This last spring, I was discussing the Portland dilemma with a writing friend of mine.  Being in a town without much of a corporate presence, with tons of creatives, is awesome, until the moment you need money.  For mid-level writers such as myself, it's a disaster.  The physical distance from the publishing hubs makes it hard to sell your work.  Our sheer numbers make it impossible to get teaching jobs.  And all the freelance writing gigs are in other towns.

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Two weeks ago, I posted an entry entitled On the Wearing of Hats, Part 1, in which I discussed the raison d'être for my daily wearing of a shit-brown-colored truckers' hat.  The entry sounded noble, but missed the entire point of my wanting to write it in the first place, which wasn't to explain why I wear the hat, but rather to talk about the strangeness that has crept upon me ever since I took to wearing it.
   
I was born and raised in Irving, Texas, a giant, sprawling suburb of Dallas, Texas, whose claim to fame, something emblazoned in huge signs as you entered the city limits on any of its major freeways, was that it was the home of the Dallas Cowboys.
   
From my earliest recollections, I hated it.  read more »

Every morning for the last couple of years, not long after I get out of bed and look in the mirror, observing that, yes, it is indeed another bad hair day, I have slipped on my head a trucker's hat that reads, in shit-brown lettering, Stop 'N Shop, Leland, MISS.

The mesh on the hat is a particularly unusual shade whose color I can only describe as swamp--its original shit-brown, in coordination with the screen-printed lettering, having greened from overexposure to the sun. The green is sort of iridescent, like a fly. The foam front of the hat is a fleshy tan. The bill is more of the shit-brown, creased from much use.

If one knows me, one would immediately look at the hat and assume that sort of irony that my particular generation is known for. I am not a trucker. I will never be a trucker. In fact, by wearing a particularly ugly gimme cap that even a trucker might eschew, I am somewhat making fun of truckers, which makes me a sort of passive-aggressive prick, another trait my generation is known for.
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What struck me the most about it, was that as you read it, not once is there a single moment where Murakami enjoys running, at least in the traditional sense where you have a big smile on your face while you're doing something. The entire book is about pain management and self-discipline, which sounds terribly dry and unenjoyable. It's also a book about failure, about the countless events Murakami enters and doesn't do quite as well as expected.  read more »

Whenever I bring chapters from my novel-in-progress to my workshop group, the group inevitably wants to cut out the first two paragraphs, and sometimes more, of the pages I bring in.  I always see where they're coming from: as an episode, the chapter would have more immediacy without the quick summaries of what characters do while time elapses, before the scene begins.  Yet when I think about the novel as a whole, I wonder if something human would get lost if I wrote it episodically, in this filmic, stay-with-the-action manner.  read more »

No, this is not a diatribe about the Bush Administration, although the fact that the years coincide is not entirely coincidental. This is about my personal failure, about the incredible waste of time that has been my writing life from the autumn of 2000 to the present.

I don't want your pity for this. I'm not going Morrissey. I am depressed about it, but the depression is tempered with realism, with the bare facts. I've produced nothing publishable in eight years, despite constantly being at work.  read more »

Yesterday evening, I had the occasion to sit next to a very prolific, well-published NW fiction writer.  He had with him a classic book written for girls, which, given his tough-guy reputation, one would not expect him to have.  I asked him what the book was for.  He said, "Oh, it's the structure of my next novel."  read more »

I have an Internet addiction.  In fact, I wrote an entire novel about Internet addiction.  You would think, after several years, I would have developed the proper coping mechanism for said addiction, but alas, I have not.

And so, during a particularly devastating period of writers' block, in which procrastination levels, and thus Web surfing, were redlining, I bought a precision screwdriver set and played a game of Operation with my laptop.  read more »

My former advisor and good friend, Lewis Buzbee, who authored a much acclaimed book of essays about bookstores, called The Yellow Lighted Bookshop, likes to tell the story of a lunch he had with Ray Bradbury, back when Buzbee was a college freshman.  A few interested students were invited to dine with Mr. Bradbury after a reading he gave at UCSB, Buzbee among them.  After they were finished, the rest of the students scampered off, leaving Buzbee alone with the author.
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Not too long ago, in places like London and Paris, books weren't merely entertainment, but also a way to make a record of a place and a time.  Local writers were revered because of this—they were writing history—and Londoners and Parisians kept up with their writers' work, and felt, in some way, that their lives had more meaning because they kept these writers around. 

These days, not so much.

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