Blue Day, Bitch! Get Over It!

Some days are like this. It’s been like this all my life. What’s that smiling picture doing to my right? I started life as a smart-ass. Continued that way for some time. Never really know when to stop. You evolve into a know-it-all, or got-to-tell-you-my-story. Told myself that’s because I was smart. Bitched about anything in life that wasn’t fair. Never stupid people. However… ignorant people, mean-spirited people, people who hurt children and animals, people who hurt anyone for that matter. Laws that didn’t and still don’t make sense. Disparity between the rich and the poor. Starving people. Super rich people. Extremists of any kind.

Life wasn’t fair and it was hard to make a living–so I struck out like a bitch and fought like a bitch to get here. Then, here got tedious and I moaned. I moaned. I moaned. There seemed to be more excitement as a smart-ass. Now, I have a smart-ass of my own (that means he’s smart) and I know why some people tolerated me–barely. Moaning, I found, was status quo–almost no struggle, but no striving either. That was my fault I suppose. Then, I got lucky for the second time; I think the smart-ass in me helped, but I was getting legitimately smarter, too. Moaning set in again. My fault again. Some days there’s groaning. That’s worse than moaning. Life and I are growing tired. Having a blue day.

When you’re young you make life. You take it, explore it, have fun with it. I suppose I did that, too, when I wasn’t bitching, moaning or groaning. The answer is: don’t bitch, moan and groan your life away, and don’t be a smart-ass because you’ll lose your place in line of living that life.

In case, you’re all wondering what the hell am I doing! I’m doing my version of some blogs I see. These are the dark ones. The light ones dance on flowers, butterflies and clouds. Feeling odd today, trying to figure things out. Humans are funny that way. Philosophers have done it for a millennium, but they had better words.

How about a piece of Harry’s Reality to cheer us up? Maybe later.

A Piece of Harry’s Reality

To tantalize the more hard-core SF enthusiasts. HARRY’S REALITY isn’t just about Harry Bolls. Enjoy now. Buy later. 🙂

“Captain Montoya froze in place, jarred by the startling blast that had ripped his little brother and the other Runner into millions of unrecognizable pieces, their flesh, blood and bones lost forever. Although drugged with enough adrenaline to return fire at Makr himself, his body was powerless while his mind raced. They have always had more time! With his eyes welling full of tears and his throat choked tight by emotion, he vowed revenge, promising to destroy every damned cybert, every damned machine he found on the planet!

“Damn you, Makr! Carlos screamed inside himself because he couldn’t come out of his Shadow. Damn you!

“His body twitched, his state of mind causing a tell-tale flicker of the image left by his Stealth disguise. Hopefully, no one or thing was looking.

“He had to regain his bearing. Breathe. Breathe, he ordered himself. Still, his body language gave him away, revealing that something was wrong. He felt the shock; his stomach churned. In the clichéd fleeting calm before the storm, he accepted the responsibility for a fatal error of judgment as a sole tear dropped from his left eye.

“Meanwhile, the Cyber protector’s head whirled round 360 degrees, making an eerie high-pitched whining sound as it assessed the scene fully. As its sensors located additional Bio targets, two more arms plunged forward from mid-torso and fired waves of pure energy into the darkened alleyways. The force of the astonishing wavefire missed its intended target, destroying instead part of a building. Huge chunks of concrete and steel littered the alleyway and the main street along with interior debris and minute unidentifiable remains of the tenants who occupied that part of the building.

“Missing its target sent the Blue Leader’s artificial brain an error message that made it pause a microsecond as it searched for a repair module in its program. The Bio resistance fighters are not where they were predicted to be. The cybert tweaked and adjusted its response to the data, and fired again. Missed again. It was time to use the heavy artillery. With it, the cybert could easily destroy entire buildings and insignificant residents just to get at the Bios who attacked its formation.

“If Shadow timing was off, it would be over for those inside the nearest buildings.

“It was now or never. Carlos gave the sign.

“Shields! His command was silent but the meaning of the gesture was clear. With the flick of his wrist, the four-inch long leather-like bracelet covering his forearm expanded and completely enveloped his fragile biological body with a nearly impenetrable shell. The shield covered his Stealth cloak totally, creating a two-dimensional, irregular oblong-shaped Shadow, as if tar melted or oil spilled on the pavement.

“The other Shadows lifted their wrist guards in a close-fisted salute and glided to a prone position on the ground. The leather-like armor plate expanded, at first becoming a coffin-shaped basin with rounded edges, and then seamlessly melted into the background texture of the street and alleyway, giving the barely perceptible appearance of a shadow falling on black pavement. With the shield’s heat disbursement feature like the Stealth cloak, the Shadows become virtually invisible to Cyber receptors.

“Composite material made from cybert scrap armor make the shields tougher, more resilient, and a hundred times lighter than steel. Used properly, the shields can deflect the explosive force of a wave grenade, or a laser blast, or, in their strongest position—lying flat on the ground—the lightning-like energy bolt from a disintegrator. Unfortunately, human individual differences affect this situation. An energy bolt knocked the Shadow force down and scattered them before all the shields were fully formed.

“Marta Rosienska positioned herself and her shield correctly for a lesser blast, protecting her upper body and head; but that was her fatal mistake. The force of the energy bolt was too direct for her shield to withstand—even angled and anchored properly. Her body slammed hard against the shields of others who were already falling back and anchoring as they hit the asphalt; her lifeless body ricocheted upward and back about fifteen yards to where the alley turned. Two rear action Shadow guards saw her body crushed into a bloody mess of bones and flesh as it crashed into the stone building.”

Publishers’ Block

I have been carrying around in my head what I think will be my most exciting novel to date for nearly a couple of years now. I have missed exits on the highway, been oblivious when someone asks me a question and stayed up watching television way too long in order to avoid writing the novel. However, what sounds like writers’ block, is not; it’s something else. I’m writing alright, but in my head. Everyone’s answer is to record my thoughts. I don’t need to do that. I create in my mind and on the keyboard. I get this way as I fill out new or refined scenes and characters in my head. I’m one of those writers who starts with some pertinent, often inspiring research, but gets most of the story in my head before taking on the major research necessary to complete the work. For awhile, I thought it was Writer’s Block, common enough to most writers, but I’m sure it’s not.

It’s more Publishers’ Block. With the arrival of ebooks and ereaders on the scene, the whole writing and publishing world has been turned upside down. Therein lies my conflict. I’m a latecomer to this novel writing business, having started writing and publishing early, stopping and then working for thirty years, I feel a bit like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.‘s “Slaughterhouse Five” in that I, too, have become “unstuck in time.” There’s a dreamer in me that wants to go back in time to continue what I started when I knew the rules, and another pragmatic me that wants to remain grounded and sally forth.

Of course, the literary me would to tell you, I was inspired by Kurt Vonnegut, whose novel “Slaughterhouse-Five” is regarded as the 18th greatest book in the 20th century by Modern Library and is considered by most literary critics as his best and most influential work.  Just as Billy becomes “unstuck in time,” Harry in my novel, Harry’s Reality, becomes unstuck in reality. Other than that, there are no other similarities I can think of at the moment. If you read the book and find some let me know. Maybe something stuck from the Vonnegut seminar I took in college. Interestingly enough, my professor and I argued whether Vonnegut wrote mainstream fiction or science fiction.

While I, in private, agreed he was a mainstream writer (as he himself proclaimed, which is probably why I took my stand), I wrote a major paper, taking each one of his novels we read for the class and applied science fiction definitions. As you know, science fiction definitions do vary and the use of science or technology as a subject in some of the more liberal definitions makes it fairly easy to make most books to have at least elements of science fiction. “Slaughterhouse-Five” had time travel, for example. I got my “A” and the professor and I agreed to disagree. At that time, we read all of Vonnegut’s books to date, which ended with “Breakfast of Champions.”

When you read a Vonnegut book, it seems almost simplistic. He spares words like Hemingway and Steinbeck. I tend to overwrite and whittle down. I don’t know maybe they did, too. Vonnegut’s (and Steinbeck’s for that matter) works would be perfect e-novel material. Short and to the point, but I doubt they would have received the critical success and “Slaughterhouse-Five” would never have been named 18th out of a 100 of the greatest books of the 20th Century. I guess that might be happening in an alternate universe.

Today as a writer it’s difficult to figure out the path to publishing, or better yet the path to literary recognition. Hopefully, some writers will still bother to take the time to write, not only creative entertainment, but books that are influential. You might say it’s too easy to get published today, and too hard to get published the right way.

As to where I stand on a literary note. All my life I wanted to be a genre writer. Then, I became involved in theatre. Plays (and some films) often have several layers of meaning and leave you thinking at the end, or breathless. With a novel, you can keep people thinking as they come back to re-read a paragraph to take it in again. I don’t think writing has to be dull to be literary, nor do I think it has to be so far out of the realm of reality, light years and/or billions of miles in space to be interesting. But, then, anything done badly doesn’t work at all.

A Waste of Air

Everyone’s reality can be a story. Everyone’s story is their reality. We all can be part of the reality, but not all part of the story.

Two films I saw recently suggest how we all experience different realities in our lives. These films also provide evidence that nothing is black and white. Of course, the reviews of the films won’t talk about realities and I won’t talk about the reviews. INHALE was the first movie to get my attention. Dermot Mulrooney stars as a lawyer/father who goes to Mexico desperately searching for a doctor to find a way to buy lungs for his dying daughter. Reality, in this case, means socio-economic-politico environment. The reality in the U.S. is far different than it is in Mexico, and he finds his choice is easier to make, whether we agree or not. It’s his story. It’s an excellent movie with people struggling with their own realities of the world they live in.

Next, came a British film with Emily Watson called ORANGES AND SUNSHINE. Watson plays Margaret, a social worker in the 80’s, who is approached on the street by a woman from Australia who has come looking for her “mum.” She had been “orphaned” when she was four, told her mother was dead and shipped off to Australia. The social worker finds out there are no records of ships transporting children in either Great Britain or Australia. That being the case, this situation amounts to illegal deportation.

Apparently, the children were offered “oranges and sunshine” to coax them to get on the ship calmly. Hence, the title. Often the children were told their parents were dead when society had merely deemed their parents unfit then. This was especially true for those children of single parents since it was practically criminal to be an unwed mother. Margaret discovers thousands of children who were a “burden” on the social system were shipped out to the colonies and “provided as slave labor.” She hears the “children’s” (all grown by now) stories, some hard to listen to, as she seeks to help them find family–especially mothers. Here, reality is represented by the stories of lives so hard, some abused mentally and/or physically and/or sexually, and all missing family members. Although Margaret is making a difference for some of the “children” and in telling the world their story, the reality of the others is wearing on her and her family to the point she develops symptoms of PTSD. It is not until she accepts her part in the “children’s” present and past reality that she able to continue her work.

By the way, 130,000 children were deported illegally from 1941 to the 1970s and the British Prime Minister in 2008 finally apologized for it. On the government’s part, that is appalling and surreal in itself. “All they want from you is to know who they are!” They want to know their whole story.

In Harry’s Reality, there is a complete and total fantasy that masquerades as reality, and the reality the illusion is hiding is so stark that it seems unreal to be almost unbelievable to those who see it or live in it.

With your help, I’d like to explore some of those moments in between our realities, where we can’t believe it’s happening–it’s surreal. As an actor I’ve explored the imagined world of many a character as I tried to give that character a life. I’d like to think there is some of me in every character I have played. I think every actor should feel that way about his craft or something is wrong. As a social psychologist, I look at individuals alone and groups interacting among themselves, and their environments. As an actor I was always part method and part psychological in figuring out my character; in essence, I psychoanalyzed my characters. Okay, I hated improvisation. Do you suppose I’m too grounded?

You would think it would be the training or speaking business world or the government work in particular where I was most staid or settled; however, it is in these environments, where I was the most unsettled. I had to act the most–put on my best show of being like everyone else; it was where I found the most nut-jobs, and where I had to use the most creativity. Being involved in the theatre and using psychology to study people always stimulated me. Doing what I had to do to make a living stultified me. Truly, there is such a word. It means “to make one feel ridiculous or stupid or a waste of air” or words to that effect. So, I’ve decided never to be stultified again. You with me!

Tell me what you think. What’s your reality? Your story.

Battle Between the Lines…

I could really piss someone off with this post. To admit, not doing it, makes a person sound dumb. It being “reading between the lines.” It’s not rocket science, to plug a cliché, most us learned to do it in school, then promptly forgot it. Now, we don’t know when we do it. We know when something we read or see, when someone is telling us something, but that’s not all there is to it… Truth is I’m not so sure anyone literally does read between the lines anymore, except for a few college students who have to in English class.

So, when it comes to books, I was appalled to read a novelist write trying to sell his book say: “This ain’t literature.” Sure enough, I’m sure it wasn’t. So, no deeper than that!  No reading for something beyond the obvious.

Does anyone read between the lines of the written word? I suppose some do, but probably without thinking. And, I have to do battle with those who say, “What’s wrong with plain entertainment?” Nothing, but don’t sit there and wonder why no one is taking your writing seriously any more than they take a bang-bang-shoot-’em-up-blow-’em-up film. Okay, well, maybe Tarantino’s because he invented his own bizarre brand of violence and vulgarity in film. I’m talking specifically about e-books here. Anyone can publish them, anyone can market them, and anyone can easily find a distributor.

There are places where it is still important to “read between the lines.” In acting, it is essential to do so, otherwise, you’ll never understand your character or a scene. In public speaking, you have to read an audience without lines; so, here you have to do more than read lines. We assume nothing is unimportant.

Writing e-novels without a purpose other than to entertain, makes it no better than “hack” writing. Hollywood does that. It used to be an insult to called a “hack.” That was a writer who wrote for the cheap shot. In this case, I’d say it’s the guy who writes a “western” story taking place in space or so far in the future so he can call it science fiction and e-publishes because he is accountable to no one. If no one reads it, no harm done.

Harm is done. Harm is done to all the hardworking serious writers of e-books. To those folks, I say, read on, and please make a point with your stories. Stories with nothing to say, that are perhaps unusual or seems on the surface to be the kinds of books we usually buy until we try to read them do e-novels more harm than good. I remember as a kid having to read any kind of literature, but as I grew up I began to see it–the importance of reading between the lines. As a critic of both literature and drama, I see that the best have more than one layer of  meaning; you may not get it the first time you read the book or the first time you see the play, but that’s the beauty of it. Layers and reading between the lines to discover them. The novel or play is so much richer. The lack of which is why publishers, agents and reviewers don’t take e-books seriously as a matter of course. Wouldn’t it be nice if your e-novel stood just as much of a chance of being made into a decent movie as those books on shelves? Not much plot in your book? Hell, just make a point. Make it say something different.

A special note to those who know me personally and I guess those who don’t will learn my intentions here. I who have lived a varied existence most recently being involved in theatre and training as well as writing, I am shutting down my training and speaking business page and using this as my Writer’s Page. I received many good offers to train or speak especially overseas, but at this time in my life I want to concentrate on writing. I will continue to write theatre reviews as they come up, host my international training and development blog, and teach public speaking or English/theatre part-time. I haven’t changed the Acting Smarts page here yet if you’d like to see some of my background. This is still a work in progress. At present I have e-published my best seller, The Cave Man’s Guide to Training and Development, two books on theatre, and my novel, Harry’s Reality. In Harry’s Reality, the 90% live in a fantasy world, the 10% live in the real world, and 1% of that 10%, feared by everyone, is at war the artificial intelligence that runs the planet.

Questions and Comments are certainly welcome.

Confession of a Reading Snob

I never thought I’d say this, but I must confess I am a reading snob. And, I agree with every other e-book writer out here. I admit to having published not one, but four books digitally. And, one of them is a novel. There is nothing on paper unless I print on demand.

There is snobbery in the publishing business. Always has been–always will. They will always lean toward the blockbuster sure thing. However, that snobbery is not just in the publishing of a new writer, who in the end self-publishes, but there’s a kind of snobbery that comes with taking up an e-book for the first time and reading it.

My wife is not one of those people; she doesn’t see the need to keep books. She’s had two or three different e-readers. Me? Keep me out of book stores, library sales, etc. I’d always come home with several books. My dilemma  was not how I was going to publish it more along the line of figuring out if already had this book at home. I wrestled long and hard with notion of even reading a book I couldn’t put on a shelf others could see. So, I was the snob.

Then, I wrote a novel. Got an agent who quit being an agent, and went back to writing. Got another agent who dropped out altogether and another (I don’t know what happened to him). For some reason, having nothing to do with my book, I seemed to have bad luck with agents.

Since my novel is science fiction, I sent the manuscript directly to the big science fiction publishing houses and was gently rejected, but one sent me a nice handwritten note about a page in length that really just said to keep writing and that hard science fiction and fantasy was the “dish of the day.” My novel is not hard science fiction. Technically, it is a dystopian novel with a sense of humor. Ironically, I’ve made so many changes recently to update the technology in it…

I had to publish quickly or the technology of today would overwhelm the technology in my book. It would be like writing a novel that took place in today, but there was only 1970’s technology in evidence. So, that meant self-publishing. For various reason, financial being one, I decided to publish it as an e-book. There was a learning curve. Still is. I began reading e-books, but only those written by the masters I already read in paper. I felt like a traitor. I wasn’t really. I was just a snob, a reading snob. Then, I had to broaden my list of writers because I would finish a book before the next one came out. I found myself struggling to find authors to read. Sometimes I would re-read a book; when it was on one my bookshelves, it was easier to tell if I had already read it or not, but in the e-book library, not so easy.

But then it happened. I found some free e-books and started reading them, too. If I didn’t like what I read, I deleted it. It was harder to actually throw away a hard copy. Mostly mentally. Honestly, some of the e-books weren’t as good as the best sellers, but I didn’t expect them to be, and I suspect it is because they may not have been as researched as much, copy edited as much, or have support and feedback of a major publisher. The e-book writers convince themselves that they are good enough to have been published by the major print players, but the world isn’t ready for them yet, or their story is out of sync (my particular favorite) with the market.

I read e-books now. So, I guess, I’m an equal opportunity snob. Don’t you love it when you ask someone why he or she doesn’t read e-books and the answer is: “I like the feel of paper when I read.” It sounds a bit perverted. Meanwhile, I’m trying to decide if I want to publish with Smashwords again or go with Amazon KDP. I think I’ll go with Amazon; they have a better mainstream reputation. I wish it were different, but it’s not.

The more you read e-books, the more likely it is that e-book authors will become more respectable. I don’t want paper published books to go away, but I do wish our youth would read more. I don’t care what format it’s in. Studies say we aren’t reading for entertainment anymore; however, gone with that also go one of the ways of developing and nourishing an interest in exploring the real world.

So, if you read e-books, regularly, and not just the blockbuster writers, maybe the big guys will give the new, little guys a chance. The big guys were quick to start e-publishing as soon as the e-readers became available. They couldn’t afford the revenue lost to digital books, but e-books, in fact, have not made a dent in the publishing empire; it is a corporate world after all. I have read some bad e-novels that were not my choice of a good read, but I also have read some that surprised and fascinated me.