Holy Gigabytes, Batman!

It's still amusing to me that my Google mail account can be stuffed with some 600 MB of extensive back-and-forth between friends, teachers, editors, bosses, and the goofy daily emoticon swap the wife and I engage in. You know:

:-*

;-D

8-P

It's like a mere 10 percent of e-mail capacity in the golden age of Gmail, and yet it swamps by a factor of three the Mac I took to college with me.

Don't even get me started on the pea-brained capability of my old Commodore 64.

Plugging my Power Mac 7100 right into the wall in my dorm room at Carnegie Mellon was my introduction to the wondrous and corrupting world of the Internet, circa 1994. People were still "fetching" documents and pictures across the country then, usually on campuses. Mosaic, an early forerunner of Netscape, was clanking along in its beta version, but no worries. At tech-savvy CMU we were hooked directly into each others' computers via the campus ethernet (first in the world to go wireless a few years later), and so began our transformation into electronic squirrels, hording all the free games and pictures (porn? NO...!) and movies and sound files, etc. we could click our happy little fingers to.

I remember in the first blush of downloading, I imagined I might squeeze an entire pirated movie onto my hard drive, as if that were even possible then. Instead, we made due with 20-second snippets from Animal House and sound files from Ace Ventura and Pinky & the Brain, and thought ourselves with it. And we were, for the time.

Part of being "with it" was the ritual almost-monthly scrubbing of your hard drive, or else employing the nascent StuffIt and other compression programs to clear up space on the computer for more bootlegged junk.

My 250 MB hard drive -- which ran a cool $4,000 for the whole system back then -- quickly capsized. And I had to browse the computer tech mags for the ominous-sounding external storage devices. I paid around $800 for my 750 MB "attic" to cram more junk in, which I connected to the main three-encyclopedia-volume-size drive with a SCSI, or "scuzzy" cable. Remember those? To take the air of geekdom off the whole hook up, I named one drive Chip, and the other Dale, or Calvin and Hobbes, or Gwen and Pam, whatever floated my dorm room sensibilities at that particular time.

And now my Gmail slush pile alone could devour poor Calvin... or was it Hobbes?

Oh well. At least I never had to resort to receiving e-mailed porn. That crap comes whether you ask for it or not.

Getting Linked for Literature

When I decided to jump the track of my journalism career and veer into the uncertain world of freelance writing, I was blessed to have an arsenal stocked with weapons and talismans that made life on the outside a little less shadowy.

Foremost, my wonderful wife, who is also a writer, understands me and my passion and supports what I do. I cannot stress enough how important this is.

Second, my "chops" were in pretty good order, since as a newspaper reporter, and a prolific one at that, I wrote every day. When I wasn't writing, I was interviewing, or laying the groundwork for writing. And when I wasn't doing either, I was dreaming about doing both. I had a nice foundation of six years eating, breathing and sleeping writing.

Along with the chops came discipline. I knew the only way to get a story out was to get it out on the page.

Fourth -- and I didn't mean when I started this blog for it to be so ordered -- I had a soft place to land when I left the Naperville Sun. I was already well into a book project, and I had made up my mind to apply to MFA programs in order to find myself a new community of writers and contacts (very important) and continue honing my craft. I also want to teach. Now, I hadn't been accepted to Columbia when I handed in my resignation, but I had made up my mind that no matter what, I was going to go for it, I would write my way through whatever came up. OK.

The good news for me is that it's work out so far. Oh, I still lie awake some nights gnashing my teeth over money, fretting over the impracticality of leaving a career where I was solidly contributing and getting immediate gratification for an industry where progress is solitary and slow. But that conviction remains: I will write my way through whatever comes up. And now that I'm nestled into my fourth semester of grad school, with my nonfiction book just out, and a few freelance credits to my name, I'm looking forward to what's next. And taking stock of what I know -- and can share.

This is all a lengthy preamble to spotlighting a few of the reasons I'm blogging in earnest this year. The literary reasons, anyway. At school, I have ample opportunity to swap contacts, share publishing stories (many of which, inevitably, are about rejection), get turned on to tips and secrets, compare notes on process and find that crucial audience of peers that can help lead you to breakthroughs in your craft. As I pointed out above, I was well on the way to finding these thigs for myself months before my first semester in the MFA program. I knew I couldn't thrive without them. Much of writing is lonely, but you can't hope to succeed at it without the (at times painfully) public side: submitting your work, querying agents and publishers, contacting the media (from the other side now, for me), interacting with readers, networking, reading your work aloud in public (for some of us, A THRILL; for others, an invitation to their own beheading).

Early on, though I made it my mission to write every day, no excuses, when the writing wound down I also made sure to put in some productive time researching the business. I buried my nose and affixed a forest of Post-Its to market guides like Writer's Market and Jeff Herman's Guide to Publishers, Editors & Literary Agents, and agent tomes like Betsy Lerner's The Forest for the Trees. I eyeballed the fine print at the front of story collections, noting the journals where my favorite authors were published, as well as where Best Of... compilations found their stories. I also did a great deal of research online, fattening my Favorites menu with book publishers, agents, journals to submit to, web sites of writers I love, useful blogs, places for industry news and legal advice -- anything relevant, I socked away.

Getting this blog up and running, partly due to my publisher's beginning blogs on the book biz from a publisher's perspective and insider tips on book marketing, reminded me that all the links populating my own, personal bandwidth could also benefit YOU. At school, we get our fill of this stuff, and thankfully. But even my classmates have connections and insights that I don't have; any chance we get, we mine each other. Well, now a lot of the stuff I have, I've laid out here, like a Thanksgiving spread you're welcome to belly up to: dig on in!

This morning, I expanded my "For Writers" list into four categories: agents, industry news & advice, other writers, and submitting. This is by no means an original or comprehensive set up. Many of these links will lead you to sites and blogs that have a wealth of other information, and that's by design. This collection represents a chunk of what I have and use at the moment -- and a lot of my loosely-organized system depends on my "site hopping", following one fruitful contact to get me to the next, and the next, and so on.

So, about the lists:

The Agents category mostly contains sites where agents blog. These are the ones I've been reading for a year or more now. They're windows into the publishing world. Agents blog about query letters, and manuscript reading, and sales, and the way they do their business. Very useful to know for writers attempting to break in. And at the top of the list is a useful place to start -- or even finish -- your search for representation. Who knows how long AgentQuery will be free? Check it out!

The news and advice list is pretty self-explanatory and could have been twice as long. Of particular use to me are the legal advice sites: I've linked right to the pages I draw stuff from. For Chicago writers in a pinch or a jam, Lawyers for the Creative Arts offers pro bono services.

The Other Writers list could also be longer, obviously. These are a few of my faves, many of whom, like T.C. Boyle and John McNally and Jim Butcher and Marcus Sakey, blog about the biz and share their own tales of publishing and offer insights into process. I may in the future link to some of my colleagues here -- up-and-coming writers you should put on your radar screen.

Lastly, because it's so long (and hardly complete), is a list of journals you might want to submit to, or indexes of the same. Some I've tried knocking at, others I'll get to, others are the dreams we should all keep dreaming. As with any, make sure you familiarize yourself with what they publish before sending your stuff on over. The clot of query letters is thick enough with uninformed writers gumming up the works. There's also a link in this section to The Unsung Critic, who champions the cause of beginning writers (particularly screenwriters): he (or she) reads manuscripts and writes a review on the site. If that's your bag, baby, crinkle it.

Feel free to drop me a comment or a line with your experience following these links or surfing the waters of rejection/acceptance. And in all cases, GOOD LUCK!

DO YOU BLOG?

Into the Blogosphere! (Multiple Personality Disorder Edition)

With all due regard to Sufjan Stevens and his four recorded versions of his song “Chicago”… (Check out three of ‘em on The Avalanche album) here is my lunging stab at overextending myself from the first tick of the New Year.

Like a Harlem Globetrotter with a Guinness-record fetish, I aim to keep three blogs spinning about in cyberspace this year, not because anyone told me I should, not because I have to, but because in my compartmentalized, creative way (talk about multiple personalities), I want to.

This all basically started with a colleague I respect asking me “Do you blog?”

What do they say – hindsight is like French kissing the funhouse mirror? Well, no, actually I just said that. But I think you know what I mean.

What I mean is, when I answered her, I thought I knew what she was asking, and I was confident in my answer. And now, looking back, I see completely missed the boat. Like, John-Cusack’s-girlfriend-in-Say-Anything missed the boat.

Her question came about in this context: as a former newspaper reporter and columnist taking a plunge into grad school and fiction writing, I still get the Jonesing, now and again, for journalistic work, be it a magazine or newspaper column, a radio essay, or the stray profile or other assignment. Late last year I sent an e-mail to that effect to a few editors and well-placed contacts of mine, basically saying, if they knew of any freelance gigs that might be a fit, give me a shout. This colleague wrote back, saying she would keep me in mind, and concluded by asking, “Do you blog?”

I responded, essentially, yeah, of course. (Affecting the tone of a Nick Hornby character, probably John Cusack in High Fidelity, since I’m mentioning it.) I referred her to the blog I’d been keeping on My Space, where for a year or so I’d been posting excerpts from stories, or updates on life, and lately had been teasing friends and readers with news and outtakes related to the publication of my first nonfiction book, Building the Green Machine. At that point, the book had really taken over everything: the blog, the MySpace page, my life. (My wife’s, too. And still she manages to get excited about it. God, how I love her.) And while I’m sure that’s a legitimate use of blog space, it doesn’t quite fit the usual mode of blogger discourse, mainly, as “web log,” a sort-of tap into the keg of the writer’s mind which spews forth in a sometimes forceful, sometimes freeform spray about all the dirty corners and bright-lit byways traveled in life.

In retrospect, I see that I wasn’t blogging, not really. My aims were far too direct, not that that’s a sin in the blogosphere. But where my colleague was concerned – holding up my blog as an example of how I write, and how I think, and what things move me to write, get my socks going up and down, so to speak – my efforts on MySpace weren’t really hitting the mark. Compared to what I tackle daily in my journals – random pop culture, news, rants, books, movies, parenthood, life as a grad student, running, etc. – I was cutting off the reader from what I’m truly about.

Make no mistake, I was about and am about Building the Green Machine a lot of the time. And that’s unavoidable. As Sarah Keeney, eminently awesome marketing expert at my publisher, Savas Beatie, writes in her latest blog, first you birth the book (the long process of researching and writing it, revising it, publishing it), then you give it legs to walk (the winding trail of publicity, getting the word out and the book out into readers’ hands). So that’s an ongoing focus of mine. But it sure isn’t the only one.

So I started thinking about what more I could bring to blogging. I probably shied away because, like, there are only so many hours in the day to devote to sleep, eating, parenting, exercise, classes, and my God, writing, that what kind of sustained effort would I manage to mount when there are only so many pages in me every 24 hours, and I already have plans for them! And my writing mind is so attuned that anytime I consider an idea that may be blogworthy, it usually gets blown up into a column or essay or … gasp… something longer and meant for printed publication. And there’s a whole jungle gym of rules about what you post and don’t post if you aim to eventually see it in print, and want to get paid to boot.

But what I discovered is that a lot of what I’m already thinking about – in the microbe-germ-paramecium-barely-fertilized-egg stage, anyway – could be churned out here to qualify me as a card-carrying participant in the bustling Blogiverse. It’s practically a requirement nowadays, isn’t it? Like hanging the high-def TV in the family room (though I resist, and cling to my dust-attracting 1996 RCA 19” model). And thus, my ambition to juggle three blogs at once.

That’s more an accident of affiliations, actually. I mean, I’ve got my MySpace blog, and the obscene number of friends I’ve made there, mostly due to the drum corps connection. So I want to keep them posted on that front. But I’ve also got the official book site and blog, and the professional obligation to keep that humming, and to “interact” as the tab indicates. And now my publisher, Ted Savas, and dear Sarah are blogging about the industry, and I’m trying to keep up with that and cheer them on every now and again, which I do through my Google BlogSpot account, and that profile just seemed so blank and lonely, so diligent former staff writer that I am, I want to fill that space, too.

And so there is my goal and my sickness and my obsession, to somehow maintain relevance, or at least entertainment value, in three corners of the Blogiverse. I notice other writers doing it, and doing it personally, like Sam Weller (MySpace and The Bradbury Chronicles site) and John McNally (MySpace and BlogSpot… what else, John?). My question: what do you do? How do you keep up?

In any case, should be a fun experiment. And if the characters in my fiction start to squirm and eye me pityingly, looking more or less blank and lonely as the pages I should be devoting to them dwindle, I only hope I come to my senses and call a hasty retreat. But for now, it’s:

INTO THE BLOGOSPHERE! (Google)

INTO THE BLOGOSPHERE! (Building the Green Machine)

INTO THE BLOGOSPHERE! (My Space)