The Life and Opinions of an Agentless Novelist

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

2008-01-14T14:34:00.000-08:00

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.

Reading at Writers' Dojo Launch Party

2008-01-07T15:00:00.000-08:00

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...

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

2007-12-03T10:03:00.000-08:00

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.

Onesies

2007-11-26T08:05:00.001-08:00

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...

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

2007-10-24T13:41:00.000-07:00

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*

Baby Wit Loves Auditors

2007-10-22T11:10:00.000-07:00

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.

The Great Baby Clothes Debate

2007-10-11T13:08:00.000-07:00

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.

Writing Into the Desk

2007-09-27T11:47:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-26T12:13:00.001-07:00

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...

Blog Relaunch

2007-09-13T13:01:00.000-07:00

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.

Nick Cave's Creative Process

2007-07-24T12:27:00.001-07:00

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

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

2007-07-24T12:01:00.000-07:00

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:

Atticus!

2007-07-16T16:39:00.000-07:00

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 � 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 d�but, 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).

Best Magic Marker Job Yet

2007-07-05T09:25:00.001-07:00

Sent in from a fan:

Bridging the Gap

2007-06-26T09:36:00.000-07:00

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.)

Can't Blog. Writing.

2007-06-20T11:39:00.000-07:00

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...

A Yearning for Community

2007-06-13T16:14:00.000-07:00

Those of you who have read my writing probably know that I am both strangely obsessed with and oddly divorced from the notion of community. I have always wanted to start "something"--to lead a group of people to do "something"--and yet I have always been completely petrified when it comes to fulfilling this dream.

Well, over the last few months I have been scheming to start a writing community here in Portland, and for the first time in my life this scheming has led to something, a group of published writers who operate under the moniker PEW!

(PEW! stands for Portland Emerging Writers, despite the fact that most of us emerged quite some time ago. We're working on a new name for the group...)

The PEW! members include Monica Drake, Cheryl Strayed, Justin Tussing, Ellen Urbani, Paul Neilan, Sara Ryan, Heather Sharfeddin, Kassten Alonzo, and Yours Truly. The group hasn't done much--we meet once a month over drinks and gossip about the publishing industry--but I am glad that after much pained writing about the yearning for community, I have finally reached out to start one....

Baby Names

2007-06-07T09:51:00.000-07:00

So the baby name panic button kicked in yesterday. As a writer, it's my job to come up with a clever name for my child. You would think I would be good at this, but given the debacle with my first child's name, I'm gun-shy. (It turned out OK, but the fact that we announced her name as one thing, and then caved to the groans and changed it to a name that's more common (albiet, beautiful) still smarts.)

(Our first-born's name is Ava Isabel Frost. A nice name that rolls of the tongue, but there's about a million Ava's in Portland these days... Our original name was going to be Wilhelmina Marmalade Frost--it's tough to tell whether Ava would have pulled it off, or hated us forever for that one, but it was certainly more bold.)

There is the added stress of us choosing not to find out whether it's a boy or a girl, so I have to come up with TWO good names.

Adding to the grief, I discovered a website that has a forum in which some so-called baby experts will review your name. So, of course, I listed my names there. The first woman shot them all down. (Although, I took some comfort in reading her profile. She's in her late forties, and her sons are named the rather generic Michael, Patrick and Robert)

Anyway, here are some of the names we are thinking about. Feel free to leave a comment with your suggestions. I'm a glutton for punishment...

GIRL NAMES:

Beatrix Riona (nickname Bee)
Marguerite ______ (nickname Maisie)
Zia or Zaida ______ (middle name?)
Astrid _______ (middle name?)

BOY NAMES:

Ezra Rainier
Atticus ______
Jasper Rainier

Too Many Journals

2007-05-23T11:47:00.000-07:00

It occurs to me that I'm attempting to maintain one too many forms of writing. I have the novel that I'm working on, the ever-changing outline to that novel, this blog, a writing journal, a running journal, and the journal I maintain for my daughter. I always feel I'm neglecting one or all of these, and it's no wonder: what am I doing writing all these journals?

Despite the fact that it's terribly boring, I've decided to cut and paste the last ten days of my writing journal here today just so that I don't have to bother adding a creative blog entry. Perhaps it will be of some interest to other writers to see what another writer's daily writing journey is like...

5/14/07

Left the house at 8. Got a cup of Stumptown. Arrived at the office just before 9. Dicked around the Internet until about 9:30 before settling in. Went through some pages that I�d written on Friday and changed a few things. Flipped through the beginning of the next scene which I intended to keep, before working on the new ending to the Bridge of the Gods scene. At 10:30 got hungry and went down to get a breakfast burrito. Ate and listened to Pandora until about 11:10. Started writing again and wrote out a new dialogue to the end of the Bridge of the Gods scene, making it so that Mercyx questions Flynn�s sincerity, judged by the way he makes fun of Booker in his comics. Mercyx tells Flynn about the Jebus, and Flynn inadvertently laughs. Mercyx rides off. I wrote this straight through to 12:30�took a bathroom break and a trip downstairs for a soda. It�s now 12:40. Got through 15 pages and wrote over 1,000 words. Going for a long run and then will probably can the writing for the day.

5/15/07

Had trouble getting settled today for some reason. Didn�t start writing until 10:30�sort of dicked around the Internet. Cut some material and sutured some material back in, trying to write the minimal amount of material to grow the conflict between the comic and Booker. Added 2.5 pages and 300 words between 10:30 and 1:45. Going to pay some bills, do some nitpicky things and call it a day.

5/16/07

Got out of the house early this morning and began working without too much of the usual websurfing. Started writing at 8. Wrote slowly today, but the writing seemed stronger than I can remember it being in a long while. Wrote a lovely description of Douglas Yamhill�s Ben Dover books to begin a new sequence where Dougie suggests to Flynn that he not write down Booker�s speeches word-for-word but rather that he reinterpret it.
Added 4 pages, most of it new with a little cut and pasting of a description of Dougie that had been cut out earlier. 750 words. Ended writing at 10:30� going for a run and then have to get Ava at 1.

5/17/07

Got a very late start today. I really need to reduce the procrastination. Walking the dog and making coffee is one thing, but I really don�t need to spend 30 minutes on Sportsline.com. Still, I started at 11 and wrote relatively close to straight through to 1:15, adding 5 pages and 1,000 plus words. The scene at Ben Dover books is getting longish, I wonder how it will work with the pacing. Still, good to be adding a needed scene. Going to eat lunch now and then do some tic-tacky things.

5/21/07
Took the 18th off to go hiking on my birthday. Stayed home today and started writing early�around 8 A.M.�without too much web surfing. Finished out the Ben Dover Books section around 9. Did some laundry and then got caught imagining PCT trip. Didn�t get writing again until 10. Wrote a transitional section about bridges. This finishes Scene 14 on the outline. Tomorrow I will begin a rewrite of the next Booker sermon on authenticity. This will take some focus and doing. Wrote 3.5 pages today and 850 words. (No recycled material.) It�s 11:30 now� have to get Ava at 1.

5/22/07

Big zero today. Just couldn�t get it together. Had to take Ava into school at 9. Got home, got all my stuff together, put my laundry away, and finally managed to get out of the house close to 10. Got to my office at 10:30 to the sound of very loud construction. Farted around for fifteen minutes before deciding to run some errands. Returned a lamp, got some library books, and then got a call from Andrea offering to pick me up and drive me home. Figured it was a good idea, given the noise at my office. She decided to take a long lunch, much to my chagrin, and I didn�t get home until 1:30. By then I was depressed and sat around reading my new books until I had to get Ava at 3:45. Sigh�

5/23/07

Set down at the computer around 7 today. Spent an hour dicking around. (I�m very obsessed with this potential hiking trip that I want to do with Joe�the Northern Loop on Mt. Rainier.) Getting to writing was difficult�I needed to make sure the continuity between this speech and others before it was right, and revising this sermon seemed daunting, but eventually I got started. Wrote an intro to the sermon introducing how Flynn was beginning to see Booker as a real preacher, added a quick ditty about the Portland weather (a habit at the beginning of these sermons�is there some reason why I�m including them), pointed out the growing discomfort between Flynn and Booker, and then had the lesbians break the tension by arriving on the scene. I added 930 pages, and then pasted in a bit of stuff from previous introduction of the lesbians to Flynn. A total of 4.5 pages with 2 pages of cuts. Finished writing at 11:45. (Total length of novel has gone down to 440 pages from previous versions.)

Can Gamers Save the World?

2007-05-20T09:14:00.000-07:00

During one of my not infrequent evenings of aimless web surfing, I came across an article about Jane McGonigal, a young woman who has predicted that a game developer will win a Nobel Prize by the year 2032. While I'm attracted to the both the arbitrariness of her having chosen the year 2032, the eccentricity of her pursuit of such a precise goal (it doesn't seem such a stretch to think she's envisioned herself as the recepient), and just her general geekiness, what struck me about her this prediction was how essential it seems to me.

One of the "games" that Ms. McGonigal has helped invent, is a month-long Alternative Reality Game (which, as all gamers must do, has been acronymed ARG), called World Without Oil. During the month of May, players of the game simulate a world oil crisis. They blog about the crisis, send video, and walk (or bike, or take public transportation) around imagining that oil prices are skyrocketing.

I'm not sure if the game has resulted in any major breakthoughs in how people should deal with an oil crisis (From the time I've spent surfing the WWO website, it seems to have merely encouraged an uptick in creative writing, photography, and gardening) but I liked the general tenor of it.

I wonder if we need this sort of game. If the warnings of the entire scientific community can't stop us from continuing a carbon pollution that very well may destroy the planet we live on, and if the laws of supply and demand don't stop us soon enough, how can we get everybody to stop?

I mean, seriously, the inconvenience of taking my bike everywhere, while every motorist who comes up behind me raises the hair on my neck, is just too much to do alone. It's simply not very fun, and I end up in my car again.

But if we all spontaneously started playing a game and tried to make it a new human adventure...

Interview of Me on Riottt.com

2007-05-17T14:18:00.000-07:00

Paul Semel posted a nice interview of World Leader Pretend on his blog Riott.com.

On the Internal Reality of a Novel

2007-05-15T15:13:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking lately about an interaction I had with Monica Drake, who was lamenting some negative comments in a review of her book Clown Girl. The reviewer had said something about the book being over-the-top and its main character histrionic. Monica's reply was something to the effect of, "Duh, it's a book about a clown!"

(And Monica, I know you've got your Google Alert turned on, so when you read this please correct me on my paraphrasing. I've never been a very responsible journalist.)

I love writers that can do what Monica did, where the writing style matches the personas of its characters. The Catcher and the Rye was such a break-through because of this. IMHO, it's an underappreciated trait.

On Draft #7, Zadie Smith's Book On Beauty, and a Second Post about Honorable Failure

2007-05-14T15:38:00.000-07:00

It was interesting reading Zadie Smith's book On Beauty immediately after reading an article by her titled Fail Better about how author's tend to drift away from their original purpose when writing a novel. (Sorry, the link to that article is dead. It was originally printed in the Jan. 20th edition of the UK Guardian.)

The novel was incredibly ambitious. It tackled topics as diverse as affirmative action in American colleges, interracial marriage, the psychological effects of religious belief and/or disbelief, and the way American's perceive beauty. It was philosophical, yet carried enough of a thread of a plot to keep the reader interested. It had all the makings of a work of great literature, and then, well, then it dissolved into a very tangled story of dirty fifty-something college professors (yes, that's plural) sleeping with YES, FUCK ME undergrads.

This isn't to knock the book. It was definitely on the verge of greatness--it just, well, got lost in its own expansiveness and needed a quick and cheap ending.

Anyway, I'm not writing this to knock Zadie Smith, who is an ungodly talented writer, but rather myself. I'm deep into what is now the seventh draft of my next novel. It was intended to be an expansive treatise on what's wrong with religion in America. I had written six-hundred odd pages, most of which was my main character going off on tirades, and the plot wasn't even close to tying together.

I've been, honestly, very close to complete dispair and utter defeat. But after taking three months off from writing, I came to the realization that despite the fact that most novels are generally some 60,000 plus words, the great works of literature generally only make one or two simple points. I'd been trying to make hundreds...

On the surface, it seems ludicrous that a novel can only make a couple of points. If I'm simply trying to make the point that:

1) The way Americans think about religion needs to drastically change.
and
2) My generation's ironic and fatalistic outlook is putting the world at great peril.

it would seem that I could do so in a few paragraphs--why do I need to write a whole novel? Well--that's just it--it often takes some 60,000 plus words to convince someone of something. As adaptive as we are, humans are still resistant to change--it takes a novel and then some to get us to alter our behaviors.

So anyway, I'm dropping nukes on the suburban sprawl that my novel has become, and trying to keep the book entertaining while I make a few points. Let's hope whatever emerges isn't too mutated for publication.

SF Weekly Reviews World Leader Pretend

2007-05-14T14:17:00.000-07:00

I'm a little miffed that it took me this long to notice the SF Weekly review of World Leader Pretend that came out last month. It was positive and insightful. (They took a slap or two at the end, but that's pretty much boilerplate review writing.)

I do have to say that there's this funny premise that appears in reviews of World Leader Pretend where people assume that since I wrote a book about online gaming I'm some sort of technology guru.

Frost (himself a refugee from the S.F. dot-com world) shows definite promise as a writer, with a better grasp of emotional and linguistic nuances than one would expect from a techie, and knack for poetic use of cadence and repetition in his lengthy sentences.

They're surprised when they find out that the book carries an emotional punch. The truth is that I'm a psychology major who spent his early twenties attempting to save the world, who subsequently failed, and who came to San Francisco at the beginning of the dot-com boom when tech firms were hiring everybody with a pulse. I'm so not a techie. I always tell people (in jest) that my book is for the girlfriends of gamers, not the gamers themselves. True gamers would pick apart all the book's implausibilities. I was merely fascinated by how online gaming sort of inadvertantly caused the formation of these impromptu international communities, and the possibilities this created in terms of global understanding and togetherness.

On the Uselessness of Contemporary Critique

2007-05-11T09:12:00.000-07:00

David Rochester and I took my blog post On My Wasted Education a step too far.