Omer is funny.

A history lesson by keyword. Note the two-hundred year plus prevalence of the word "war."

So a colleague sent me an email congratulating me on my positive PW review. This is the exact same review which I complained about in my last post, thinking it was absolutely terrible.

I reread the review this morning, and was like, what the hell? Is this the same review I read yesterday? Why did I think it was so terrible?

This is, I think, what happens when you think the world revolves around you--when some creepy part of you is still a two-year-old who had very wonderful, doting parents. "DON'T YOU SEE MY INCREDIBLE GENIUS!", you think. "I'M ONLY 2, AND I ALREADY KNOW MY ABC'S!"

So I didn't get a starred review. And the review said that, at times, the book "felt dated" and that the characters seemed "schematic." But in the end, the reviewer called the book an "uncommon literary illustration of the split-identity common to gamers" and really that's pretty positive.

Man have I been thin-skinned of late. I hope all the people who've had to deal with me in the last couple weeks can forgive me. It's only going to get worse.

Labels: What They're Saying about my Novel, World Leader Pretend

A friend sent me a wonderful essay by Zadie Smith about why there are so few "great" novels published, and I've been crunching on it for a week now.

The part that struck me the most was the following:

Great styles represent the interface of "world" and "I", and the very notion of such an interface being different in kind and quality from your own is where the power of fiction resides. Writers fail us when that interface is tailored to our needs, when it panders to the generalities of its day, when it offers us a world it knows we will accept having already seen it on the television. Bad writing does nothing, changes nothing, educates no emotions, rewires no inner circuitry - we close its covers with the same metaphysical confidence in the universality of our own interface as we did when we opened it. But great writing - great writing forces you to submit to its vision. You spend the morning reading Chekhov and in the afternoon, walking through your neighbourhood, the world has turned Chekhovian; the waitress in the cafe offers a non- sequitur, a dog dances in the street.

I post this mostly because this is what I attempted to do with World Leader Pretend. I set out to write a book whose reality was a tad bit unreal. My first review was bad (It was very typical New York snark--I won't do it the dignity of a link) but what was strange about it, was that what the reviewer disliked about the book was precisely the thing I was trying to accomplish. The reviewer called the book "messy," to which I say YES! ABSOLUTELY! SO REFRESHINGLY MESSY! The reviewer called the characters "schematic," to which I say YES! A GOOD WORD! THE MAIN CHARACTER SEES THE WORLD IN MATH AND SO THE BOOK'S WORLD IS THAT WAY TOO!

I seemed to have gotten the reviewer to "submit to my vision." So in a way, I accomplished one of the supposed goals of great fiction. The only problem is that the reviewer didn't think much of my vision...

Labels: What They're Saying about my Novel, World Leader Pretend, Writing Process

Hmmmm.... David Foster Wallace, James Bernard Frost--gosh, I wonder who inspired the whole middle name thing...

Labels: Book Lovers

Dave Eggers wrote a brilliant introduction for the tenth anniversary of Infinite Jest.

It's funny, I connect that book to so many things. It was an albatross that I carried around with me, replete with two bookmarks, one for the book itself and one for the footnotes (which I did read in their entirety), around San Francisco one summer. It was my bus read. I can still see myself there, on the 5 Fulton, fully absorbed, missing my stop yet again.

Labels: Book Lovers

It looks like my publisher finalized the cover for my book. I say it looks like, because I know as much about this as an outsider. I found it today on Amazon, and so I assume it's the final cover. This post explains the situation a little more.

(They know I don't like the cover, when I've asked about the cover they say they're working on it, and we kind of settled into a mutually agreed upon silence...)

The only surprise on the cover was the inclusion of a quote by David Bowman. It reads:

"Store your copies of Infinite Jest in the basement. World Leader Pretend is this generation's Bible-slash-novel."

The quote is way over-the-top, but being a David Foster Wallace fan who would never store his copy of Infinite Jest in the basement, I can't help but like it.

Labels: What They're Saying about my Novel, World Leader Pretend

I appreciated the compliment about the World Leader Pretend sticker that fellow author Michelle Richmond paid me on her blog recently. However, it was the monster truck tire metaphor that had me ROFL.

Labels: What They're Saying about my Novel, World Leader Pretend

I love, love, love that I live in a town where the city's weekly magazine will publish the entire first chapter of a local author's debut novel in its pages. Check out Willamette Week to see an excerpt from Monica's Drake's Clown Girl. Thank you, WW!

(Now me, next!)

Labels: Book Lovers, Portlandia

The concept of "drafts" began pre-computer age. When you typed out your novel--if it didn't come out perfect the first time--you had to go back and retype the whole thing. Thus, a second, third, fourth,...umpteenth, final draft.

These days "drafts" don't follow the same easy numerical sequence. For example, in the new novel I'm working on, I tell people I'm on a sixth draft, but I have never actually gone back and rewritten the whole thing word-for-word. The first half of the novel is largely intact, the way I wrote it the first time with some minor clean-up. Meanwhile, the second half has been tweaked six times, although the truth is that in none of those drafts did I actually make it all the way through. There was always a point where I stopped, knowing it wasn't quite right, and started a new draft.

So depending on one's viewpoint, I could say that I still haven't finished a first draft, after working on this book for two and a half years. Or I could say that I'm working on a sixth draft, which makes me feel much better.

Labels: Writing Process

Daniel Eckhart recently turned me on to LibraryThing, a website that catalogues all your books for you. Membership is free and you simply purchase a device called a CueCat, an ingenious scanner that attaches to your computer via the USB port, which quickly scans the ISBNs from the covers of the books, and soon you have a database of the 500+ books you own.

This is particularly helpful for someone like me, who has more books than bookshelf space, and who, being a writer and all, regularly wants to reference them. (What exactly was that Jack Kerouac line about leaving Portland, Oregon--something to do with itching--that I can't quite remember...) Half the time I don't even remember if I still own the book, and I'm far too lazy to go through every single book on my shelves, and every single book in the boxes in my basement to find out.

With LibraryThing, though, I can go online, see that On the Road is in Box #1, and presto, I can go get it and find the line.

Anyway... I've spent the last three days with a scanner scanning all my books, and geeking out over them--reading a few pages here, a few pages there. It's a memories thing, like going through old photographs. I have far better things to do, and like most things technology-related, the time spent with the new technology outweighs any advantage the new technology brings. But still it's kind of fun. Check out my book list here. (Just so you know: the business management books, Philip K. Dick, and anarchist books are my wife's; the geeky David Foster Wallace and Douglas Coupland books are mine.)

Labels: Book Lovers

I switched over from the beta version of Blogger today. The only glitch I see so far is that all previous comments now say "anonymous."

This is kind of depressing. Like all this time I've just been talking to myself.

Labels: blog issues

Mike Ryan sent me a funny email with a link to a bumper sticker that read: Militant Agnostic: I Don't Know and You Don't Either.

While meant to be funny, that bumper sticker pretty much sums up my religious philosophy. I have friends who are atheists, and who view agnosticism as a sort of Atheism Light. Like we're hedging our bets or something.

Personally, I think atheists are as wrong as everybody else. The simple facts that-- a) the world exists and that b) we didn't create it--lead to the logical conclusion that some other entity probably did. (Don't get me wrong, I don't think it was some white-bearded dude who sent his only son down to Earth only to see him crucified, either.)

My agnosticism is very strong. I believe strongly that there is something else out there, and that no one on this planet has figured out what that is yet. I believe that religion, in some ways, has been helpful. Mostly by providing us with sensible dictates like Thou Shalt Not Kill so that we survive long enough to try and figure out what that something is.

I also believe that the only method we have for discovering what that higher power might be is science. Einstein was likely our greatest mystic. Science is a very rational way to discover the rules by which our world operates. And what better way to understand a master than to understand his rules…

Labels: Religion

Some of you may already know about my wrangling with the publisher over the cover art for the book. I lost the battle, of course. And now I have to live with the damn thing. (Don't get me wrong, the art is perfect for an L. Ron Hubbard book.)

I decided to be proactive, though, and create my own cover for the book. The wife and I teamed up with sticker artist DAve of San Francisco to produce a sticker that can be placed over the original paperback cover of the book. The early results are so fun! And so much more telling about the wackiness of the novel's pages.



I just wish the publisher "got it." What's with people these days, anyway? Even the book dorks are corporate.

Labels: World Leader Pretend

Ever simply have too many books to read? Before the holidays I already had a backlog, but then my sister came to town armed with a suitcase full of paperbacks. Not long after, I discovered the classics section at the Goodwill. Then, Kieron Dwyer came over and left me a pile of his graphic novels. I have stacks of books on my desk, in the living room, and my bedroom. I can't escape them.

The ensuing pressure of all these books in all my rooms has forced me out my home. I've been spending my evening hours at the local tea shop playing Yahoo! online poker...

Nonetheless, I've redone my list of books in the sidebar of this Web Site with the ones at the top of the stack. Hopefully, I'll get to them. Samantha Hunt is a friend of a friend. I'm reading Why Waco? and The Motorcycle Diaries to learn more about how movements get started for A Very Minor Prophet. I'm reading Tocqueville because Vonnegut called every American who hasn't read Democracy in America a wuss, and I can't have Vonnegut thinking I'm a wuss. I'm reading City Limits and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities as part of a general attempt to get to know my adopted city better. And also to figure out why the heck everybody here is so obsessed with urban planning.

Labels: Book Lovers

In case you were following the progress of my second novel, writing the novel backwards turned out to be a terrible idea. It's back to square one for the New Year...

Labels: Writing Process

A good article about attending book readings.

Labels: Book Lovers