237 reasons why

The New York Times tells of a University of Texas study of reasons why people have sex. Four hundred forty-four Texas students and hangers-on came up with a total of 237 different reasons why they have sex; 1500 others were then asked to list how much each reason applied to them. Here's the whole list (MS Word document at the utexas.edu server), but among the reasons are:

Someone dared me.

I wanted to make the person love me.

My friends pressured me into it.

I wanted to capture someone else's mate.

I was slumming.

The longer you read the list, the more it starts to sound like those lists of "classic plots" which are supposed to contain the boiled-down themes of every story, play and film ever written. There are 36 of them, or seven, or perhaps twenty. Things like:

Rivalry of kinsmen

Murderous adultery

Madness

Fatal imprudence

Involuntary crimes of love (example: discovery that one has married one's mother, sister, etc.)

Personally my main reasons for having sex are:

It feels great

I'm fascinated with the other person's responses

I like and feel comfortable with my persona in bed

Now let's compare with the list. Let's see... Those are reasons 15, 41 (sort of), and 95 (sort of). Of course, many of the other reasons have applied at different times.

I think my favorite reason from the list is "The person was famous and I wanted to be able to say I had sex with him/her." Not because it applies, but because it's really funny. I had sex with a slightly famous person once, not for that reason, but because I was curious whether the sexual persona she had displayed in her writing was anything like her real sexual self (reason 41). It was.

Good weekend

I had a good weekend working on my new book, starting off with a 6100 word first chapter. If every weekend is that productive, I wouldn't have much of a problem finishing by the end of the year, the deadline. Of course, everything will get a lot more complicated as I go along -- and it better, or the book won't be worth much. I hope the planning I've done will save time and worry.

And there's nothing better than a stand-up triple

It was Philip Roth in his novel The Great American Novel who depicted an intimate conversation between a baseball star and his lover, who asked him what his favorite part of the game was -- assuming he would reply "Hitting home runs." No; it's hitting triples,

...smackin' it, first off. Off the wall, up the alley, down the line, however it goes, it goes with that there crack. Then runnin' like blazes. 'Round first and into second, and the coach down there cryin' out to ya', 'Keep comin'. So ya' make the turn at second, and ya' head for third--and now ya' know that throw is comin', ya' know it is right on your tail. So ya' slide. Two hunerd and seventy feet of runnin behind ya', and with all that there momentum, ya' hit it -- whack, into the bag. Over he goes. Legs. Arms. Dust. Hell, ya' might be in a tornado, Angela. Then ya' hear the ump -- 'Safe!' And y're in there...

I wonder if that might be something of what the writer of the blog I Blame the Patriarchy might have been thinking when she titled her denunciation of anal sex Anal is the new 'third base'. (Courtesy Boinkology.)

The posting is so well written and so acidic that at first it seems like satire, but by the end it's clear the writer is perfectly serious in asserting that "Since the excessively vaunted sexual revolution decreed that all women henceforth would be empowerfulized by their service to male sexuality... too many women have been giving up the vagina too easily, and even blow jobs are hackneyed now that housewives are writing mundane marriage manuals on the subject. 'Regular' het sex just isn't brutal or insulting enough anymore" and thus more and more men are demanding anal sex.

Started writing my new novel today

That's 2048 words down, another 85,000 or so to go. The writing seems a little flat to me, but I can correct that later -- if my deadline gives me time to do any rewriting, that is.

Hooked on a feeling

I don't know what the topic of the email was, but on the advertising bar of Gmail today I saw this:

I couldn't resist clicking on it, and wound up at a site with a big advertisement for, not software, but a "course" that promised to teach how to write any book in less than a month. I was particularly tickled by the description of the "Master Writer" behind the course:

Living in his luxurious English home, Nick Daws has been a full-time writer for over 12 years. He enjoys a life of holidaying with his beautiful wife, playing his part as a regional celebrity, and occasionally putting finger to keyboard to write another book.

Oh, la. Eet ees almost too much to touch ze keyboard and write yet anozzer book.

Then there are some of the "WRITING SECRETS no-one has yet told you about":

How to only ever write in FIVE MINUTE segments, so you never lose interest!

Hey, that's just how I do my technical writing. I work for five minutes, then walk around for another five minutes, then force myself back to my desk. I'm starting to get the idea here. You can also learn:

...an ingenious method of injecting instant scene setting into your books, using just two extra words.

Hmm... could they be adjectives? Turning the sentence "He walked across the street" into "He walked across the windy busy street" certainly does inject instant scene-setting.

Why characters are KEY to any book -- fiction and non-fiction!

The course is "your key to a superior lifestyle, 'celebrity' status and industry kudos," an enlightened state further described like this:

Perhaps you're doing it for fame, or the money. It could be you just want to become an industry guru and boost your career. Or it's possible you simply want to become the talking point of a party by introducing yourself as a writer.

Emphasis theirs. I can just see someone reading this and imagining attending a cocktail party where people are whispering to each other "Look -- there's the writer! How I envy him!"

I read much of this out loud today at work to the other technical writers, most of whom are also in writing groups and are working on novels in their spare time. We had a pretty good chuckle. Because the fact is, we are making good money as writers -- minus the scene-setting and the characters, unless the "Transaction Tracer" or the "Report Template Creation Wizard" can be thought of as characters.

Want to really make good money as a writer? There are courses, all right -- like this. But never mind being a celebrity.

Strange little word processors

A couple of weeks ago Anna and I saw a fellow in a cafe in Noe Valley using one of these strange little word processors. He was typing up a storm on its little screen: [Picture of an Alphasmart 2000]

It reminded me of the Apple eMate I had several years ago -- well gee, a long time ago, like 12 years ago. I had thought it would be a good portable writing tool but it had a tiny memory so it wasn't very useful, and I soon sold it on Craigslist.

The pictures in that post do not do justice as to how beautiful it was. It was a true clamshell design made of a translucent dark green plastic. Here's a Business Week article on the thing's design, from 1997. If only its innards had been up to snuff to the design of the shell!

This picture is better -- you can see the semi-transparency of the case.

Bliss in my office

I've been spending the last two days in my office over at my friend Bob's house, where he rented me an entire bedroom as an office so he wouldn't have to find another roommate. There's the new chaise I got delivered yesterday so I can take naps -- very important part of my creative process.

For much of yesterday, I worked on character backstories, creating this big timeline:

Yet another American in Bangalore

I just got googlerted to the blog of a woman who has just moved with her husband from the Bay Area to Bangalore. Here's a post from Day Three -- she wasn't having a good time of it. Evidently her first experience of the Third World -- and in fact she wasn't even seeing the real Third World, she was seeing the fancy (for Bangalore) apartments catering to Westerners.

I do sympathize.

Too bad she isn't the one running

Whatever you think of presidential candidate John Edwards, you have to admire his wife. Facing a cancer death sentence, she's making her beliefs perfectly clear. Appearing with "other top candidates or their surrogates" at a Planned Parenthood event today, speaking to a gay rights group over the weekend. She's interviewed on Salon today.

As for her husband, he benefits by association, without actually having to come out and support the positions these groups support. If you agree with them, then he hopes you think he does too. If you don't, you're not going to vote for him anyway, so it's a no-lose situation for him.

I am kind of liking Edwards; I've been sending him small amounts of money. He's less divisive than Hilary -- if you thought there was partisan polarization during Bill's administration, just wait til she gets elected -- and more experienced than Obama.

Nevertheless, I think the absolutely perfect ticket would be Obama for president, Hilary for VP. She'd never settle for that, though.

Progress at the beginning

Been working on my new book -- not the India one -- still getting the characters squared away. There was one character whom I was having the hardest time getting a handle on. Every time I tried to imagine one of the other characters -- about whom I have a fairly good mental image -- interacting with this problematic character, I couldn't picture it. He was slippery like teflon.

At that point I realized that one of my characters was like a housemate I'd once had many years ago, and another was like this VP at a company I once worked at, and that I was able to call up mental images of most of the characters based on people I'd known, if only slightly. But I had the hardest time thinking of who this slippery guy might be. Then it hit me, I know exactly whom to model him on. I have a very clear image of this one guy I know and this will make working on his character so much easier.

Along the way of working on the characters, I've been inventing a lot of backstory for them: how'd they meet each other, and so forth. One of the boundaries of the book is that one character who is a software millionaire knows them all, and has invited them all up to his vacation cabin in Washington state. So I have been thinking of plausible ways all these people actually know one another.

And I've been making big-ass colorful charts with post-it notes and colored markers. That's the right-brain part of the exercise -- if I have that right. I always forget which is the right brain and which is the left. The non-practical one.

Strange book deal of the week

From Publisher's Marketplace:

Jill Myles's SEX STARVED, the humorous adventures of a newly-fledged succubus as she copes with her new "life," the need for sex, and the dangerous vampire and sexy angel she's torn between; and SEX DRIVE, featuring a succubus road trip to New Orleans, [sold] to Pocket Books.

That's classified as "Women's Romance/Fiction." I guess succubi are the new vampires -- well, that's all that vampire thing was about in the first place, right?

Dept. of self-screwing

I was supposed to take a business trip next week, but it's been cancelled. Most of it was made through company websites and the cancellation is fairly straightforward, but in an effort to save the company -- a 10 billion dollar company -- money, I made my car reservation through HotWired. Well, I can read, so I knew that if you make a reservation on HotWired and cancel the trip, you're screwed. So I'm out $270 for a car and $120 for a hotel room.

But this happens to thousands of dopes every day. The funny thing is that when you call HotWired to beg them to refund your money anyway, they put you on hold for about ten minutes with the most soporific, calming piano music you ever heard. It's like what they play in the nursing home to make people realize it's time for bed. By the time you've listened to that for ten minutes, you can't possibly be angry at the lady who recites the rules to you -- the same rules you agree to when you make the purchase -- and tells you you're screwed. In fact, I felt sorry for her -- what a crappy job she has, telling people all day long that they're screwed. I'll bet she listens to that calming piano music all the time.

Strange name of the week

The writer of this news story from Information Week on some obscure but "critical" browser security flaw draws attention to the odd title "chief security something-or-other at Mozilla." But the truly odd thing is the name of the holder of that non-title: Window Snyder.

Does she have siblings named Dialog and Button?

'Harry Potter' series hasn't led to reading revolution

According to experts, the fact that millions of kids read a new Harry Potter book every year or two isn't enough to turn them into inveterate readers -- so says this NYT story just posted.

I was struck by this passage from the story:

Starting when Avram Leierwood was 7, he would read the books aloud with his mother, Mina. "We'd sit in the treehouse in our backyard and take turns," recalled Ms. Leierwood, of South Minneapolis.

But while Ms. Leierwood has remained an avid fan, Avram, now 15, is indifferent. When "Deathly Hallows" comes out, he will be on a canoe trip. As for reading, he said: "I don't really have much time anymore. I like to hang out with my friends, talk, go watch movies and stuff, go to the park and play ultimate Frisbee."

On the one hand, the kid's position is not only perfectly normal, but healthy. He's not just playing video games, he's socializing and even exercising with chums. Then I thought about why, when I was 15, I read all the time. I was never able to say "I don't have much time anymore" for reading, because I had all the time in the world. There were few people who wanted to hang out with me, talk, play frisbee, etc. I didn't really have any friends. When I wasn't reading, I rode my bicycle on long trips to the mall by myself.

I would hate to say that teenagers have to make a firm choice between reading and living normal teenage lives, but I have the feeling it's true. Only social misfits like me really read that much as teenagers. On the other hand, in our society the number of people who can be at the top of any heap, whether it's a corporation or a high school, is pitifully small. So perhaps there are a larger number of social misfits than it might seem. Nowadays, however, I have the feeling most of them are whiling away their lonely hours on the internet and/or playing games, not reading.

technorati: books,Harry Potter, librarians, reading

I'll take Ants in Your Pants, please

... [There is] a truth that novelists shy away from: their trade embarrasses them. When you first start making things up, you expect that someone is going to tell you to stop. Perhaps you want them to, so that you can get back to behaving like an adult, and make a living in the real world. You have to invent a character, a main character too -- readers expect it, though the notion of setting up this giant "as if" device and lugging it around with you is inherently shaming. You know your main character barely emerges from layers of solopsism, and for the longest time it -- it is an "it" before becoming a he or a she -- dangles from some part of yourself, an ugly parasite, an unviable cojoined twin.

Eventually you give it a name, in a squeamish separation ceremony, a combined amputation and baptism. Somehow this rite of passage convinces readers to accept your squirming offcut as a real person, although one who lives in an alternate universe. But you, the writer, remain ashamed of your ploy. You can hide the same, or bypass it altogether, by doing what Mischa Berlinski does -- give the main character your own name, and pretend you or your alter ego are in the business of jotting down a few facts. You fit out your book with the apparatus of nonfiction -- footnotes and a reading list. Then your publisher writes "A Novel" on the cover, and the complicity comes full circle; writer and reader sit winking at each other, and the story begins.

-- Hilary Mantel, writing in the NY Review of Books, 19 July 2007 (p. 27),
in a review of "Fieldwork" by Mischa Berlinski.

Initially I found myself agreeing with almost none of that description of writing a novel. The strange birth metaphors, the business about shame and embarrassment as if writing a novel were a particularly unglamorous sexual fetish, the general air of revulsion -- for me, that is not what novel writing is about.

But then, in a reaction typical for me, I thought, Uh oh -- maybe that means I'm not doing it right. (Woman in Woody Allen film: "I finally had an orgasm, but my doctor said it was the wrong kind.") Should writing a novel be a wrenching process of dissociation, of revealing the worst parts of myself under the pretense of art? Would achieving that level of discomfort mean I was finally a real artist and not just a hack or dilletante writing surface-level comedy?

Then I remember the lesson of Sullivan's Travels: Sometimes people need "Ants in Your Pants of 1938" much more than they need "O Brother, Where Art Thou."

Third draft done

I finished the third and, I hope, final draft of my novel Dear Prudence, which I started in November 2004. It's off to my agent with it, and it's on to the next project.

Update: To celebrate finishing the book, I'm doing something a little counter-intuitive -- I'm posting some chapters that I cut from the first part of the book. I think they're kind of funny. If you're a fan of my writing, maybe you'll enjoy them, even out of context.

Character making

Did some work on the characters for my new book today. While taking a break I talked to my friend Bob, who owns the house I rented my office in. He's a composer and non-fiction writer. "I don't know how you fiction guys do it," he said, while applying some sort of sealant to the bathroom floor tiles.

"I'm just making it up as I go along," I replied, meaning the technique, not the book. I've done each book differently, and I am trying some new stuff with this one. I'm thinking of doing my notes as a wiki this time.

But I might have answered: You just play God with the characters. Not too much, though. At a certain point, they take on a life of their own and you have to stop interfering.

I'm definitely at the starting-from-scratch God part now, though.

The medium is the mass age

Asks this provocative essay in the British Guardian: Has the masterful narrative sweep and sheer brilliance of "The Sopranos" killed the American novel?

(The success of "The Sopranos") wouldn't be troubling were Americans reading other, actual novels. But they're not - at least not in the numbers they once did. An alarming study released in 2004 by the National Endowment for the Arts noted that in the last two decades the US has experienced a 10% drop-off in the reading of literature -- which they define as just one novel, story or play per year -- and a 28% drop in the key 18-24 age group.

In truth, the novel has been whacked by a number of things, starting with the decline of public education, where standardised tests stand in for cultural (and actual) literacy.

Emphasis mine. Regardless of the merits of the comparison between the best television series ever made and the entire corpus of the American novel, I was struck by the writer mentioning the decline of public education. Isn't that also at the base of the decline in shared American democratic values?

technorati: The Sopranos

Influential novels

Earlier today I blathered that On the Road has to be "probably one of the ten most famous and influential novels of the 20th century."

Oh? What are the other nine?

Hmm, well, it would be hard to go wrong with:

Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls

Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Heller, Catch-22

Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

"Pauline Reage," Histoire d'O

De Lillo, White Noise

Nabokov, Lolita

Orwell, 1984

O'Connor, Wise Blood

Oops, that's ten already. But what about The Great Gatsby, all of William Falukner, James Joyce, E.M. Forster, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth... Clearly a fool's errand. Here's the Modern Library's 100 Best list.

How On the Road was created, edited and sold

"All Things Considered" today has a story about the genesis (and exodus) of Jack Kerouac's On the Road, probably one of the ten most famous and influential novels of the 20th century. A nice long print (i.e. not audio) story is here, and that page contains a link to an even more "in-depth feature," as well as video of the famous 120-foot-long scroll typescript.

The piece includes usually not-discussed information about how Kerouac got an agent for the manuscript and how the agent and the eventual editors at Viking dealt with the unweildy book.

Remember your manners

[The writers] Caroline [Gordon Tate] and Katherine Anne Porter spent the weekend here... and one night, we had the lot of them to supper. Katherine Anne remembered to inquire about a chicken of mine that she had met here two years before. I call that really having a talent for winning friends and influencing people when you remember to inquire for a chicken that you met two years before. She was so sorry that it was night and she wouldn't get to see him again as she had particularly wanted to. I call that social grace.

-- from a letter of Flannery O'Connor
to the novelist Cecil Dawkins, 8 November 1960,
in The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor"

technorati: Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter

My new office

Here's my new office, from the doorway. Desk and chairs provided by my friend the landlord!

I went out and bought today a chaise to nap on, but it'll take them a couple of weeks to deliver it. Then I'll take a picture of the other side of the office.

Not-so-casual encounter

I really had to chuckle at the many, many hoops that a person would have to jump through to meet this woman's qualifications [Permalink] for a "lover" (but "Be clear that you are not looking for a girlfriend/wife").

I understand that a lot of people out there have been burned and want to control things more in the future, but really, I've gotten jobs paying more than $80,000 a year with fewer requirements than that person has. (By contrast, this woman is looking for a houseboy with possible benefits and has many fewer requirements.)

My new office

A couple weeks ago I sent out a mass email to friends, looking for someone who had a spare room in their house, or knew of one -- someone who didn't want a housemate to fill it, but could stand my presence fairly often in the next six months as I work on a new project (see previous entry).

My email had perfect timing, as a friend who owns a Victorian house and lives in one of the flats had just had his housemate announce she was moving out at the end of the month, and, in his words, "I think I'm getting a little old for housemates." So today I moved into her vacated room. It's a splendid 10x13 bedroom, complete with windows with no view whatsoever, his DSL is broken -- fewer distractions -- and best of all, it's within walking distance, so no worry about parking, moving my car, etc. etc.

He also had a spare desk, chair, lamp, bookcase -- all stuff old housemates and tenants had left behind. My biggest expense, aside from the monthly rent, was for a spike bar so I could plug everything in to the one outlet.

A picture should accompany this entry, but I didn't have the presence of mind to think of taking one. Imagine a bedroom with a wood floor and nothing in it but the above-mentioned furniture, and some big windows that look out on nothing but the house next door about two feet away, painted gray.