Final Word: Aspen Summer Words
OK. I know I’ve occupied a few posts here with my trip to Aspen last week. I promise - just in case you’re getting a little weary of it - that this will be the last one. But you have to understand: while the trip last week probably didn’t change my life in any significant way (at least not yet!), it reaffirmed for me that I’ve been leading my life the way I ought to. And given the doubts that sometimes creep in when you’re a surface narcissist with actual “closeted” insecurities, as I am…. Well, affirmation will keep me going for another couple of years. For now, I have a renewed enthusiasm for myself and my work.
Elizabeth McCracken, my white hot teacher for my white hot class, reminded me of something that I sometimes forget. It’s both egotistical (what artist does not have a formidable ego, no matter how much he or she tries to hide it?) and self-deprecating - it reflects the attitude all true artists should have. “We are all genuises with a lot to learn,” she said.
And it’s true. If you don’t think I am BOTH things, then you can kiss my ass.
Anyway - last post about Aspen. And I’ve already said a decent portion of what I mean to say in this post, about how Aspen Summer Words stoked a fire that has always burned inside me but is always in danger of dying out. Here, though, are a couple of other things that it taught (or re-taught) me.
1) That I am NOT past my prime. My friend Todd Wiley once asked me when I’d give up writing, when I’d decide that maybe I wasn’t going to go any further, when I’d admit that I’d hit the ceiling. I told him then that I’d never give up, that I’d always try to push things a little further. And I still believe that’s true. But sometimes, when I see a new gray hair or a wrinkle, or I count another birthday - either of my own, of my parents, or of my kids - I think, well, Will - you went another span of time and you didn’t make any forward motion. I’ll think maybe I’ve lost a little of my edge.
With limited exceptions (Emily Curtin-Philips, who is a mere 25 and Brittney Weber, who just passed 30), the people in my class were all roughly my age. And ALL OF US were still struggling with many of the same issues, the same limitations, the same barriers. As I got to know those people, got familiar with their genuises and their - for want of a better word - PROWESS, I realized that we are all capable, talented writers, that it is only luck and circumstance that hold many of us back, that with enough time (and we have time) and perseverance, we will always be able to move forward. We may never have a best-seller or win a national award. But we will not fail. We still have bright futures ahead of us.
2) That those ensconced in the old school system of publishing STILL resist the potentially new paradigms that threaten their way of doing things. Many of them still haven’t figured out what to do with the Internet, with social media, with the blogosphere, with new technology like Kindles and iPads. And so they actively discourage using these things to publish, promote, and sell literature. Now, this is NOT to say that ALL of them resist such innovations and discourage their use - far be it for me to make such a broad generalization. But either they were over-represented at Aspen Summer Words or an uncomfortable amount of them do. I’d actually be curious to know which agents and editors are actively trying to figure out a use for the new communications technologies as well as ways to apply them to their business models.
Still, for those who do resist, who can blame them? These things are becoming larger and larger threats to their well-being. They are the gate-keepers of what gets published - and though their system is flawed, subjective, and subject to manipulation and mistakes - it is a system that has more or less worked for many years. For them and for publishing.
That the gates might be rushed, the walls they’ve maintained might be pulled down: it’s scary. And who knows? Maybe they have a point. Because it’s possible that without them, we might have mob rule, and we all know that mob rule doesn’t work.
Still, I don’t think it’ll be mob rule. It’ll just be different. And they’ll have to adapt - we all will.
I am willing to; many of them are not.
Are you?
For the time being, as things either transform or they don’t, I’m prepared to work in both paradigms - I will try to get published over and over again “on paper”, and I’ll continue to work on this site and my social media outlets. Because of Aspen Summer Words, I’ve been refueled. Invigorated.
Watch me. I can do this for as long as it takes.
Novel Podcast: A War Between States, Part 18
It’s been since before the holidays that I posted a podcast of the novel I’m podcasting. But don’t worry - I haven’t forgotten it, just neglected it! Still, here’s a new installation, which will be followed later this week by another installation. In this one, we return to Nate Wells, now after the closing of his magazine. Here Nate meets a mysterious stranger, and hopefully you’ll soon be wondering the same thing Nate is….
A War Between States Part 18:
Chapter 10, Part One: Campaign: Nate
August 20, 2003
Deanna was the last one to leave. She walked across the tiled floors of the office with a cardboard box cradled in her arms. From its top protruded the peak of the goofy alarm clock/art piece she’d bought at the Lakewood Antique show — the goofy alarm clock/art piece her girlfriend wouldn’t let her keep in their apartment. It looked like a flamingo, with long yellow legs holding up a blue cuckoo clock house from which the flamingo’s elongated pink neck thrust, and from which an orange pendulum hung like a silly neck tie.
The peak of the blue house caught Nate’s eye as Deanna bustled by. She’d already said good-bye, so she didn’t say anything else to him as she left, only stared straight ahead, jaw clenched and blue eyes shiny with tears. Nate didn’t blame her — they’d both nearly burst into crying when they’d met in his office three hours ago to exchange future contact information and say farewell. Deanna wanted to hang around and help Nate finalize his plans for the business, but the bankruptcy lawyers and accountants insisted that they needed no help.
Nate watched her open the front door with extended fingers, watched her thrust her foot in to open it further, and watched her bump through the opening with her hips. Sunshine outlined her briefly and then she was gone. The door closed behind her.
Nate sat at a desk in the rear of the main office and gazed out across the room. He realized that, without its tell-tale decorations and desktop knick-knacks, he couldn’t remember whose desk this had been. All of the desks were void of computers. Nate had already purged their memories, downloaded all the stored articles and copies of the Scribe to CD. He’d already sold them all to subsidize the final paychecks for his former employees — a move the bankruptcy lawyers had balked at when they found out he’d done it. Still, Nate stood by his decision.
“They stuck with me through it all,” he told the stern-faced lawyers — one bald, droopy-cheeked man, the other a younger, swarthy-looking man who blatantly ignored Brylcreem’s insistence that ‘a little dab’ll do ya.’ “I can’t give them a decent severance package. The least I can do is give them the money I owe them for putting out our last issue.”
The computers were gone, and with Deanna’s departure, all the decorations — the posters, the toys, the shelves of books — were gone as well. Nate’s own Lego robot and his North By Northwest poster were in the back of his Blazer, which was itself newly restored and still not paid for.
And so the white-washed walls appeared starkly white-washed, except for the tiny tack holes which the building management’s work crew would start to spackle that week. The tiled floor seemed so much brighter now under the flourescents, even with the office furniture still intact. There was a slight echo throughout the few rooms.
“It looks so empty,” he said out loud to test the echo again, and wondered how empty it would look when the office furniture rental guys came and took all the desks and filing cabinets away.
He sighed and stood, went to his office for one last look — one final check to make sure that he’d gotten everything.
He stared at the empty, dusty corners of his tiny office and sighed again. For six years, ever since he’d started the Scribe, he’d happily come to this office and did what he was most passionate about: he’d bathed in information, in facts and conjectures, in opinions and statistics.
In words.
Every day, immersed in words.
“All struck a finishing blow by one ignorant man’s whimsy,” he said to the dust.
The dust gave no reply.
So Nate spun on his loafered heel and headed the way Deanna had gone — out the front door. He switched off the flourescents, stood in the dark a moment, then opened the front door and stepped into the morning sunlight.
Outside, the street was mostly empty. Deanna’s Civic was gone, and someone in a pickup truck was pulling into her spot in front of the building. A man in Bermuda shorts and a polo shirt was walking toward him on the sidewalk. A line of people in vehicles waited to use the automated teller at the bank across the street. The air around all of them was hot and oppressive — the sun too bright, the Atlanta smog noticeably thick. The atmosphere reminded him of Marionville.
Then he heard a bird chirp in the maple tree to his left and he smiled. It was so hot in Marionville during August, even the birds didn’t chirp.
“Well, hell,” he said, “at least I’m not there.”
“Not where?” a voice asked in reply, and Nate started.
He whipped his head around to see that the man who’d been approaching on the sidewalk was standing beside him, smiling, a pencil-thin mustache perched under his small, sharp nose.
“Oh, nowhere,” he said to the man and smiled automatically — a friendly I-don’t-know-you-but-how-are-you-have-a-nice-day smile.
The man smiled back. He was a good head shorter than Nate and he beamed up at him with genuine — could it have been? — affection. Nate was tall, but the man was diminutive, only coming up to the bottom of Nate’s chest.
“Marionville,” the man said through his smile. His uneven but ultra white teeth flashed in the sun.
Nate turned to face the man full on. He gaped down, even as the man gazed up. The man rocked back on his penny loafers and chuckled softly.
“How did you know that?” Nate asked.
The man licked his thin, pale lips. “You’re Nathan Wells, the editor and publisher of the Atlanta Scribe. I recognize you from your headshot in the paper.”
Nate nodded, a little flattered but unsurprised. He wasn’t famous really, but people recognized him now and then. That still didn’t explain how the man knew he was thinking about Marionville just then.
“I remember a little editorial you wrote about how you grew up,” the small, smiling man continued. “First in Marionville, Georgia, then in Opelika, Alabama. Although the piece was a bit nostalgic, you didn’t paint the prettiest picture of Marionville. So, I figured if you were glad you weren’t somewhere, there was a fair chance that there was Marionville.”
Nate frowned and furrowed his eyebrows at the man. “Good guess,” he said.
Now the man laughed out loud. “Actually, it was an educated guess, and I should hope it was good — making good, educated guesses is what I do for a living.” The man shuffled back a step so that he could offer his hand to Nate and perform a little bow. “My name is Raymond Bernhardt. And now you’re wondering why I’m educated — even in the slightest — about Nathan Wells and his recently, dearly departed Atlanta Scribe.”
The Cast
- Nate Wells - Jay Elgin
- Raymond Bernhardt - Jeff Jarvis
- Narrator - Will Kenyon
Almost Finished With…
At this point, I consider myself a qualified success.
I make money by writing. I write every day. I’ve published short stories, poems, articles, and complete fodder in a number of national and international magazines. I maintain this blog, which is growing slightly in popularity every week. Toot, toot, toot my own horn.
Well….
I’ve never published a novel, which would probably be the largest achievement I could hope to muster at this point in my career. And it’s not that I haven’t WRITTEN any novels - I have, as you’ll soon learn - I just haven’t PUBLISHED one. And who knows IF I’ll publish one. All I know is that either later this week or early next, I will finish another one, and I think this one is the most publishable one I’ve written yet.
I finished my “first” novel in 2000. Some of you have read it. It was called The King of Karma, and it had a great premise and some moments of potential genius that I intend to recycle (Cat’s on fire…, the shit dream.) but I’ve looked at it with the jaded eyes of ten additional years of experience and I don’t think it’s ready for the world. It MIGHT be salvageable, but that would take a lot of work - work I’m not willing to give it right now. And frankly, I’m kind of sick of it. I edited the shit out of it for years and I don’t want to edit it anymore.
I chalk it up now to experience: writing Karma taught me how to write a novel, how to carry a narrative over 70,000 words, over 30 chapters, over 400 pages.
My “second” novel, The Survivor of San Guillermo (Get it? Saint William?) has just gotten out of hand. At first it was a shortish book - 55,000 words tops. But it’s a time travel novel, and different aspects of my version of time travel - the what ifs and why nots - planted seeds that made the novel start growing. At this point it’s 60,000 words + and has spilled into another book. I think it MIGHT become a trilogy or more - and I just don’t want it to dominate my life at this point. Publishing a trilogy is attractive, though, and the novel’s pretty good, so I won’t abandon it. But for now, there’s other fish to fry.
For instance, my “third” novel, the first quarter of which many of you have already read or listened to: A War Between States. This novel isn’t even finished - it’s a little over half done - but since I’m podcasting it, I feel compelled to finish it in the future. It looms large on the horizon. (BTW, expect a new podcast next week, after I get my buddy Jeff over to read the part of the leprechaun.)
Yes. I said leprechaun.
Anyway, all of this is just lead-in to what the main point of this post is: that I’m one chapter, two or three sittings, a handful of days away from finishing my ultimate achievement. My “fourth” novel idea, my third completed novel. And like I implied earlier - I am waaaaay enthusiastic at the prospects of this book.
On the phone with my friend Stephanie, and to my wife and mother, I have confessed something that I am certain was true: if I didn’t finish this book, tentatively titled Hood, I don’t think I would have ever attempted a novel again. This one has been a hard road, one I started in 2004, and unless I succeeded on finding the end of that road, I don’t think I’d have had the wherewithal to start the trek another time. But HEY!!! One more chapter and it’s done!
Already, I’ve started thinking about the query letter for the book - that’s how confident I am about finishing it (blogging about it this morning instead of working on it might also be an indication of my hubris). You should know that query letters are fucking hard to write - they have to be perfect, and it’s soooo hard to be perfect. But I’m actually looking forward to writing this one, because I know EXACTLY what I’m gonna say.
And now you’re wondering what this book’s about. Or at least I hope you are.
MAYBE I’ll publish the query letter here once I finish it. We’ll see. For now, here’s a quick soundbite:
The novel tentatively titled Hood tells the story of a group of graffiti artists in south Atlanta, one of whom discovers that his murals, drawings, and tags are coming to life - and that he’s part of a small group of people in the world who have similar abilities and who can travel “between worlds.”
Enough. I’m done. It’s 9 in the morning and I have to take my son to school. When I get back, I’ll put pen to paper and get a little closer to finishing….
Excitement! (Excuses?)
Busy Busy Busy
I gotta post something, right? I gotta keep fresh material coming at you or else you’ll go elsewhere for your thrice weekly dose of “cussin’” and poetry and drunken diatribes. So here’s a post - and this one’s just a sort of update on something really cool that’s happening in Kenyon world.
You don’t know this (well, some of you do), but I’ve written 2 novels and 2 pieces of 2 more. One novel - King of Karma - though it has good parts in it, is on the whole unpublishable - a learning experience from years back. Another novel - San Guillermo - is complete, but it’s part of a growing narrative that I’ll work on, I promise, once I publish a “standalone”. You guys are reading and listening to one of the unfinished novels - A War Between States, which by the way I should have another installent of next week.
Which brings us to the unfinished work with the working title Hood. Right now, I’m exactly 6 chapters away from finishing Hood, and so you gotta understand: finishing that book, which has taken me 4 years to write (having kids slowed me down, plus I sort of got “lost” in it for a while), is PRIORITY NUMBER ONE. I like what I’m doing with this site, but if I don’t finish this novel - whether I get it published or not - I don’t think I’ll ever be able to write a novel again. And that would be a blow to me as a writer.
So bear with me. There’s still a lot of material out there for me to present to you - it’s just gonna come in dribs and drabs over the next 2 or 3 weeks while I burn up the final pages of this book.
And if you wanna read the book after it’s finished, that can be arranged.
Oh, and if you’re an agent or publisher and you’re interested in an “Urban Horror Fantasy” and you like what you see at this site and think my style might translate well to that sort of thing, drop me a line.
Heh.
The Publishing Industry is Dead! Long Live the Publishing Industry!
“If any industry deserves to go under, it’s the publishing industry.”
- Andrew Sullivan, award-winning blogger and journalist
THAT, ladies in gentlemen, is the kind of incendiary, I-may-not-have-all-the-facts-straight-but-what-the-fuck-here-goes shit that I WISH I had the balls to write.
Alas, though, Andrew Sullivan has won an award for his blogging, and I have not. He, and not I, can get away with saying stuff like that (OK, not quite – he’s been called to the carpet a couple of times for it).
What he said, though – what a LOT of people have been saying – and some of the things I’ve personally been feeling lately about the publishing industry prompted me to try and write about it all. So I started doing research about the shortcomings in said industry, especially against the backdrop of our growing recession. And you know what I found out?
I found out that there are a lot of conflicting views regarding publishing. Some – many of them disgruntled writers and the like – think that publishing is doomed should it continue on its current track. Others – mostly industry insiders – think it’s doing just fine, even if traditional bookstores are closing and the acceptance of innovations like E-books and Print-On-Demand has been slow in catching on.
I read so much conflicting information that I almost – ALMOST – gave up on this post. Fuck it – I still have Netflix DVDs to watch, and there’s beer in the fridge.
But then I thought, hang on a sec, Will: the original impetus behind wanting to write this post was to take a look at how the “little man” i.e. YOU, fits in to the changing world of publishing.
So how do I fit in? How does any of us? And if for some Godforsaken reason Stephen King or Dan Brown are reading this blog post, then you gotta know that I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about the grad student with the next Grapes of Wrath already written who isn’t going to get it published because no one in Hollywood can figure out how to make a movie out of his book. I’m talking about the unpublished or little-published writers out there.
It would be easy for us to sit back and lament about how hard things are, how unfortunate we are to be the ones trying to disseminate our writing into the world in an era when everyone’s looking to score the next Harry Potter or DaVinci Code , an era when 95% of books actually LOSE money. That, BTW, is one of the few factoids I found several people agreeing on – although it scares the shit out of me to believe it, it DOES help make my point.
It would be easy to lament because the old school model of publishing, at least to the common writer, is a lot like playing the lottery.
It would be easy except for one thing – the thing you’re looking at right now, the thing which has changed all the rules for just about every artistic medium imaginable, the thing which I believe scares the EVERLOVING shit out of the people who are or formerly were in control of those mediums:
The Internet.
Years ago, I resisted the idea of publishing online. I felt, and rightly so I think, that because of the ease and immediacy of online publishing, there was a lack of legitimacy – a problem a lot of people expressed. With no safeguard to keep shitty writers from pitching their wares, how were we to know what’s good and what’s utter garbage? I felt that by publishing the old-fashioned way, I added legitimacy to my work.
But you know what? The safeguards have failed us. There’s a lot of utter garbage hitting the shelves anyway, for a variety of reasons: 1) we as Americans haven’t stopped reading, but we’ve become less discriminating readers 2) with the right marketing, certain writers could poop on a piece of paper and sell a million copies and 3) there’s always the possibility of said garbage getting optioned for a screenplay, so it gets by.
Also, I realized that there IS a form of legitimization to writing online. If you’re good, people will return to you time and again. If you suck, they won’t. Simple as that.
On the Internet, it is almost invariably true that the cream rises and the shit sinks, which is not the case with traditional publishing. It took a while, in fact, but even the antiquated publishing industry is catching on to the concept: I hear more and more stories of authors making it big (or at least somewhat big) by starting out online and gaining momentum. They market themselves well, and/or they write well, and what they’re doing grows and grows until somebody with some bucks takes notice and BAM!!!
So now I still feel uneasy about the state of publishing, and I think that anyone would be a fool to deny that it is indeed in a state of flux, mostly brought on by errors in judgment and the advent of the Internet.
But I’m also excited and encouraged. I read these success stories more and more, and I believe I’m seeing one take place before my very eyes (see my previous post). That excitement is a significant reason behind me “jumpstarting” this web site after letting it lie dormant for over a year.
Now, if you’ve read this far, enjoyed yourself, and maybe gained some insight, look out: you’re legitimizing me.
And I thank you for it.