Dear Reader,
Wonderful news today, my first novel Time of Death has found a home! On January 19th I received word from Five Star Publishing that they would be purchasing my manuscript.
Writing is a funny business. You spend your time laboring away over the keyboard – pounding away at the keys and burning up synapses to create what you believe is a great story, you edit heartily to prune everything up into a presentable shape, and then you send your work off firmly believing you will be rejected. In no other business is the performer so convinced that all their efforts will come to naught. Yet we keep going.
Perhaps being a writer is a form of insanity – it’s worth considering. Unfortunately, as soon as you’ve come to the decision that you’re crazy you sell a piece and the whole cycle of insanity is revived.
Now I wait for contact from the publisher. Probably an editor who will help me with further pruning and shaping – it’s the hard part of the job, the part that isn’t fun. In the end, though, what comes out will be tighter, better written, and more pleasurable to read. I once attended a writer’s conference where Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale. She said something at that conference that has stuck with me, “If you sell a novel you’ll start editing – by the time you finish editing you will hate your novel.”
I hope I don’t wind up hating it – I put a lot of work into it to hate what I created!
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Sunday, January 17, 2010
More Airports, More Transition
Dear Reader,
Traveling seems to be my obsession lately. Maybe it’s a part of the general unrest that’s become my work life lately. With insecurity surely must come unrest and there’s nothing more restless than the modern airport. It’s a place of transience, a hallway between two states.
The first state is physical – you are traveling and that, reasonably, entails moving from one place to another. As I sit at the terminal, waiting for my flight, I watch dusty travelers bound for destinations across the country and around the world. There are the vanquished fans of the visiting football team, the road-weary business travelers heading for the next corporate call, and then there is the endless stream of bleary-eyed refugees. Even the flight crews are just passing through – either on their way to their next plane or home for a little sleep before taking off again.
The transition is more than physical, though. When I step through the doors and walk into the ticketing level of IND, my mental attitude changes. I’ve long lauded the ‘old fashion’ concept of air travel – the days when boarding a plane and was part of the enjoyment of traveling. There’s something lovely and nostalgic about pictures of stewardesses with little airline hats pushing carts of complementary comfort items down the broad aisle between rows of seats and travelers who dressed (jacket and tie and a nice dress for the ladies) to travel. Merely going from ticketing area to terminal destroys that image – the process is something like passing through a Star Trek transporter where you are disassembled molecule by molecule and reassembled on the other side of the x-ray machines. No amount of nostalgia can survive such a trip – its hard enough to maintain your dignity.
Security isn’t the problem. I don’t think you could find a single person who’d like to reduce airport security to the level that would allow crazies with exploding underwear to board of their own volition. Personally, I believe the blame for the death of pleasurable air travel on a variety of factors. Airports have become ticket kiosks attached to low quality, over priced strip malls. Airlines no longer have to provide service. Unless flying first class and on a luxury carrier the traveler is considered an irritating inconvenience instead of a customer. The airlines have strangled the service they provide down to the utter minimum and shoehorned as many travelers as possible into the smallest amount of space. And, unfortunately, I’m sure that it only will get worse until the air travel industry is forced to reinvent itself.
So, I sit here at terminal B7 waiting for my flight to Dallas. It isn’t dawn outside and when I look out the cantilevered windows I only see the lights of the waking city, the blinking indicators of the runways, and my own reflection. Everything else is uncertainty, a dark canvas to be filled in by the light that time will bring. After tomorrow I may have a secure future, a great new job, and an assurance that my life can move forward in some trajectory that resembles what I’d hoped for before the Great Economic Decline. Then again, maybe there’s only more uncertainty out there – another airport and more waiting and wondering.
Traveling seems to be my obsession lately. Maybe it’s a part of the general unrest that’s become my work life lately. With insecurity surely must come unrest and there’s nothing more restless than the modern airport. It’s a place of transience, a hallway between two states.
The first state is physical – you are traveling and that, reasonably, entails moving from one place to another. As I sit at the terminal, waiting for my flight, I watch dusty travelers bound for destinations across the country and around the world. There are the vanquished fans of the visiting football team, the road-weary business travelers heading for the next corporate call, and then there is the endless stream of bleary-eyed refugees. Even the flight crews are just passing through – either on their way to their next plane or home for a little sleep before taking off again.
The transition is more than physical, though. When I step through the doors and walk into the ticketing level of IND, my mental attitude changes. I’ve long lauded the ‘old fashion’ concept of air travel – the days when boarding a plane and was part of the enjoyment of traveling. There’s something lovely and nostalgic about pictures of stewardesses with little airline hats pushing carts of complementary comfort items down the broad aisle between rows of seats and travelers who dressed (jacket and tie and a nice dress for the ladies) to travel. Merely going from ticketing area to terminal destroys that image – the process is something like passing through a Star Trek transporter where you are disassembled molecule by molecule and reassembled on the other side of the x-ray machines. No amount of nostalgia can survive such a trip – its hard enough to maintain your dignity.
Security isn’t the problem. I don’t think you could find a single person who’d like to reduce airport security to the level that would allow crazies with exploding underwear to board of their own volition. Personally, I believe the blame for the death of pleasurable air travel on a variety of factors. Airports have become ticket kiosks attached to low quality, over priced strip malls. Airlines no longer have to provide service. Unless flying first class and on a luxury carrier the traveler is considered an irritating inconvenience instead of a customer. The airlines have strangled the service they provide down to the utter minimum and shoehorned as many travelers as possible into the smallest amount of space. And, unfortunately, I’m sure that it only will get worse until the air travel industry is forced to reinvent itself.
So, I sit here at terminal B7 waiting for my flight to Dallas. It isn’t dawn outside and when I look out the cantilevered windows I only see the lights of the waking city, the blinking indicators of the runways, and my own reflection. Everything else is uncertainty, a dark canvas to be filled in by the light that time will bring. After tomorrow I may have a secure future, a great new job, and an assurance that my life can move forward in some trajectory that resembles what I’d hoped for before the Great Economic Decline. Then again, maybe there’s only more uncertainty out there – another airport and more waiting and wondering.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Correction
Dear Reader,
All of us make mistakes and I believe the best thing we can do when we recognize a mistake is to own that error. To that end, I have an error to admit. It isn't a tragic one. It isn't a substantial one. Instead its one of those bungles of the brain - the type where you deftly explain your reasoning and conclusions only to realize much later that you didn't have the question quite right.
Yesterday, when I wrote about traveling by train, I made a bit of a mistake on the fare information. In actuality, the price for travelling by train with a bedroom works out to be over $600 round trip. I neglected to include a return trip in my original estimated price. I also realized that the comparison wasn't exactly of the old apples vs. apples variety - my plane ticket was coach and my train estimates were definitely first class. To rectify this I performed a quick fare estimate with Delta Airlines for a flight leaving on November 8, 2009 and returning November 11, 2009 and I came up with a cost of $1100.00 round trip. Also I didn't realize that meals are included with your fare when you book a bedroom with your train trip.
What it comes down to is you're buying time when you fly. If time is what you need (or something you don't have to spare) air travel is your bag. If you have time for a more gentile trip (and its within your budget) I recommend the train.
Yours Most Sincerely
- G
All of us make mistakes and I believe the best thing we can do when we recognize a mistake is to own that error. To that end, I have an error to admit. It isn't a tragic one. It isn't a substantial one. Instead its one of those bungles of the brain - the type where you deftly explain your reasoning and conclusions only to realize much later that you didn't have the question quite right.
Yesterday, when I wrote about traveling by train, I made a bit of a mistake on the fare information. In actuality, the price for travelling by train with a bedroom works out to be over $600 round trip. I neglected to include a return trip in my original estimated price. I also realized that the comparison wasn't exactly of the old apples vs. apples variety - my plane ticket was coach and my train estimates were definitely first class. To rectify this I performed a quick fare estimate with Delta Airlines for a flight leaving on November 8, 2009 and returning November 11, 2009 and I came up with a cost of $1100.00 round trip. Also I didn't realize that meals are included with your fare when you book a bedroom with your train trip.
What it comes down to is you're buying time when you fly. If time is what you need (or something you don't have to spare) air travel is your bag. If you have time for a more gentile trip (and its within your budget) I recommend the train.
Yours Most Sincerely
- G
Friday, October 23, 2009
An Addendum on Traveling
Dear Reader,
This morning, after a short nap of nine hours, I had an opportunity to read my last missive about traveling. I think it could best be described as downtrodden. Maybe spending too much time alone in a hotel room is apt to put anyone in a bleak kind of mood - that is unless it's a hotel on some sun-blessed shore with good music and warm starry nights. Then again, I guess if you're in your room long enough instead of out somewhere dancing and enjoying good company, well you'd probably be depressed in Bali Hai. I guess the point is, I don't want to come down on the wrong side of travelling because I really like to travel. Well, at least somewhat.
It seems at the moment travelling has kind of run down hill and, at the moment, is lying in a ditch waiting for an ambulance to arrive. I'm old enough to remember a time before the major airlines started knocking on congress' door with a cup and cart of apples, so I remember a time before the airlines cut costs by eliminating service. Ah, yes, the times before every plane was packed to the overhead bins, before passengers and ungulates had a shared understanding of the trip to the slaughterhouse. At present there are two trips a day from Indianapolis International Airport to Dulles - one departs at 6AM and the other arrives at 11PM. Any enjoyment in between would seem to be of the delirious, bleary-eyed sort. Add to this the fact that the major airlines have steadily decreased space for passengers and gotten progressively worse at making schedule and you've a good idea of why travel (business travel) can be distinctly unpleasant by its very nature.
So, what's a fellow to do? We're all prisoners of the Airlines, aren't we? The simple answer is no, we are not - so long as we have time, that is. We're prisoners of our schedules, when we adapt and make our schedules adaptable a great number of opportunities present themselves.
I give you my schedule for my latest business trip to Virginia: Depart Monday morning, arrive Monday afternoon, shuttle to the rental counter, pace the hotel lobby and sleep on an uncomfortable bed, go to work over the course of three days, return Thursday evening, delayed by the airlines, and finally arrive back home in time to welcome Friday morning which was already an hour old by the time I parked in my driveway. Total cost, $414.00 plus rental car and meals with all the health benefits of drinking a slurry of catsup and salt.
Now, I present an option:
You can catch an Amtrak from Indianapolis to Chicago Union Station and then on to Washington DC, a seventeen hour jaunt on train with a 2 adult bedroom car, for $366.50. On-train meals won't cost any more than they do in an airport and if you bring a deck of cards and maybe a good friend you can make a rolling party of the jaunt. Grabbing a rental at Union Station isn't a problem since the rental car agency (at least the one I use) has a desk in the train station. GPS will get you from the station to the hotel in barely more time than it took to drive from Dulles.
The difference is obvious - 17 hours. Think of my trip, though. If I would have left Sunday Evening I could have ridden through the night and arrived Monday morning and probably wound up at my hotel earlier than I did by flying. Not to mention the sights between Indianapolis and DC, the off chance of meeting a few colorful people, with a wireless account I could have worked from my bedroom, or if I wanted I could have gotten a few chapters of my next novel written. And all for the cost of 17 hours trundling along on the rails - it's worth considering.
Yours in Sharing the Rails,
- G
This morning, after a short nap of nine hours, I had an opportunity to read my last missive about traveling. I think it could best be described as downtrodden. Maybe spending too much time alone in a hotel room is apt to put anyone in a bleak kind of mood - that is unless it's a hotel on some sun-blessed shore with good music and warm starry nights. Then again, I guess if you're in your room long enough instead of out somewhere dancing and enjoying good company, well you'd probably be depressed in Bali Hai. I guess the point is, I don't want to come down on the wrong side of travelling because I really like to travel. Well, at least somewhat.
It seems at the moment travelling has kind of run down hill and, at the moment, is lying in a ditch waiting for an ambulance to arrive. I'm old enough to remember a time before the major airlines started knocking on congress' door with a cup and cart of apples, so I remember a time before the airlines cut costs by eliminating service. Ah, yes, the times before every plane was packed to the overhead bins, before passengers and ungulates had a shared understanding of the trip to the slaughterhouse. At present there are two trips a day from Indianapolis International Airport to Dulles - one departs at 6AM and the other arrives at 11PM. Any enjoyment in between would seem to be of the delirious, bleary-eyed sort. Add to this the fact that the major airlines have steadily decreased space for passengers and gotten progressively worse at making schedule and you've a good idea of why travel (business travel) can be distinctly unpleasant by its very nature.
So, what's a fellow to do? We're all prisoners of the Airlines, aren't we? The simple answer is no, we are not - so long as we have time, that is. We're prisoners of our schedules, when we adapt and make our schedules adaptable a great number of opportunities present themselves.
I give you my schedule for my latest business trip to Virginia: Depart Monday morning, arrive Monday afternoon, shuttle to the rental counter, pace the hotel lobby and sleep on an uncomfortable bed, go to work over the course of three days, return Thursday evening, delayed by the airlines, and finally arrive back home in time to welcome Friday morning which was already an hour old by the time I parked in my driveway. Total cost, $414.00 plus rental car and meals with all the health benefits of drinking a slurry of catsup and salt.
Now, I present an option:
You can catch an Amtrak from Indianapolis to Chicago Union Station and then on to Washington DC, a seventeen hour jaunt on train with a 2 adult bedroom car, for $366.50. On-train meals won't cost any more than they do in an airport and if you bring a deck of cards and maybe a good friend you can make a rolling party of the jaunt. Grabbing a rental at Union Station isn't a problem since the rental car agency (at least the one I use) has a desk in the train station. GPS will get you from the station to the hotel in barely more time than it took to drive from Dulles.
The difference is obvious - 17 hours. Think of my trip, though. If I would have left Sunday Evening I could have ridden through the night and arrived Monday morning and probably wound up at my hotel earlier than I did by flying. Not to mention the sights between Indianapolis and DC, the off chance of meeting a few colorful people, with a wireless account I could have worked from my bedroom, or if I wanted I could have gotten a few chapters of my next novel written. And all for the cost of 17 hours trundling along on the rails - it's worth considering.
Yours in Sharing the Rails,
- G
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Traveling Man
A week of business travel has got to be the loneliest, most alienating thing possible – except for, maybe, being an expatriate. Schlepping from airport to rental counter and across alien countryside to a nondescript, corporately approved hotel leaves a guy feeling like he’s got no country. I find myself staring out the hotel window, past the heavy-duty tapestry drapes and across a sea of asphalt to the strip mall across the street at odd hours. As if I might see someone I know out there – somebody dropping by to say hello. It doesn’t happen.
I get up at whatever wrong hour work demands and hit the free breakfast buffet in the lobby. I never have eggs on a Tuesday and definitely never eggs and sausage – but they’re there on the steam table. Tossing aside the pretence of hominess, I get cold serial and skim milk with a toasted English muffin. I never have those things on a Tuesday either – but they’re closer to my normal breakfast bar while I drive fare than anything else the hotel has to offer.
I roll into work at what, back home, would be the god-awful late hour of 7:30. Showing up at an out-of-state plant site requires showing up late – your schedule has to conform to the hours of the front desk when there will be a receptionist or security guard whose well enough informed to get you the prerequisite visitor’s badge and let you sign off on the magical book that documents your arrival and departure. I wonder if there are hundreds of register books stowed away at elder companies – all of them bearing witness to the comings and goings of people long since dead and gone.
Tense hellos and introductions lead to the temporary office – a space as denuded of character as parts of the Amazon after slash and burn farming. My spot is on the second floor among rows of file cabinets and disused copiers. The vent huffs noisily when the heat comes on and directly below me is some machine that pounds most of the morning, apparently smashing big somethings into littler somethings.
Nobody visits you when you’re the guy from the Indy office come to stay for a week. Well, unless some low-ranking schmo has pulled take the visiting guy to lunch duty. I always feel sorry for the guy whose got to take me to lunch. Not that I’m unpleasant to be around but what the heck do you talk about with someone you don’t know, probably won’t see again, and don’t know anything about? Sports, weather, work, and then whatever you’re eating – then you’re out of bullets and its just chewing until time to get back to work.
In a half hour I’m off for the airport again. Waiting in some noisy bar or lounge while US Air screws up the schedule. Then it’ll be crammed into the flying sardine tin for the trip home. That old crutch “home is where the heart is” should be amended to “home is where your life is”. Everywhere else is just a shadow of life – life on pause, flickering like a VHS tape paused in mid-scene.
I get up at whatever wrong hour work demands and hit the free breakfast buffet in the lobby. I never have eggs on a Tuesday and definitely never eggs and sausage – but they’re there on the steam table. Tossing aside the pretence of hominess, I get cold serial and skim milk with a toasted English muffin. I never have those things on a Tuesday either – but they’re closer to my normal breakfast bar while I drive fare than anything else the hotel has to offer.
I roll into work at what, back home, would be the god-awful late hour of 7:30. Showing up at an out-of-state plant site requires showing up late – your schedule has to conform to the hours of the front desk when there will be a receptionist or security guard whose well enough informed to get you the prerequisite visitor’s badge and let you sign off on the magical book that documents your arrival and departure. I wonder if there are hundreds of register books stowed away at elder companies – all of them bearing witness to the comings and goings of people long since dead and gone.
Tense hellos and introductions lead to the temporary office – a space as denuded of character as parts of the Amazon after slash and burn farming. My spot is on the second floor among rows of file cabinets and disused copiers. The vent huffs noisily when the heat comes on and directly below me is some machine that pounds most of the morning, apparently smashing big somethings into littler somethings.
Nobody visits you when you’re the guy from the Indy office come to stay for a week. Well, unless some low-ranking schmo has pulled take the visiting guy to lunch duty. I always feel sorry for the guy whose got to take me to lunch. Not that I’m unpleasant to be around but what the heck do you talk about with someone you don’t know, probably won’t see again, and don’t know anything about? Sports, weather, work, and then whatever you’re eating – then you’re out of bullets and its just chewing until time to get back to work.
In a half hour I’m off for the airport again. Waiting in some noisy bar or lounge while US Air screws up the schedule. Then it’ll be crammed into the flying sardine tin for the trip home. That old crutch “home is where the heart is” should be amended to “home is where your life is”. Everywhere else is just a shadow of life – life on pause, flickering like a VHS tape paused in mid-scene.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Dresden Files, Kindel, and Lighting my Fire
I'm not a reviewer and I don't intend on turning this blog into just another opinion column on books, writing, or anything else for that fact. I don't mind recommending what I thought was a good read, though. Over the weekend I finished Jim Butcher's first Dresden File novel, Storm Front. As a writer of hard-boiled mystery I appreciated his treatment of the genre and his portrayal of the magical world of his protagonist, Harry Dresden, had the right mix of comedy and tragedy for my tastes. I'd recommend it to anyone who's in the mood for mixing mystery with magic.
I also have to say my first experience with the Amazon Kindle turned out to be positive. The device is easy to use, readable, and not too focused on its own tech to be user friendly. I'm using a Kindle I, so I don't have any idea what version II has improved – I hope it adds a backlight for those of us who read in bed.
Reading Butcher's work has put me in the mood to brush the dust off my own keyboard and get back to work. I've given my writing enough of a rest, I guess, and as I said last week: writers write, always. Ideas have been plunking around inside my head and its time to let them flow out through my fingers – that's the only way to shut the characters up, in the end. Let them voice their opinions, prejudices, and foibles on the page so that they'll quiet down inside my head. So it begins.
I also have to say my first experience with the Amazon Kindle turned out to be positive. The device is easy to use, readable, and not too focused on its own tech to be user friendly. I'm using a Kindle I, so I don't have any idea what version II has improved – I hope it adds a backlight for those of us who read in bed.
Reading Butcher's work has put me in the mood to brush the dust off my own keyboard and get back to work. I've given my writing enough of a rest, I guess, and as I said last week: writers write, always. Ideas have been plunking around inside my head and its time to let them flow out through my fingers – that's the only way to shut the characters up, in the end. Let them voice their opinions, prejudices, and foibles on the page so that they'll quiet down inside my head. So it begins.
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