On heroes

I was surprised the other day to see that my last posting was quite some time ago... So this is an issue that's been quietly bugging me for a long time.

Heroism has been devalued in the past decade, largely thanks to international terrorism and its intended product of causing broad-based terror. When unsuspecting and largely innocent civilians are attacked by bombers or shooters, they cause terror. Those who become victims are often called… heroes?

Victims are victims. They are suffering unnecessarily, unfairly, unjustly. In a world where we tend to believe good behavior and bad behavior are sorted out through punishment, victims are those injured or hurt - in effect punished - without having indulged in bad behavior. Sometimes they are forces for good and are killed unjustly. So they really are victims. But they are not heroes.

It’s become especially popular to call all soldiers heroes. This is thornier, and more sensitive. Joining the armed forces isn’t the same as getting a job at, say, Sears or Microsoft or Bank of America. Civilian work is considered generally non-life threatening, not intended to be dangerous. People who work at Bank of America go to work in the morning expecting to peacefully return home. Soldiers, on the other hand, take a job that could put them in immediate danger for their lives.

It’s really with soldiers/sailors that the ‘hero’ label gets used too broadly. On this point alone I know I face opposition. Soldiers=heroes for many. I agree that many soldiers behave heroically, but not all are de facto heroes. In WWII, and since, there were soldiers identified as heroes. Usually they got medals for this distinction. More soldiers fired guns at the enemy than were given medals. This group, the undecorated shooters, could be considered heroic, but they are not singled out and recognized, and while soldiers do their job without special recognition, even risky assignments, I do not believe they should all be called heroes.
They have the potential to become heroes, as can civilians, if they encounter an emergency where they react with the values considered heroic. If they put their own lives at risk to save others, or to eliminate a lethal enemy under lethal conditions, they are heroic. If they did their job with logical respect for staying alive, they are honorable soldiers but not heroes. They do deserve the nation’s thanks for going where they go, and should be honored as soldiers, as our defendors.
But heroes? We need to distinguish Victims, and Honorable Soldiers separately from Heroes. It would seem that suddenly we are awash in heroes. I don't think we're all behaving so much better than people did fifty years ago. I think the global instant information age has devalued, among other things, the label 'hero'. Survivors are suvivors. This label needs to again become special.

Ni-agara-Falls...slowly I turn... a history museum, anyone?

When you are from the falls and live elsewhere, people over 50 will eventually run the Three Stooges opening line. I remember seeing it as a kid, and it's still got the power to draw an amused smile of recognition...but that's all. The other recurring joke (unintentional) is when you are somewhere far away - say, Tucson - and someone asks you where you're from cuz you don't sound like you come from around here - and you say Niagara Falls... "I knew this guy I worked with on the Alaska pipeline back in the seventies, he was from there, name was Steve?"

My usual response is to say, "true, there's only four of us, but he never made the meetings. You sure about him?"

I decided to post an idea I've had for years. It's about Niagara, and about its declining fortunes. I've been watching from afar for over twenty years and seeing promotional ideas come and go, businesses come and go... and the falls is even more decrepit looking than when I left in 1978.

Yes, the Canadian side is a blueprint for tourism development. But with all those lights and attractions, they have overlooked a cultural touchstone. There really isn't a Niagara Falls museum on either side. We have the Schoellkopf, and it does a fine job with the natural history of the gorge, but I'm talking about human history. In particular about the development of industry that erupted along the river in the late 19th century. There's a vast amount of interesting history that is virtually unknown outside of us geeks who seek it out.

I don't know for a fact how to do this, but I would hope there are grants out there that would get the process started. I know there was a collection, but it wasn't displayed properly - I think it was associated with the Local History section in the library, another neglected institution.

More later as I discover how good/bad an idea this is...

Lulu-ed - docutech and nuvera

Yet another foray into the semi-slutty world of print on demand, and self publishing. I've been monitoring ebay for the past couple months, watching auctions on docutechs and nuveras - these are the trade names for the most widely sold digital printers, used for POD. Though these machines will take up a wall of your basement, and originally sold in the upper tens of thousands, it's been ten years since they first appeared and the prices have dropped. Currently one can buy one for about five thousand. I can't justify the expense, but I'm keeping an eye on it. It would be neat someday...

Separately but in the same vein, I took my historical novel and went poking around lulu.com. They are unique (I think) among self-publishing companies in letting you play with their typesetting software free. You can even create a cover and display it on your screen for free. I set up a version of my buried gold story and it looked so good I decided to spring for the $15 to get a hard copy. As best I could tell, looking at the many, many self-publishing outfits out there (hard to believe in 2001 there were only a handful, though a fair number have come and gone) require you to give them chunks of money before they even show you the software.

So I have a galley of my buried gold tale, and separately it's still being read by a small publisher, but I thought in the mean time I would try to get some blurbs by sending the galley around.

The publishing model continues to change...

Espresso Book Machine

Today I met the Espresso Book Machine, at Harvard Books on Mass Ave in Cambridge. It's the only one in Massachusetts, and was closer than the one in Manchester, VT. From the online documentation I've found, the Espresso is a fraction of the size of the Xerox machines that provide POD.

Current technical drawbacks to the EBook machine. The bookstore currently has access only to public domain titles. Even though my first novel, Weathermen, was POD, it was not available. I asked and was told that access to POD titles is currently very limited. Only Lightning Source (Baker and Taylor) titles are at all available, and there are still some glitches, so access to titles remains a big hurdle to in-store book creation. To see the machine in operation I had to pick from public domain titles. I tried George Orwell, hoping for one of my favorites, but one of a very few options was Animal Farm.

Second technical drawback. The machine does require hot glue to bind each book, and however fast a computer may boot up, glue must be reheated in the physical world. My wife and I waited an hour (they thought it would be sooner when we started, and when it took longer we decided to wait it out). The machine ordinarily gets enough business from the neighborhood scholars seeking out of print titles; we were the victims of a warm Saturday. The Xerox printer spit out the pages in under a minute (172 pages). The entertainment value is watching the cover printed on a separate, color printer, then watch the pages run over the glue roller, then tucked snugly into the cover, pinched tight, then run over a tiny router that trims the book. The book is dropped into a spout and it appears like candy bought in a vending machine. The entertainment value of watching a book being made is evident in that the Espress machine's sides and top are transparent plastic.

I don't mind too terribly that we got a parking ticket waiting for the glue to get hot enough...

A memory - David Finitz

David Finitz


In late May, 1970, in Niagara Falls, New York, eleven year old David Finitz was playing with two other boys near the upper Niagara River. The boys found an abandoned door, or something akin that floated, and dragged it into the river to use as a raft. It drifted into fast water and the two older ones managed to swim to shore; David panicked and stayed alone on the raft as it began the terribly fast trip down the Upper Rapids and over Niagara Falls.

To stay out of the upper river was as common gospel to children in Niagara Falls as not playing in traffic, though my father, who grew up within a mile of the falls, one day pointed out a pathway one step from fast water he and his friends biked as boys. Because the Robert Moses Parkway and the factories on Buffalo Avenue constitute a physical barrier between the residential area and the upper river, there hasn’t since been a story like David’s, and that may be why his death still is a marker in my memory. To this day there are few scarier ways to die in my dreams than being swept over the falls. And yes, I occasionally have that dream, though the falls in my dreams never appear as starkly cold and rocky as they are, and I somehow linger at the rim until I awaken.

What disturbed me then and continues to are the photographs. At least one tourist was on the bridge over the upper rapids. She looked upriver and saw a boy on a piece of wood in the middle of the Upper Rapids coming downstream fast, and she aimed her camera and shot film. The clearest frames ended up in the local paper, and then in the June, 1970, issue of Life Magazine. She was paid for the photos, as is customary.

I was thirteen when this happened and the local paper printed a front page photo, grainy black and white of David on his raft and I was chilled. It wasn’t hard to conjure a scenario where I might have stumbled into the same predicament, especially if I was trying to impress two older boys with my courage; I’d endured stupid, less lethal dares. Now in my fifties, I was sifting through Ebay listings one day and remembering David’s name, typed it in. I got two hits, both for editions of Life Magazine for sale featuring four frames from the amateur movie camera.

I have to wonder how that tourist felt, and if the memory stays with her. She captured the last minute of someone’s life, both of them knowing it was the last minute. I am a photo-bug myself, as my wife can testify, but I have never been witness to sudden tragedy and don’t know what my reaction would be. Would I have shot film? Would I have dropped my camera and screamed with him? Might I have glanced around to see if there might be rope or some other flotsam with which to attempt a rescue? I like to think I would have done something besides firing a shutter – and that is unfair to the photographer, having never been in that position. There is one argument in favor of documenting the event – Mrs. Finitz did not become a mother of a missing child, wondering ever after what became of David.

There have been rescues in the upper river, people plucked from the waters, in one case a girl I knew slightly was saved near the very precipice of the Horseshoe Falls. Most of the rescues have been in the shallower rapids of the Horseshoe, which are far broader than those preceding the American, or Niagara Falls. A helicopter ride has crashed a couple times over many decades and boats drift too far downstream and shear off their props in the rapids, then usually run aground. But all of these rescues occurred in the Horseshoe Falls, in the broader, shallower rapids where victims may be able to hang on and permit rescuers reaction time. In fact, of those going over the falls involuntarily, the survivors all went over the Horseshoe.

Part of me wishes there was no photographic evidence of David’s last minute. It was, in a way, an early snuff film.

Where the gold is buried...done, more or less

What a journey this project turned into. While SHD was in the process of being published I began writing WTGIB, so peg it at about seven years. I needed to know the circumstances of the loyal Quakers and their overland journeys to Niagara, and finally had to accept that, in the words of the UEL records, a key book that may have contained such details was likely burned in 1813. So I had to make it up, which isn't as much fun as it might sound, not when one is taking pains to keep it all historically accurate.

I pictured the story arc beginning in the 17th century, with the martyrdom of French priests, then going to 1759 and the siege of Fort Niagara, and then to the actual storyline of loyal Quakers in 1789, and finishing today, with my two Tuscarorans - my favorite characters. I took the first chapter to Vermont and Ellen Lesser patiently explained why I should keep the story 'organic', i.e. stick with the actual story line and end it then.

So I ignored her suggestion and wrote a 150K word novel that nobody, but nobody wanted to read. I went back and chopped up the siege of the fort and tucked it into the Quaker's story, which made sense then. And last year I decided to follow Ellen's advice and sacrifice my two favorite characters... so now I've got a reasonbly tidy $72K word historical novel. I'm still missing Diane Printup and Chris Green, my Tuscaroran lovers...

All I need is a publisher(!)

Assassination of Jessse James by the Coward Robert Ford and other westerns

Ron Hansen wrote this novel, dosed with much fact, in 1991. It was put on the screen a year ago, a point worth noting for those writers dreaming of movie deals. The book has a conversation with the author, and he relates that the movie producer picked up a used copy of the novel in Australia. I'm also reminded of the poet whose book was picked up in a 2nd hand shop by Sheryl Crow, for her first hit. Anyway, Casey Affleck got an Oscar nomination for playing Robert Ford (Brad Pitt playing fellow Missourian Jesse James was ignored by Oscar - I think he's got Cruise-itis).
Original point - many times I've enjoyed a movie for which a book was previously written, and I can't recall ever going back to read the novel. Most agonizing example: Last of the Mohicans. Loved the film. Loved it. Went back to the book. Couldn't get past page three... that 18th century writing style was torture.
Hansen's book of course tells more story than the movie showed (picture=thousand words notwitstanding). I learned that Bob's brother Charley took his own life, a downer that didn't reach the big screen. By way of almost misleading the viewer, Bob Ford's killer is protrayed as a crazed looney seeking fame, which is part of how Ford explained killing Jesse, ie for the fame, expecting applause. In fact the looney was a local with whom Bob was feuding.
I previously read 'Desperadoes' by Hansen, his chronicling of the Dalton gang that met its end in Coffeyville, KS.
Does this mean I've aged just enough to be my father? Loving westerns? Perhaps. But for those who dread such a comparison, consider this: two winters ago I took my then-favorite film, The Proposition, home for my parents to watch. Set in turn of the 20th century Australia, starring Guy Pearce and Danny Huston and Ray Winstone, I found it masterful and poetic. My parents politely waited for the final credits to finish before getting up and scramming... I suspect westerns are changing.

As it happens, over Xmas I saw 'The Road', McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel, a departure from oaters. In lieu of horse, father and son push a shopping cart. Sad story, sad movie. I don't think the flick lost much moving from the book, which I'd read several months prior.

Writing Camp

Writing Camp is my name for writing workshops/conferences. Years ago, when I attended my first, I was unsure what the reaction of non-writing people might be to 'I'm attending a writing conference'. What reaction did I fear? The same one gets if admitting in public to being a writer. "What have you written?" And if your work isn't immediately recognizable you feel obscure, unknown, a charlatan, i.e. anyone can claim to be a writer.

So writing camp became an amusing, disarming way to say 'I'm going off for four days to eat, drink and sit in rooms with other people who write. We'll have a nominal leader who teaches for a living and is therefore qualified to lead us.'

What does one encounter at these gatherings? Other writers, of course, and they run the range of newbies, weary veterans, the published and the unpublished. I have to confess one rarely meets writers who are publickly known - the workshop leader and I walked down a street in Montpelier without a single starstruck fan asking him for an autograph. I never met at a workshop Michael Crichton, Stephen King, or other writer I knew of from my regular life. The writers who teach at these gatherings are usually teachers in writing programs in colleges and they have a few publications to their name, but you'll need to explore Amazon to find them. So you aren't being taught by a famous writer - which is for the best, as some famous writers probably can't teach.

Past writing camps: Rappahannock Fiction Writing Workshop, in Virginia, catering strictly to fictional prose - attended 3 years. No poetry, no nonfiction. Sadly, this workshop had its last gathering in August, 2001.
Colgate Writing Conference, at the college in upstate New York - attended once, left early.
Vermont PostGraduate Writing workshop in Montpelier, VT. I've attended three times and plan to return this year. They offer workshops in fiction (short story, novel), non-fiction, translations, and lots of poetry.


Are you better than me?
For writing workshops, you submit your writing and you will receive copies of the other attendees' works. So before the gathering, you've already read their work, and they yours. And as part of the workshop everyone is reviewed by everyone else (And if it's a five day workshop and you learn on the first day that you are 'up' on Day Five that can make for a long workshop). And because life is short and these workshops aren't free, you begin to rank yourself compared to others. You don't want to find yourself out front, you won't learn anything that way. I'm happiest when my work doesn't look shabby next to the other material. I feel humbled and a little dismayed when someone presents a polished story - when you say (maybe just to yourself) 'I wish I'd written that'; it's the highest compliment I think a writer can give. I've read through those photocopies and said, "this one isn't bad"... "this one has good spots but seems to be missing something" and I confess to once reading an attendee's work and suspecting the workshop was letting in some sub-par writers to pay the bills. Ironically, that writer promoted himself as published to boot... I have no doubt he was.
I've seen one attendee leave early when she was called from home to say an agent had called... that's the best way to leave a workshop, with everyone else's tongues hanging out.

I applied once to Bread Loaf and was rejected. Everyone should apply once... The reason I like Vermont is its closeness, and now I know some of the people. I just wish it was cheaper, though they have a culinary school on site and 2 out of 3 years the food has been great.

But I've left for last the best part of these workshops, why I keep returning: being exposed to other work and other writers is so revitalizing! This is something you can't get reading someone's work on craft, or in any other way. (I also get a mild charge out of leaving copies of my novel in the bookstore - though last time it was just for an airing out, none sold(!))
You may arrive utterly burned out and blocked, but by the end of the workshop you will very likely be working on something new or have a better idea how to fix a work in progress. At Vermont, each group reads in a public room to whomever feels like listening (honestly, it's usually just the groups slated to read that day, and those who feel strong about solidarity), and I don't know a better way to ruthlessly edit writing than preparing it for public reading to other writers.

Kindle...again.

As a sort of birthday gift for my wife and anniversary present for both of us, I bought the latest Kindle last June. This is the 8x11 page sucker. It looks like a full sized notebook, compared to the original Kindle which looks like a PDA on steroids.

As I say, I bought it in late June. My wife has downloaded a lot of novel excerpts and one novel. I downloaded the memoirs of U.S. Grant because it was public domain (99 cents) and I'd read it was one of the more readable presidential memoirs. I can say that Grant did not load up the narrative with dense vocabulary, and if I only had the Kindle next to me in the room where I park at night and watch TV, I might have finished the memoir. I also ordered the New Yorker via Kindle. It does an adequate job with the cover (it's a WSJ type display, no colors) and okay with the cartoons. I admit the learning curve on navigating the TOC is steeper than I'd expected (again, if I were using it more frequently this would probably be a nonissue), but the bottom line with the Kindle is that I don't pick it up as often as I'd thought.

It's not too heavy, and the display isn't bad. It's certainly portable enough - yes, I've read it on the hopper. It's not at all hard to back up a page on the Kindle, the response time is probably faster than the time it takes me to flip through print pages... why is it so hard to say this? I like books.

In part my slow adoption of the Kindle is that many of the books I want to read are not yet available electronically. I most often purchase used books by authors I've discovered (whose titles may be ten or more years old) and these titles have not been set up for Kindles. I spend more on shipping than on the books.

So in ten years, if titles are retrospectively set up for the Kindle, I may be carrying a battered electronic reader around...maybe. By comparison I was hopelessly addicted to my first Ipod within three months... and I now watch more flicks via Netflix download than DVD, so I'm not the slowest of adopters.

I wonder which is the greatest burden on the environment, print books or the energy required to run a Kindle? I haven't seen any statistics I trust either way...

Friends of the editors - 1 year anniversary

You may have noticed in earlier postings I announce the web site friend Denise and I have to publish people (including ourselves); friends of the editors has been limping along for about a year now.

We haven't been deluged in submissions, and that's largely because we've been hesitant to promote it. We did get a shout-out from Grub Street, and got a few excellent submissions from that.

We do things a little differently on FOTE. We do decline material, but usually we give detailed reasons, and in one case, I reverted back to my days as a comp instructor and did a line-by-line edit. I presume others do this as well, but I've never had a rejection that wasn't a form.

So...I've finished a draft of 'Mud Season', the zombie novel, but now I'm rewriting it, going from a third person POV to first person. Periodically I remind myself that I have more fun writing than publishing. Less rejection, more creative....

So consider sending a short piece to www.friendsoftheeditors.com. We do fiction, nonfiction and poetry.