Writerville

Billy Saddle: The Story So Far

2012-01-15T13:20:00.000-08:00

When he sees it in his dreams, the ball arcing toward the spruce forest like a Satanic missile, David realizes that he has superpowers. He takes a deep breath and blows the ball far into the woods, where it will do no further harm. Where it will not inspire his best friend to launch a Willie Maysian sprint away from the infield, and to end up in a crumpled heap at the left-field fence, his heart collapsing on itself like a termite-riddled shack.

They gather on the end of the jetty at Point Brown. David cannot recall the significance of this spot, but the will was clear. The trek was perilous – a half mile into the ocean along a narrow strand of rocks – but the late May weather is a miracle of sun and calm.

David sets his sportcoat on a rock and offers the brief tribute he’s been running through his mind all morning. A man of music, and nature, and laughter. The kindest man I have ever known. He tells Larry’s favorite joke – the one that ends “tank tankity tank” – and is relieved when everybody laughs. And he tries, in his creaky bass-player’s voice, to sing a few measures of “Someone to Watch Over Me,” because that was Larry’s favorite song. He’s surprised to find that he’s not crying. He turns, opens the lid and sends the ashes into the ocean.

When they return to the beach, Elena’s eyes are too dark and moist for him to fathom. Pablo and Derek are annoyed, but they’re teenage boys, it’s their job. He’s happy enough when they take turns slapping him on the shoulder.

“I hear you were wonderful,” says Elena. “You’re such a good friend.” She hugs him, but he pulls back.

“Dios mio!” (This is their little joke, the Anglo husband with his Spanish eruptions.) “I left mi jacqueta on the jetty.”

“Silly gringo. You’d better get it – it’s your favorite.”

“Okay. Ten minutes, tops.”

“Don’t hurt yourself.”

Derek and Pablo do their best not to groan.

David runs the jetty, the same game that he played with his boys when they were small. Find a flat surface, stick it, look for the next. Elena couldn’t come to the scattering because she’s too fat. He hates to think these things. David slows his pace. He’s tired; he’s near the end. He hears singing.

He sees a scarlet hunting cap, in the Bavarian style. A short black feather rises from the band like the flag on a mailbox. The cap looks like it’s gone through hell, and so does its owner, a human fencepost dressed all in denim. His wiry hair and beard are the color of rust, his skin like a sunbaked saddle. He aims a crooked, avian nose toward the landing point of Larry’s ashes and sings “‘Round Midnight” in a sandpaper baritone.

David was wrong. This was Larry’s favorite song. And he knows why he didn’t sing it, because he can feel it taking him apart, brick by brick.

Point Damon is a living illustration in The Way of Things. The seaward shore, harassed by waves and wind, offers a rock-strewn but solid footing of wet sand. The harbor side, lapped by gentle waves, presents a layer of sand and soil the consistency of sponge cake. Each step sinks two inches, turning a mile hike into five miles of work.

In the parlance of Ocean Shores, today is a good day: overcast with light rain and a wind that will not actually knock you over. David walks the seaward side, one gray crescent after another, and runs through his mental list.

Larry. He never realized how close they were. He never knew the frequency of their daily interactions. What does he do with the trio? The softball team? Will every deep fly, every performance of “Witchcraft” be an insult to his memory?

Elena. His wife is grotesquely fat. But this is the same woman he married, the woman he loved with a passion that threatened to swallow him whole. The woman who gave him two gorgeous boys. He cringes at the sight of her, at the very thought of sex, and he hates himself.

Money. This was the plan: they would open an ice cream shop. At the end of the school year, he would go from teaching to dishing up sundaes. Summer sales were good, but not enough to justify a year-round overhead. They needed to find something to attract the locals during the off-season, or they needed to get the hell out. Besides, he suspected his wife was embezzling the stock.

Thankfully, he’s interrupted by The Carousel. At the end of the point, the water from the ocean swings to the left, running along the shore in a semicircular stream. David could watch it for hours. But today he smells chicken. And curry. Rosemary, parsley. He has heard that grief can distort the senses, but he didn’t expect such a specific list of ingredients.

He turns toward the smell and finds a wigwam built of driftwood. Some of the pieces are twelve feet high. A trail of smoke rises from the center. As he nears the spot, he finds an opening, and rough shapes: a log, a plank holding plates and glasses, one book. A large pot hanging from a length of copper pipe.

He hears whistling: “Take Five.” Around the bend of the harbor shore stands a naked man, covered in soap. David beelines back to the ocean. For the first time this week, he’s hungry.

David has taken up smoking. Not because he likes it; because he needs something to do. Isaiah has begun his solo dinner hour. David sets his bass on a stand next to the dance floor. He descends the long flight of steps next to the hotel and settles on a low wall near the dunes. The night is crystalline cold, stars flocking over the beach in record numbers. An elderly couple walks the wooden path over the sand, bundled up like ice skaters. David pulls a mint-green box from his windbreaker. He’s had it for two weeks, and still has five cigarettes. He pulls one out and stares at it. He hears singing.

No. It’s Isaiah, playing “Cottontail” at an easy swing. The man’s a genius. Just keeping up with him makes his brain hurt. People say David’s basswork sounds great, but it’s hard to enjoy yourself when you’re a swimmer lost at sea, fighting a rip tide of chord changes. Weird. It sounds like Isaiah’s playing one of those Ella Fitzgerald scat lines. How the hell do you get that from a piano?

He hears a finger-snap, and spies a shadow at the back of the hotel, hiding between a dune and a patio. David closes his eyes and listens to the voice, deedling an arc of nonsense syllables over the top of the melody. He makes it sound easy; it isn’t. Larry was the best singer he’s ever known, and scatting totally threw him. If he lights the cigarette, Shadow Man will disappear, so David listens for a while, pockets the mint-green box and heads upstairs for a soda.

Ralph won’t let his musicians drink until they’re done playing. David can’t really blame him; he’s known a lot of musicians. But it’s hard to play cold sober, especially tonight. At break time, they head for Isaiah’s truck and break out the miniature liquor bottles. David resists the temptation to raise a toast to fallen comrades, and takes his Jack Daniel’s at a shot.

“Ah! Much better.”

“Always,” says Isaiah.

Isaiah is seven feet tall. A seven-foot Jew with a Barry White voice and one of those chin-spike tufts that the Beats called a goatee.

David once said, “You ever consider the fact that you could snap me like a twig?”

Isaiah unleashed his monstrous smile. “You know how hard it is to find a good bassist?”

No talk now. They take turns sighing, watching their breath rise into the streetlights.

“Tourist season,” says Isaiah.

“I know.”

“Need a singer.”

“Yep. And Ocean Shores is just crawling with Bennetts and Sinatras.”

“I keep playing the old intros,” says Isaiah. “And I look over to give the cue…”

“Yeah. Tell you what. I’ll take out an ad. We’ll do some auditions. Frankly, I need the money.”

“Ice cream?”

“Because the tourists of Washington State deserve the same chance at obesity as my wife. Oh God. I’m sorry.”

Isaiah cleans out a Captain Morgan. “Nonsense! This parking lot is our confessional. You say whatever you need to.”

“Thank you, Father Silverstein.”

“Here. Take the sacrament.”

He hands David a bottle of Binaca. David takes a blast and hands it back. They make for the hotel.

“What do you wanna play?”

“Something happy.”

“‘Girl from Ipanema.’”

“That’s not happy! She doesn’t even see the poor guy.”

“Yeah,” says Isaiah. “But she’s tall and tan and young and lovely.”

David stares at home plate, a Milky Way of scars and scratches. The umpire finishes his sweeping and stands up. “Real sorry about this – recent events and all – but I gotta start the clock, David. Y’got five minutes to come up with that eighth man.”

“I understand. Just wish I knew where Georgie was.”

David wanders down the line. His players are warming up, heads on a swivel, looking for a savior. He peers into the spruce forest beyond the bleachers and catches a flash of red.

“Hey! Guy in the cap!”

The man slows to a halt and looks in David’s direction. Still wearing denim, still with the Bavarian hat.

“We need another guy or we have to forfeit.”

The man squints and blinks. “I don’t know…”

“You don’t have to do a thing. If you just stand out there, you’ve already saved us.”

The man studies his boot-tops, then stares into the outfield. He licks his lips and scratches an ear.

“Right field okay?”

“Right field’s perfect. Hey! Anybody got an extra glove?”

Oscar offers a beat-up Rawlings. They go with the standard eight-man defense, leaving second base open and trusting David to pitch for the inside corner. Naturally, his first attempt drifts over the plate, and the batter lifts a lazy fly to right. Merzy’s fast, but there’s now way he’s going to get there. Their new recruit is frozen, gazing skyward as if he’s just spotted an interesting bird. David realizes he doesn’t even know the guy’s name, so he’s left to watch in a silent panic.

The man flips his hand into the air. The ball lands with a smack. He takes it out and studies it, looking for secret messages, then chucks it to the second baseman who isn’t there. It rolls to David’s feet. Merzy jogs by and slaps the man on the back. He flinches.

After the third out, the man walks directly across the foul line and sits on a tree stump. Oscar comes over to confer with David.

“You see the way he threw up his glove like that?”

“Yeah,” says David. “He’s a player.”

“Shall I invite him to join us in the dugout?”

“Nah. Probably won’t bat till next inning.”

“O ye of little faith.”

“Well if you bozos would line up a few hits…”

The following inning, someone laces a ball down the right field line, and the legend of Red Man grows. He races to the line, plants a foot and spins, hurling a one-hopper to second. The batter rounds first and stays there, shaking his head. At the end of the inning, Red Man strolls to the rack and picks out a bat.

“You’re up third,” says David.

“Figured.”

His eyes are bullets of steel blue.

“I guess you’ve played this game before.”

He wraps his fingers around the handle and flexes his wrists.

“Tell you the truth, I can’t remember.”

The first two batters manage to wind up on second and third. Red Man stands in, leans his bat against his shoulder and watches four pitches go by, two strikes, two balls. David is tempted to call time and remind him that it’s okay to take a swing, but decides that it really doesn’t matter. The next pitch is about to drift by for strike three when Red Man punches at it, slapping a grounder into right. Both runners score. He stands on first, arms folded, as if nothing could be more natural.

They lose the game – ten-on-eight being a pretty hefty advantage – but they do manage to fight off the ten-run mercy rule. With condolences added to the mix, the pitching-mound handshakes take longer than usual. When David returns to the bench, he finds Oscar’s old glove dangling from the bat rack. Red Man is nowhere in sight.

David’s children are a joke of the universe. Elena’s father Pablo died during her first pregnancy, so their eldest automatically took his name. Naturally, the genetic blender kicked out a gringito with blond hair, blue eyes and a windstorm of freckles. This crook-nosed Ichabod Crane charmed his way to an insane level of high-school popularity, and now, at 19, maintained his dominion over the local youth as night manager of Laney’s Pizza. He rarely left the premises.

The naming of number two fell to David, who chose to honor his still-living Uncle Derek. This time, the blender delivered jet-black hair, coal-black eyes and skin the color of pancakes. Now 16, he resembles a young Desi Arnaz, minus the skills with music and women. He is, in fact, the biggest geek David has ever known – but he glories in his geek-ness, which is somehow very cool.

David loops his softball bag over his shoulder and closes his car door, unleashing all the stars in the galaxy. He sends his thanks to the tall pines that block out the lights of town. And there’s Gemini. He and Larry were so much alike that they called each other Castor and Pollux. In the sky, he could never remember which was which.

He stows his bag in the hall closet and reports to the computer room, where Derek is pursuing his parallel life in the World of Warcraft. His avatar, a blond viking with green gecko-skin, is doing equestrian battle with a gold-plated triceratops. He wins, as expected, stomping the poor critter into a copper-puddle extinction.

“Yes!” he exults, and spins in his chair. “Hi Dad. How’d you do?”

“Lost.”

“How much?”

“Eight runs.”

“Woohoo!”

“I don’t…”

“You beat the spread.”

“You’re making book on slow-pitch softball?”

“Sure. I had you as eleven-point ‘dogs. And Toby Monamer, that almighty oaf, now owes yours truly a cool deuce.”

“Deuce?”

“Two bucks. We keep it pretty light.”

“But it’s still gambling.”

Derek tents his fingers like a district attorney and speaks in a booming baritone. “Miss Thompson, please read back the testimony from… sometime last month.” He places a pair of reading glasses on the tip of his nose and responds in a Lily Tomlin nasal. “Derek’s father: ‘Son, the best way to stay out of trouble is to find creative ways to stay busy.’”

David grins. “You are such a geek.”

“Damn straight. And if you really are going to raise me in the bustling cultural paradise of Open Sores, what’s a little gaming if it keeps me away from the crackheads?”

“You know, one of these days…” David raises a rhetorical finger, “I’d sure like to win an argument with you.”

Derek flashes a Cuban bandleader smile. “I’ll toss you a bone once in a while. Ya got my numbers?”

He hands him the scorebook. “Stat monster.”

“You beat the spread with eight men? Who the heck is Red Man?”

“We had to Shanghai a civilian. Didn’t even catch his name.”

“Not to tweak your old-school sensibilities, Dad, but today we call them Native Americans.”

“Gotcha. Get to sleep sometime.”

“I will. Love ya!.”

“Love ya back.”

David heads down the hallway, already working on his next-day limp. He pauses at the bedroom door and is relieved when he hears Elena snoring.

“When Lincoln and Douglas debated in Charleston, Illinois, Lincoln said the following: ‘There is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as… there must be a position of superior and inferior… I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

He spots a hand mid-class. Ah yes, Kevin Konker.

“Kevin?”

“Isn’t this just another case of a bunch of liberal academics trying to rewrite history?”

From the tone of his questions, Kevin had long ago given himself away as a fan of conservative radio, where grand conspiracies could be constructed from whole cloth whenever the host ran out of actual arguments. David always found it best to begin with a compliment, the better to knock his opponent off-balance.

“That’s an excellent question, Kevin. In fact, ne of the biggest mistakes made my academics is to judge historical figures by modern moral standards. Imagine if Lincoln ran for President in 2012 and made this same statement. Holy crap!”

His low-level obscenity gets a laugh, which in a final-period class, on a sunny day, is a major victory.

“However, the Lincoln-Douglas debates were widely attended and recorded, so I assure you, that is what the man said. Lincoln saw the abolition of slavery as an unattainable goal, so he kept his focus on stopping the spread of slavery. And he occasionally talked like a racist. If he had tried for more – if he had become an outright abolitionist – he would not have become President, and we would not be talking about him right now.

“Now. I want you to understand something else. All your lives, we have sold you an image of Abraham Lincoln as a great and saintly figure. This is because your minds were not yet capable of grasping the jarring complexities that make up the true Lincoln. In the end, I hope that you will see him as I do: not that giant dull face on Mount Rushmore but a flawed and vigorous human being, an absolutely brilliant politician and legal thinker, and an amazing leader of men. But I leave that decision to you.”

He checks the clock and finds he has only ten seconds.

“Chapter 16 for Monday. One week till finals. Hang in there!”

He nails the last word at the bell, then steps away from the door lest he be trampled. In Ocean Shores, spring fever is an actual and perilous affliction. The salmon swimming upstream is Abigail Sparling, a gathering of strawberry blonde curls, freckled cheekbones and hazel eyes that bend light like Einsteinian opals.

“David, I love you.”

“Hold that thought.” He catches Kevin by the shoulder. Kevin turns with a blank look, that expressionless expression used by teenagers the world ‘round.

“Mister Konker. Keep those questions coming. Makes for a lively classroom.”

“Oh. Sure. Thanks.”

And he’s gone with the rest. David makes certain to close and lock the door before he returns to Abbey, who is perched provocatively on his desk.

“Now I love you even more. First I loved you for that fucking brilliant analysis of Lincoln. Now I love you for taking that Limbaugh-loving punk – he who claims that it ain’t poetry unless it rhymes, ahrr! – and planting that devious little seed of skepticism. You are a beautiful, beautiful man, and I want to have your children.”

“Thanks. But could you please stop the gushing before one of my children passes by?”

She twirls a strand of hair around a pinkie. “Sorry. I’m a poet.”

“No shit. Any other reason for your visit, Ms. Sparling?”

She hands him a flyer. “The annual literary anthology. Tell your students. Perhaps buy a dozen copies for your family.”

“Well, I don’t know about…”

“Because your son’s in it.”

“Really?”

“Two poems. Excellent poems.”

“I had no idea.”

“Derek’s mind is almost as interesting as his old man’s.” She hops off his desk and makes for the door. David’s always had a weakness for women who wear jackets with blue jeans. She turns at the door.

“Listen. I understand the wife thing, the professional thing. That… other thing. But I am well acquainted with tragedy. If you want to talk sometime, I’m sure you’ll find a way to let me know.”

Abbey opens the door with her left arm – because it’s the only one she’s got – and slips into the hallway. He listens to the tock of her cowboy boots until they fade into the hum of the ventilation, and wonders if his son is in love with her, too.

He pulls into the Beach Mall to find young people on mopeds, running loops around the parking lot. This is both the plus and minus of Harvey’s Bike-Rent. Plus: it brings in traffic. Minus: stupid, reckless traffic. A teenage couple is headed right for him, legs and arms all over the place. They wobble past his fender in a burst of Doppler giggling and turn for the beach. It’s Derek’s friend, Toby Monamer. With a girl.

“Hi handsome.”

Elena slides a bowl into the sink. She may or may not have been eating from it.

“Hola, guapa.” (?)

He leans over the counter for a kiss and comes back with Exhibit B. Strawberry.

“How’s the biz?” he asks.

“Sunshine! Got a nice little after-school rush.”

“I’ve been slipping subliminal messages into my lectures. Benjamin Franklin got the French to send Lafayette largely by plying his wife with pistachio ice cream.”

Elena releases her bright, rounded laugh. Her laugh is as tasty as her lips. And she laughs at his jokes.

“One more week, I’ll be back there with you, honey. You okay for closing?”

“I’m fine. Could you pick up a pizza?”

“I know just the place.”

She draws up a simple smile. There’s something else about her that he has never figured out, until now. Her eyebrows are perfect: dark and sharp, curving inward at an angle that makes her seem ceaselessly witty and sexy. All these years, he has been in thrall to something he has not actually seen.

“What?”

“Looking at my beautiful wife.”

The smile grows. With whiter skin she’d be blushing.

“You make me feel like a teenager.”

“Just stay off the mopeds.”

“Gringo loco.”

He exits to a warm breeze. A twelve-year-old grinds past on a skateboard.

He drives all of one block to Laney’s Pizza, but he pauses at the entryway. Pablo is hands-on, dancing among register, oven and counter, touching up the rough edges, nudging his workers this way and that. Pizza management is not civil engineering, or graphic design, or teaching, but look how good he is.

David makes his entrance to the usual greeting.

“It’s my old man! How ya doin’, Pops?”

Pablo offers a sloppy grin and four knuckles. David delivers the fist-bump and follows with the finger-pistol salute.

“Hey!” says Pablo. “New school/old school. Coolest father in town, man. Gets it from hanging out with teenagers all day. Am I right, Cube?”

The Asian kid with the white Mohawk thumps his chest and flips a peace sign. “Word!”

“I’m here strictly on business,” says David. “Your mother would like a large combo with anchovies.”

Pablo makes the Yuk Face, his rubbery features sucking toward the center.

“What is up with that?”

“It’s Ocean Shores, son. Ocean. People here like seafood.”

“I’m gonna be sorely disappointed tonight when I raid the fridge and find fish all over the pizza.”

David moves toward Cube at the cash register. Pablo waves him off.

“Yer money’s no good here, old man.”

“You’re sure.”

“Hey, I’ve earned some freebies. Just don’t tell my cheapass friends. Now go play. I’ll come getcha.”

David wonders why he never feels like the father anymore. It’s a long downhill road, one that began with Pablo’s first command, at the age of five: “Not that jacket, Dad! Nobody likes that jacket.”

David heads for the arcade and finds The Sopranos in working order. Who wouldn’t love a pinball machine with its own stripper pole? He cherishes this tiny island of time created by the cooking of pizza. It’s mindless, it’s fun, and – thanks to the thousand wasted afternoons of his youth – he’s good at it. The last thought before he slips into the noise and blink is this: I have got to find a singer.

God knows how he got so many sharks in the family, but Derek’s into the anchovies, too. Unfortunately, the little buggers have decided to pursue a second life, swimming laps around David’s stomach. An hour into the struggle, he gives up on the idea of sleep and rises to the edge of the bed. Elena moans and shifts; the mounds of her flab settle into place like cooling lava. He cannot imagine how he will ever again venture into these territories, but he knows that someday he must try.

This is not a positive track. He wanders to the laundry room, finds an extra pair of jeans and heads outside. It’s one o’clock. Pablo’s not home yet.

Out of sheer habit, he walks into town. Past the ice cream shop, his personal albatross, toward the hotel, his primary irritation. He takes a left toward Laney’s.

Pablo’s pickup is out front. The front door is wide open, the lights are on. The anchovies in David’s stomach have gathered in a tight pack. He stops in the entryway and listens. Nothing. He steps inside, light on his feet, the way he feels after he releases a pitch. The place is unnervingly perfect, like a museum of a pizza parlor. He hears the faraway roll of the breakers.

“Pablo?”

A small sound from the back. He steps into the hallway past the arcade.

“Pablo?”

The response sounds like the mewling of a cat, somewhere inside the walls, but then it gains consonants.

“Dad?”

He finds a doorknob around the corner, takes a breath and turns it. It’s a tiny, dark room, smelling of ammonia and vomit. The light slides across to reveal a figure huddled next to the wall, his head buried in his knees. David crouches next to him; he’s breathing in short, gasping intakes, like an engine about to stall.

“Pablo, it’s okay. It’s Dad.”

He manages to get an arm under his knees, another around his shoulders, and carries him to a bench. Pablo smells of urine; he’s shaking uncontrollably. David holds him on his lap and tries to remember all the old tricks: smoothing the hair, gentle rocking, the whispered chant of “It’s all right, it’s all right.”

Pablo looks up, his pale blue eyes bigger than ever. “They had guns, Dad. I thought… I thought they were gonna…”

He buries his head in his father’s chest and shivers, the adrenaline working its way out.

“It’s all right,” says David. He pulls his cell phone from his jacket.

David is almost grateful that tonight’s candidates are awful. He’s got enough on his mind. Mostly his eldest son, who has not left his room for days.

Candidate number one is a tough-looking redhead who comes from a blues background. She sings every song as if her old man is coming home to blow her head off, and the more she emotes the harder she sings. Putting all that pressure on her throat causes her tone to blat out, nicely illustrating the line between singing and shouting. He’d like to give her a good, hard slap for crimes against music, and feels fortunate that Isaiah is handling personnel duties.

“Thanks so much for coming out. You’ve really got a terrific voice. We’re going to take quite a while to come to a decision, so please be patient with us.”

“No problem!” she says. “I’m so sorry about your friend.”

“Thank you. That’s one reason we’re taking so long with this. We’re still in a bit of shock.”

He sends her out the door and returns to the garage, eyes to the heavens.

“Sorry, Larry.”

“You are so smooth. You sure you never went to law school?”

Isaiah grins. “That is so much preferable to ‘You sure you never played basketball?’”

“So you’d prefer to be stereotyped by race as opposed to height?”

“‘How’s the weather up there?’”

Candidate number two is even worse. David recalls a mention of classical training and choirs. Larry used to attribute his breath control to just such a background. But to show up with sheet music, and to reproduce each note with Mozartean precision? Well, yikes. He and Isaiah are dragging him through a metronomic rendition of “Luck Be a Lady Tonight” when a ruckus breaks out inside the house. It sounds like a pit bull on the attack.

David cuts out, leaving Isaiah with Luciano Pavarotten, and sails down the hall. He opens the door to find Pablo in his briefs, sparring with the TV screen as he sends a squad of zombies to horrible deaths.

“Die, you motherfuckers! Pieces of shit DIE! Fuck you and fuck you. Not so fucking bad now, are ya!?”

He spots his father at the door and freezes. David is stunned at the transformation, the scraggly patches of beard, the snarled fright-wig, dark circles under wild eyes.

David points at the screen. “Watch out! They’re right on top of you.”

Pablo pauses, confused, then turns to find a circle of flesh eaters bearing down.

“Shit!”

“Get ‘em!” yells David. “Kill those motherfuckers!”

“Yahh!” Pablo guns them down in a shower of blood. “Die you assholes! Fucking DIE! Ahahahaha!”

David returns to the garage, feeling very fortunate that Elena’s not home.

“Hi. Sorry ‘bout that. So Isaiah, have we heard enough of a sample?”

It takes a moment for Isaiah to realize that David is initiating an escape sequence.

“I think I’ve heard enough.”

“Thanks so much for coming out,” says David. He punches the garage door opener. “You’ve got a fantastic voice. We’re going to take a while to…”

By the end of the spiel, he manages to walk Placido Dumbingo to the driveway. He grabs two beers from the fridge, and they toast their auditioner farewell as he circles the court.

“We are so fucked.”

“Come on,” says Isaiah. “That’s only, what? Seven singers?”

“Eight.”

“Shit. Maybe we need to start cruising the karaoke bars.”

“Ha! Right.”

“I’m not entirely kidding. What was the ruckus about?”

David takes a deep drink and stares at his fake-book, which has flipped itself open to “Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby?”

“I think that was… therapy.”

“You got a weird family, man.”

“Define ‘weird.’”

David lights the cigarette, and takes a puff, and releases it. It rises toward the green exit sign as a low-flying cirrus. Okay, he thinks. That’s pretty cool. Twenty feet beyond the sign, Isaiah plays “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To,” spilling out the chords like he’s not actually sure if he’s going to play it. Then he chunks a cluster of notes and kicks into an easy swing. The singer comes in a little phlegmy, but he coughs it out and swells the second line like a rubber band, playing with the finish on a delayed staccato.

This is the voice David’s been carrying around in his head. Weathered brass, rough but dead on pitch, an apostle to the song but willing to play around. He surrounds the final note with baby notes (exactly like Sarah Vaughan) before landing it with a nice warm vibrato for the sendoff.

David leans back and finds him in the same spot, camped between the last dune and a low balcony.

“Hey! You’ve got a great voice.”

Shadow Man freezes.

“It’s all right. I’m with the band.”

He answers in a mumble. “Sorry. I’ll get moving right away.”

He shuffles away, stumbling in the sand.

“No, hey! We need a singer, and…”

“Don’t want trouble.”

Once he hits the wooden path, he’s gone. David flashes on the feral cats behind the ice cream shop, the ones that have been shooed away a thousand times.

He takes another puff.

“Jesus, Isaiah. That room is so dead.”

Isaiah shoots a mini-bottle of tequila and coughs it down. “I never realized how much of our public persona was Larry. Tell you the truth, sometimes I thought he was pretty cheesy. But I guess people like that.”

“Maybe we need to work up a reparteé.”

Isaiah snorts. “Oh yeah. That’ll work.”

“How come I can lecture to students all day long, but I can’t think of a thing to say about ‘Mack the Knife’?”

“Because there, you’ve got tons of material, and you love talking about it. Here, it’s all about that bass. It’s easier for singers – they’re already out front. Don’t push it. No one likes a phony. But if you do feel a wry comment coming on, give it a shot.”

“You’ve put some thought into this.” David opens a vodka.

“Isn’t that four?”

“Tough week. Month. Year.”

“Any leads?”

“The usual Aberdeen-crackhead theory. No actual evidence. Smart criminals. No security cameras. Caught Pablo alone, right when he was sorting the night’s take. Poor kid. I don’t know if he’s going back. Got him hooked up with a therapist.”

“Parthenia?”

“You’ve been?”

Isaiah turns up his hands. “I’m Jewish. A physical freak. Divorced. A ‘working’ musician.”

“They should probably just put you in an institution.”

“Thanks to Parthenia, no. And I hate to add to your personal shitpile, but Ralph said we need to get a singer by next week or he’s going to look elsewhere.”

“Jesus.” David downs the vodka in a spiteful shot. “Yaknow, I keep running into this homeless dude. Hides out behind the hotel. He’s got a way with a song.”

“Oh yeah,” says Isaiah. “That’s what we need. Boxcar Willie.”

“Hey, it’s like softball. Better to throw a body out there than forfeit the game.”

“Oh it’s all good until he starts panhandling the customers. I’ll make a round of the town Dumpsters and see if I can sign him up.”

“Let’s play some music before I get more depressed.”

Isaiah smiles and hands him the Binaca.

“I was thinking we’d start with ‘Learnin’ the Blues.’”

“Asshole.”

Coach Hazlett was nice enough to make David a key for the weight room, and during school vacations he became a regular visitor. His cover story was the equipment – so much better than the free weights at home – but it also made an excellent escape from the rest of his life.

Such was the case over Christmas, when Elena’s evertalking mother had turned his home into a windstorm of blather. Here on the bench press, alone with his own breath and the steady chink of the weights, David could relax. Then the door opened: Abbey Sparling, black leggings and a Seahawks sweatshirt. Despite her innate radiance, she looked worn out. But this was no surprise; this was the first Christmas.

She came to his side and bent forward into a stretch.

“Hi.”

“Hi. Doin’ okay?”

She breathed out. “Too much time. During school I had distractions.”

“Mike hook you up?”

“Yep. Should I feel privileged?”

“You, me and Señora Vitanza.”

“Wow! I feel so VIP. ‘Course, it’s hard to say no to a woman whose remaining limb is taking a beating.”

“Correcting papers?”

“Oh God! Isn’t it endless?”

“Hard enough with two hands.”

Abbey stopped her stretches and studied the jungle of rods and cables. “Wow. Where do I begin?”

“‘Love Story.’”

“Seriously.”

“Let’s try the pull bar.”

He took her to the station. A cable ran from the weight stack to a pulley, dangling a bar with handles on either end.

“Really?” she said.

“Sure.” He set the weight stack at ten pounds, grabbed the center of the bar, slipping the cable between his ring and middle fingers, and pulled it to his chin.

“I learned this after my shoulder surgery. The trick is to go real light, with lots of reps, and don’t go heavier till you absolutely have to.”

Abbey took a wide stance, felt around for the proper grip on the bar and pulled entirely too hard. The ten-pound weight flew from the stack; when it dropped back it yanked the bar from her grip and sent it spinning. David stepped in to grab it and broke out laughing.

“Damn, woman! You’re stronger than I thought.”

He looked down to find her crying, and it was easy to guess why. Nothing in her life – not even this stupid, small thing – would ever go right again. He reached over to wipe away a tear, but his hand stayed there, and the sadness in her eyes was a gravity he could not resist. What followed was a storm of kissing, of breath and tongues and warmth. It ended five minutes later. Abbey knelt on the met, her sweatshirt gone, her hand on David’s crotch. When their eyes met, they realized they could go no further.

Abbey stood and touched his shoulder – then took back her hand, as if his skin were electric.

“I’m… sorry.”

She picked up her sweatshirt, hurried to the door, and was gone. David stared at the door for thirty seconds. He set the stack to 50 and went back to work.

David pulls the bar behind his head, taps the metal to his shoulder and lets it back up. He feels the familiar weakness filling his arms, gives it one more rep and clicks the bar back to its holder. He finds Abbey walking his way in a yellow sundress festooned with asters.

“So now you don’t even wait till school’s out?”

“The little buggers better be out studying for their finals. I take it you’re not joining me?”

“Going outside. In the sunshine. Maniac.”

“You know, Washington was an amazing physical specimen. He once broke up a riot by holding two of the participants apart – by their throats.”

“So your personal fitness guru is the Father of Our Country.”

“Yes, well, I gotta do something. I’ve been deprived of softball.”

“Oh no! The Larry thing?”

“Yeah. We’re just not up for it.”

“Maybe it’s the fact that it happened right there on the field. That’s pretty traumatic.”

“You are quite perceptive. You should be a poet.”

“Says the father of the poet.”

She hands him a thin glossy book. The cover features a pale-skinned girl with a feathered mask and a lizard tattoo.

“Hey! Sharp. And creepy.”

“Paula, my genius photographer. Just a freshman. Well, I’m going to catch some rays. Happy lifting!”

“‘Bye!”

She walks away and out the door. David’s left brain is urging him to finish this round of lifts. His right brain says, Screw it! Read the poems. He wipes his arms with a towel, sits on the leg-press and flips to pages 32 and 33, headlined Derek Falter: Two Poems.

Walking Bass

I was born on a five-four-one

fast-change turnaround,

took my milk in twelve measures

in a house of funk

I am the son of a bass player,

my friends deep into the

ritual of eldermock when

Dad powers up,

thwacks the low string like a

Prince sideman,

blaxploitation soundtrack,

porn film.

Man! Your dad’s cool.

Youth of America!

Do not let this happen to you.

The first sign of parental-

musical interest should be

answered with a subtle

campaign of hints regarding the

accordion, the hammer dulcimer,

the ukelele

(which really does get a bad rap).

Otherwise, you will end up

trying to talk your way into a

front-porch kiss with a

girl more intent on the

walking blues coming from the

garage.

Cripes! that what I said

Cripes!

Really, Dad.

(Spoonful of cereal, sip of

orange juice)

The clarinet is a

vastly underrated instrument.

David chuckles. Pretty freakin’ funny. And “fast-change turnaround”? Who knew the kid was actually listening?

Promise

Mr. and Mrs. Caterpillar were married in the branches of a cedar in early spring.

“You know,” said Mantis (presiding). “Things will change.”

“I suspect they will,” said Mrs. C.

“But our love will transcend,” said Mr. C.

They took their honeymoon in the San Juans, and spun their cocoons in the bridal suite. Weeks later, Mr. C popped out as a swallowtail butterfly, with elegant wings of black and yellow.

He was admiring himself in the mirror when he heard a large crash. He found a small Orca flopping on their bed, clothed in dazzling lava-lamp patterns of black and white. The Orca bared its teeth, and from its mouth came the voice of his wife.

“Hi honey! How do I look?”

Oh God oh God, thinks David. He sets the stack to 100 and goes back to work.

He has sighted the torpedo making for the boat, but he has no idea what to do. He is angry at Derek, but for what? Being too keen an observer? Too masterful a writer? It’s his own damn fault – the kid was raised on the First Amendment. How could a Constitutional scholar introduce censorship into his own house? What he needed was a deeper understanding, and there was one obvious place to get it.

“Abbey?”

“Hi. What’s up?”

“It’s about this poem.”

“I hope I didn’t overexpose you on that. But I think most of the kids know you play bass, and it’s really a funny poem.”

“No. The other one.”

“Oh. The Caterpillars?”

“It’s about my wife.”

“Oh.” Silence. The flipping of pages. “Oh geez. Oh. I am so sorry. I get so much of this fairy-tale stuff. You would think an English teacher would be better at sniffing out an allegory.”

“It’s okay,” says David. “I mean, shit, you can’t tell a kid not to write about his own family. I’m just trying to figure out how to handle it.”

“Can you meet me tonight?”

“Is that a good idea?”

“Oh stop it, you moron. Just trust me on this. Meet me at McKenzie’s at eleven-thirty.”

“Okay.”

McKenzie’s is a pretty standard neighborhood bar, but it affords certain advantages that attract some of the better karaoke singers. The low ceiling and modest surroundings provide a comfortable setting and excellent acoustics. The host, Captain Kirk, is good with a soundboard and not given to radio-DJ yakking – a rare combination. The singers perform in a cave-like room slightly separated from the main area and bathed in red light. This creates an impression that you’re watching the singers on a very large television, but the performers seem to find it reassuring, like an acoustic womb.

David crosses the parking lot, full of doubts. His late-night constitutionals have provided a certain window for covert operations, but in such a small town the slightest whiff of teacherly hanky-panky is bound to cover the peninsula like a fast-moving fog. He finds Abbey at a back table and gives her a hug before heading off for a beer. Mrs. Lorenson from the post office is giving a reasonable approximation of “Black Velvet.”

“Are you a participant?”

“I try.” She’s twirling a strand of hair, a teenage move that makes him nervous. “I sorta stick to the eighties – the music of my generation.”

“Good stuff. Any thoughts on my brilliant kid?”

She pulls out a copy of the anthology and opens it to Derek’s poems.

“First point. The Orca is a large mammal, but also a beautiful one. ‘…clothed in dazzling lava-lamp patterns of black and white.’ Best line in the poem. The swallowtail is also beautiful – with markings that mimic the Orca’s. The poet admires his parents, and understands the deep connections between them, but he also sees this troublesome gap threatening to break them up. He doesn’t need punishment; he needs reassurance.”

David takes a moment to gather this in. Captain Kirk introduces Johnny Q, who works in the produce section at Sav-Mor. He wiggles his way into “Heartbreak Hotel.”

“So why do I still feel like giving him a kick in the ass?”

“Because he has placed you in a precarious situation, and pushed you toward a round of truth-telling with your wife that you have been putting off. Because you feel guilty and superficial for even bringing it up.”

“Jesus! Slow down. All this insight is freakin’ me out.”

“Sorry. I call it my Inner Parthenia.”

“You too?”

She holds up her remaining hand. “Oh yeah. Not much need for psychotherapy here.”

“I’m pretty sure I’ll soon be a client myself. Hey, one other thing. Is this really a poem?”

“Good question. We got short-shorts, flash fiction, microfiction… Derek opted for prose poetry, which carries the elevated tone and compression of poetry without the usual stanzas and line breaks. Oh! I’m up.”

She sings “Allison” by Elvis Costello. Her voice is solid but pedestrian, marked by the usual amateur lack of breath support. She returns to the table looking sheepish.

“Oh God I hope I didn’t suck.”

“Beat hell out of most of our auditioners.”

She takes a sip from her whiskey sour. A large man gets up to sing “Crystal Blue Persuasion.”

“By the way,” she says. “I consider your son’s poems the best in the anthology. He is remarkably gifted, and he manages to entirely avoid the teenage love of abstractions.”

“Abstractions?”

“Non-specific words – words that don’t deliver an image. ‘Sadness.’ ‘Abomination.’ ‘Loyalty.’ Notice the difference if I say ‘hydrangea,’ ‘pancake,’ ‘blaxploitation soundtrack.’”

“So I’ll have a starving poet to go with my agoraphobic pizza manager.”

“Maybe he’ll get a job as an English teacher.”

“Oh! Like there’s any future in that.”

She delivers a backhand to his biceps. He rubs it dramatically.

“Yow! Remind me not to give you any more weightlifting tips. One-armed monster.”

She smiles. “So refreshing to be openly abused for my handicap.”

“Oh! So now we’re using the H-word?”

“Can I drive a stick? No. That’s a handicap.” She looks to the red room. “Ah. You’re about to see the real reason I dragged you here.”

Captain Kirk introduces a singer named Billy, a bearded man dressed all in denim. Unlike the other singers, Billy uses the stand, loosening the midgrip before adjusting the height and pressing the mic into the clip. The KJ brings up the screen: “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry,” a Sinatra arrangement.

The song begins with one of those Tin Pan Alley preludes. The accompaniment is spare but Billy’s right on it, a rich, unforced baritone, handling the high skips with ease. He’s got that Sinatran quality of convincing you that he’s just a guy in a bar, telling a story. But then the strings kick in and he’s painting a banner of coffee-colored torment; the tone rises and ebbs like a wave, falling back to the conversation.

David is not entirely surprised to find that it’s the man behind the hotel – but here he’s unrestricted, amplified, and taking full advantage. He softshoes the minor intervals of the bridge, giving it the feel of a man perched in the clouds, contemplating his life. The strings well up and he’s back on the ground, a searing double forte, leaning away from the mic so he doesn’t blow out the speakers. He cuts the sound so drastically that it sends a shock through the room; he issues the final restatement at a groomed whisper, then opts for the kind of unresolved end-note that Mel Torme favored, spelling it out till it dissolves in the air. The quiet hangs thick, till it’s cut through with applause.

David finds Abbey grinning at him.

“You’re like a hawk studying a mouse.”

“He’s awesome. Does he need work?”

“Really?”

“Honey, I got nothin’. And that is so much more than nothin’.”

“Okay. Um, listen. I better go get him. He disappears pretty quickly. So I’ll see you at school.”

“Shouldn’t I meet him?”

“Look. I won’t B.S. you. Billy’s a little… okay, a lot weird. He doesn’t respond well to direct approaches.”

“Like a feral cat.”

“Exactly. And you probably won’t get him for a rehearsal, either. But he’s good, and you’re desperate.”

“Marriage made in heaven.”

Abbey grabs her purse and gives David a kiss on the cheek. “Bye, hon.” Then she looks around at the crowded bar. “Whoops!”

A man in a black cowboy hat gets up to sing “Walking in Memphis.” David takes it as a sign, downs his last swallow and starts for home. He sees his jacket in the window – black with a yellow collar. Like a swallowtail butterfly.

Billy Saddle: The Story so Far

2011-11-14T13:25:00.000-08:00

“I hear you were wonderful,” says Elena. “You’re such a good friend.” She hugs him, but he pulls back.

“Dios mio!” (This is their little joke, the Anglo husband with his Spanish eruptions.) “I left mi jacqueta on the jetty.”

“Silly gringo. You’d better get it – it’s your favorite.”

“Okay. Ten minutes, tops.”

“Don’t hurt yourself.”

Derek and Pablo do their best not to groan.

David was wrong. This was Larry’s favorite song. And he knows why he didn’t sing it, because he can feel it taking him apart, brick by brick.

Point Damon is a living illustration in The Way of Things. The seaward shore, harassed by waves and wind, offers a rock-strewn but solid footing of wet sand. The harbor side, lapped by gentle waves, presents a layer of sand and soil the consistency of sponge cake. Each step sinks two inches, turning a mile hike into five miles of work.

He hears whistling: “Take Five.” Around the bend of the harbor shore stands a naked man, covered in soap. David beelines back to the ocean. For the first time this week, he’s hungry.

“Ah! Much better.”

“Always,” says Isaiah.

Isaiah is seven feet tall. A seven-foot Jew with a Barry White voice and one of those chin-spike tufts that the Beats called a goatee.

David once said, “You ever consider the fact that you could snap me like a twig?”

Isaiah unleashed his monstrous smile. “You know how hard it is to find a good bassist?”

No talk now. They take turns sighing, watching their breath rise into the streetlights.

“Tourist season,” says Isaiah.

“I know.”

“Need a singer.”

“Yep. And Ocean Shores is just crawling with Bennetts and Sinatras.”

“I keep playing the old intros,” says Isaiah. “And I look over to give the cue…”

“Yeah. Tell you what. I’ll take out an ad. We’ll do some auditions. Frankly, I need the money.”

“Ice cream?”

“Because the tourists of Washington State deserve the same chance at obesity as my wife. Oh God. I’m sorry.”

Isaiah cleans out a Captain Morgan. “Nonsense! This parking lot is our confessional. You say whatever you need to.”

“Thank you, Father Silverstein.”

“Here. Take the sacrament.”

He hands David a bottle of Binaca. David takes a blast and hands it back. They make for the hotel.

“What do you wanna play?”

“Something happy.”

“‘Girl from Ipanema.’”

“That’s not happy! She doesn’t even see the poor guy.”

“Yeah,” says Isaiah. “But she’s tall and tan and young and lovely.”

“I understand. Just wish I knew where Georgie was.”

David wanders down the line. His players are warming up, heads on a swivel, looking for a savior. He peers into the spruce forest beyond the bleachers and catches a flash of red.

“Hey! Guy in the cap!”

The man slows to a halt and looks in David’s direction. Still wearing denim, still with the Bavarian hat.

“We need another guy or we have to forfeit.”

The man squints and blinks. “I don’t know…”

“You don’t have to do a thing. If you just stand out there, you’ve already saved us.”

The man studies his boot-tops, then stares into the outfield. He licks his lips and scratches an ear.

“Right field okay?”

“Right field’s perfect. Hey! Anybody got an extra glove?”

After the third out, the man walks directly across the foul line and sits on a tree stump. Oscar comes over to confer with David.

“You see the way he threw up his glove like that?”

“Yeah,” says David. “He’s a player.”

“Shall I invite him to join us in the dugout?”

“Nah. Probably won’t bat till next inning.”

“O ye of little faith.”

“Well if you bozos would line up a few hits…”

“You’re up third,” says David.

“Figured.”

His eyes are bullets of steel blue.

“I guess you’ve played this game before.”

He wraps his fingers around the handle and flexes his wrists.

“Tell you the truth, I can’t remember.”

“Yes!” he exults, and spins in his chair. “Hi Dad. How’d you do?”

“Lost.”

“How much?”

“Eight runs.”

“Woohoo!”

“I don’t…”

“You beat the spread.”

“You’re making book on slow-pitch softball?”

“Sure. I had you as eleven-point ‘dogs. And Toby Monamer, that almighty oaf, now owes yours truly a cool deuce.”

“Deuce?”

“Two bucks. We keep it pretty light.”

“But it’s still gambling.”

David grins. “You are such a geek.”

“Damn straight. And if you really are going to raise me in the bustling cultural paradise of Open Sores, what’s a little gaming if it keeps me away from the crackheads?”

“You know, one of these days…” David raises a rhetorical finger, “I’d sure like to win an argument with you.”

Derek flashes a Cuban bandleader smile. “I’ll toss you a bone once in a while. Ya got my numbers?”

He hands him the scorebook. “Stat monster.”

“You beat the spread with eight men? Who the heck is Red Man?”

“We had to Shanghai a civilian. Didn’t even catch his name.”

“Not to tweak your old-school sensibilities, Dad, but today we call them Native Americans.”

“Gotcha. Get to sleep sometime.”

“I will. Love ya!.”

“Love ya back.”

David heads down the hallway, already working on his next-day limp. He pauses at the bedroom door and is relieved when he hears Elena snoring.

He spots a hand mid-class. Ah yes, Kevin Konker.

“Kevin?”

“Isn’t this just another case of a bunch of liberal academics trying to rewrite history?”

His low-level obscenity gets a laugh, which in a final-period class, on a sunny day, is a major victory.

He checks the clock and finds he has only ten seconds.

“Chapter 16 for Monday. One week till finals. Hang in there!”

“David, I love you.”

“Hold that thought.” He catches Kevin by the shoulder. Kevin turns with a blank look, that expressionless expression used by teenagers the world ‘round.

“Mister Konker. Keep those questions coming. Makes for a lively classroom.”

“Oh. Sure. Thanks.”

And he’s gone with the rest. David makes certain to close and lock the door before he returns to Abbey, who is perched provocatively on his desk.

“Thanks. But could you please stop the gushing before one of my children passes by?”

She twirls a strand of hair around a pinkie. “Sorry. I’m a poet.”

“No shit. Any other reason for your visit, Ms. Sparling?”

She hands him a flyer. “The annual literary anthology. Tell your students. Perhaps buy a dozen copies for your family.”

“Well, I don’t know about…”

“Because your son’s in it.”

“Really?”

“Two poems. Excellent poems.”

“I had no idea.”

“Hi handsome.”

Elena slides a bowl into the sink. She may or may not have been eating from it.

“Hola, guapa.” (?)

He leans over the counter for a kiss and comes back with Exhibit B. Strawberry.

“How’s the biz?” he asks.

“Sunshine! Got a nice little after-school rush.”

“I’ve been slipping subliminal messages into my lectures. Benjamin Franklin got the French to send Lafayette largely by plying his wife with pistachio ice cream.”

Elena releases her bright, rounded laugh. Her laugh is as tasty as her lips. And she laughs at his jokes.

“One more week, I’ll be back there with you, honey. You okay for closing?”

“I’m fine. Could you pick up a pizza?”

“I know just the place.”

“What?”

“Looking at my beautiful wife.”

The smile grows. With whiter skin she’d be blushing.

“You make me feel like a teenager.”

“Just stay off the mopeds.”

“Gringo loco.”

He exits to a warm breeze. A twelve-year-old grinds past on a skateboard.

David makes his entrance to the usual greeting.

“It’s my old man! How ya doin’, Pops?”

Pablo offers a sloppy grin and four knuckles. David delivers the fist-bump and follows with the finger-pistol salute.

“Hey!” says Pablo. “New school/old school. Coolest father in town, man. Gets it from hanging out with teenagers all day. Am I right, Cube?”

The Asian kid with the white Mohawk thumps his chest and flips a peace sign. “Word!”

“I’m here strictly on business,” says David. “Your mother would like a large combo with anchovies.”

Pablo makes the Yuk Face, his rubbery features sucking toward the center.

“What is up with that?”

“It’s Ocean Shores, son. Ocean. People here like seafood.”

“I’m gonna be sorely disappointed tonight when I raid the fridge and find fish all over the pizza.”

David moves toward Cube at the cash register. Pablo waves him off.

“Yer money’s no good here, old man.”

“You’re sure.”

“Hey, I’ve earned some freebies. Just don’t tell my cheapass friends. Now go play. I’ll come getcha.”

This is not a positive track. He wanders to the laundry room, finds an extra pair of jeans and heads outside. It’s one o’clock. Pablo’s not home yet.

Out of sheer habit, he walks into town. Past the ice cream shop, his personal albatross, toward the hotel, his primary irritation. He takes a left toward Laney’s.

“Pablo?”

A small sound from the back. He steps into the hallway past the arcade.

“Pablo?”

The response sounds like the mewling of a cat, somewhere inside the walls, but then it gains consonants.

“Dad?”

“Pablo, it’s okay. It’s Dad.”

Pablo looks up, his pale blue eyes bigger than ever. “They had guns, Dad. I thought… I thought they were gonna…”

He buries his head in his father’s chest and shivers, the adrenaline working its way out.

“It’s all right,” says David. He pulls his cell phone from his jacket.

Billy Saddle - The Story So Far

2011-09-17T13:08:00.001-07:00

When he sees it in his dreams – the ball bounding toward him like some round promise of destiny – Billy realizes that he cannot move his arms, because Frankie Minor has wrapped him in an ill-timed embrace. The ball flies past, so close that he can see the stitching. Billy’s anger is animal and quick, until he looks behind them and sees the ball bouncing into the right-field corner. The dream fades as McCarthy rounds third.

When he sees it in his dreams, the ball arcing toward the spruce forest like a Satanic missile, David realizes that he has superpowers. He takes a deep breath and blows the ball far into the woods, where it will do no further harm. Where it will not inspire his best friend to launch a Willie Maysian sprint away from the infield, and to end up in a crumpled heap at the left-field fence, his heart collapsing on itself like a termite-riddled shack.

They gather on the end of the jetty at Point Brown. David cannot recall the significance of this spot, but the will was clear. The trek was perilous – a half mile into the ocean along a narrow strand of rocks – but the late May weather is a miracle of sun and calm.

David sets his sportcoat on a rock and offers the brief tribute he’s been running through his mind all morning. A man of music, and nature, and laughter. The kindest man I have ever known. He tells Larry’s favorite joke – the one that ends “tank tankity tank” – and is relieved when everybody laughs. And he tries, in his creaky bass-player’s voice, to sing a few measures of “Someone to Watch Over Me,” because that was Larry’s favorite song. He’s surprised to find that he’s not crying. He turns, opens the lid and sends the ashes into the ocean.

When they return to the beach, Elena’s eyes are too dark and moist for him to fathom. Pablo and Derek are annoyed, but they’re teenage boys, it’s their job. He’s happy enough when they take turns slapping him on the shoulder.

“I hear you were wonderful,” says Elena. “You’re such a good friend.” She hugs him, but he pulls back.

“Dios mio!” (This is their little joke, the Anglo husband with his Spanish eruptions.) “I left mi jacqueta on the jetty.”

“Silly gringo. You’d better get it – it’s your favorite.”

“Okay. Ten minutes, tops.”

“Don’t hurt yourself.”

Derek and Pablo do their best not to groan.

David runs the jetty, the same game that he played with his boys when they were small. Find a flat surface, stick it, look for the next. Elena couldn’t come to the scattering because she’s too fat. He hates to think these things. David slows his pace. He’s tired; he’s near the end. He hears singing.

He sees a scarlet hunting cap, in the Bavarian style. A short black feather rises from the band like the flag on a mailbox. The cap looks like it’s gone through hell, and so does its owner, a human fencepost dressed all in denim. His wiry hair and beard are the color of rust, his skin like a sunbaked saddle. He aims a crooked, avian nose toward the landing point of Larry’s ashes and sings “‘Round Midnight” in a sandpaper baritone.

David was wrong. This was Larry’s favorite song. And he knows why he didn’t sing it, because he can feel it taking him apart, brick by brick.

Point Damon is a living illustration in The Way of Things. The seaward shore, harassed by waves and wind, offers a rock-strewn but solid footing of wet sand. The harbor side, lapped by gentle waves, presents a layer of sand and soil the consistency of sponge cake. Each step sinks two inches, turning a mile hike into five miles of work.

In the parlance of Ocean Shores, today is a good day: overcast with light rain and a wind that will not actually knock you over. David walks the seaward side, one gray crescent after another, and runs through his mental list.

Larry. He never realized how close they were. He never knew the frequency of their daily interactions. What does he do with the trio? The softball team? Will every deep fly, every performance of “Witchcraft” be an insult to his memory?

Elena. His wife is grotesquely fat. But this is the same woman he married, the woman he loved with a passion that threatened to swallow him whole. The woman who gave him two gorgeous boys. He cringes at the sight of her, at the very thought of sex, and he hates himself.

Money. This was the plan: they would open an ice cream shop. At the end of the school year, he would go from teaching to dishing up sundaes. Summer sales were good, but not enough to justify a year-round overhead. They needed to find something to attract the locals during the off-season, or they needed to get the hell out. Besides, he suspected his wife was embezzling the stock.

Thankfully, he’s interrupted by The Carousel. At the end of the point, the water from the ocean swings to the left, running along the shore in a semicircular stream. David could watch it for hours. But today he smells chicken. And curry. Rosemary, parsley. He has heard that grief can distort the senses, but he didn’t expect such a specific list of ingredients.

He turns toward the smell and finds a wigwam built of driftwood. Some of the pieces are twelve feet high. A trail of smoke rises from the center. As he nears the spot, he finds an opening, and rough shapes: a log, a plank holding plates and glasses, one book. A large pot hanging from a length of copper pipe.

He hears whistling: “Take Five.” Around the bend of the harbor shore stands a naked man, covered in soap. David beelines back to the ocean. For the first time this week, he’s hungry.

David has taken up smoking. Not because he likes it; because he needs something to do. Isaiah has begun his solo dinner hour. David sets his bass on a stand next to the dance floor. He descends the long flight of steps next to the hotel and settles on a low wall near the dunes. The night is crystalline cold, stars flocking over the beach in record numbers. An elderly couple walks the wooden path over the sand, bundled up like ice skaters. David pulls a mint-green box from his windbreaker. He’s had it for two weeks, and still has five cigarettes. He pulls one out and stares at it. He hears singing.

No. It’s Isaiah, playing “Cottontail” at an easy swing. The man’s a genius. Just keeping up with him makes his brain hurt. People say David’s basswork sounds great, but it’s hard to enjoy yourself when you’re a swimmer lost at sea, fighting a rip tide of chord changes. Weird. It sounds like Isaiah’s playing one of those Ella Fitzgerald scat lines. How the hell do you get that from a piano?

He hears a finger-snap, and spies a shadow at the back of the hotel, hiding between a dune and a patio. David closes his eyes and listens to the voice, deedling an arc of nonsense syllables over the top of the melody. He makes it sound easy; it isn’t. Larry was the best singer he’s ever known, and scatting totally threw him. If he lights the cigarette, Shadow Man will disappear, so David listens for a while, pockets the mint-green box and heads upstairs for a soda.

Ralph won’t let his musicians drink until they’re done playing. David can’t really blame him; he’s known a lot of musicians. But it’s hard to play cold sober, especially tonight. At break time, they head for Isaiah’s truck and break out the miniature liquor bottles. David resists the temptation to raise a toast to fallen comrades, and takes his Jack Daniel’s at a shot.

“Ah! Much better.”

“Always,” says Isaiah.

Isaiah is seven feet tall. A seven-foot Jew with a Barry White voice and one of those chin-spike tufts that the Beats called a goatee.

David once said, “You ever consider the fact that you could snap me like a twig?”

Isaiah unleashed his monstrous smile. “You know how hard it is to find a good bassist?”

No talk now. They take turns sighing, watching their breath rise into the streetlights.

“Tourist season,” says Isaiah.

“I know.”

“Need a singer.”

“Yep. And Ocean Shores is just crawling with Bennetts and Sinatras.”

“I keep playing the old intros,” says Isaiah. “And I look over to give the cue…”

“Yeah. Tell you what. I’ll take out an ad. We’ll do some auditions. Frankly, I need the money.”

“Ice cream?”

“Because the tourists of Washington State deserve the same chance at obesity as my wife. Oh God. I’m sorry.”

Isaiah cleans out a Captain Morgan. “Nonsense! This parking lot is our confessional. You say whatever you need to.”

“Thank you, Father Silverstein.”

“Here. Take the sacrament.”

He hands David a bottle of Binaca. David takes a blast and hands it back. They make for the hotel.

“What do you wanna play?”

“Something happy.”

“‘Girl from Ipanema.’”

“That’s not happy! She doesn’t even see the poor guy.”

“Yeah,” says Isaiah. “But she’s tall and tan and young and lovely.”

David stares at home plate, a Milky Way of scars and scratches. The umpire finishes his sweeping and stands up. “Real sorry about this – recent events and all – but I gotta start the clock, David. Y’got five minutes to come up with that eighth man.”

“I understand. Just wish I knew where Georgie was.”

David wanders down the line. His players are warming up, heads on a swivel, looking for a savior. He peers into the spruce forest beyond the bleachers and catches a flash of red.

“Hey! Guy in the cap!”

The man slows to a halt and looks in David’s direction. Still wearing denim, still with the Bavarian hat.

“We need another guy or we have to forfeit.”

The man squints and blinks. “I don’t know…”

“You don’t have to do a thing. If you just stand out there, you’ve already saved us.”

The man studies his boot-tops, then stares into the outfield. He licks his lips and scratches an ear.

“Right field okay?”

“Right field’s perfect. Hey! Anybody got an extra glove?”

Oscar offers a beat-up Rawlings. They go with the standard eight-man defense, leaving second base open and trusting David to pitch for the inside corner. Naturally, his first attempt drifts over the plate, and the batter lifts a lazy fly to right. Merzy’s fast, but there’s now way he’s going to get there. Their new recruit is frozen, gazing skyward as if he’s just spotted an interesting bird. David realizes he doesn’t even know the guy’s name, so he’s left to watch in a silent panic.

The man flips his hand into the air. The ball lands with a smack. He takes it out and studies it, looking for secret messages, then chucks it to the second baseman who isn’t there. It rolls to David’s feet. Merzy jogs by and slaps the man on the back. He flinches.

After the third out, the man walks directly across the foul line and sits on a tree stump. Oscar comes over to confer with David.

“You see the way he threw up his glove like that?”

“Yeah,” says David. “He’s a player.”

“Shall I invite him to join us in the dugout?”

“Nah. Probably won’t bat till next inning.”

“O ye of little faith.”

“Well if you bozos would line up a few hits…”

The following inning, someone laces a ball down the right field line, and the legend of Red Man grows. He races to the line, plants a foot and spins, hurling a one-hopper to second. The batter rounds first and stays there, shaking his head. At the end of the inning, Red Man strolls to the rack and picks out a bat.

“You’re up third,” says David.

“Figured.”

His eyes are bullets of steel blue.

“I guess you’ve played this game before.”

He wraps his fingers around the handle and flexes his wrists.

“Tell you the truth, I can’t remember.”

The first two batters manage to wind up on second and third. Red Man stands in, leans his bat against his shoulder and watches four pitches go by, two strikes, two balls. David is tempted to call time and remind him that it’s okay to take a swing, but decides that it really doesn’t matter. The next pitch is about to drift by for strike three when Red Man punches at it, slapping a grounder into right. Both runners score. He stands on first, arms folded, as if nothing could be more natural.

They lose the game – ten-on-eight being a pretty hefty advantage – but they do manage to fight off the ten-run mercy rule. With condolences added to the mix, the pitching-mound handshakes take longer than usual. When David returns to the bench, he finds Oscar’s old glove dangling from the bat rack. Red Man is nowhere in sight.

David’s children are a joke of the universe. Elena’s father Pablo died during her first pregnancy, so their eldest automatically took his name. Naturally, the genetic blender kicked out a gringito with blond hair, blue eyes and a windstorm of freckles. This crook-nosed Ichabod Crane charmed his way to an insane level of high-school popularity, and now, at 19, maintained his dominion over the local youth as night manager of Laney’s Pizza. He rarely left the premises.

The naming of number two fell to David, who chose to honor his still-living Uncle Derek. This time, the blender delivered jet-black hair, coal-black eyes and skin the color of pancakes. Now 16, he resembles a young Desi Arnaz, minus the skills with music and women. He is, in fact, the biggest geek David has ever known – but he glories in his geek-ness, which is somehow very cool.

David loops his softball bag over his shoulder and closes his car door, unleashing all the stars in the galaxy. He sends his thanks to the tall pines that block out the lights of town. And there’s Gemini. He and Larry were so much alike that they called each other Castor and Pollux. In the sky, he could never remember which was which.

He stows his bag in the hall closet and reports to the computer room, where Derek is pursuing his parallel life in the World of Warcraft. His avatar, a blond viking with green gecko-skin, is doing equestrian battle with a gold-plated triceratops. He wins, as expected, stomping the poor critter into a copper-puddle extinction.

“Yes!” he exults, and spins in his chair. “Hi Dad. How’d you do?”

“Lost.”

“How much?”

“Eight runs.”

“Woohoo!”

“I don’t…”

“You beat the spread.”

“You’re making book on slow-pitch softball?”

“Sure. I had you as eleven-point ‘dogs. And Toby Monamer, that almighty oaf, now owes yours truly a cool deuce.”

“Deuce?”

“Two bucks. We keep it pretty light.”

“But it’s still gambling.”

Derek tents his fingers like a district attorney and speaks in a booming baritone. “Miss Thompson, please read back the testimony from… sometime last month.” He places a pair of reading glasses on the tip of his nose and responds in a Lily Tomlin nasal. “Derek’s father: ‘Son, the best way to stay out of trouble is to find creative ways to stay busy.’”

David grins. “You are such a geek.”

“Damn straight. And if you really are going to raise me in the bustling cultural paradise of Open Sores, what’s a little gaming if it keeps me away from the crackheads?”

“You know, one of these days…” David raises a rhetorical finger, “I’d sure like to win an argument with you.”

Derek flashes a Cuban bandleader smile. “I’ll toss you a bone once in a while. Ya got my numbers?”

He hands him the scorebook. “Stat monster.”

“You beat the spread with eight men? Who the heck is Red Man?”

“We had to Shanghai a civilian. Didn’t even catch his name.”

“Not to tweak your old-school sensibilities, Dad, but today we call them Native Americans.”

“Gotcha. Get to sleep sometime.”

“I will. Love ya!.”

“Love ya back.”

David heads down the hallway, already working on his next-day limp. He pauses at the bedroom door and is relieved when he hears Elena snoring.

Billy Saddle: The Story So Far

2011-07-24T13:33:00.000-07:00

Billy Saddle

a novel by Michael J. Vaughn

“I hear you were wonderful,” says Elena. “You’re such a good friend.” She hugs him, but he pulls back.

“Dios mio!” (This is their little joke, the Anglo husband with his Spanish eruptions.) “I left mi jacqueta on the jetty.”

“Silly gringo. You’d better get it – it’s your favorite.”

“Okay. Ten minutes, tops.”

“Don’t hurt yourself.”

Derek and Pablo do their best not to groan.

David was wrong. This was Larry’s favorite song. And he knows why he didn’t sing it, because he can feel it taking him apart, brick by brick.

Point Damon is a living illustration in The Way of Things. The seaward shore, harassed by waves and wind, offers a rock-strewn but solid footing of wet sand. The harbor side, lapped by gentle waves, presents a layer of sand and soil the consistency of sponge cake. Each step sinks two inches, turning a mile hike into five miles of work.

He hears whistling: “Take Five.” Around the bend of the harbor shore stands a naked man, covered in soap. David beelines back to the ocean. For the first time this week, he’s hungry.

Billy Saddle So Far

2011-07-16T12:22:00.000-07:00

Billy Saddle

a novel by Michael J. Vaughn

When he sees it in his dreams – the ball bounding toward him like some round promise of destiny – Billy realizes that he cannot move his arms, because Frankie Minor has wrapped him in an ill-timed embrace. The ball flies past, so close that he can see the stitching. Billy’s anger is animal and quick, until he looks behind them and sees the ball bouncing into the right-field corner. The dream fades as McCarthy rounds third.

When he sees it in his dreams, the ball arcing toward the spruce forest like a Satanic missile, David realizes that he has superpowers. He takes a deep breath and blows the ball far into the woods, where it will do no further harm. Where it will not inspire his best friend to launch a Willie Maysian sprint away from the infield, and to end up in a crumpled heap at the left-field fence, his heart collapsing on itself like a termite-riddled shack.

They gather on the end of the jetty at Point Brown. David cannot recall the significance of this spot, but the will was clear. The trek was perilous – a half mile into the ocean along a narrow strand of rocks – but the late May weather is a miracle of sun and calm.

David sets his sportcoat on a rock and offers the brief tribute he’s been running through his mind all morning. A man of music, and nature, and laughter. The kindest man I have ever known. He tells Larry’s favorite joke – the one that ends “tank tankity tank” – and is relieved when everybody laughs. And he tries, in his creaky bass-player’s voice, to sing a few measures of “Someone to Watch Over Me,” because that was Larry’s favorite song. He’s surprised to find that he’s not crying. He turns, opens the lid and sends the ashes into the ocean.

When they return to the beach, Elena’s eyes are too dark and moist for him to fathom. Pablo and Derek are annoyed, but they’re teenage boys, it’s their job. He’s happy enough when they take turns slapping him on the shoulder.

“I hear you were wonderful,” says Elena. “You’re such a good friend.” She hugs him, but he pulls back.

“Dios mio!” (This is their little joke, the Anglo husband with his Spanish eruptions.) “I left mi jacqueta on the jetty.”

“Silly gringo. You’d better get it – it’s your favorite.”

“Okay. Ten minutes, tops.”

“Don’t hurt yourself.”

Derek and Pablo do their best not to groan.

David was wrong. This was Larry’s favorite song. And he knows why he didn’t sing it, because he can feel it taking him apart, brick by brick.

Notting Hill and Me

2011-01-30T15:20:00.000-08:00

In forming the shorthand that an author must create to handle cocktail-party chats, I began to use the film "Notting Hill." "'Operaville' is like an opera version of 'Notting Hill.'" Recently, I realized I hadn't actually seen the film, so I got a DVD from the library and gave it a viewing. It was a fascinating experience. The central conceit - a 'normal' person's life being suddenly invaded by a celebrity - provided the same kind of comic opportunties in the film that I had used in my book. Say, the moment that the protagonist shows up at a party with a date who happens to be a world-famous personality (the hilarious shocked reactions of friends). And the central idea behind the device is this: the celebrity provides the same kind of supernatural presence that many a myth would give to an angel, or a ghost, or a Greek god. The immortal being among the poor working slobs?

I also enjoyed the differences. My own international diva is not the kind of mega-celebrity symbolized by Julia Roberts' character, Anna Scott - but in a way, for the devoted minority who follow opera, the reaction is even more intense, because they care deeply about the qualities and values represented by Maddalena Hart. I'm reminded of my own meeting with Duke Snider, who to any old-time baseball fan is a god, an actual Brooklyn Bum and Hall of Famer. But when I drop his name in my artists' milieu, I get a "Duke who?" (When I introduced an opera singer friend to Frederica von Stade backstage, she nearly passed out.)

In any case, it's a very enjoyable film, so I'm glad I've been using it as a comparison.

Celebrity Crap

2010-05-01T13:11:00.000-07:00

I really hate books by celebrities. I'm sure some of them are okay - but I'm sure there are a thousand more deserving authors out there whose books would be more than okay.

I was willing to ditch this piss-poor attitude when it came to Craig Ferguson's novel, "Between the Bridge and The River," because I think his ad hoc mononlogues on late night are brilliant. Alas. It read like a seventeen-year-old trying to impress his friends with his awesome vocabulary. I only made it through two chapters.

So once again, I say, Hey! Celebrities! Get off of my cloud. This job calls for a REAL author!

The Five-Word Drill

2009-08-26T23:07:00.000-07:00

I've been texting with someone who's working on her first novel, and she asked me for five words. So I sent them, and two days later she sent me a quite imaginative story inspired by those five words. When she sent me five words back, I at first balked - being in the middle of a rather enormous novel - but later that day I realized I had brought my most recent conflict to an unanticipated resolution and my novel desperately needed the kind of "left turn" that enlivens any good plot line. So I took those five words on a lengthy beach-walk and mentally composed a fascinating little story that became a dream in the novel, that supplied the spark for a wholly unexpected new conflict - just the left turn I had been looking for.

You never know where the next inspiration is going to come from. And I'd certainly recommend the five-word drill as a good way to keep the faculties loose.

2009-08-20T15:10:00.000-07:00

Hi! There's a story about me in the Tacoma News-Tribune. Check it out at http://www.thenewstribune.com/1199/story/850333.html

Fiction Writing as an All-Purpose Skill

2009-08-11T12:17:00.001-07:00

A friend of mine introduced me to this woman I'm going to meet in person on my impending book tour to Tacoma, and we've been texting to get to know each other a little. Suddenly, this morning, I started getting these weird texts - about how she's got a live-in boyfriend and needs to break it off with me, and then apparently the boyfriend gets a hold of the phone and starts texting to me directly about how she's a cheating, lying so-and-so, and he discovered her texts to me, etc.

Problem was, there was something about this narrative that was terribly phony. Very obvious use of exposition to plant ideas in my head. Unnecessary facts. And, for a guy who's supposedly just been cheated upon, way too much concern for his rival's feelings. As fiction, it just didn't hold up - it was like a really poorly written novel. So I didn't respond.

Turns out, the malicious ex-husband stole Lady X's cell phone and was trying to spread every lie he could think of to all her friends. But he didn't count on the super-psychic skills of Editor Man!

So see? Writing fiction can be useful in all kinds of ways.

Chasing After "It"

2009-06-30T13:33:00.000-07:00

I am fond of comparing my writing experience to that of a parent preparing his children for the world outside. Because no matter how careful and thorough you are, once they're out that door, you don't really know how that child will do, and you especially don't know if they might have that "it" factor that brings success.

When compared to a baseball player, I've had a pretty good average, "it"-wise. My first two novels were... my first two novels. My next two - the opera novel "Gabriella's Voice" and "Frosted Glass," a mid-life crisis set on the Oregon Coast and written in first-person female - had "it" in scads. (The response to "Glass" was almost religious, and I suppose you could call it a "cult favorite.") After that, alas, three beautifully written autobiographical novels with nary a shred of "it."

I was extremely excited when I found out about IndieReader.com. Billed as a sort of Sundance Festival for self-published authors, the site offers the kind of screening process that deserving authors desperately need to set themselves apart from the growing crowd of self-published titles. I naturally sent in my most recent work, the karaoke-set "Outro," and included "Double Blind" almost as an afterthought. I shouldn't have been surprised, however, when they decided to feature DB on their fiction page, since this recognition is only the most recent on a growing list of the novel's "it" parade.

Lord knows, I never expected this one to be a hit. But I had a longtime desire to take on the giggly Puritanism of American culture, and my friend Katrina Galway sealed the deal by loaning me novels by Milan Kundera and Leonard Cohen that were much nastier than anything I was liable to dream up. So I kicked that parental voice out of my head, and embarked for the dark side.

The instigating thought for the book was the confession of a close friend, on his wedding night, that he did not love his bride-to-be - that he was just marrying her because he didn't think that anybody else would ever put up with him. So astonishing was my friend's insecurity that I had to dream up a much more plausible reason for putting my narrator/protagonist, Hopkins Grinder, into the same position.

With the consultation of my geneticist pal Robert Pesich, I also made Hopkins a scientist, so that, in addition to talking about sex the way a guy would, he could talk about it the way a scientist would: as a perfectly natural part of life. Thus outfitted, he does what any guy in a loveless marriage would do: he has an affair, with Kelly, a single mother who just wants someone to come around once a week, screw her and then get the hell out. Their initial tryst - in the back room of Kelly's bead shop - has been called "every straight man's fantasy."

I wanted to give Hopkins some redeeming quality, though, and I landed on a good one: he loves his kids. So I created Laura and Marcus, based on my own passel of beloved nephews and nieces (notably my nephew Steven) and crafted endearing and complex attachments between them and their attentive parents.

But here's the complication: Hopkins is a child of divorce, one who would never allow his own children to suffer the same fate. Quite a quandary, then, when his wife Jessie ends an argument by "accidentally" almost cutting one of Hopkins' eyes out with a paring knife. Hopkins decides to recruit a hobbyist seducer, Damon Karvitz, to placate his frazzled, unloved wife (to keep them together no matter what) and is elated with the results - until he finds his wife being merrily boinked by Damon on a hidden-camera website.

This constant process of painting myself into and out of corners is exactly how a shameless sex book developed a deliciously dark sense of humor and a series of surprisingly poignant family situations - a quality only deepened when Hopkins develops an unexpected friendship with Stanford doctor Lisa Pisarro. The intensity is cranked up by an extremely tight, fast-paced writing style - a discipline I learned during the editing of "Frosted Glass" with my drill sergeant/publisher, John Rutledge.

The popularity of DB has come from an audience of male readers, who appreciate Hopkins' tell-it-like-it-is sex tales and then find themselves identifying with his many conflicts. A typical example is Paul, a bar-buddy who doesn't read much but has read DB three times over, and expounds on its qualities like Billy Graham testifying about his Savior. Or Joe, who expected the lurid aspects of the story but also found it "uncomfortably insightful about the male libido." But DB's "it" quality is perhaps best summarized by a female reviewer, Molly Zoe, who wrote, "If you have ever read anything like 'Double Blind,' it would surprise me greatly."

Poetic Ambiguity and The Killers

2009-04-28T13:44:00.000-07:00

The first time I heard the song "Human" by The Killers, I was astounded - not just by the group's new techno sound or Brandon Flowers' artfully slippery vocal attack, but at the the use of actual poetic language in a pop song. I was highly amused, a month later, when I found a story in Rolling Stone reporting that Flowers' lyrics were drawing a lot of flack - particularly the song's central question, "Are we human, or are we dancer?"

Although poetry has a long tradition of the intentional misuse of words (check out e.e. cummings' "anyone lived in a pretty how town") the simple reassignment of the word "dancer" from noun to adjective (gasp!) had apparently blown the minds of the pathetically linear rock fanbase.

What bugged them even more, I suspect, is that they didn't know what Flowers was trying to say. Much to his credit, at least in the Rolling Stone story, he refused to explain himself, other than saying the line was inspired by a quote from Hunter S. Thompson ("We are raising a generation of dancers"). By doing so, he was preserving what can often be a powerful weapon: poetic ambiguity.

I am a great fan of poets who do not explain themselves, and who apply surreal flights to their works. This is what drew me to Charles Simic, our recent Poet Laureate, whose breakthrough collection of prose poems, 1990's "The World Doesn't End," is virtually packed with the stuff. I use surreal imagery and language in my own work, and when someone asks me what a particular passage means, I respond, "What do you think it means? Because that's what it means." By incorporating ambiguity and mystery into my work, I am ceding responsibility for the ultimate determination of the work's full meaning to the individual reader, who must then become a more active participant - and a more active reader is a more involved reader.

Flowers is not the only songwriter out there who has pulled off this trick. I recently saw an interview with Chris Martin, the lead singer of Coldplay, on "60 Minutes." In talking about the band's first hit, "Yellow," he said, "What's it about? I have no idea what it means. I still think about that every day." He also inadvertently revealed a list of band rules posted in his studio, one of which was, "Always Keep Mystery - not many interviews."

"Look at the stars,
Look how they shine for you,
And everything you do,
Yeah they were all yellow."

Regardless, it's a beautiful song, the word "yellow" evokes a myriad of meanings within the lyrics, and people respond to it in ways that they often can't describe. I sing it sometimes at karaoke - and was thrilled, the other night, when I finally found a karaoke track of "Human." After giving it my best shot (no matter how well you know a song, singing it the first time is always a leap of faith), I brought this very subject to the attention of my cohorts, singers Mack and Cicily. Always looking to be cautious in poetic conversations with non-poets, I offered my most on-the-surface interpretation of Flowers' question: Are we human - what we are - or are we dancer - what we do? Mack came back at me with the interpretation I had always felt (much as I felt the the emotional images I had received from the Martin's use of the word "yellow") but never actually put into words: That the idea of a dancer evokes creativity, expressiveness and freedom. Thus, are we human - in the pedestrian, coldly scientific sense of that word - or are we dancer - spiritual, energized, expressive beings?

In that case, I said, I hope we're dancer. Perhaps yellow dancer. In a pretty how town.

Image: What Chris Martin meant by "yellow"? Photo by MJV.

The Little Touches

2009-04-01T13:43:00.000-07:00

At my book release party at Books, Inc. in Mountain View, CA, one of the staff members reproduced a portion of my cover in chalk to publicize the event. I was mightily impressed that they would go to these lengths. I wish the photo quality were better, but I wanted to share it with you.

The Old Flip-Flop

2009-02-27T13:07:00.000-08:00

A friend who's into me being a writer asked me how things were going. I joked that I had my head into three novels - selling one, editing another, starting a third - and wasn't always sure which one I was talking about at any particular time. And I told him that the new one was really coming to me strongly, was threatening to take over my life, and that I was purposely slowing it down a little while I finished my editing on the previous one.

"Oh, you shouldn't do that!" he said. "You've got to strike while the inspiration's there." And then launched into a five-minute talk on the art of writing, involving some movie with Sean Conncery a few years ago ("Finding Forrester"?).

I was actually highly amused, because this happens all the time - amateurs giving advice to the 25-year veteran novelist. So I just listened until he come to this understanding himself and said, "Well why the heck am I telling YOU all this?"

I think it's mostly projection, but it is funny how much advice I get sometimes. People are always telling me about books I should read, and I feel like saying, "Shouldn't YOU be asking ME about good books to read?"

Image: The last line, final draft of "The Monkey Tribe," novel number ten.

The Case of the Imposter Novel

2009-02-22T13:56:00.000-08:00

I was talking with a friend last night, and asked her how she was enjoying my book, "Double Blind," which I gave to her a few weeks previous.

"Well, the setup's taking a little too long."

"Wow. That's curious. No one's mentioned that before."

"Well, it's all that stuff about the sheriff, and his relationship with the married woman."

"But my novel doesn't have a sheriff."

"Of course it does!"

"I swear, honey, I wrote the book - there's no sheriff."

When she checked the book that night, she discovered that IUniverse had somehow sent me a book with my cover but somone else's text! A check of my inventory revealed that, thank goodness, this hadn't happened with any of the other copies. But my friend had been plodding through this story, thinking how different it was from my previous novel, for almost a month.

"Well why didn't you say something?" I asked.

"It wasn't very good," she said. "And I didn't want to hurt your feelings."

Shape Poem Podcast

2008-12-30T13:49:00.000-08:00

Recently, Terrain.org asked me to record two shape poems, "Consolation" and "Return to Sender," for inclusion in their winter 2009 issue. As part of the process, I created my own podcast; you can listen to these poems directly at http://www.gcast.com/u/michaeljvaughn

Note: For writers who may have need of MP3 files, but don't have the right software on their computers, the Gcast process is superbly easy. You record items to the site through your cell phone, and can then convert them to MP3s for export eslewhere. Highly recommended!

Image: a photo of the shape poem "Consolation"

My Life in Publishing Hell, Part IX

2008-12-24T14:23:00.000-08:00

Outro
The Epic Karaoke Novel Arrives at IUniverse

I am a dedicated karaokephile, and have always been fascinated by the instant community that develops when people sing to each other. It's only natural, then, that I would use a karaoke bar as a setting for a novel. Outro follows the life of Channy Lebeque, a karaoke hostess in Gig Harbor, Washington who, despite the merry atmosphere that she nurtures at her shows, seems to be suffering from some great unspoken grief. The source of this grief is revealed by the antagonisms of Ruby Cohen, a talented singer of jazz standards who has come to Gig Harbor after a failed Broadway career. The sessions of storytelling between Ruby and Channy go to places that surprised even me, revealing the ill fates of Channy's young, gung-ho husband that led to a bad ending in Iraq.

Bouyed by the credentials that I earned through my many stories at Writer's Digest, Outro got many, many nibbles from the agents and editors of America, but none that resulted in a contract. Part of the reason may have been revealed by the analysis of my friend Michelle Sutton, who told me that, although Channy's mysterious early griefs definitely pique the reader's curiosity, they're also a little irritating ("Like, what's this chick's problem?"). I tackled this by doing a little chapter-switching, opening with a flashback of Channy's meeting with her future husband at the Alaskan Highway's famed Signpost Forest. I hoped that this would show a younger and happier Channy, before she was beset by the tragedies that have caused her current depressions.

Not enough to get an acceptance, mind you. But I am far past the idea that agents and editors put good writing at a priority - celebrity status and author platforms being much more important - so I took my rejections like a man and re-entered the self-publishing process at IUniverse. As of this writing, I have submitted the text, back matter, author bio and photo (the splendid work of my journalist pal, Anne Gelhaus), all through the online submission process. Most importantly, I obtained another incredible image from my Italian photographer colleague, Paula Grenside, who supplied the startling cover for my previous novel, Double Blind.

The photo, "Warmth," is something I've had my eye on for quite a while. I used it previously as the cover image for my online literary journal - geocities.com/capricejournal. The image satisfies all the elements I look for in a piece of cover art. First, it's a striking image that will help the book to "jump off the shelf." Second, it evokes the themes of the book without overtly spelling them out. The photo portrays a young woman, her identity hidden by brilliant photoshop overlays of texture and color (notably a sublime spring green), cradling an object that gives out a reddish glow. I think of that glow as Channy's grief, which is simultaneously comforting her and keeping her hidden from the world. The title further emphasizes this idea: "Outro" is the opposite of "intro," a word that comes up on the karaoke lyric screen when the singing is over but the music continues.

Third, "Warmth" is a piece of art unto itself, produced by Paula years ago, with no intention toward some novel that her colleague Michael might write. I cherish the idea of contributing to the dissemination of Paula's brilliant images, and intend to keep doing so with future novels. (I have always preferred photography for cover images, and have used it all three times that I have had the say-so in such matters, including my first novel, Frozen Music, in 1995.)

The designers at IUniverse did their usual excellent job with the piece - notably in continuing the luscious background tones as a wraparound to the back page - but gave me a little conundrum. The designer used a fanciful, gothic type for the title word. It was lovely, but "Outro" is not a well-known word, and I feared that people would have a problem making it out through the typography. So I apologized profusely and asked them to change it to something plainer. They went with the type they used for the author name, and it's all ready to go. I found 30 or so typos on my proofread (an embarrassing amount for someone who prides himself on clean manuscripts), and as soon as IUniverse corrects two more the book will be on its way to press.

I am considering some unusual marketing for Outro. I may take a little tour of karaoke bars, using my singing as an opening to give people flyers about the book (and getting that astounding cover image into their hands), and looking for reviews from karaoke magazines and newsletters. I also may reproduce the entire text in a serialized form on this site, with the addition of notes explaining some of the writing processes of each chapter. (I am currently publishing a serial version of my earlier novel, Gabriella's Voice, on my opera website, operaville.blogspot.com.

If Outro ever did make it big, I am not so sure that I would sell out to the major publishing houses. I love the artistic control afforded by the IUniverse system, and could be very happy just selling my future novels through their site and gathering up the royalties. I have been through way too much publishing hell to trust an industry that has become overconglomerated, tasteless and cowardly, and have often fantasized about accepting some huge literary award and taking the opportunity to tell them all exactly what I think of them.

Image: "Warmth," manipulated photograph, Paula Grenside.

My Life in Publishing Hell, Part VIII

2008-12-19T15:31:00.000-08:00

Double Blind
The Self-Publishing Experiment

My next project was based on something I'd always wanted to do: to write a novel about sex that got away from this silly American giggliness and spoke in plain terms. To bolster my approach, I used a first-person male narrator who is also a scientist (and much more apt to see sex as a natural process). I came up with an outlandish plot (a husband accidentally getting his wife involved with an Internet porn site) that had some surprisingly poignant things to say about bringing unnecessary chaos into the lives of children. I was also relieved to be back in the land of the non-autobiographical novel, and the kind of imaginative, pure storytelling that had produced my earlier favorites, Gabriella's Voice and Frosted Glass.

Blessed with the credentials I'd recently gathered writing for Writer's Digest, I thought I would have a better chance with agents and publishers. Alas, no. I had, however, crossed a personal boundary: I no longer had any doubt in the merits of my writing, and particularly in Double Blind, and I knew that it deserved to be read. So I decided to do it all on my own.

Some of this decision was fueled by the can't-beat-'em-join-'em angle. I went with IUniverse, largely because it's owned by the same folks who own Barnes & Noble and is thereby well-connected with the distribution system.

Tossing all humility aside, I am the perfect self-publisher. With my stringent self-editing habits I handed IUniverse a near-perfect text (I have yet to find a typo, two years later). They did a beautiful job with the typography and layout. On the design side, I had the chance to pursue the photographic approach that I had always envisioned. I'm a sometime-photographer myself, and have always been drawn to book covers featuring photos. My first book, 1995's Frozen Music, featured a Susan Merrill photograph that I still adore.

With Double Blind, I was in some extraordinary luck. A few years before, the online journal Avatar Review accepted some of my poetry. I became a regular correspondent with the poetry editor, Paula Grenside. She lives in Italy, and as an opera buff I enjoyed attempting some conversations with her in Italian. One day she invited me to check out her online photography portfolio, and I immediately fell in love. Working in a wide variety of styles - black and white, color, computer-manipulated and not, landscapes and model work - Paula had created some fantastically imaginative work. I asked to use some of it for an online journal of my own - geocities.com/capricejournal - and a few months later, when it came to Double Blind, I knew I wanted to use one of her works for the cover.

Scanning Paula's portfolio, I though I was looking for a nude shot - something as frankly sexual as the narration - but then I happened upon a non-manipulated black-and-white of a svelte young woman with a lizard tattoo and a feathered mask. There was something so flirtatious and mysterious about her demeanor that I knew this was my cover. (Later, a friend would point out that I had, in fact, written a mystery, so it's no wonder the photo made that connection.) I asked Paula to send a Tif file of it off to IUniverse, and what I got back was perfection: a design that used shadowed blue-gray type to blend the title and author name with the graytones of Paula's image.

I've also been pleased by the customer service at IU. They assigned me to a customer service rep who walked me through the process: she was prompt with answers and always encouraging in her tone - even when wrestling with my clumsy attempts at getting the right format for the author photo. Later, they offered some intriguing group advertising buys, and even though it didn't help sales at all, I did appreciate the opportunity to have DB in Poets & Writers and the New York Times review of Books. (I got a call from a long-lost colleague who assumed that the latter meant I had hit the big time. I did not correct her.)

After trying for a year to encourage people to buy DB online, I discovered that a friend of mine had just published a book on recession economics (nicely timed!) and decided to set up some readings for the both of us. We called it the Sex & Money Tour. And here are my findings: as a self-published POD author, you simply have to bring your own copies. It's the only way a bookstore will host you. Our two readings received some excellent response. In the book-mad county of Santa Cruz, CA, we drew 60 folks to the Capitola Book Cafe, and in Silicon Valley, 30 came to Books Inc. in Mountain View. I did my usual dramatic readings (with a couple actor friends to add dialogues) and was very happy with the audience response. I was especially pleased with the Books Inc. store, which afforded my title some excellent display space, sent me a check for sold copies a week after the reading, and still has six copies on their shelves six months later. The Capitola store has sent me nothing, but does have some copies of the books still on its shelves.

Although DB was far from a sales success, it taught me some valuable lessons, and I am set to try some more ambitious things with my upcoming IU book, Outro, which I will chronicle here as the process goes along.

Next: Outro, epic karaoke novel

Find Double Blind at http://www.amazon.com/Double-Blind-Michael-J-Vaughn/dp/0595418074/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1229729394&sr=8-3

Birth of a Novel

2008-12-16T14:05:00.000-08:00

I'm jumping ahead on this a little, but here's the image I'm using for my upcoming novel, "Outro," currently being developed by the design staff at IUniverse. It's a manipulated photo, "Warmth," by Paula Grenside, the Italy-based artist who also supplied the image for my previous novel, "Double Blind." So, see if you can imagine what might be done with this, and in a couple days I'll publish the designer's first attempt.

My Life in Publishing Hell, Part VII

2008-12-11T12:41:00.000-08:00

Rhyming Pittsburgh
A Dive Into Weirdness

With my next novel - an account of a failed marriage proposal that I now refer to as "The Long Island Fiasco" - I decided to try a new twist on the autobiographical-novel form. I made my protagonist, Jake Willoughby, into a poet, and used actual poems that I had written to my girlfriend in the context of the story. Even with this innovation, my publisher at Dead End Street was not interested in the title. The struggles over POD distribution had left us all a little exhausted, and trying to market another Subtle Literary Work from Vaughn wasn't really on his priority list. I didn't blame him - and besides, it seemed like time for the both of us to move on to something else. I had also become increasingly self-assured as an artist, and was looking for a publisher who (unless large cash advances were involved) would give me pretty much complete control over the text.

My limbo lasted all of a week, and my subsequent alliance with LBF Books unleashed a string of art-imitates-life-imitates-art that's a little hard to explain.

Jacqueline Druga-Marchetti was the author of my second editing project, The Shroud, a sci-fi novel based on the Jurassic Park-ish idea of cloning the DNA from the Shroud of Turin. It was a brilliant idea, but the prose needed some tightening. I was tough on Jake's writing (yes, that's her nickname), but I involved her in the process at all times, and I gave her absolute veto power over all changes. She really appreciated this approach, and we became friends as well as colleagues.

When Jake heard I was moving to Long Island - with the goal of proposing to my long-time girlfriend - she invited me to take part in a book festival she was organizing in her home town, Pittsburgh. The post-festival party featured her cover rock band, and when their drummer flaked I played a set with them absolutely cold. (The experience was crazy-scary and crazy-adrenalizing. A horror novelist played the second set and managed to bloody his thumb on a drumhead. Typical.)

A month later, when my Long Island trip officially became the Fiasco, Jake invited me to hang out in Pittsburgh for a month, so I could lick my wounds before heading back to California. And also to play a couple of gigs with her band, which had fired the flaky drummer.

All of this became fodder for the novel. I retrieved my soul in Pittsburgh, especially on the artsy, quirky South Side club district, which is why I used the name of the city in my title (and also to reflect its predecessor, Painting Tacoma). While I was writing the novel, Jake got together with an author/physician/investor to start a small publishing firm, LBF Books. When she learned that Dead End Street had turned down Rhyming Pittsburgh, she immediately offered to publish it.

Oddly, the use of "Jake" for my protagonist is complete coincidence. It's a name I had always used at cafes when I got tired of three different "Mikes" trying to steal my latte. Otherwise, nothing in the book is coincidence, and, to summarize, one of the characters in the book had just become its publisher. Weird!

LBF designed the book with some intriguing illustrations by Laura Givens, based on photographs of models in various scenes from the story. These were used on the cover as well as in several interior illustrations - an old-fashioned touch that people really seemed to enjoy (except for my subsequent girlfriend, who realized that one of the photos was meant to represent me in bed with another woman). We debuted the whole line at the West Virginia Book Faire, and had one helluva good time. I drove there with a poet who turned out to be a professional mezzo soprano, and who also could do a mean impression of Cartman from South Park. After that, naturally, I was a judge at Jake's karaoke contest.

Seeing that this book was not a POD, but a small, standard-print run, I looked forward to booking some author appearances, but found myself with a whole new set of obstacles. LBF was wholly ineffective at satsifying the requirements of the distributors, and when bookstore managers couldn't find the title on their computer listings, they refused to even consider me. When I finally found a couple of real pros who could see through the problems, one of my readings, at the University of Washington Bookstore in Tacoma, was cancelled when LBF failed to get the books there on time.

My single reading came at the Borders in Tacoma, and this time I managed to screw things up all by myself. Not realizing that LBF didn't accept returns on autographed books (a silly policy), I signed all thirty copies that had not sold at the reading. The district manager sent me a nasty email accusing me of blackmailing my way into shelf space. I apologized profusely, feeling terribly embarrassed, but then something weirdly wonderful happened. The bookstore manager got ticked off at the district manager for being so nasty with me, and decided to get back at him by making me her personal cause. She placed all thirty copies of Pittsburgh next to the lines for the cash registers, during the holidays. Out of sheer guilt, I bought five copies myself, but the other 25 sold out by New Year's, confirming what I had always suspected: that if any of my books ever got the proper treatment, they would sell. And God bless that lovely store manager, wherever she is, for taking up my banner. I will try to piss off district managers from now on.

After that, Jake became increasingly flaky and incommunicative, and it became counterproductive for me to even bother with any further marketing. The entire LBF line was later purchased by a Canadian press that sends me irritating emails and does absolutely nothing to promote my book.

Next: Double Blind and the world of self-publishing.

Find Rhyming Pittsburgh at http://www.amazon.com/Rhyming-Pittsburgh-Michael-J-Vaughn/dp/0975453335

Image: One of the very cool interior illustrations by Laura Givens (see lauragivens-artist.com for more).

My Life in Publishing Hell, Part VI

2008-12-08T16:45:00.000-08:00

Painting Tacoma

The End of the Dead End Street

Already beset by the challenges of trying to get the publishing industry to open itself up to POD titles, my publisher John Rutledge was increasingly eager to fish in the Hollywood pond instead, and went to the extent of publishing my screenplay adaptations of Gabriella's Voice and Frosted Glass. The adaptation process surprised me. Unlike many authors, I absolutely relished the process of re-forming my stories into the visual language of cinema, and had no problem hacking and slashing wherever it was called for. We had some serious nibbles. Sam Waterston of Law & Order fame expressed interest in Glass, but had to beg out due to scheduling conflicts. Gabriella drew an offer from a small filmmaking group in New York. After reviewing the contracts, John decided that the group wasn't up to snuff, and turned down the offer. That's a decision I have grown to regret. Since I had no real name built up, I think we should've taken the chance.

Into this rather dismal atmosphere came Painting Tacoma, based on my relationship with a born-again Christian woman with bipolar syndrome. I thought the issues of cross-faith romance (I'm an atheist) and mental illness - along with the setting in my adopted second hometown - would be enough to carry the book, but John had been hoping for something a little "sexier," something with the grand storytelling impact of a Gabriella or Frosted Glass. On the up-side, my writing process had attained the point of near infallibility. John seemed almost disheartened that there was no real editing to be done. Knoll Gilbert came up with a magnificent cover design - blending the paint of the title with fantastical colors reflecting the hallucinatory stages of bipolar episodes - and we put out another beautiful book.

Faced with the continuing frustrations of the bookstore-distribution process, however, Painting Tacoma never had a chance. Many of my own energies were, ironically, being taken up with a resurgence of the very romance I had written about, so I lacked the strength to beat my head against that brick bookstore wall. In the end, the book that would prove to be my last with Dead End Street died a quiet death.

Find Painting Tacoma at http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Painting-Tacoma/Michael-J-Vaughn/e/9781929429929/?itm=1

Next: Rhyming Pittsburgh and a dive into weirdness.

My Life in Publishing Hell, Part V

2008-12-05T13:20:00.000-08:00

The Legendary Barons
Let the Autobiography Begin!

TLB - based on the exploits of my long-time softball team - was noteworthy (in a publishing context) for its cover, done by a guy who formerly designed a Nine Inch Nails album cover - and for the inclusion in its story line of the book tour for my first novel, Frozen Music. Called by a friend "The I-Told-You-So Tour," my cross-country traveling crew included a friend who had recently lost her mother - and who decided to indulge in a full-scale alcoholic adventure during the trip.

Barons was the first of an autobiographical trilogy that would prove to be quite a struggle for me. The effort was to balance real-life events - which rarely follow the perfect arcs of classic storytelling - with the requirements of fiction. Although I am happy with the work I did in this gray area, I have come to realize that my best work - as in Frosted Glass and Gabriella's Voice - comes from material that may be drawn from real life details, settings and characters, but follows storylines that are not tied down to the rigors of memoir.

After the great success of Frosted Glass, Dead End Street was firmly behind me. In fact, after the editing boot-camp conducted on FG by myself and publisher John Rutledge, DES hired me as an editor for Michael Kelleher's true-crime novel Suspect Zero and Jacqueline Druga-Marchetti's apocalyptic sci-fi book The Shroud. Barons was the first application of this new editing rigor to my own work, and it showed in the final editing process, which did not require much work on John's part.

After a successful release party at the San Jose Barnes & Noble, I sought to book some appearances in outlying regions of Northern California, and began to run into the roadblocks that would continue to plague my DES efforts in years to come. Even with print-on-demand firmly established as a publishing technology, the bookstore distribution systems refused to adapt to the new realities. The system was clearly set up to accommodate books with thousands of copies at the warehouse, and even when we sent the required minimum to those warehouses, the Ingram readouts refused to list their availability.

The other issue was returnability. Distributors refused to offer full returnability on copies that didn't sell in the bookstores, and even after DES offered full guaranteed returnability direct to the publisher, the bookstore managers refused to go for it. What's more, POD had begun to open the floodgates for poorly designed, poorly edited, poorly written titles, and bookstores refused to believe that DES was actually producing professionally designed, edited and written books. The stores began to ghettoize POD titles into author faires; authors were required to bring their own copies to the faire, give the stores a percentage of any copies sold that day, and then take the rest home - which removes the most basic reason for arranging author appearances, which is to get copies of your book on the shelves, where consumers might see it and take a chance on an unknown author. Faced with glass ceiling after glass ceiling, I began to wonder how I would ever be able to bring my novels to a wider audience.

Next: Painting Tacoma, the end of the Dead End Street

To see Legendary Barons, go to: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Legendary-Barons/Michael-J-Vaughn/e/9781929429899/?itm=5

My Life in Publishing Hell, Part IV

2008-11-30T14:57:00.000-08:00

Frosted Glass

The Editor-Go-Round

Dead End Street signed me up for my next novel, Frosted Glass - about a down-on-her-luck marketing executive who falls for a beachcombing eccentric on the Oregon coast - and we immediately ran into problems. The novel is narrated by the protagonist, Sandra Lowiltry, and my editor, Christine Mrazovich, hated her. She also didn't like the style, which was much more "unreined" than Gabriella's Voice. In a way, I could understand Christine's feelings. From what I knew of her, she was a divorced mother, and Sandra's profile - a self-involved businesswoman who desperately wants a baby, and who acts like a complete twit when it comes to her personal life - would not be someone Christine would be fond of. Nonetheless, I had the ultimate faith in Frosted Glass, and it was clear that I couldn't work with an editor who would prefer to rewrite the whole thing. So I asked my publisher, John Rutledge, to assign another editor to the project.

The next editor was an absolute train wreck. He had a PhD in Creative Writing (a degree which I've always viewed with great suspicion), and he seemed intent on completely rewriting Glass in his own style, in accord with many great theories of literature that he had picked up in college. When I protested his machete style of editing on my first chapter, he responded, "No author has been allowed to have a personal style since John Updike." Excuse me? I decided to use some of the cache I had earned with Gabriella's Voice, and asked John to dismiss this editor, too.

Then a rather marvelous thing happened. Running out of options (and editors), John decided to take on the project himself - and became the best editor I've ever had. John Rutledge's "day job" is as an intellectual properties lawyer. At the time, he was working for a firm in Marin County that represented the Grateful Dead and many other Bay Area artists. I teased John one day when he mentioned a conversation with "Carlos." I said, "Come on, I know you're trying really hard not to name-drop, but I know who 'Carlos' is, pal." In any case, John's life mission, it seems, is to cut the unnecessary verbiage from traditionally overwritten legal documents (I noticed this with DES's author contracts, which were actually understandable!). I had come to understand that I had intentionally overwritten Frosted Glass, and that it did need some hacking and slashing. The difference with John was that, while he was tough on me, he let me be a part of the process, and allowed me to review and rewrite changes that he suggested. This removed many of the adverserial feelings that can creep into an author-editor relationship. Not that we didn't argue - boy did we argue! - but he was nice enough to let me have my say. In the end, once we whittled the excess away from Glass, we had ourselves a beautifully crafted novel, one that I still consider my best.

I learned so much about the editing process from the Frosted Glass experience that I soon became one of DES's editors, and it has always been my hallmark to include the authors in on the process - and, in fact, to give them final say over all changes, thereby gaining their trust. I received excellent reviews from my authors, because I gave them the same consideration that John gave to me.

The cover design for Glass was a marvel of synchronicity. In researching the image, my designer, Holly Smith, had gone to websites featuring the finds of beach glass aficionados. She chose to use as her subject a gorgeous piece of cobalt blue with a faint star at its center, and framed it with bits of seaweed, sand and foam. The piece she chose is perfect for the story, which features a large piece of the "rare and lovely blue" as a pivotal sign of affection between the beachcomber and Sandra. It turns out, however, that Holly had not read that far into the story - had simply picked the blue piece because she found it to be the most stunning piece on the website.

The book came out in July 2002, and I managed to assemble a Northwest tour - including a stop in Lincoln City, OR, very near the novel's setting, and other appearances in Washington, Montana, Colorado and Nevada. After a memorable stop in Great Falls, Montana, I drove head-on into a blizzard, and spent the night stopping every few miles to chip the ice from my windshield. (My brother-in-law, Rick, had graciously loaned me his 4WD truck for the trip, and I needed every of its power to make it.) I called it a night in Casper, Wyoming, and had to cancel my Colorado appearances when they closed down I-80 due to all the ice on the freeway.

During the planning of this trip, an unsettling trend began to appear: bookstore managers began to balk at arranging appearances for POD authors, citing distribution problems and returnability issues (DES's guaranteed return policy did not seem to impress them). These issues would intensify in later years.

As a side note, John asked me to write screenplay adaptations for Gabriella's Voice and Frosted Glass. Unlike many authors, I very much enjoyed the opportunity to adapt these stories to a visual medium, and hacked and slashed wherever needed. DES eventually published both adaptations in soft-cover. We received some notable interest from John's Hollywood mailing list - especially Sam Waterston of Law and Order fame - but failed to land a contract. A small indie company in New York made a play for Gabriella, but John turned it down, citing indications that the company didn't really have its act together. With perfect hindsight, I wish we had signed them up, anyway, because I'm not exactly Michael Crichton, and why not take a chance?

Next: The Legendary Barons and the Autobiography Bug

Find Frosted Glass at: http://deadendstreet.com/v3.asp

My Life in Publishing Hell, Part III

2008-11-25T13:19:00.000-08:00

Gabriella's Voice

The Breakout

My great love for opera inspired Gabriella's Voice, the story of a young opera singer and her mysterious patron. After a couple of interesting rejections from an academic press that said it was "too plot-driven" and a commercial press that said it was "too intellectual," the book was accepted by Dead End Street LLC, a new publisher in Washington state dedicated to using the new ebook technology to give exposure to worthy books that might otherwise get overlooked.

For a brief while in the latter days of the millennium, the ebook trend appeared to be working. I attended an ebook convention in San Francisco, and was pleasantly surprised to find that a new electronic reading device, The Rocket, was developing a cult following, and that my novel was becoming an increasingly popular entry into the Rocket's memory banks. The Rocket was eventually re-manufactured by RCA, and basically vanished from sight. Wish I could tell you more.

But there were other, plentiful signs that the consuming public was just not ready to read their books in this form - a notion bolstered by the ever-rising prominence of traditional-book chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders. My co-publishers, Ivan Black and John Rutledge, were savvy enough to see this reality, and to switch to the mid-point technology of print-on-demand. Thus, the real "book-book" version of Gabriella arrived in 2001. (And a real book, of course, was what I had been after all along.)

The editing of Gabriella, by Christine Mrazovich, went very smoothly, but we had some consternation with the cover design. The artist had assembled a montage of items related to the story, and it sorely lacked a strong central image. Taking camera in hand, I took my opera-singer pal, Jennifer Der Torossian - the woman who inspired much of the title character - and set her in a pose from the novel's final scene: Gabriella, weeping atop a pile of wardrobe in the dressing room. I sent the photo to the artist, and he came up with his own version, a pleasingly rough piece of art that people seem to really respond to. (Years later, DES came up with a "smoother" cover design, but readers seem to prefer the original.)

I lacked the time or money to pursue an extended tour for Gabriella, but I did manage some local readings. The first featured Opera San Jose soprano Barbara Divis, who joined me in reading dialogues from the book and then performed related arias. The performance, at the Borders in Los Gatos, CA, drew 200, which pretty much blew me out of the water (I suspect most of them were there for Barbara, but I was perfectly willing to make use of her popularity). Two years later, Barbara and I re-created this performance at the Lincoln Center Barnes & Noble, directly across from the home of New York's Metropolitan Opera. Gabriella also garnered a $3,000 fellowship from Arts Council Silicon Valley. Things were looking up!

You can find Gabriella's Voice at: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Gabriellas-Voice/Michael-j-Vaughn/e/9781929429950/?itm=1

Next: Frosted Glass and the Editor-Go-Round

My Life in Publishing Hell, Part II

2008-11-23T14:36:00.000-08:00

Courting the Seventh Sister

Doing the EBook Limbo

After the usual round of universal rejections, I had actually relegated Sister - a story about the world's most perfectly run adulterous affair - to the "cold case" file, and had gone on to marketing my next novel, Gabriella's Voice. In one of those rare moments of simultaneous acceptance, I received two offers for Gabriella, two days apart. (Before you begin the ethics investigation, they both requested samples, but not exclusively.) It ended up going to Dead End Street Press (more on that later), and then I had the awkward job of telling the second press, an ebook publisher called Online Originals, that the book was no longer available. Bless their hearts, they were gracious enough to look at Sister as an alternative, and seemed to like this one even better.

Based in the UK, O.O. was one of the first all-ebook publishers. I saw no reason not to give the new technology a whirl, especially since ebooks were suddenly a hot topic in publishing and technology circles around the world. Besides, it gave me a chance to dig Sister out of its undeserved grave and give it a chance to be read. Very soon, it received a featured spot on the well-designed O.O. website, and we were on our way.

To, pretty much, nowhere. As much as people were pushing the new technology, no one was actually buying ebooks. People were just too attached to the traditional paper-based book.

I have had high hopes of resurrecting Sister yet again - I really do love the story, and the setting, inspired by my years as PR director at the Villa Montalvo Arts Center and mansion in Saratoga, CA - but have largely been blocked by the publishers. A conversion to print-on-demand entails a large fee to the author, and a much-needed rewrite (a rewrite that I have already performed) would require even more fees. The only way out would be an offer from a standard-print publisher - and even that's tricky, because any potential publisher would also, naturally, be interested in ebook rights, which are held by O.O. I currently count Sister as a lost work - perhaps waiting for that day when my Pulitzer win/Oprah appearance/marriage to Gwyneth Paltrow thrusts me into the spotlight and forces somebody to pay Online Originals massive sums of money for the rights. Meanwhile, I have consoled myself by resuscitating two of the main characters, Scootie Jones and Audrey LaBrea, and inserting them into subseqent novels.

Next: The Breakthrough: Gabriella's Voice

Art: The title image for Courting the Seventh Sister from the Online Originals website: http://onlineoriginals.com/showitem.asp?itemID=128

My Life in Publishing Hell, Part I

2008-11-06T10:50:00.000-08:00

Even though I am a contributor to writer magazines, I am not entirely trusting of their contents. The articles are often too one-size-fits-all to be of any use whatsover to the individual writer. With this thought in mind, I decided that a blow-by-blow account of my publishing history might be of use. I've had extremely varied, sometimes bizarre experiences with publishing. Take from it what you will.

Frozen Music
Dodging the Scam

My first novel, based on my experiences in a college choir, was accepted by Northwest Publishing in Salt Lake City in 1994. There was a catch, naturally: a $3,000 price tag for "subsidy publishing," in exchange for a guaranteed printing of 5,000 copies.

My first editor, gifted with the uber-literary name Gwen Bloomsburg, was a doll. She made few changes - changes that inevitably improved the text - and she became a personal in-house cheerleader for my novel and its humorous, rambling narrative. ("Half the fun is getting there," she was fond of saying.) Our mutual proofing was so immaculate that it took two years before someone discovered a typo. I had described Jesus on his way to "Cavalry," which to this day inspires a mental image of the Messiah on horseback, dressed in a Union uniform.

Northwest allowed me some say-so on the cover, and I had just the right image, a photo by my friend Susan Merrill. The pigeons in Susan's photo were "frozen" in flight, portrayed in gray tones against a sepia background, produced through the decidedly low-tech process of covering them with rubber cement before dipping the photo in a sepia bath. The Northwest designer wrapped the photo around the spine, applied some tasteful typography, and I couldn't believe that my very first cover could look quite so good.

These were the days when Barnes & Noble was still the new kid on the block, and anxious to fill its calendars with author appearances. I managed to arrange a 25-bookstore tour, from Las Vegas to Brunswick, Maine, and was accompanied by two friends in a VW Vanagon (the particulars of that tour made an interesting chapter in my subsequent novel, The Legendary Barons).

Soon after the tour, I began to hear rumors about my publisher. The company was making use of a new technology called print-on-demand, in which entire books were stored digitally and then printed on high-tech copying machines whenever orders were placed. The resultant books were actually rather remarkable in their quality - only an expert could tell the difference between these and standard-print books. The scam, apparently, was that they were printing the 5,000 copies designated by author contracts only if those copies were actually needed.

Even considering this possible scam, I couldn't see how NWP could make enough money to continue operations unless they actually did market their books effectively. And I had certainly damaged their little operation by placing some 1,000 copies on shelves across the country. But I, like all NWP authors, was about to be screwed royally; I had no idea till recently how deep the scam went. The following is a report I recently found online, from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (sfwa.org):

"Northwest was a fraud right from the start. The idea was to use a small portion of the author's investment to print a few hundred of the several thousand books promised by contract, and convince the author that the rest of the books were being warehoused. Meanwhile, the balance of the money, converted to cash, went directly to [company founder James] Van Treese, who--according to charges later brought against him--took most of it to Las Vegas and gambled it away.

"Inevitably, income from author contracts ceased to be sufficient to replace the funds being taken out of the company, and the scheme toppled of its own weight. Northwest began ducking creditors and bouncing checks. Royalties were sent out against insufficient funds; later, they weren't sent out at all. Toward the end the company abandoned even the pretense of publication, stonewalling authors with excuses and delayed publication dates.

"In 1997, Van Treese and his son Jason were charged with 22 second-degree felony counts of communications fraud, securities fraud, tax evasion, and racketeering. In 1999, a bankruptcy judge ruled that the Van Treeses were personally liable for the company's debt, freeing bankruptcy trustees to go after their personal assets. In February 2001, James Van Treese was sentenced to up to 30 years in prison. The sentence is the result of a plea agreement: Van Treese pleaded 'no contest' to four counts of communications fraud, two counts of securities fraud, and one count of failing to pay income taxes. Jason Van Treese pleaded 'no contest' to two third-degree felony counts of failure to pay taxes, and entered guilty pleas to four class A misdemeanor counts of attempted communications fraud. He faces up to 10 years in prison.

"Despite the resolution of the Van Treeses' criminal case, questions remain about the number of Northwest's victims and the actual amount of money stolen. It's estimated that as many as 500 writers may have been defrauded, for as much as $10.5 million. It's unclear at this point as to what (or even whether) future action will be taken to clarify these issues. And as usual in such cases, restitution has not been forthcoming."

Despite everything, I managed to get some valuable things out of my NWP experience: a good-looking, well-edited first book, the experience of setting up and conducting a national tour (an experience I have yet to repeat), and the invaluable advice of the NWP marketing guru I spoke to during a visit to Salt Lake City: "Watch what's on the best-seller list," quoth The Man, "and then write something similar." Genius!

Find Frozen Music at

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Frozen-Music/Michael-J-Vaughn/e/9781569013601

Next: Courting the Seventh Sister and the joys of ebook limbo.

The Big Tease

2008-10-14T11:26:00.000-07:00

I spend much of my summers screening entries for the Writer's Digest self-published books competition, and the absolutely number-one writing mistake among the entries goes something like this:

Jenny awoke to a hail of bullets. She quickly rolled out and ducked down next to her bed as fragments of sheetrock rained off the wall. Jenny had only seconds to consider how she had gotten herself into this situation.

It all began in the EZ-Care Senior Center, where Jenny was raised by her great grandfather, Paul Abhrahamson Johanssen, who they called "Spruce"....

Seven pages of background information later...

Now, back to those bullets!

Are you freakin' kiddin' me?! Many authors have this need for their readers to understand every plot detail at all times - thus to write first chapters filled with background exposition. But that's not what first chapters are for - what they're for is getting your reader involved, and you don't do that by pulling this incredible tease-job.

So please, get Jenny out from under that hail of bullets. You've got an entire novel to fill in the details.

Photo by MJV. Artwork by Nina Koepcke.

Challenging Young Writers

2008-10-03T15:40:00.000-07:00

Following is an essay I wrote for Diane Scanlon's excellent website for gifted children and their parents, www.dirhody.com

Inside a wooden case that once held a children's-model telescope, I keep a slip of paper from the second grade. It's a test result, revealing that my seven-year-old self had the reading comprehension skills of a freshman in high school. This was a pattern that would continue in later years. My sixth-grade teacher stopped giving me any but the bonus spelling words (the basic words being a waste of everybody's time). In high school, I hated every English class I took, and got A's in all of them.

Looking back, it's amazing that I never got into my school's honors humanities program. I was clearly a natural writer, one who was not being challenged - and that was why I hated English class. But it was the '70s, and everybody seemed to be focusing on the other end of the spectrum, making sure the problem kids would at least make it to graduation.

Fortunately, my SAT verbal score finally tripped the wire. I was invited to San Jose State's honors humanities program, where a corps of professors from different disciplines took us through world history - from Genesis through Nixon - touching on the music, art, philosophy, science, history and literature of each era. And boy did we write! Constantly. At the end of the two-year program, for my final project, I wrote and performed in a play in which Aristotle, attempting to tutor Alexander the Great, has his idealized forms rudely diasassembled by Copernicus, Darwin and Freud. It was hilarious, especially when Craig Carter, playing on Freud's cocaine addiction, emptied two dozen packets of sugar on a mirror, performed his part with a wacky German accent, and then managed to accidentally snort some of the sugar into his nose. I found him in the hallway, hacking and snorting like a rodeo bull.

Since then, things have worked out well. Craig finally cleared his sinuses and became a gonzo-style journalist. I went on to write a dozen novels, seven of them published, to win a few poetry awards and fellowships, to cover theater and opera for several different Bay Area magazines, and, recently, to write on poetry and fiction for Writer's Digest.

So would I have taken this route without that honors humanities program? To be frank - yes. I ran into my sixth-grade best friend Maurice a few years ago, and he said, "Oh yeah. You were always talking about writing novels." Clearly, I'm one of the obsessed.

But I worry that it took so long for my obvious needs to be noticed - that other talented kids with just as much talent but perhaps less determination might not have received the kick-start that their gifts merited. Which is why I'm so glad to see a website like Diane's. Not that kids with learning disabilities don't deserve every attention they receive (let's talk about my brother Larry, who overcame his to win an MBA, and is now a Silicon Valley CFO). But let's not forget about kids with special abilities, talents that need to be challenged in special ways.

Photo by MJV.

Process

2008-10-02T12:11:00.000-07:00

The particulars of writing - the small, physical details - are an eternal fascination to writers (beginning, would-be and veteran), so let's talk about that. Keep in mind, however, that what works for me might not work for you.

Longhand, longhand: I am a devout fan of hand-writing. There's nothing more liquid for the permanent codification of ideas than the easy flow of thoughts from brain to hand to pen to paper. The computer screen, to me, presents entirely too much separation between you and your words. Particulars? Spiral notebooks (for their resistance to abuse) and Papermate Write Bros. light-blue pens (cheapness, inkflow and come on! Black ink? How dull.).

Location, location: A busy coffeehouse, enveloped by that lovely wall of chatter, with plenty of fellow humans to watch when you need a visual respite (there's a physiological, brain-function need for this, BTW - I'll get to it later). A long view is a nice plus, a non-jiggly table an absolute must (apply folded-up newspaper under table legs as needed). And - duh! - some caffeine. A beverage also makes a handy disciplinary device. On a slow day, at least make yourself write until you finish that latte. At this very moment, I'm on a solid window counter at Peete's in San Jose, CA, with a lovely view of the traffic on the Alameda and a solid surface to work on. Comestibles? One strong latte and an ollallieberry scone (because I like to say "ollallieberry"). You may find, as I have, that the largest danger in the coffeehouse is a nearby conversation that is too interesting. Be strong. Move to another table immediately; nothing is more important than your writing. (I almost feel like telling my neighbors, "I'm sorry, I have to move because you're much too intelligent.")

Is there a Draft in here? I'll get more specific later, but following is the rundown of my drafting process:

First: Written as quickly as the pen will fly, as quickly as the thoughts arrive. Think of it as a jigsaw puzzle: you must first pour out all the pieces onto the tabletop so you can begin to sort them out. Remember Hemingway's saying: "Everyone's first draft is shit." Just get it out, baby.

Second: Written a tad more slowly, to allow time for renovation, but still fast and sloppy enough to open up new ideas.

Third: Written as slowly as possible, with a focus on word precision, sentence structure, punctuation - the small stuff.

Fourth:Typing into the dreaded computer. Largely a matter of word processing, but sometimes a garbled sentence will hit the brain-screen and call for a fix.

Fifth: The edit. Print out the completed manuscript and read through it, marking changes with a colored pen as you go. Type changes back into computer.

The Extreme Sixth: For special cases (for instance, my last novel). Take printed-out manuscript and rewrite it longhand, as in the third draft above. Retype the whole thing into the computer. This one is grueling, but does offer a certain reassurance to the author, who can now tell himself that he has been exceedingly thorough.

The Chapter Method: I tend to do my novels a chapter at a time, working them at least through the third draft before going on to the next. This is largely because I work without an outline, so I need to get a firm grip on where my plot and characters stand before I go into the next development.

Shew! Enough for now. I'm sure I'll get further into some of these aspects later. Besides, I just finished my latte.

Photo by MJV

An Interview with Diane Ackerman

2008-09-10T15:43:00.000-07:00

Through my work with Writer's Digest, I am often given license to root through some fascinating literary minds - none more so than that belonging to Diane Ackerman. Starting out as a widely admired poet, Ackerman took her deeply lyrical use of language and combined it with a talent for interpreting scientific knowledge to produce A Natural History of the Senses, a collection of essays on our perceptual equipment that became a surprise best-seller in 1990. She has since applied her unique package of talents to such topics as the human mind, the animal world, the history of love and the sources of creativity. I had the chance to interview her for WD articles on author-poet "double-threats" and the application of brain science to creativity. Her answers were like small poems, ink candy, so beautifully wrought that, frankly, I felt like I was cheating. She made my job too easy.

Ackerman's latest venture is narrative non-fiction. The Zookeeper's Wife (2007, W.W. Norton) chronicles the use of the Warsaw Zoo as a hiding place for Jews during World War II. In a sense, the story is right up Diane's alley. Her descriptions of the animal population, of Polish culture, and of the attempts of Nazi scientists to re-create extinct species through back-breeding are filled with the same sense of wonder and precision that imbue her essays.

Ironically, it was precisely that fascinating brain that kep me from finally meeting Diane in person. She was scheduled to appear at a bookstore near my hometown of San Jose, but suffered a concussion and couldn't make the flight. Still, she was gracious enough, as always, to answer a few questions.

MJV: How did you come upon this remarkable story? Was it something that you've been considering for a long time?

DA: Decades ago, I proposed an essay for National Geographic that would carry me into the primeval forest skirting Poland's border with Russia, to see animals of the sort paleolithic artists painted in ochre on the cave walls at Lascaux. I'd heard that a few living fossils-- including ancestral horses-- were still running around this Polish preserve, and also that they had something to do with Nazi perversity.But I didn't know, when I proposed the story of ancient horses in Bialowieza Forest to my editor at NG, that I was sharing some of Adolf Hitler's, Hermann Göring's, and zoologist Lutz Heck's passion to revive extinct animals. NG had a photographer sailing to French Frigate Shoals, in the Hawaiian archipelago, to chronicle the last few monk seals left on earth (they used to pepper the Mediterreanean, Caribbean, and South Pacific) and he dispatched me there instead. But over the next fifteen years, all sorts of miscellaneous facts, lore, insights, and other fare began to accrete, until I rejoined my quest where I'd left it, on the trail of horses, bison and Nazis, and layer by layer, a bizarre fascinating story began emerging.

MJV: How did you find the shift from your more essay-style works to a narrative form?

DA: I had to learn how to write narrative nonfiction, but many of its elements were familiar, since I'd written a lot of nonfiction prose about studying animals in the wild, which required merging drama, conversations, facts, observations.

MJV: The amount of detail is (no surprise) just amazing. How much time and effort went into the research for this? Did you do any traveling to investigate things first-hand?

DA: Because The Zookeeper's Wife is nonfiction, I couldn't make anything up, but I needed to detail the sensory texture of daily life at the zoo in Warsaw for this particular woman. So I saturated myself in Antonina's world and the era. In Poland, I spent time at the Warsaw Zoo and in the villa where the Zabinskis lived; followed Antonina's footsteps down some of the streets she wrote about; spoke with people at the Warsaw Zoo; interviewed the Zabinskis' son; spoke with women, now in their eighties, who served in the Underground during the war; visited outlying cities and Bialowieza Forest; located the insect collection that plays an important part in the story, and visited other relevant sites and museums. I read a sea of books, interviews, and testimonies-- by and about people who witnessed the holocaust-- and studied WWII history, armaments, cuisine, leaders, airplanes, medicine, architecture, fashion, music, films and such. And I studied the sounds and smells and behaviors of the animals that the Zabinskis adopted as pets and those they tended in the zoo. I had great fun learning about Polish plants and animals and folk customs. The whole process was completely fascinating and absorbing.

More info at http://www.dianeackerman.com/

Phoning Molly

2008-09-08T17:50:00.000-07:00

Molly Ringwald was coming to town, starring in a touring production of Sweet Charity, and the young men of the San Jose media community were freaking out.

"One of them said he's afraid he'll start drooling halfway through the interview," said the PR agent, who was clearly enjoying all the hoo-hah around her latest assignment.

As the senior journalist in the bunch, I had a distinct advantage. About the time that Molly was making her mark in The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink, I was in college, and in that superior way that college men adopt, had no time for some teenage actress.

Looking into Molly's post-stardom bio, though, I found something pretty intriguing. She had a propensity for hooking up with (and, on one occasion, marrying) novelists, and had surprised everyone in Connecticut by writing a series of book reviews for the Hartford Courant. Apparently, the woman who always played the strange-but-smart girl actually was a strange-but-smart girl. That afternoon, I called the interview number - a rehearsal hall in Boise - and we were introduced. After covering some expected subjects regarding the show (singing in her dad's jazz band, honing her dancing skills), I told her I was a novelist and really appreciated her enthusiasm for the form.

"Oh!" she said. "What kind of books do your write?"

"Literary, mainstream. They're sort of slice-of-life, a lot of contemporary issues."

"So what's your latest about?"

"It's called Frosted Glass. It's about a Silicon Valley woman who..."

You can see where this was going. I had succeeded in getting myself interviewed by Molly Ringwald! Sadly, on the cusp of launching into a digression about mythological motifs in modern narrative, a little switch went off in my head, and I realized two things: 1) I had been granted only 15 minutes for this interview, and 2) I had not yet obtained enough material for my article.

"Geez, Molly, as much as I love talking about my writing, I think I need to ask you some more questions about the show."

"Oh. Okay. Sure."

She actually sounded disappointed - and it's easy to figure why. Considering the cold realities of a national tour, she probably had to conduct one of these interview sessions for each new city - repeating the same snappy quotes to several different reporters at a sitting. (And I hate to think of the lame questions the droolers came up with.) I flatter myself to think that she much preferred talking about my latest book.

Thanks, Molly, for turning the tables. Don't you forget about me.

Read the original article at:
http://www.thewavemag.com/pagegen.php?pagename=article&articleid=26026

Boredom breeds creativity

2008-09-08T13:20:00.000-07:00

And this blog is proof.

In my constant pursuit of verisimilitude in fiction, I have talked myself into forsaking my current novel, Monkey Tribe, for two weeks. The story centers on a life coach who's trying desperately to broaden the horizons of his client, a nerdy Silicon Valley accountant who has recently been tossed out of his narrow, workaholic life. Some of the early ventures are visits to Burning Man parties and to the pagan drum circle of the title, but recently I decided that this client, Jack, had to experience the hoity-toit side of life, too - and had the perfect setting just waiting for me.

Thanks to 25 years of covering the performing arts in Silicon Valley, I will soon be escorting a genuine diva, soprano Barbara Divis, to the 25th anniversary gala of Opera San Jose (and yes, my journalism career coincided divinely with the birth of the opera). I met Barbara years ago, when my reviews of her singing became ridiculously poetic; divas like nothing better than critics with an ear for genuine talent. But Barbara was also interested in my tennis skills. It has since become my assignment to run her ragged around various courts, so she may continue to fit into all those gorgeous gowns that her roles provide her.

Beyond this plot twist of sending our hero unexpectedly into the higher levels of society, Barbara fits neatly into a running theme of the book: unassuming characters who turn out to have extraordinary talents. So the novel demands that I include her, and it would be silly of me to write the scene until after the actual gala, when I will assuredly pick up all kinds of helpful details.

I harken back to Randall Platt, a gifted young-adult author in Gig Harbor, Washington, who tattooed me with this thought: if you are able, in any way, to personally experience what your character is going to experience, you have to do it. This is not always easy. Years ago, for my novel Painting Tacoma, I made plans for my character to walk out on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge late one night, leading the reader to believe that he was contemplating suicide (don't worry, he was not). "Well, you know what that means," sayeth Randall. "You better go walk that bridge." Damn, I thought. She's right.

As you might expect, the subsequent trek produced all kinds of details that I might never have dreamed up otherwise. Primarily, that the bridge's narrow sidewalks and lack of separation from traffic make it the Worst. Bridgewalk. Ever. Helped very little by the carload of teenagers who drove by yelling "Jump!" (I also spotted two other teens walking the other direction, apparently on a date!)

My big problem is that I am addicted to the novel-creating process, and the idea of going two weeks without, whilst I wait like a 17-year-old for the senior prom, and dig through thrift stores for a do-it-yourself tuxedo (another assignment I have given my hero), fills me with dread. So, I thought, why not start that blog that I have been putting off forever?

Welcome aboard. I hope I can be of service.

Upcoming: a few words with Diane Ackerman, author of A Natural History of the Senses and the recent The Zookeeper's Wife.