James Bernard Frost, Author | World Leader Pretend | Portland Writing Scene | Fiction Gamers | Angst

Writers' Dojo Launch Party: A Herb Cain-Like Post-Party Reflection

1) To the woman who said to me, "oh, you're the guy with the blog," that cracked me up. Blogs are funny things, you think no one reads them, and then you get into a room full of people and find out that people not only know you, but they also know about your dog's bowel movement problems...

2) Like 3/4ths of the population (yes, I made up that stat) I have a tremendous fear of public speaking, and so what I did, before I got up on the "altar" to speak to the hundred or so gathered at the Writers' Dojo reading, was to consume a very large pour of red wine. This led me to tell the crowd gathered that every single one of them should thank Jeff Selin for the amazing thing he did for Portland by opening the Writers' Dojo. I said this very eloquently and smoothly, without the nervous stammering that usually accompanies anything I say without notes. I was proud of myself for having done this--it was only a little later when someone pointed out how swamped Jeff was with thank-yous, that I realized I'd gone slightly over-the-top. Ah, liquid encouragement...

3) I realize this wasn't some sort of competition, but Doug Lain noted that the women writers kicked the male writers asses on the stage, and he was admittedly right. Both Allison Clement and Chelsea Cain wowed the inebriated crowd with some seriously funny shorts. That was fun. Oh and nice red velvet shoes, Chelsea.

4) Speaking of shoes, oh never mind, let's not get into that again...

5) OK, I have a beef with the people bitching about the $120/month cost of the Dojo. This is a far better deal than ActivSpace or, god, CubeSpace, and you're surrounded by writers, rather than, say, walls. Yes, a lot of what the Dojo has to offer you can find at a coffee shop, but if you're not already a part of the Portland writing scene, the Dojo gives you an entry into it. Plus, you don't have to listen to the real estate agent sitting next to you talking up the latest 400K-for-a-studio "green" ass-ugly condo development. Jeff Selin took a huge risk by opening the Dojo, and I admire both him and the folks who are taking a chance on it by joining. Plus, I love the way he's actively engaged the local writing community. I think every single Portlander should go over to the Dojo and shake his hand…

6) Yep that's me on Melissa Lion's Metroblogging page. Can you say, dork!

7) Has anyone seen Diana Jordan's shoes? I think they're missing.

Labels: Portlandia

Reading at Writers' Dojo Launch Party

I'll be reading alongside Kim Stafford, Alison Clement, Tom Spanbauer, and Chelsea Cain at the Writers' Dojo Launch Party on January 12th. The event is open to the public, with free food and booze. Doors at 7, Readings at 8, and Partying until the wee hours. I don't know how late I'll stay, being a family man and all, but I imagine I'll be there long enough to say hello to anyone who wants to say hello...

Labels: Portlandia, World Leader Pretend

Reading at the Portland Downtown Library 12/15 @ 12:30 P.M.

In a rare appearance, I'll be reading at the downtown library around lunchtime on Saturday the 15th. Take a break from your holiday shopping and come see me. I'll be the guy reading to an empty auditorium with a box full of Voodoo donuts by his side. Take a donut and bolt--I really don't care. Whatever's leftover is going to the homeless teenagers out front anyway.

(That is, if the staff at the PPL doesn't confiscate the donuts on the way in. I imagine I'm breaking all kinds of eating in the library rules...)

For the hell of it, I'll be reading brand new material. Raw, first draft stuff. I'm feeling the urge to go off, Howl-style. It won't make any fucking sense but it will sound good. I swear.

Labels: World Leader Pretend

Onesies

Baby Wit received a cease and desist order from the Gerber Corporation for the use of the word "onesie" on our website. We've gotten to a point in our business careers where receipt of a cease and desist order isn't instant cause for a freak out. These things fly around like hotcakes, American businesses having a seemingly endless team of lawyers sitting around with nothing to do but worry about who unknowingly slipped a trademarked term onto a web page.

(If big business stock weren't so overinflated, we wouldn't have time for this argument, because they'd be properly competing for a buck like the rest of us, and wouldn't have the money to hire a bunch of overpriced lawyers.)

The onesie, however, is an interesting case. Google indexes over 157,000 web pages that use the word onesie, the majority of which are commercial sites selling onesies not related to Gerber. I am sure that many of these companies, as they creep up the search rankings, are well on their way to receiving the same cease and desist letter we have. And they will, if they are small businesses like ours, pull the word onesie off their websites.

But there is a problem here. There is no good searchable equivalent of the word onesie. A quick look at keyword statistics reveals that when people are shopping for onesies, they type in the keyword onesies. None of the other synonyms match up--creepers, bodysuits, one pieces, snapsuits--none of them get nearly the traffic that the word "onesie" does.

Furthermore, these terms have their own inherent problems. One pieces, more often than not, relate to women's swimsuits, and so if you use this term on your site you have people visiting looking for swimsuits instead of baby onesies. (For a while, we were getting a ton of traffic on the search term "one piece sex." A quick glance at the stats revealed that these people were not, in fact, hunting for Baby Wit.) Creepers is largely a U.K. term. Bodysuits conjures surfing. You get the picture.

So the question becomes this: Should Gerber be allowed to control the Internet real estate on a powerful search term because they hold the trademark to that term? Gerber is essentially setting up a monopoly on a search term. They're saying that no one else is allowed to set up shop on Main St. (Onesie St.), forcing everyone else to sell in the ghetto (Get your One Piece Sex here!)

We get a lot of traffic on search terms like "funny onesies." These people are not looking for Gerber onesies--they're looking for us. Does Gerber have a right to take this business away from us? Can a company "own" a Google search term?

It'll be interesting to see if Google and Gerber eventually butt heads on this. Google's been selling their "Google onesie" in the Google store for a while now, even though it's printed on a American Apparel one piece. Wonder if they'll comply with the cease and desist...

Labels: baby clothes, Baby Wit, the politics of onesies

The Other Authors Went to Wordstock and All I Got Was this Stupid T Shirt

So I got shafted by the Wordstock Festival. Apparently, there were "too many local authors" already signed up--whatever that means.

But I'm not bitter. As a consolation prize, they've asked me to introduce a few local writers, including a couple of my faves in Monica Drake and Paul Neilan, and I'll do it with a smile on my face.

I hope they give me a t-shirt.

Because I'm going to give them plenty of stickers. *grins evilly*

Labels: Ad Busting, sticker cover

Baby Wit Loves Auditors

So last month we were audited by the Oregon Employment Department. We were, of course, terrified--mostly we were racking our brain for anything we might have done wrong. They assured us that it was a routine audit--that our number just came up--yet we were suspicious. How could we not be suspicious? Surely in our ineptitude we had done something egregiously wrong!

So they did our audit, and lo and behold, after they had finished crunching a bunch of numbers, they wrote us a check! We had paid them TOO MUCH MONEY. And furthermore, after cutting us a check, they made us feel all warm & fuzzy by telling us that we were one of the cleanest companies they had ever audited. Hooray for us!

Apparently, the payroll service we were using had Andrea and I paying unemployment insurance, even though we're self-employed and weren't legally obligated to pay it. This had been going on for three years, so we got three years worth of UI money back, a good chunk of change.

Now, the devil that hangs out over my right shoulder is saying, hey, clean equals stupid--what are all these dirty tricks that other businesses know about that we don't? Why are we sending all this money to Halliburton when it could be going back into our own pockets? But I'm trying to squish the devil and not look a gift horse in the mouth.

Labels: baby clothes, Baby Wit

The Great Baby Clothes Debate

As Chuck Palahniuk pointed out, every Portlander has three jobs, and I'm no exception. When the wife had our second child, I was thrown into the family business--making ironic baby clothes. Add this to author and parent, and there's my three.

Our baby clothes company, which sells rock baby clothes on black onesies amongst other things, has sparked more cultural debate then anything I've been involved in. On Monday, MSNBC ran an article about us that asked the question: should parents "let kids be kids," or should they dress "how their parents want them to."

The premise kind of cracked me up, because last time I checked, most babies can't really dress themselves. There is a huge difference between a 3 month old and a 2 year old, and while we carry stuff for older kids too, we've always been primarily a baby site.

But let's grant that we do sell some stuff for toddlers. I just don't see why letting kids be kids automatically means they want to dress like giant purple dinosaurs. The amount of marketing effort that goes into hooking kids into Barney, Disney, and the rest of the corporate-sponsored apparel industry is astounding. Kids aren't naturally attracted to purple dinosaurs, they're deviously manipulated into liking them.

Which isn't to say that we've thrown away all our daughter's Snow White costumes--it's just that we want to show her that making our own clothes is cooler, that you don't have to just drive your SUV into Wal-mart and wear what corporate America wants you to wear.

Labels: babies, Lessons taught by 4 year-olds

Writing Into the Desk

I discovered a fun phrase while searching the Web yesterday. When Russian writers like Mikhail Bulgakov were writing traditional Russian novels that the Soviet regime wouldn't publish, they called it "writing into the desk," because they wrote books that they knew they couldn't get published.

Sounds a little like what most experimental writers are doing these days, given the present-day corporate publishing environment.

The Writers' Dojo and My Unhealthy Attachment to Shoes

So last week I rode my bike over to St. John's to check out Jeff Selin's new writers' space the Writers' Dojo. Writing communities have always fascinated me, from fabled writing groups like the Algonquin Round Table to the Grotto in San Francisco to my own writing community here in Portland, so I was excited to see what Jeff was starting.

The space is absolutely beautiful. It has an Eastern theme, as its name suggests, with bamboo flooring, polished wood beams, and grounds with a well-manicured garden. When I walked in, Jeff asked me to remove my shoes, and I could feel the perfect spring of the spotless floors.

With all due respect to Jeff, and his vision of bringing a writing community to St. John's, which I completely support and think is a great idea, well, I didn't like it.

This says far more about me than it does about the wonderful space Jeff created. I have an ongoing debate with my wife about wearing shoes in our house, and the last thing I want is to have the same issue in an office space. To me it's just one more thing to have to remember to do. Like I walk in the door, all excited to see my kids, and then I get, "Jim! Take off your shoes!" and I'm completely deflated and grumpy.

And then, I don't know, I just like my work space to be a little grungy--my office space in the Periscope Studio is full of the tchotskies of comic artists. I loved it. Crap everywhere. And God, you should see the mess in the Baby Wit garage.

The Writers' Dojo was simply too clean for me. I mean, where would I put my shitty, old, spray-painted 500-pound Steelcase? And what about my pile of wadded-up notebook paper?

Anyway, I'm going back to my trash-ridden hovel. The space is great, please ignore me...

Labels: Portlandia

Blog Relaunch

It's been a chaotic summer. A new baby, an endless flow of relatives, and summer break for my daughter have all contributed to a dearth of writing (not to mention blog entries).

I'm back this week, though, and I've started working on Draft #8 of my next novel. As usual I'll keep you up to date.

In honor of this new beginning, I've decided to relaunch my blog with a new theme. The whole "agentless novelist" schtick was getting old. I mean, I am proud that I was able to sell a book to a major publisher without agent, but people weren't taking it that way--instead they're saying things like this.

The second version of the Frost book, created in response to the author’s objections to the first, didn’t appeal to me, but I might not be the reader for this kind of book. Finally, the clearly frustrated author had an illustrator create a sticker to cover up the publisher’s art. I wonder how that’s working for him. The tagline of his blog says “The life and opinions of an agentless novelist.” Agentless? Maybe that’s a clue. My literary agent has extremely good judgment when it comes to things like cover art.

Ouch. I can certainly understand that opinion. And it's likely a good agent would have helped. But a more committed publisher, a less prickly editor, and just in general less of a production line publishing environment would have too.

Anyhow. The blog relaunch.

I'm going to be writing more about the Portland writing scene. Thus the new blog description. I'm also planning to let my angst fly a little more--the world just ain't right these days--and there's nothing like a blog for releasing pressure.

So expect darkness. And lots of it.

Labels: blog issues

Nick Cave's Creative Process

Strange--Nick Cave and I share the same creative process...

Labels: Writing Process

If You're in San Francisco on Thursday 7/26 Go See Paul Neilan

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE somebody go see Paul Neilan read from his book Apathy and Other Small Victories this Thursday. Apathy is the funniest, most irreverent, and yet indicative of the times novel I have read in a long time. Aside from that, Paul is a great guy, one of my favorite people in the whole world, despite the fact that we’ve only gotten together a few times for drinks (and talked about our own inadequacies, and talked about how the world has gone mad, and drunk very cheap beer until we were very silly and were praising God for good public transportation)

If you do go, please bring him a salt shaker (preferably a simple one stolen from a diner… he’ll understand), and please introduce yourself to him as a friend.

More details about Paul's reading here:

Labels: Book Lovers

Atticus!

This was the official birth announcement we sent to friends...

Atticus Charleston Frost, a.k.a “A.C.”, a.k.a. “Aces,” a.k.a. “Charlie,” a.k.a. “Atticus Rose Zebra” (Ava’s entry) was born on July 11th, 2007. He weighed a whopping 9 lb. 6 oz., measured a tall 21 inches, and was delivered naturally by his brave and fierce mother. Both mother and baby are resting healthily at home, and his sister Ava has been a proud and helpful big sister.

(His mother asked me to add that his head circumference was 14 ½ inches, a fact which his father would have left out, given the wincing that is sure to follow.)

Atticus is a bit of a procrastinator—he was two weeks overdue—but given a deadline, he performed with a flourish. His father weaved through rush hour traffic to deliver his mother to the hospital at 5 P.M., and Atticus completed his assignment with grace, arriving with a splash into the world at 7:35 P.M. As an exclamation to his début, upon being placed in his father’s arms, he took a good and proper poo.

Atticus shares a birthday with his maternal grandfather, Alfred Carl Jr., the late astrophysicist--he was given the initials A.C. in his honor. He also shares a birthday with his step-grandfather Bill Yee.

Atticus’s first name is a reference to Atticus Finch, the character in Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird, who did what he felt was right, even when what was right was an unpopular thing to do. The name’s origin is Greek, meaning “from Athens,” and Atticus’s father likes the fact that Titus Pomponius Atticus was the world’s first publisher.

Charleston adds a hint of jazz and fun to the name Atticus. It is also a nod to Charlie Bing, the patriarch who brought Andrea’s maternal family to the United States from China. Andrea’s mother, Blanche, and her two aunts, Nancy and Jane, have all been steady presences in our family’s life.

Atticus has his mother’s hair, ears, and slight overbite (good for character).

Labels: Atticus

Best Magic Marker Job Yet

Sent in from a fan:

Labels: World Leader Pretend

Bridging the Gap

I don't know how this is even possible, but somehow, when I'm writing novels, I never know when I'm going to be done with a draft until the very moment it is done. This seems impossible, after all, can't I see the ending coming?

But I never do. I'm just writing, thinking I have days and weeks left to write, when suddenly I realize I'm done.

Now most of this is because my writing process doesn't involve writing a novel straight through from start to finish. When I begin a novel it's all excitement and whirlwind and fury, I madly scribble for four or five months until one day I wake up at around page three-hundred and realize that I have to start tieing everything up. This always causes panic and disillusionment, and I usually write another fifty pages of absolute garbage before I decide that what I really need to do is write the ending of the novel.

And so I do this, I write the ending of the novel. And generally this is pretty fun too.

That's when the real fear begins, and that's when things get excruciating and painful, because I now have to take all the build-up and guide it to the book's conclusion. Doing this is the real work of a novelist. Some writers, some very well-respected writers, never do this. And to be honest, I think they should all get bitch-slapped for it. Many of the "hot" literary stars--David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers being the worst offenders--they just write the fun stuff and ignore the excruciatingly difficult tying together part of writing. I can't blame them for doing it, as it cuts out about five-sixths of the work, and they get paid the same either way, but that empty feeling that their readers feel, it's because deep down somewhere they know that DFW and DE are big cheaters.

But me, I'm a purist (and deluded as well), and so I've been working on my novel for the last two and a half years, trying to connect this novel's point A to its point B. I have tried, and failed, five times to do it right. Each time the novel went off in some unwanted direction, and the gap between the opening three hundred pages of the novel and the last fifty was never breached.

Well, yesterday I bridged the gap. I actually did so not by adding pages, but by subtracting them. I was frustrated, trying to figure out what the next scene should be, when I decided that I needed to rid myself of the four pages I had just written. I deleted the four pages, and then, low and behold, I realized that I could simply start with the scene that comprised the ending of the novel.

I would need to do a little clean-up, but more or less the narrative arc of my novel was complete. I was now done with Draft Seven, the first real draft of VMP. (Granted, the ending still needed to be altered to fit the changed direction of the story, so technically the draft wasn't done, but the great mental blockade had been wrecking balled, and besides that I should go back and read the whole thing to see exactly how the ending needed to be changed.)

Labels: Writing Process

Can't Blog. Writing.

Sorry fans of L.O.A.N. Still working on the seventh draft of VMP. We have narrative arc! No time for much else. Baby launch to come soon as well...

Labels: Writing Process

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1.14.2008

Writers' Dojo Launch Party: A Herb Cain-Like Post-Party Reflection

1.07.2008

Reading at Writers' Dojo Launch Party

12.03.2007

Reading at the Portland Downtown Library 12/15 @ 12:30 P.M.

11.26.2007

Onesies

10.24.2007

The Other Authors Went to Wordstock and All I Got Was this Stupid T Shirt

10.22.2007

Baby Wit Loves Auditors

10.11.2007

The Great Baby Clothes Debate

9.27.2007

Writing Into the Desk

9.26.2007

The Writers' Dojo and My Unhealthy Attachment to Shoes

9.13.2007

Blog Relaunch

7.24.2007

If You're in San Francisco on Thursday 7/26 Go See Paul Neilan

7.16.2007

Atticus!

7.05.2007

Best Magic Marker Job Yet

6.26.2007

Bridging the Gap

6.20.2007

Can't Blog. Writing.