Readers and writers blog

I need a laptop computer, but shopping for one reminds me of a theory proposed by some astronomers that the universe will expand to an apogee, then come slowly shrinking back on itself. Because that’s what’s happening to us.

Fifty years ago, we couldn’t wait to get that bigger car with its bigger swept wings, that bigger house with the bigger family, that bigger job with its bigger paycheck . . . yes, even that bigger hamburger. Now, of course, there are still some idiots consumers who yearn for a big SUV, big muscle car or Big Mac and think that ingesting the latter while watching the former endlessly circle a track is harmless fun. But their day is fading along with the oilmen in the White House.

The rest of us are trying to make smaller footprints on the Earth until somebody realizes there are too many feet.

I suppose I should be thinking about something else — like exactly what I need in that laptop — but it’s too damned confusing. The more compact our technology becomes, the more complex its specifications. I can barely understand this big desktop computer I’m working on right now.

Do I need Dell’s Inspiron 1520 laptop — of which there are three models with various Intel Pentium microprocessors ranging from a 1.73GHz / 533Mhz FSB / 1MB cache to a 2.0GHz / 667Mhz FSB / 2MB cache and prices ranging from $649 to $1,208, not counting the rebates? Or would the Inspiron 1525 be more to my liking with its Vista rather than XP operating system, a similar variety of caches and prices ranging from $499 to $1,253, not counting other rebates?

Are they kidding?

Well, I’m not kidding about needing a laptop. Because at the end of this month, my wife and I and her parents are taking our first extended trip since this website-weblog began. And we’re going where there are numbers that I can understand and appreciate.

For example, 90. That’s the birthday my wife’s Aunt Maxine will celebrate on June 2 in Huntington, Ind. She’s the benign sovereign of a family of six siblings, and a nicer woman you won’t find. Second in that line is my father-in-law, Glenn, who’ll be 88 a few days later. My mother-in-law, Virginia, will be 84 before then. So the four of us are going to pack into the smallest van we can find and head for Indiana on a nine-day trip.

I can’t pack up this desktop, so it’s going to have to be a laptop if I hope to continue posting entries twice a week on our weblog.

Like technology, large families also are shrinking, but there are four other footprints on this Earth that I’m glad of — my wife’s two sons, Todd and Brett, who grew up smart about computers and who just may have bailed me out.

Todd gave me general information about laptops, and Brett helped me review some of the offerings on the Internet before noticing that I didn’t seem to understand much of what was being said, then diplomatically mentioning that he and Todd have a laptop they haven’t used for a while. A little slower than the new Dells, but plenty for what I need. A lot less expensive, too.

What this world needs is not more people but more smart people. Thanks, guys. Now I’ve got to learn how to use the damned thing.

More new offerings today in Works:

• A new short story by James L. Fox called ‘Lonesome Charlie,’ the tale of a grizzled old prospector who has an unusual way of finding people to talk with in his remote desert existence.

• Chapter 16: Conversations of Steve Karmazenuk’s science fiction novel The Unearthing. Scientists have their first communication with an alien spaceship in the New Mexico desert, a craft that seems to have its own life qualities, including an intelligence that dwarfs that of humans.

• Chapter 10: 45th Avenue of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Gerard goes to his first date with Ginny but runs into a few pitfalls — she apparently has forgotten the date, the battery runs down on his borrowed car, and later, when he’s finally making headway at her house, she is called away by another boyfriend.

Talk to you later. I’ll be the guy wrestling with the laptop.

– Sid Leavitt

Once again, I went to the annual dinner that a local nursing home gives for its volunteers. And once again, they didn’t suspect a thing.

The fools.

Everyone was so nice. They had little gifts for all of us. And the food was great, as good as any local restaurant, and that’s saying a lot because just across the Hudson River is the Culinary Institute of America, which sends trained chefs into the local economy as well as across the world. I’m not saying this nursing home is the fanciest place where I’ve ever played music for senior citizens, but it’s a lot fancier than the first place where I did.

That was the county infirmary, and it was 15 or 16 years ago. How I came to play my guitar there is a long story that I will try to shorten here:

My latter-day musical career was inspired by a girlfriend I had 16 or 17 years ago — that’s right, about a year before I moved here to take an editing job with the local newspaper. This girlfriend . . . how can I say this? Well, she was, as I once told her in a moment of exasperation, the Girlfriend from Hell. Self-absorbed, narcissistic, rude, argumentative, ungrateful, spoiled. But she was a pretty good musician. She had a passable voice, basic guitar skills and — now, this is what killed me, because she had such short arms — was an accomplished trombonist.

One of my attempts to improve bonds between us was to try to get involved with her music. I got out my old guitar and sang with her. She, of course, said my playing sucked and my singing was too nasal. That was shortly before she drifted off somewhere else and I came here to New York.

And I vowed that I would prove her wrong.

So my old guitar and I went off to a local music store to sign up for lessons, and, to give me incentive to pay attention, I signed up as a volunteer at the county infirmary to play backup guitar at singalongs. I figured they had plenty of singalongs since it’s a large, multistory facility that cares for hundreds of elderly folks — and, as I later discovered, does a remarkably good job of it. (Yes, New Yorkers in some cases do get something back for their taxes.)

Now, I was no musical novice. As a kid, I took piano lessons for a number of years. And in the 1960s, I too switched to the acoustic guitar to impress all the young hippie women, although by now, I’d forgotten most of the chords.

The activities director at the infirmary was glad to see me, handed me mimeo sheets of a half dozen old songs with words and chords, and off we went to a singalong, she on lead guitar, me on backup. It was great.

But then, the second week, she didn’t show up — and never did again. But I did. Elderly people in a nursing home aren’t very mobile, and I needed that captive audience.

Since then, I’ve collected about 250 old songs, gotten a lot better on the guitar and tried to work my nose out of my voice. And something even better than that happened:

My musical career led me to my wife. Well, actually, to my wife’s parents, both retirees with musical talent who also played at local nursing homes. So we started playing together, and I eventually managed to inveigle their daughter to join us. And me.

By the way, she’s an excellent singer — much better than the GF from Hell — and a good basic guitarist. And, what’s more, she likes me.

The four of us still play once a week at the local nursing home, and we all again enjoyed the volunteer dinner. The difference is, they’re all altruists — they do it out of the goodness of their souls. But not me. Because when I look out over my guitar, I still see that captive audience that I’m still taking advantage of.

But let’s just keep that between you and me.

This week’s new offerings in our Works section:

• Chapter 9: San Bruno of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good in which Jones talks about his career as a Kinney shoe salesman where he meets an attractive brunette who likes her feet played with, then remembers he has promised to tell his readers about his first date with Virginia Good.

• Chapter 15: Progress of Steve Karmazenuk’s science fiction novel The Unearthing in which a team of scientists brings in a world-class mathematician to help them decipher a rune-based language found within an alien ship unearthed in the New Mexico desert.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image at top is from the website of SEO Consultants, an Internet marketing and development group that uses a lot of monkey pictures on its staff page.

Although not a naive person, I have a streak of optimism that occasionally gets me in trouble. In the latest episode, it has gotten me spammed, if not scammed.

For I am now, you see, a member of Who’s Who in publishing.

Well, isn’t that fine, you might say (if you suffer from that same sporadic optimism as I do), and I certainly must be pleased that I will be included in the upcoming 2008-2009 honors edition of the registry published by Madison Who’s Who.

I was. Until I googled them.

Scam, scam, scam, said the bloggers — one a college professor who said “having a PhD doesn’t mean you won’t get duped,” another a young woman who was nominated as an attorney but doesn’t have a law degree, yet another a 70-year-old who paid $708.95 for which, she said, “I got a piece of paper.”

Now I’ve had enough experience with spam so that I should recognize it when I see it — it makes up nine-tenths of the comments we get here at R&W Blog. And I’ve been phished often enough so that I should be able to avoid a hook. (Sorry, “Bank of America,” I can’t “reconfirm” my password, account number and credit card number because I’ve never had an account with “your” bank. And sorry, “IRS,” but I doubt the real agency has really lost my Social Security number.)

But the Madison Who’s Who hit me at just the wrong time (or right time, for them): Like the professor, who was up for tenure and thought someone was doing him a favor by nominating him for a prestigious listing, I thought I knew who might have nominated me:

My wife and I know several publishers, and we had just had dinner with two of them, an amiable evening that was followed by an email exchange of pleasantries about how much we enjoyed talking about each other’s publishing ventures, they in books and we on the Internet.

Isn’t that nice, I thought. They sent my name to Madison Who’s Who. What a lovely surprise.

Then, too, Madison took a low-ball approach that seemed believable. All I had to do was fill out a form asking for information that anyone reading this weblog would know — name, company name, title, email — and my telephone number, something anyone with an Ulster County, N.Y., directory would know. No credit card numbers, no passwords. And it’s free.

So I filled out the form and emailed it back. Then, having a second thought that should have been a first thought, I checked the Internet. Apparently, I am going to get a phone call.

Although I now have a “basic listing” in their registry, “each applicant will be reviewed before the membership is approved,” Madison informed me. Judging from what I’ve read on the Internet about others’ experiences, I think that “review” comes over the phone.

That’s when I get the option of getting a “lifetime” membership in their directory for $700 or a five-year deal for $400, plus other benefits.

Well, I may have my moments of optimism stupidity, but I’m very good at getting rid of telemarketers.

And now, today’s new offerings in our Works section:

• Chapter Eight: Coyote Point of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good in which Jones takes up studies with author and literary editor Gordon Lish after starting a journal and telling his sweetheart, Virginia, that he is a writer.

• A Special Investigative Subcommittee Report in Steve Karmazenuk’s science fiction novel The Unearthing, a summary of events leading up to and repercussions following worldwide attacks by religious fanatics unsettled by a huge alien spacecraft unearthed in the New Mexico desert.

Meanwhile, I wait for that phone call. Oh, and just in case you don’t quite follow the headline on this entry, the answer to the mystery word is: I’m the “he” who should have said, “What’s this?”

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The type on the image at the top of this entry comes from a poster advertising a rock program by Who’s Who, a tribute band that recreates the legendary group The Who.

James L. Fox is a fellow hermit, and we have a deal: He likes to write, and I like to read what he writes.

We present his latest short story, ‘All That Glitters,’ in our fiction section today.

Fox and I do have our differences. At 80, he’s a few years older than me (but not that many). He served in the ‘Tin Can’ Navy of Admiral Bull Halsey’s 7th Fleet, while I pounded various parts of the Earth in the old 1st Army. He admits to being a hermit — he lives in the Mojave Desert of southern California in the shadows of the San Gabriel Mountains — while I am sort of a recluse but really more of a lollygagger, a dawdler who likes to sit at home on the suburban outskirts of New York City and daydream.

Fox likes to describe his short stories, posted in a Hermit’s Cave section of his website, as ‘tall tales,’ but I see them more as what we used to call ‘good yarns.’ Because his tales could never be as tall as some told by relatives of mine.

I got my first name from a great-uncle who used to tell of winters so cold that he once saw a chain of lightning frozen in a pond. Or mosquitos so big that the only escape was to run inside a house and wait until they shoved their beaks through the window screens, then hammer the beaks over to trap the buggers. (Of course, they once flew away with the house, he said.)

I have another uncle who tells such whoppers that some members of the family actually get angry:

“Every word that comes out of his mouth is a lie,” they say.

“I know it,” I say, “but I love the stories.”

I’m sure Fox has a much better reputation for veracity, but I have the same affection for his stories. I’m still thinking about where Jim Graham’s boots went in “Lucky Dawg,” the first of Fox’s short stories that we published April 10. (Note: You won’t find the story under that title now. It is now included in a new fiction entry titled ‘Short Stories by James L. Fox,’ now topped by “All That Glitters.”)

Fox’s website is a rambling place of long and short stories, essays, community services and a few commercial touches, one of them a website he set up for his daughter, Sherry, who takes care of him. The nameplate of his Reading Room shows a smiling bat welcoming you to a cave full of stories with the following introduction from the Mojave Hermit:

Ya get lots a’ time to think about how things oughta be when you’re all by yer lonesome in the desert lookin’ for gold and wonderin’ what if this and what if that were different. I never ever started a yarn with a plot in mind . . . I just created some ornery characters (some of them are real people, but I ain’t tellin’), I just threw them together and let the fur fly. Sometimes, I never knew how it was gonna end ’til it did. Hope ya enjoy my make-believe people.

Spoken like a true hermit.

And now, today’s other new offerings:

• Chapter Seven: North Beach of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good in which Jones and his friend Elliot, who is about to ship out to Vietnam, go to a jazz club where they first meet Ginny Good, a cute girl with a giggly voice and a tight black dress.

• Chapter Fourteen: A New Light of Steve Karmazenuk’s science fiction novel The Unearthing in which scientists notice a strange blue energy coming from cell samples taken from an alien ship unearthed in New Mexico.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image above is an illustration by Scott Mayhew showing Plato’s cave, an allegory used by the classical Greek philosopher in his work The Republic. The cave symbolizes, among other things, that what we perceive may be only shadows of a deeper reality, notably of The Good. The illustration is from a website, Matt Lawrence’s Home Page, now a dead link.

By definition, anyone who submits a comment to this site is intelligent, good-looking and, as Garrison Keillor would say, has above-average children — we’ll even throw in your ancestors as well — but sometimes a comment is especially meritorious.

So thank you, Kevin Dickinson, for raising a subject in our April 13 comments that merits further discussion — the pressure on bloggers to post more material and more frequently than most other writers write.

It’s a good point. For example, our blog entries average from 600 to 700 words, about the same as a 15- to 20-inch newspaper column, and we post entries twice a week. Most newspaper columnists these days, unless they’re working very hard, generally don’t file more than one or two columns a week.¹

(Remember to ask me about a column I once wrote.)

As I told Kevin, certain subjects like his — Words — and ours — writing — are harder to post about frequently than, say, those personal diaries you find all over the blogosphere where the writer can post the equivalent of “Well, not much to report today, but here it is. . .” I’m sure these weblogs, like daily letters home, are great for people who know the writer personally rather than electronically, but for the rest of us. . .

There are exceptions, and they’re on our blogroll. For example, June at Bye Bye, Pie, is an astonishingly good daily diarist, but that’s because she is an astonishingly good writer with a lot of imagination and a lot of personal, chit-chatty style. (Good proofreader, too.)

Bernita Harris at An Innocent A-Blog also is remarkable, and she usually writes about our hard subject, writing. She’s cut back temporarily to three posts a week, but that’s because she has a book in progress.

Another difficult subject, art, is handled with apparent ease by Charley Parker at lines and colors, again on an almost daily basis. And there’s Heather Armstrong at dooce, Franklin at The Panopticon, May at about a nurse, Rod McBride at Midwest Rock Lobster . . . well, you can see them all over there at the right.

I admire them all because they all have something to say, they say it with grace and integrity, and they do so at their own pace — some of them much more amply and expeditiously than we do.

Anyway, here are our new offerings today in Works:

• Chapter Six: San Mateo of Gerard Jones’ Ginny Good in nonfiction and Chapter Thirteen: Descent of Steve Karmazenuk’s The Unearthing in fiction.

Oh yeah, the column I once wrote:

I remember as a reporter being envious of columnists — what a soft job, I thought — until I was asked to write a weekly column. Of course, I still had to do my reporting job, and since I was so old-fashioned that I didn’t want to express opinions about issues I reported on, finding subjects was more difficult than I had foreseen.

There’s an old joke about news being so slow that newspapers are tempted just to run names from the telephone book. I actually wrote a column like that — not a bad one, either — using names from a phone directory of a city of about 25,000. I found a man named Mailman who in fact was a milkman. I found a Dr. Scholl who didn’t specialize in feet. I added up loose change — the total of Penneys, Nichols and even a Dime listed in the directory.

My real coup was that I found a guy who was a real credit to everyone who knew him — because that was his name, Real Credit. Of course, it was a Franco-American city in northern New England where ‘real’ would be pronounced ‘rey-AL’ and ‘credit’ would be ‘cre-DEE.’ But it worked in print.

And now that old story has helped me get another blog entry done. We recycle.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTES:

1. The legendary Los Angeles Times columnist Jack Smith at one time was writing five columns a week, but even he had to cut back in his later years.

2. The image above was borrowed from the May 3, 2007, entry at HRmarketer.com blog, no photo credit listed.

Time again for a little housekeeping, which at our place means just shifting stuff around without throwing anything away. But this time, if they haven’t already been at your fingertips, it means getting out those dictionaries and encyclopedias again.

Because Conrad is back.

Actually, Conrad H. Roth never was away, just stored in the inactive section of our blogroll after he announced the day after New Year’s that he would quit writing his weblog, Varieties of Unreligious Experience. Well, earlier this month, he started Vunex up again.

Sadly, an urbane colleague of his, Aaron Haspel of the weblog God of the Machine, will be taking Roth’s place on our inactive list. Maybe Haspel will come back, too.

Conrad H. Roth isn’t his real name, and since he prefers anonymity, suffice it to say he’s a young Englishman who’s smarter than anyone of any age has a right to be. But everyone ought to know someone like that. We’re glad to.

His first entry back shows Roth still is as mind-bendingly erudite and sesquipedalian as ever. His April 6 post bears a headline in Gaelic — Thanum an Dhul, which is a line from an old Irish song called “Finnegan’s Wake” in which a drunk is mistaken for a corpse until he’s sprayed with whiskey, a revival theme central to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake — and to Roth’s return to blogging. Circuitous, eh?

The man is conversant in Latin as well as some French and German, and the motto on his website is in Italian, supposedly advice given to Goethe in 1786 — Non deve fermarsi l’huomo in una sola cosa, perchè allora divien matto: bisogna aver mille cose, una confusione nella testa — which, as best we can make out, means:

A man shouldn’t stop at just one thing because that will make him crazy. He needs to have a thousand things, a pandemonium, in his head.

In Roth’s case, it’s a lovely pandemonium. Welcome back, o erudite one.

Now, as for Haspel, his website opens very slowly and hasn’t had a new post — actually, most of them are briefs in a center column, the larger entries on the left being much rarer — since Jan. 21. Haspel, a critic and reviewer particularly fond of poetry, quit God of the Machine once before, in 2005, but returned a year later. We hope he does again.

As with everything on our inactive list at the bottom of the blogroll, even if God of the Machine doesn’t start up again, we think what’s written so far is still worth reading.

And speaking of that, here are today’s offerings in our nonfiction and fiction sections that are worth reading:

• Chapter Five: Pacifica of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good in which the author continues moving back in his personal history — a playwrighting triumph cut short by a bitchy teacher in Michigan, a disappointing move to California, an abortive attempt to ship around the world on a yacht — until he has a thespian encounter with a Mormon kid from Salt Lake City who will become his friend.

• Chapter Twelve: Inquests and Inquisitions of Steve Karmazenuk’s science fiction novel The Unearthing in which a series of worldwide attacks is launched by a group of religious fanatics stirred into unrest by the presence of an alien spacecraft in New Mexico. The group’s leader escapes into the ship itself and for some mysterious reason knows how to manipulate its complex controls.

So, between these and the resurrected Roth, there’s plenty to read today.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image at the top is a work called “Fagin Knew a Sin,” an ink-on-paper anagram on Finnegans Wake by Ben Stack, a Dublin-born artist now living in Australia. His website is at http://www.benstack.com.au/.

And now, a little self-congratulatory celebration. Because as of tomorrow, we’re 1. No, not No. 1. That would be a little too self-congratulatory. No, R&W Blog is 1, as in one year old.

As for our number in the blogosphere, well, that’s somewhere around 395,000. Which, considering that Technorati says it’s now tracking 112 million weblogs, isn’t as bad as it might sound.*

Our biggest surprise after our first year, although we haven’t set any readership records, is that we seem to have tapped into a growing Internet phenomenon — the e-book-in-progress.

More about that in a minute, but first, a little backstory.

The year got off to a slow start. Because, actually, the website Readers and Writers is now a year and a half old, and it took us six months to realize that we needed to add a blog or — and here’s another water metaphor to add to the one we led with Sunday — go under.

Our first blog entries were April 18, 2007, but they were just excerpts from my book, Adrift in America (which you can still conveniently find on this site by clicking on the aforementioned title). It took us three more days — April 21 — before we said hello as bloggers and started explaining ourselves:

Here is the whole idea: Amid the explosion of websites and weblogs in recent years, much of it dedicated to the type of personal chatter you hear on cellphones these days, it occurred to us that someone should put up a website dedicated to that passion so many of us bear — the passion to write, along with its corollary, the curiosity to read what others are writing — that would be free and unlimited. To be fair, there are many fine sites and blogs dedicated to the free part, but very few to the unlimited. Well, Readers and Writers Blog is unlimited.

That entry also quoted a gentleman we consider our predecessor, an Internet pioneer named David Guest who 10 years earlier had put up a website also called Readers and Writers. Although he used a slightly different URL, the purpose was the same — to give writers a place to publish their works for readers to read free.

“The site never took off,” he told us. “Writers all seemed to want to earn money from their efforts and were afraid to put their works in the public domain . . . (and so) I just let the site sort of die.”

Well, things have changed, and it seems to have happened in the last year or so.

For us, it all broke in February when a nice guy from Montreal, writer Steve Karmazenuk, sent us a note that he’d like us to run the first four chapters of his science fiction novel, The Unearthing. Right out of the blue. For free.

Then along came Joseph Cigan, a nice guy from Chicago who makes his living as an independent trade contractor but had done some writing and wanted to try his first novel. It wasn’t finished, but when we saw the first few chapters of Sniper in the Mist, we knew we had to serialize it.

Our first e-book-in-progress.

Then Karmazenuk came along after talking with some of his web-savvy friends and advisers and said he’d decided to release all of The Unearthing on our site. Wow. So we’re serializing that.

Then along came Gerard Jones, a nice guy (well, he’s a little curmudgeonly but a pussycat at heart) from Ashland, Ore., who not only let us serialize his book, Ginny Good, but gave us a link to free audio copies of it.

And now comes Jeri Cafesin, a nice woman (I just couldn’t keep the parallel with ‘guys’ and call her a ‘gal,’ sorry, that’s too Texas) from the San Francisco area who’s sending us chapters of her novel, Disconnected — yes, also an e-book-in-progress.

So check out the latest installments — Karmazenuk’s Chapter Eleven: Crisis, Cigan’s Chapter 7: Tsunami in Heaven and Jones’ Chapter Four: Fifteen Mile — as well the other writers in nonfiction, fiction and poetry, some of whom I haven’t mentioned, but bless them all.

One more note about our place in the blogosphere. Our number, 395,000, has stayed about the same in the past six months or so, and since Technorati estimates that’s about the same amount of time in which the total number of blogs usually doubles, R&W Blog seems to be doing all right.

If you’ll forgive one more aquatic metaphor, we may be treading water but the sea is rising to new levels. And so we float off into another year.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

*Actually, a more realistic total might be between 1.5 million and 3.5 million, which still would put R&W Blog in the upper 25th to 10th percentile. It could be even higher, depending on who’s counting what. It’s not clear to me whether the Technorati figure of 112 million includes inactive as well as active blogs — and whether it’s blogs in all languages or just English, which is only about a third of the worldwide total. (A surprising statistic in the latest annual report by Technorati CEO David Sifry is that the largest number of blogs worldwide are written not in English or Chinese but Japanese.)

Wow, I’m rolling in waves of words — so much to read, so little time to do it. And even as I verge on sensory overload in this literary sea, it’s not an unpleasant sensation.

I’m basically a nonfiction guy, due no doubt to all those years I spent writing and editing newspaper copy. I’ve read a fair amount of fiction — mostly as a young man and mostly the classics of either antiquity or the 17th through the 20th centuries. As I grew older, my reading tastes gravitated to nonfiction — history, memoirs, trade stuff.

Now I administer this website-weblog where we’re serializing three novels and one nonfiction novel, all of them well-written, and it’s like I’m a young man again.

Here’s a sample of what I’m talking about — it’s the final paragraph in our first installment of J. Cafesin’s novel Disconnected that we began serializing on Thursday:

I angled the gun so it pointed toward my brain and fingered it until I found the trigger. Every microscopic movement of my fingers registering in my head, but it felt unreal, like it was happening to someone else and I was just watching. Or like I was playing a game and even if I pulled the trigger and the bullet ripped the back of my skull out, it would only be temporary, like in a dream or cartoon, and after, I would get up, go into the kitchen and get a Diet Coke while I tried to figure out what to do with the rest of my evening. I squeezed the trigger very slowly. I could barely hear my intuition screaming at me to stop, but I didn’t. I never listened to my intuition anymore, anyway, why start now. . .

Man, that’s good writing. And it made me want to read today’s installment, Chapter One.

I should also mention today’s other installments:

• Chapter Ten of Steve Karmazenuk’s science fiction novel, The Unearthing, subtitled “First Contacts,” in which members of a scientific survey team begin deciphering the language of an alien ship unearthed in the New Mexico desert.

• Chapter Three of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction work, Ginny Good, in which Jones talks about his early years in Michigan, including confrontations with a couple of teachers and the beginning of a steamy liaison with . . . well, you’d better read it for yourself.

As a result of all this good stuff, I’ve been spending a lot more time at this computer, doing a lot of type conversion and proofreading and whatever small amount of editing is required to adapt these works to R&W Blog’s general style — mostly punctuation.

And, as I said, I’m reading a lot more fiction these days, which is good, but it has made me realize how much my horizons narrowed over the years. Now that I’m retired, they’re broadening again.

A fellow blogger, Kevin Dickinson of Words, one of our blogroll listings at the right, talks in his April 3 entry about how much more he wants to read and how little time he has to do it: “I’m a dish sponge trying to be a car-wash sponge,” he says.

It’s a familiar feeling. And according to a recent newspaper article, it’s not just shared by me. The article cites the increasing pressure that bloggers put upon themselves and lists two of them, men ages 60 and 50, who died of heart attacks and a third, age 41, who survived his coronary.

Well, I’m older than all of them, but I don’t worry about keeling over at the computer. For one thing, I can’t worry about it — I’m in my late 60s where death shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. For another thing, right behind this space I use as an office is a treadmill where I walk for 20 minutes a day — about a mile — most every day. And I do get out regularly.

And finally, what I feel as I sit here blogging is not pressure or dread but excitement and satisfaction. And if that kills me . . . well, I can think of worse ways to go.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image at top is “River over Yin and Yang,” a 2005 painting in acrylic by Max Riggs, whose website is at http://www.maxriggs.com/.

Well then, after emailing a bunch of literary agents, introducing a new author friend and chit-chatting about my personal triumphs, it’s time to get back to our business here at R&W Blog — putting up more works for you to read.

Oh, and also an announcement about new offerings by one of our blogroll colleagues.

But our latest news is that we will have a new e-book-in-progress in our fiction section: Jeri Cafesin, a freelance writer in the San Francisco Bay Area, will be contributing chapters of her new work, Disconnected, which we begin serializing today.

It’s an unusual work about a young woman in conflict that begins not with a prologue but an epilogue and has a narrative style that brings to mind images of unusual vividness, perhaps cinematically so. On Sunday, we’ll move on to Chapter One, and Cafesin will be sending more chapters as they become available.*

It will be our second e-book-in- progress. The first, of course, is Sniper in the Mist by Joseph Cigan, and he’s hard at work on Chapter 7. We’ve seen a preliminary version of the chapter, which shifts from his Chicago neighborhood of the 1960s to the war in Vietnam and a powerful description of a company of soldiers there. It’ll be ready soon, Joseph tells us.

We also have another new work in the fiction section today — a short story by James L. Fox called “Lucky Dawg” that involves a retiree-turned-prospector and his lop-eared hound, a work that in the old days we would’ve described as “a good yarn.” There may be a bit of autobiography here since Fox lives in the Mojave Desert area of southern California near the San Gabriel Mountains. He promises more short stories to come.

Also today, we offer the latest chapter in The Unearthing by Steve Karmazenuk, who has been a good friend to us. He was the first author to let us serialize his book — a finished work already on the paperback market at a price — free of charge. Our latest installment is Chapter Nine: Discoveries.

And while we’re on the subject of freebies, what can we say about Gerard Jones, another new contributing author, who not only lets us serialize his book, Ginny Good, but gives away copies of both the paperback and audio versions to anyone who asks.

In Sunday’s initial installment of Ginny Good, an autobiographical work he describes as a ‘nonfiction novel,’ Jones begins his circuitous route back into the 1960s, giving us a hint of the trail of broken icons he will leave along the way. In today’s installment, Chapter Two: Del Mar, he continues his introduction of the love of his life, Virginia Dixon Good.

To get to any of these offerings, either click on the links provided in this blog entry or go to the appropriate section under Works at the upper right of this page — nonfiction for Jones, fiction for Cafesin, Cigan, Fox or Karmazenuk — and follow the trail there.

And now our announcement of new offerings on the website of our friend Ted Knerr at Art-spirit, the only artist’s site on our blogroll. So here they are:

In his gallery — walls: the art of my friends — there are three new members, photographer-painter Orlando Richards, painter Anne Bucher Tilghman and photographer Aline Tisato. And five of the gallery’s now-28 members have updated their works — new photographs by Bob Drouin and Allan Michael, new sculpture by Ernie Gerzabek, new ceramic sculpture by Ralph Holker and new paintings by Miriam Hirschhorn.

And Ted has posted a new painting of his on the home page as well as a new essay on authentic art on his quotes page.

I saw the new painting on one of my rounds through our blogroll, but I missed the essay before Ted announced his new offerings. I apologize for my oversight, Ted, and thanks for the announcement.

In fact, I apologize to all of our blogroll buddies listed over there to the right. What once was my daily rounds through our blogroll has now become less frequent as we get more contributions from writers for our Works section.

I can’t complain. It’s a welcome problem.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

*Cafesin also is author of Reverb, a novel about a man who is consumed by his music until he undergoes a bizarre journey that awakens him to the world outside himself.

In the newspaper business, the opening paragraph of a story generally is called the lead¹ — well, it’s still spelled ‘lede’ by some journalists, a usage supposedly started to avoid confusion with the metal, lead, which was what most newspaper type was cast in when I started in the business, and there was never any confusion even then, which is why I have steadfastly refused to misspell the word all these years, especially now that it seems just an affectation by bushy-tailed journalists and editors too young to remember when newspaper type wasn’t set electronically.

Whew, now that’s an example of a bad lead.

And now for some good leads — great leads, actually, not by journalists but by writers. The greatest lead ever written, for literary, theological, historical and other reasons way too long to get into here, is Herman Melville’s opening to Moby Dick:

Call me Ishmael.

And anyone who has read The Metamorphosis will never forget Franz Kafka’s opening words:

As Gregor Samsa awoke from a night of uneasy dreaming, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

And then there’s:

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like ‘I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive. . .’ And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: ‘Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?’

The screaming voice, of course, is that of the narrator, Hunter S. Thompson, in his Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. And the bats, of course, are . . . well, you know the story.²

And now, I’ve got another lead for you, the opening to what is described as a novel. I don’t know if this lead is great, but it’s very, very good:

I’m using everyone’s real name. They can all sue me. I hope they do. I could use the excitement.

And the author, Gerard Jones, apparently does use everyone’s real name in his book, Ginny Good, which is subtitled A Mostly True Story and is described by Jones not merely as a novel but as a ‘nonfiction novel.’

What struck us not just about the lead and the book but about Jones as well is . . . you gotta like the guy’s attitude.

Well, maybe you don’t, but we do, and that’s why today we’re offering the first installment of Ginny Good. You can either click on this link, Ginny Good, Chapter One, or go through the nonfiction section under Works at the top right of this page.

As we said in our previous entry about Jones, the book is a chronicle of a classic 1960s love affair, and like everything from that decade and into the ’70s . . . well, it was just a different time, a time that a lot of us wish had translated more effectively into today’s world.

By the way, Jones also has issued Ginny Good in audio form, and you can find that, as well as the entire book in electronic print, at his website, Everyone Who’s Anyone.

Also today, after a week’s hiatus, we continue serializing Steve Karmazenuk’s science fiction novel, The Unearthing, with Chapter Eight: Continuation and Contrast, in which a team of scientists learns more about an alien spacecraft in New Mexico and one of them gets an exciting ride in one of its satellite vehicles.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTES:

1. But not always. Sometimes the lead is in the second or third paragraph, but that’s about the limit. Any deeper than that, the journalist is in danger of what is known as ‘burying the lead.’ Or ‘lede,’ if you must, o j-school grads.

2. Just in case you don’t, the bats are hallucinations produced by the aforementioned drugs.