I spammed my mailing list yesterday with the announcement that my book is available for preorder. I wrote the email. Rewrote it. Spell-checked it. Made sure I blind copied everyone, so the email list wasn't visible. I stared at it a while. And then, I clicked. And as I clicked, I knew I had done something wrong, that I shouldn't have clicked.

Today, when I got a few replies, I realized what I had done wrong. I hadn't put anything in the subject line. No PREORDER WORLD LEADER PRETEND TODAY.

I am much chagrined. I can see my email now, populating spam folders, lost forever. Many of the people on my mailing list I have not spoken to in years, and my email has changed a few times since then, and when they see this email, from Jim at sinceritypress, they will surely ignore it. AAAAAAAARG. My ineptitude is once again exposed.

Labels: World Leader Pretend

My wife and I had an eerily successful Thanksgiving dinner last night. All our guests arrived on time. Everything was cooked and on the table at precisely 4 P.M. All kitchen mishaps were minor. We made three pies, none of which fell. Our daughter was cheerful and charming. My brother told funny stories. The dog lapped up the table scraps. No one drank too much. The neighbors stopped by and joined us for dessert. My mother-in-law did all the dishes.

I feel like something horrible is going to happen. I'm going to avoid major thoroughfares for a week.

Labels: Writing Process

For those of you sitting on pins and needles wondering if I was going to make my 50,000 word goal for NaNoWriMo, it is now official: I failed. I have good excuses for this--I became more involved in publicity for World Leader Pretend; I went off with the wife for a much needed work-free weekend; my mother-in-law is in town--but mostly I just failed.

This won't, however, deter me from setting lofty goals in the future. I find that I have about a 10% return on lofty goals, and the only way to get to that 10%, is to fail 9 times first. For example, when I'm quitting smoking, I have to quit for about nine days in a row, before the accumulated horror of prematurely shortening my life sinks into my brain long enough for me to actually run the cigarettes under the faucet. (And not go out two hours later and buy more...)

Most people do not seem to operate this way. If they don't succeed the first time, it gets progressively harder for them to succeed. For me, though, the sheer volume of failures has given me confidence. I am actually happy that I've failed, because today, I can make a new goal, and because I fucked up the last one, I'm much more likely to accomplish it this time around.

I never thought I'd say this, but maybe Nietzsche was right.

Labels: Writing Process

They're selling my book at Wal-Mart. I have no idea how to respond to this. It's like when Donald Rumsfeld bought a snow globe with a characature of himself in it, with the caption "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas" on the outside, and put it up in his office.

I mean, did he get the irony of this? Or was the irony that he didn't care, that he'd gotten so big that he was impervious to criticism. (Or perhaps he simply thinks racism is funny...)

I am rather certain that no one at Wal-Mart has read my book, and so no one at Wal-Mart knows that around page 30, I begin to criticize, in a subtle way, what companies like Wal-Mart have done to this country. And yet, I wonder if they did know, what they would do? Would they even care? Or would they just be stoked to have a book they could sell at bargain bin prices in their store? I mean, you can buy Michael Moore books at Wal-Mart too.

Note from author: Actually, I lied, you can't buy Michael Moore books at Wal-Mart.

Labels: World Leader Pretend

Alas, Chloe didn't have the new Dave Eggers book at Reading Frenzy so I was forced to go to the other independent bookstore in town for it. I also picked up Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope (if some wingnut doesn't shoot him, that guy is going to make a great president), and local writer Paul Neilan's Apathy and Other Small Victories.

Labels: Book Lovers

I don't have the dates yet, but I set up my first author reading today. It's at Reading Frenzy in Portland. HOORAY!

Labels: Portlandia, Tour Dates, World Leader Pretend

I got an email last Thursday requesting that I fill out a questionnaire about myself for a feature on World Leader Pretend that a trade publication called the Adult Paperback McNaughton Catalog wants to do. (Apparently, this catalog gets shipped out to 5,500 librarians.)

As usual, I got a little carried away with my answers. An example:

Q: Can you briefly describe the process you go through when writing a novel? Where do you get your inspiration?

A: Coffee is my inspiration, my muse, and my only true love. (Don’t tell my wife.) Without beloved coffee, my fingers would never find their way across a keyboard. Every morning I walk the streets until I find my love—coffee!—and as I sit alone and barely noticed in some coffee shop—in San Francisco, or Portland, or Prescott, Arizona—my love provides me with my signature nervous and jangly diction, and off I am, another thousand words on a computer screen, praying that the words just written somehow connect with the work of the preceding day.

Read the full text here.

Labels: World Leader Pretend

You can now preorder my book! Click here and I get a little extra. (Or wait until it comes out and buy it at your favorite independent bookstore.)

Labels: World Leader Pretend

Just a patch in the Oregon sky today, a narrow sliver...

Labels: Portlandia

I got advanced copies of World Leader Pretend from St. Martin's today. WOOHOO!

Labels: World Leader Pretend

The weather in Portland has been freaky--natural disaster weather was what I overheard a patron of my local coffee shop say. Yesterday, we broke a rainfall record by a full inch, AND we broke the all-time high. What was even weirder was the low for the day was only four degrees colder than this all-time high. It was sixty-three at 2 a.m.! It's November and it feels like Florida

Anyway, apparently this is part of a phenomenon called the Pineapple Express, in which the jet stream carries moisture to us from Hawaii. (Incidently, Hawaii is the bluest state in the nation--so let's all pray that jet stream dumps all over the U.S. today. Heaven knows, we need a change...)

Labels: Portlandia

The trouble with editing a novel in which the plot has gone awry is that when you rearrange your material to make the plot work, you have to rewrite all the connective material--all the entrances and exits from scenes.

My father was an orthepedic surgeon, and the hardest part of his job wasn't putting bones back together--a clean break of the forearm is pretty much a matter of snapping the bone back in place and tossing on some plaster--the hardest part was working with ligaments, like in a hyperextended knee, where connective tissue had been stretched beyond their limits. You have to really get in there, delicately unattaching and reattaching the parts that make the knee work.

You catch my drift...it's hard work, and not as rewarding as when you write your primary material. You have to write stuff that's interesting enough to carry the story forward, but not so interesting that you end up with a 600-page novel.

Labels: Writing Process

I'm going to be reading from World Leader Pretend at 7 P.M. at Tour de Crepes on Alberta Street, as part of the Salon de Muertos. Hope to see you there!

I've recognized, for quite some time, that I have symptoms of ADD. I didn't do anything about this for many, many years. I had several reasons for this: the stigma of mental illness; the potential loss of health insurance; the pill-pushing of the pharmaceutical industry; the fear that medication would dull an active mind. There is also a part of me that recognizes the link between ADD and creativity--I would never have become a writer were it not for my bouncy, bouncy mind.

Still the symptoms of ADD--difficulty in concentration, excessive daydreaming, an inability to complete tasks, the misplacing of everything--have plagued me my entire life, and as I've gotten older and have taken on more and more responsibilities, these symptons have become a hindrance to my marriage, my child rearing, and yes, my ability to write.

So I went to the doctor to try and get some pills.

Now, I'm no stranger to amphetamines--I have a sister with schizophrenia, have spent time with other bipolars, and, um, have experimented a tad myself--so I'm aware of the potential pitfalls of Ritalin and Adderall. I know that it's just FDA-approved and regulated crack. And I've seen people go completely nutso on it. I mean completely nuts. They don't think they're nuts--they feel euphoric and great, in fact. And they can concentrate for hours... in fact I've had one speak to me for three hours straight without pausing for a breath.

And yet, the things that a small amount of amphetamine allow you to do--to keep a narrow focus and to give attention to humdrum tasks--things like cleaning the house, or doing the dishes, or paying attention to my daughter at the playground rather than spacing out, these are things that I absolutely have to be able to do or my wife will divorce me and my daughter will crack her head open.

So I got the pills.

The doctor had a ridiculous notion about how I was to take them. I was supposed to take one pill, twice a day, for a week. Then two pills, twice a day, for the next week. Then four pills, twice a day, for a week. After doing this, I was supposed to determine which dosage was the best dosage for me.

Like I said, I'm no stranger to amphetamines. If I followed her instructions, by the time I was taking four pills, twice a day, I would be clinically insane, and not only would I be clinically insane, but I would also be completely convinced that four pills, twice a day, was the best dosage for me. (Actually, maybe eight pills, three times a day, just GIVE ME MORE OF THIS SHIT!)

I filled my prescription and decided to do my own experimentation. I took one pill on a day when the house needed a thorough cleaning. It worked. Sort of. A couple of rooms got really, really clean. Spotless. All the lint out of the corners and out from under the dressers. But I only managed to clean two rooms in the space of five hours.

Next, I decided to take one pill (my prescription is for Ritalin, 5 mg) on a day when I had errands to run with my daughter. I felt really good, really on top of things. (Amphetamines! Euphoria!) I went down my list, one item at a time. I was getting things done... until I went to the grocery store. I've never been a label reader. On Ritalin, I'm a label reader. This can of beans costs .08 cents an ounce, the other .09 cents, but one has added High Fructose Corn Syrup, and the other does not. And this one has kombu seaweed in it--an anti-flatulent; which is good when you're a vegetarian who eats a lot of beans. Hmmmm...

Oh shit. Ava's standing up in the grocery cart, precariously hanging over the edge...

I put the pills away.

But then came last summer. I got World Leader Pretend back from my publisher and they wanted me to cut the book by a third. The task was daunting. I stared at the proposed changes for weeks, and found myself unable to start in on it. There were many elements to my mental block--too many to go into here--but a big portion of it was that I was no longer interested in the book: I'd finished it, in my own mind, years ago. The idea of editing it was boring, and as someone with symptoms of ADD, doing something boring is hard to do.

I took the pills back out.

And this time, for this particular task, I found the Ritalin helpful. Because I was dealing with cutting an immense amount of material, I need to have a diamond-sharp, extremely patient eye, something I simply couldn't do with material that, for me, was dated. I had to have the attention to attend to the fact that cutting something on page 50, meant changes on pages 124, 187, and 345, and I had to be able to spend 20 minutes flipping through the document to find these pages where these changes needed to be made.

So I guess what I'm saying is that my Ritalin, as I attend to a fifth draft of A Very Minor Prophet, has come back out of its amber container. The draft is a big cut-and-paste job, taking appropriate material out of previous drafts and fitting it into this one. Because of this, it takes a great deal of narrow attention to boring detail. I have to go back and find some material that I wrote in the third draft and insert it into a different place in the fifth one. It's excruciating. But not so bad with the Ritalin. (Be careful, be very careful, Jim...)

Labels: Writing Process