Augusten Burroughs on tenacity

I had an agent for a few years, and she did a wonderful job getting my novel Make Nice in front of publishers. (Unfortunately none of them bought it, but that was my fault, not hers.) As most of my friends know, last year she quit the agent business, so I'm trying to find a new agent for my novel Mango Rain (which has had other titles in manuscript, including "Bangalored").

As I start the process of trying to find an agent again, these words from Augusten Burroughs are encouraging.

As a writer, you can't allow yourself the luxury of being discouraged and giving up when you are rejected, either by agents or publishers. You absolutely must plow forward. I believe that if you have real talent as a writer, a true gift, you will eventually be published. But it may not happen according to your schedule. And it may not happen with the first manuscript you create. Or the second. So you have to be, if not patient, at least endlessly tenacious.

Once I decided to write, to be published, I knew it would happen. I knew that if I wrote a new book every six months or every year, if I continued to read great books, eventually I would write something worthy of publication. I understood I might be in my forties or my fifties or even my sixties, but I felt confident that it would happen. The reason I was so confident is because I knew I wouldn't stop trying until it happened. And this is the secret. You don't need to be confident. You just need to be stubborn.

technorati: writing, rejection

I love this country

Some clever, strong-voiced protesters infiltrated an insurance industry meeting and sang their "thanks for killing the Public Option" to the dumbfounded attendees. (Courtesy Stellaa)

Of course, in a third-world country they all would have been taken out and shot.

technorati: health care, public option

Things I had to look up: Anagnorisis

I was enjoying this satirical chart of "42 Essential 3rd Act Twists" (courtesy The Rumpus) when I was stopped dead by the unfamiliar term "anagnorisis."

Anagnorisis -- a moment of sudden recognition by the main character in a drama or story of the true nature of things. For example, in "Chinatown" when Evelyn Mulwray's confession "She's my sister and my daughter" makes Jake Gittes realize the depth of Noah Cross's evil. (Screenplay.)

technorati: Chinatown, drama

Keeping abreast of body modifications

"Ultramarathon" runners -- those who take part in races of 50, 100 or even more miles -- tend to suffer from problems with toenails. So some of them have toenails permanently removed through surgery, a process that includes "pouring acid onto the nailbed" to prevent regrowth. Runners interviewed for the NYT story say things like "toenails are dead weight;" one who had all his toenails removed said "it's one less thing to have to deal with" on races upwards of 100 miles.

The piece is a little contradictory about whether runners who have undergone the procedure -- an estimated five to ten percent of "ultrarunners" -- feel like publicizing the fact. Some of them are "tired of being freaks, and they don't want to add anything more freakish to their résumé." Others sport t-shirts reading "Toenails are for Sissies" -- a clue to the mentality of the sport.

The most reasonable comment is from one doctor who says, "You know any sport has gone off the rails when you have to remove body parts to do it."

Utter dumbass of the month

Man charged with printing phony $50s to pay dancer CHEYENNE, Wyo. -- A Wyoming man has been charged with counterfeiting money to pay an exotic dancer for a private performance. Rickey A. Kempter, 50, faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted. Prosecutors say Kempter hired the exotic dancer for a private dance at the Lariat Motel, and Kempter and the dancer shared a taxi to the location. The taxi driver called police after they arrived, saying Kempter asked him to hold a roll of $50 bills and he noticed that they looked odd and were not cut evenly. Court documents say Kempter told investigators that he made the bills on a printer in his home, but that he planned to go home and get real money to pay the dancer. From the sound of it, he didn't even have time to get it in. He'll have plenty of time to think about it, though. You can read a long version of the story in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle; unfortunately, no picture of Mr. Kempter. But courtesy of Yelp, here's the motel in question. Click through for a larger version. But be sure to read the Yelp reviews for the amazing comment about the Lariat's allure: It looked like a room to commit suicide in.

The lonely Brinks 'stockroom' man

It's one of those days when you read things in your spam inbox for entertainment. Usually I just peruse the subject lines, but I happened to open one of the typical Nigerian spam messages and realized just how quaint some of the assumptions are.

Dear/Madam,

I am happy to write to you this mail. I am glad that i have you as a friend and i hope that this mail gets to you with all happiness in your mind to help me out in this crucial matter.

First and foremost i want to tell you that i am the chief accountant with the Brinks Hellas Security Company Athens Greece with head quarters in Athens. i want to tell you that this matter all started last year 2004 when i was rounding up accounts for the year ended and also taking into stock what was in store.

Here we have a scenario worthy of the opening chapter of a Graham Greene novel. The formal, overly polite clerk of the Athens office of Brinks, somewhat marooned in his dusty backroom with God knows whatall. At the end of the year it's time to "round up" accounts, and he takes stock of "what was in store." Did I say Greene? It's almost Biblical.

Actually, I was taking into stock all the treasuries we have left, both the ones claimed and the ones not claimed, when i realized that there was this consignment that has been in the store room for about a year and a half now and no one has come to claim it. Really, i have been with this organization for about five years and know exactly when the consignments came in.

The actual destination of the consignments is from Malaysia belonging to one Mr. Hang Chen. All this stocks have been in my books and it is only me that knows whose goods have been claimed and whose goods are still in the store. ...

The letter then goes into the usual details designed to make the story more plausible -- the length of time (four months) Mr. Chen's goods were supposed to remain in the storeroom, a subplot about Mr. Chen flying to Dublin (of all places), and finally the literal money shot:

Now when i checked out the consignment late last year i decided to Scan it and found out that the consignments actually contains money and to my knowledge it contains 3 million dollars which are wrapped up. Honestly, this consignments has passed out the time lapse and i have already written it off the books.

Und so weiter. What impressed me was the opening: the figure of the lonely stockroom clerk, undoubtedly middle-aged; he's over-educated for a stockroom clerk, which raises the question of how he wound up there in the first place -- no doubt a sad tale of frustrated ambition, a sabotaged career, and bad luck. He passes the time by opening up unclaimed packages, really just out of curiosity. Imagine his surprise when he finds the three million dollars (dollars, not drachmas, yuan, Euros or whatever they use in Malaysia).

If it were a Greene book, the ensuing chapters might deal with shadowy agents seeking the true provenance of the three million dollars. It would turn out there was no such person as a Mr. Hang Chen. Inevitably, a lovely woman in her mid-30s with a classical name such as Helen or Daphne would appear mixed up in the thing, probably trying to protect someone, and the storeroom man would have to choose between his secret love for her and his moral duty.

But they don't write them that way anymore, except in spam emails.

technorati: hoaxes

Space tourists becoming boring

The founder of the Cirque du Soleil company -- formerly a charming group of European and North American hippies, now a multi-billion dollar corporation with simultaneous nightly productions in cities around the world -- was shot into space as one of those "space tourists" (in other words, he paid $10 billion for the privilege) -- and almost no one noticed, despite the fact that he reportedly spent most of the trip wearing a clown nose. I'm sure the dedicated scientists and pilots who worked for twenty or thirty years to get the same privilege really appreciated that.

technorati: space tourists, Laliberte

San Francisco: dirty, credulous, overcrowded?

I had to giggle when I read this guy's blog post about San Francisco being dirty, credulous, and overcrowded (cross-linked using ShareThis). It's not that he's wrong, it's that he's so afraid that someone will disagree with him and -- shudder -- email him, and then -- horrors -- he'll be forced to ignore the email.

Then you read his bio and see: Aha, he's in his late-mid-20s. Just the time when illusions are popped, including the illusion that just because one is really smart (see his bio, where the bragging is perfectly pitched to be just more than humble, just less than arrogant: "I've been working at Twitter since the beginning of 2007, several months before the service began to grow in popularity. It's been an education ...") one somehow deserves to be relieved of the bother of living in a real environment with "generally poor urban/civic planning" and "unreliable and inadequate public transit."

I must have missed the part where he's announcing that he's devoting his dead Saturday afternoons ("I've found precious little to do here") to organizing the citizenry for the repeal of Proposition 13 and other neo-con initiatives that have limited the scope and reach of what government can do to address such problems. In the meantime, I strongly suggest taking up kayaking or crack.

That's Jenny with an X

The appearance of Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin on the Rachel Maddow Show (thanks, @tara) educated me for the first time on, among other things: that the A-list (for the internet) celebrity's name is pronounced "zhenny zhardan," and that she seems to have excellent diction, even the traces of an East Coast posh accent.

It's a funny story and worth watching, and what a giant plug for BoingBoing. Of course Maddow's audience is likely already familiar with BoingBoing (the most-viewed blog in history) but such a feature can only serve to remind everyone that it's still relevant and not merely the repository of some writers' obsessions with squids, steampunk, and Disney World.

Read my short story 'Polar Bear'

Here's a short story, Polar Bear (PDF), which I spent a great deal of time working on several years ago, available for free from the Scribd website. (I'm not too sure just what the purpose of the Scribd website is, but for the moment I'll use it to share some of my writing.)

For those familiar with much of my work, this is not a story about sex and it doesn't really have any sex in it (though there is a cameo by a stripper). It's based on an anecdote told to me by a friend when I lived in Japan twenty years ago. She was a wealthy middle-aged lady who had a rich, depressed friend from college. He was so bored he wanted to kill himself, but she said to him, "Well, what if you just risked your life instead?" And took him hunting polar bears in the Arctic. I tried to imagine what that must have been like.

It's really one of my best short stories, a form which (outside of the realm of erotica) I have trouble with. So I hope you'll enjoy this, offered as a free PDF download.

She's a sex bomb, my baby, yeah

With her mane of black hair, taut physique, eight tattoos (including the Shakespeare quotation "We will all laugh at gilded butterflies" from "King Lear") and bedroom eyes, she projects an unapologetic sultriness whether she's wearing a bikini in GQ or bending over a '76 Camaro in a tiny blouse in her breakthrough role in 2007's "Transformers" (which not coincidentally has taken in more than $700 million in worldwide box office).

That mind-numbing sentence is only one of the many such sentences composed by an LA Times entertainment writer, who at this very moment may be considering ways to kill him- or herself after turning in an anodyne feature on Megan Fox, star of a recently released "horror comedy" and this year's sex bomb.

My only reaction is, it's nice that a brunette gets to be the designated sex bomb once in a while.

(Title of this blog entry is from the most infamous record by the infamous early 1980s San Francisco punk band Pop O Pies.)

technorati: Megan Fox