Readers and writers blog

It’s difficult to think of America as increasingly illiterate when there are such fine writers as R.J. Keller out there.

Today we begin serializing her novel, Waiting for Spring, the story of a newly divorced woman, numbed by years of rejection, who trudges out of one small Maine town into an even smaller one where she is forced to confront her pain.

R.J. Keller is the pen name of Kelly Hewins, who has written three novels, a screenplay, is an assistant editor for and frequent contributor to the Movie Fanatic website and, more happily than her protagonist, also lives in small-town Maine with her husband, two children and a family cat.

Her writing makes me nostalgic for Maine, even though I know from personal experience that those small towns aren’t the most prosperous places in the world and, from reading about Tess Dyer in Waiting for Spring, still not the most idyllic.

Neither is the book-publishing world, if it ever was a nice place. It’s certainly getting smaller for aspiring novelists, Hewins told us in a recent email:

Waiting For Spring is the first work of mine that’s made it past the query stage. I’ve become rather disenchanted with the publishing business — not because I can’t get published, but because of the reasons I’ve been given. I’m not commercial enough for the ‘mainstream’ agents (for lack of a better term), and not educated enough for the more literary crowd. I guess what I wonder about is this: If a book is ‘well-written, with engaging characters and a good story,’ then how is it not marketable? Isn’t that the reason people buy books? Or, if my writing is good, why does it matter that I don’t have an MFA? Perhaps I’m naive.

By the way, today’s new offerings also include the latest chapter in Disconnected, a novel by an author from the other coast, San Francisco writer Jeri Cafesin, who has expressed many of the same sentiments as Hewins about the publishing world.

It’s not just the imagination of a couple of frustrated authors. There’s plenty wrong with the publishing world these days. If you want one reason, just look at our most popular television shows or, worse yet — and this is particularly sore point with me — at TV “news” and its inevitable spinoff, dumber newspapers.

Yes, America’s reading habits — and reading levels — have changed. I don’t think television is a product but rather a cause of this phenomenon. Now there certainly are other underlying factors — notably, a breakdown in homes and parental oversight as well as a growing disdain for education — but one thing is clear to me:

Americans have developed an increasing appetite for mindless junk.

Which makes it harder for authors like Hewins, Cafesin and the other writers we feature in our Works section to get published on paper. And which brings up the one bright aspect of our new age — e-publishing. Right now, we’ve got two e-books-in-progress — Cafesin’s Disconnected and Joseph Cigan’s Sniper in the Mist — and two other novels in serialization, not to mention short stories and poetry.

So while they wait the wait, check ‘em out here:

• Prologue of Waiting for Spring by R.J. Keller.

• Chapter Two of Disconnected by J. Cafesin.

• Chapter Eleven: Farmer’s Market of Ginny Good by Gerard Jones.

• Chapter Seventeen: Invitations of The Unearthing by Steve Karmazenuk.

By the way, Hewins also maintains a weblog called Ingenious Title To Appear Here Later, an interesting and entertaining collection of her thoughts and experiences. I’m curious just thinking what the eventual title will be.

– Sid Leavitt

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.