, by writing to please Visigoths who read trash. We can bring up the free-market paradigm, which says that financial success by virtue of crazy sales volume speaks for itself. We could argue about that all year, none of us walking away convinced and none of us changing our habits. We also won’t make one dent in King’s pocketbook. He could buy us and sell us into slavery if he were the type. If I were him, I doubt I’d care too much what the LA Review of Books thought. I might even send Allen a $500 check with the memo line “to help you make rent next month; thanks for the pub.”

While I may not fancy King’s fiction, he wrote what I consider the most worthwhile book on the craft of writing that I’ve had the good fortune to read. I would be many kinds of a dolt if I dared ignore whatever wisdom King had to offer about this pursuit. You may call the title On Writing frank and descriptive, or you can call it generic and uninspiring. Your judgment won’t change the value of the content, which is a Polar Bear Plunge into the way King creates a novel. Deb bought it for me one Christmas. I smiled politely, thanked her, pretended enthusiasm, groaned inwardly, then started reading. The enthusiasm ceased to be pretend. So many novice writers’ Frequent Mistake Points, all disposed of with such candor.

If you are trying to break into fiction writing, and you ask me for guidance, that book is my first recommendation. Most of the time, when people ask me about writing, they don’t really want advice. They want approval for their process. If they don’t get it, they get miffed: “Well, that’s my creative process.” Wonderful–best of luck and success! But please don’t get all chapped because I didn’t bless your creative process, or even told you I thought you were doing it wrong. Just disregard me and do it however you want to. I neither gain nor lose from what you do with the guidance you asked for, but you did ask for it. Remember?

When you no longer try to get everyone to read your stuff even if they show dubious interest, and you no longer argue with authors whom you ask for advice–in short, when you stop needing a steady flow of validation in order to continue–you level up as a writer.