The Undressing of America

Moving back

2011-09-05T10:46:00.000-07:00

I'm moving all my blogging back to my first and eponymous blog, Gerard Jones. If I'm going to concentrate my writing energies on the book, I should at the very least consolidate my potential web distractions. I'll be running excerpts from this book there, starting in a day or two.

This is not a blog post

2010-12-21T10:07:00.001-08:00

Well, it worked. I finished that draft of my book before the end of October. While I was plowing through it, I imagined that I'd be here on November 1, crowing about it. But here we are 1.75 months beyond November 1 and I haven't said a word.

See, there are four ways I got it done:

1. I just got really, really sick of not having it done.

2. I enlisted the encouragement and nagging of friends.

3. With the help of one of those friends I created powerful incentives for myself—things I wanted to do very much that I could do only if I met my goal.

4. I stayed off my blog, my Facebook page, Twitter, and every other "internet presence" I have. (The teasers for the graphic-novel installments below are auto-posted by Mark Badger; I don't even have to look at them.)

The last of those tools was so helpful than once I was free to come back to my blog and strut, I didn't want to. I wanted to keep my focus going into the rewrite. Now, hardly a week goes by that I don't hear or read someone telling me that a writer these days needs to be running a regular blog and keeping a lively presence on all the social media. Maybe that'll make sense when I have a book about to come out and not a book doing everything it can think of not to get written. But when I look around, most of the writers I admire for their productivity and quality don't keep up much of an "internet presence." I just looked at Michael Chabon's website: a caricature of his latest book's cover, a skeletal appearances calendar, a few goofy pictures, and three uncollected essays, complete with typos. Why does he have no blog, no news, no discussion? Why does he have no Facebook page or Twitter account? Because the little fucker's getting his work done, that's why.

That's why I'm not posting today. And why I'll be back soon to tell you more about why I'm not posting then either.

Interview

2010-10-16T11:02:00.001-07:00

Just plugging an interview with me about the new graphic novel and related social issues on Examiner.com by Sona Avakian. It was fun to do, and I like how she pulled it together. It's here.

Good Signings

2010-10-14T22:38:00.000-07:00

Some book signings are good because customers are lined up out the door and the store owner sells enough copies to pay the rent for the month. Others are good because interesting people show up and have time to talk. More salon than signing, they’re good reminders of why we do the work.

Mark Badger and I signed copies of Networked at Leef Smith’s Mission Comics and Art in San Francisco a few days ago. We weren’t expecting a big crowd, not on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon with the Giants in the playoffs, not the day after the Mission District had spent itself on the literary bacchanal of LitCrawl. But the people who came carved out the time to sit around and talk: people connected to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, a student of Mark’s at the Academy of Art, the publisher of an arts magazine who grew up on my’s comics for DC and Malibu, a young comics artist showing his sketchbook, a video game designer, and a local writer and journalist named Sona Avakian who may or may not write about us for the SF Examiner.

Leef’s store is an airy and nicely lit space, an art gallery as well as a comics shop, one of the nicest places to sit around and talk in the Mission District as an Indian summer afternoon turned to evening. We talked about art and superheroes and social networks and privacy laws and old comic book artists and generational changes and Guatemala and Chad and digital drawings and nonprofits versus for-profits and Cleveland sports and elections and video games. Leef sold a few copies of Networked and gave away some free comics. Mark did a pen and ink drawing of Batman. I signed some old copies of Guy Gardner. Then some of us went for Indian food and learned that the Giants had come from behind in the ninth inning to win game three.

And that, as much as sales figures and lines out the door, is reason enough to write and draw.

We’ll be doing another signing on Saturday the 16^th, at Dr. Comics and Mr. Games in Oakland. No idea who’ll show up or what we’ll talk about, but we’re looking forward.

Public sightings

2010-10-08T23:12:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow night, Saturday the 9th, from 7:15-8:15 PM, Elizabeth Bernstein and I will be emceeing the San Francisco Writers Grotto reading at LitCrawl, which is basically a gigantic literary block party on around Valencia Street in SF, the concluding event to LitQuake. The theme is "Disobedience" and the readers will be Marianna Cherry, Rachel Howard, Kathryn Ma, James Nestor, Justine Sharrock, and Meghan Ward. And note how we honor diversity: we made sure to include one Asian-American and one male.

Then Mark Badger and I will be doing two signings for our new graphic novel from NBM Publishing, Networked: Carabella on the Run. The first, Sunday Oct. 10 from 5:00-8:00 PM, is at Mission Comics and Art in San Francisco. Mission is a relatively new entry in the retail community, a combination comics shop and art gallery right off Valencia Street, the main hipster artery of Northern California, and it’s already becoming well known for its music gigs, art openings and literary readings.

Six days later, from 2:00-5:00 PM on Saturday Oct. 16, we’ll be across the bay at Dr. Comics and Mr. Games in Oakland. In some ways Dr. Comics is the opposite of Mission, a venerable citizen of the quiet, classy Piedmont neighborhood that sells not comics and cutting-edge art but comics and board games. But it’s legendary for its comprehensive selection and that great rarity in comics shops, a pleasant and helpful staff. You can read people raving about them on Yelp here.

It's all a welcome break from grinding through this first complete draft of The Undressing of America, which I'm supposed to finish in about two weeks. Drop by if you get a chance and wish me luck!

What it really takes

2010-09-02T21:57:00.000-07:00

Although it is undeniably true that in this competitive, interactive, media-driven era every writer who hopes to succeed must maintain a presence in the blogosphere, it is also undeniably true that in this competitive, interactive, media-driven era every writer who hopes to succeed has to get his goddamn work done. Which is an easy fact to ignore as the rationalizations to blog and tweet and facebook come thick and fast, and so we find ourselves in that rue-inducing cycle of never finishing our books because we're so busy promoting the books that we hope to sell once we finish them.

Sometimes it takes an ultimatum to get us to open that internet-blocking application (MacFreedom for me) and withdraw from the constant fix of networking and stay buried deep in that Word file until the writing is done. Bringing with it relief and excitement and fear, such an ultimatum has come to me. Terms were offered and I've accepted: by late October I have to finish the first full draft of this book. That's a lot of writing. It's not a sure thing. But if I succeed I'll rewarded by far more than a sense of accomplishment, and if I fail I'll miss an opportunity to pursue something that I very much want to pursue. It's what I needed, this combination of carrot and stick; they say rewards are more effective than punishment for creative motivation, but I know from experience that it's too easy to be philosophical about not getting something extra, and that what I also need to keep pushing me is the fear of losing something I truly value.

So I won't be here, or anywhere else in the cyberworld, much at all until November. The little promos for the new graphic novel will keep popping up on this page, but then the truth is that I'm not even doing those myself. I might run an excerpt or two from the book as I go, just to prove to myself that I'm really getting there. But otherwise I'll just be writing. I'll be writing and writing and fixating singlemindedly on the end of October.

I'm optimistic. I think I'll be very happy at the end of next month. But I know too that there is vast potential for frustration and self-recrimination, and in the late hours when I'm exhausted and seeking any excuse not to keep pushing toward the end of the draft, I know it will be that possibility that makes me start another cup of coffee and keep going.

Wish me luck?

The Romance of Junk

2010-08-19T23:55:00.000-07:00

I was sitting at a bar and grill on Michigan Avenue, eating a blue-cheese loaded iceberg wedge and drinking a basil-infused gimlet, taking notes in my little Moleskine notebook while the guide to the Chicago Art Institute that I'd been using as a bookmark lay on the table next to it. In small-talking the waiter I said I was from San Francisco and I'd come to Chicago because my son was attending G-Fest, a convention for Godzilla fans. We shared a smile: oh, those crazy kids, ha ha ha. Overall, I was doing a very good impersonation of an adult.

But ten days later I was at the San Diego Comic Con, and I wasn't with my son. True, I had a graphic novel to promote, one that sprang from a web comic commissioned by a nonprofit advocacy group. I could try to pretend that that's the only reason I was at Comic Con, but that wouldn't explain the twenty-six straight years I'd been there before this one.

I get why my son loves Godzilla and all his fellow kaiju. And it's not just that he's huge and destructive and free of the constrictions of society and all those other virtues I wrote about in Killing Monsters. It's that he's junk. He's chuckled at by the rest of the world, and Nicky is part of a select group who understand that there's something valuable in that junk, who can tell you why the guy who directed Mothra is better than the guy who directed Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster and why YMSF makes more accurate vinyl monster toys (or "figures," if you will) than Bandai and how the composer of the best Godzilla soundtracks consciously combined Western symphonic music with Japanese folk ballads and why the American Godzilla movie really sucks.

I was that way with comics before they had a cachet, when comic cons drew only a few thousand obsessive guys and a few dozen embarrassed girlfriends. I liked discovering artistry in a medium completely dismissed by the world at large. I liked being able to take one look at a comic book page and recognize the artist, and somehow it meant more that hardly anyone beyond the confines of that convention center would even know his name. It wasn't just about finding a community and setting myself apart, either, although those were both part of it. It was also about coming to rescue of the junk. It was about saving great junk from the garbage and telling those obscure artists and writers that someone noticed. And it was about discovering gems that lay right under the noses of the mavens of culture but that they could never recognize.

That's part of what's drawn me to The Undressing of America. Because while comics have gone cool and even Godzilla has his conventions and fanzines, no one is championing the confessional magazines. No one is arguing for the importance of true crime magazines. No one tells the stories of the men who created the tabloids. It isn't even that I like the things as works. Far more even than in superhero comics and monster movies, the glimmers of artistry there are lost in a sea of hack work. Read ten True Story articles in a row and my brain goes numb.

But as cultural forces they mattered. As historical capsules they're rich. As threads in the American story they deserve far more attention than they get. When cultural historians write about the history of magazines in the Twenties they wax about the New Yorker and Mencken and Time, with perhaps an obligatory nod to the Readers Digest and the Saturday Evening Post. But naive, tatty, neglected True Story reached more people than any of them and did at least as much to change the cultural and social landscape. I like digging them out from under the piles of better-respected magazines that have been stacked on top of them for decades. In comic-fan terms, I like discovering them at the back of the quarter box.

No Exit

2010-08-14T00:31:00.000-07:00

Although The Undressing of America plugs along, it's lately getting less attention in my life than this graphic novel that's just coming out, Networked: Carabella on the Run. Which I still find disorienting, because it wasn't so long ago that I thought I was out of the graphic novel and comic book business entirely. But people warned me: once you get comics in your blood, they said, you can never get them out.

I wrote a lot of comics from the late ‘80s well into the ‘90s, then started shifting toward nonfiction books and screenplays. After the Pokémon newspaper strip in 2000 I stopped writing comics entirely. But ten years later, here I am again. In my case, what pulled me back was a bit more substantial than just something in my blood. The mistake I made when I left comics was not severing all my social ties with them. I kept talking to Mark Badger, one of my favorite collaborators from my DC Comics days, thinking it was safe to talk about innocuous subjects like kids and politics and our respective careers.

Mark was mostly teaching and coding then, but he fiddled with comics occasionally, some for small publishers and some for political groups. For a couple of years I was writing a book about comics called Men of Tomorrow, so of course we talked about the old medium. We’d even say occasionally it would be fun to play with some of our old ideas, like that Haunted Man thing we did for Dark Horse Comics, although that usually felt like just one of those nostalgic things old friends say.

Then Mark started doing work for a nonprofit group called Privacy Activism. First they hired him to do the art on an interactive game on their website, and after he impressed them with that they started talking about a web comic to encourage high school kids to start thinking about issues like online privacy in their own lives. But Mark didn’t feel like writing it himself, so he asked me if I’d like to play. The work would be light, he said. Just an ongoing comic strip, nothing ambitious.

But as soon as I started thinking in panels and balloons, the old fever kicked in. The story got longer, the characters got more interesting. “Hey, we could turn this into a graphic novel,” we said. And suddenly there’s no staying out anymore.

Hot wind

2010-07-21T10:39:00.001-07:00

Where am I? The Central Valley of California has a real geography, of farm roads and rivers and cities, but the the long, thin twilight zone of Interstate 5 has only its own reference points: about an hour downwind from the doomed, stinking cattle of Harris Ranch, between the two closed state rest areas, past the towering diesel sign, still a long way from Starbucks.

I love driving through the valley for itself, but I may love this weird road more. I love the light and I love the wind. Coming out from under the cool, foggy July of San Francisco, I especially love the wind. Hot and solid, pushing on me and stirring me to push back. It makes me want to write, too. Notes on the book, a blog post typed in a parking lot and uploaded through a truck stop wi-fi.

I know a lot of people who find that the gray calm of San Francisco makes them want to draw inside—inside their offices and their heads—to write. I have a hard time keeping my focus and energy in gray calm. It's in the noisiest and most public places and the most aggressive weather that I find myself wanting to work. Maybe it's because, when I was young and felt myself trapped in a chilly fog of a life, writing was the way I found to push my way out and engage with the world. As private an act as it is, in my gut it excites me most when it pulls me out of myself. When it knocks me around and agitates me like the valley wind.

Comic Con

2010-07-14T20:56:00.000-07:00

I go to Comic Con every year, but lately it's just been to hang out with my friend Joe and look through old yellowing comics and feel that sultry San Diego air. Oh, and the drive. I love driving alone down I-5 in the summer heat, staying at some shabby motel at the bottom of the big valley, then pushing through LA early the next morning. It's been a while since I had work to do there, but this year I do, both as the writer of a new graphic novel and as a comics historian. Another distraction from The Undressing of America, but it's always good to be reminded that there are actually people out there who like my work and want to hear what I have to say.

My schedule, if anyone's planning to be there and wants to look me up:

Thursday July 22:

1:00-2:30. Moderating a panel, More Fun with Siegel and Shuster, "a historic and revelatory panel about the misunderstood originators of superhero comics," in Room 26AB.

4:00-5:30. Signing copies of the just-released Networked: Carabella on the Run (and whatever else people want to bring up to be signed) at the NBM Publishing booth.

7:30-9:30. On a panel with a bunch of old writers and editors following the first showing of a new documentary, Secret Origin: The Story of DC Comics (in which I'm a talking head), Room 7A.

Friday July 23:

1:00-2:30. Signing at NBM again, this time with my artist pal Mark Badger alongside me.

5:30-7:00. Me and Mark at NBM again.

Saturday July 24:

10:30-12:00. Me, Mark, NBM.

1:30-2:30. On a "Comics Criticism" panel, Room 4.

5:30-7:30. Back to NBM.

Sunday July 25:

1:00-2:30. Final signing at NBM, if there still seems to be a market for it.

Look me up if you want to say hi!

Whirlwinds and work

2010-07-13T21:10:00.000-07:00

It's been a crazy stretch: London and Chicago, friends in from out of town, a film festival and more travel coming, a book coming out, multiple projects to juggle. In times like these, especially when I'm traveling, my mind seems to jump to a new level of nimbleness. I've had a series of insights into this book that I'm sure will make it better, that make me impatient to finish this thing so the world can see how brilliant it is.

But hardly any writing gets done. And in the calmer stretches where the writing does get done, my emotions settle and my brain narrows its focus. The book becomes once again a series of truculent sentences that refuse to work quite the way I want and long narrative stretches that I already have well enough in mind that bright insights and new directions would be only distractions. In those times I'll settle for a paragraph that makes sense and don't ask any more of the book than that it be coherent and reasonably interesting.

This is the constant paradox of this work, and I think much of the reason that books can take so much longer to write than I expected and so often seem in danger of not being finished at all. When I'm most in love with the book I don't actually move it forward. And the act of moving it forward is automatically a let down. It's so much easier to stay in the whirlwind, reveling in my epiphanies and looking forward to this book that will be so good when it's written someday.

There are those times, of course, when the laying down of sentences is in itself exciting, when the discovery of solutions to small narrative problems is nearly as much fun as those flashes of inspiration and quickly scribbled notes on the London tube. Those are nice times, but they don't show up on command. Mostly I just have to keep a bit of that fire of inspiration burning like a little pilot light as I push forward, remember that there will come a point, after enough hard work, when the words on the page will actually live up to the excitement of those insights snatched from the whirlwind.

How did I get into this?

2010-06-27T17:06:00.000-07:00

My friend Meghan Ward wrote a post on her blog Writerland (one of my favorite blogs on writing and publishing) called "My Writing Journey," in which she describes how, starting at the age of six and proceeding through a series of adventures, misadventures, wrong turns and right turns, she ended up deciding to be a writer. Then she asked readers to share their own writing journeys, which got me thinking: how did I end up here?

As a narrative, my story seemed pretty lacking compared to Meghan's. Hers is full of twists and turns, stabs at other careers, the recurrent siren call of writing, all the things you want in a good life journey. Mine had some build up, then one sharp moment and there I was. But it's a story I've never heard exactly from anyone else, and maybe that alone makes it worth telling.

I was one of those kids who is compelled to tell stories from his earliest years. On family hikes I'd pour out inchoate adventures endlessly to anyone who would listen (which was always my dad; it must have been his military training that enabled him to endure what drove everyone else insane). I drew pictures on my Playskool blocks in narrative sequence, like comic strips, and then lined them up on the floor to see how long—physically long—I could make a story. And when I figured out how to use the alphabet, the first thing I did with it was add dialogue to my picture stories.

I didn't read much, at least not as much as most writers say they did as kids. It was the pouring out, not the taking in, that drove me. Sometimes I'd love a book but read only until I got an idea for a story of my own, then drop it and start writing.

Here the nature-nurture loop gets complicated, as it always does, because I was also enthusiastically supported in my writing by my mom. Her heroes were writers: poets and playwrights, mostly, but novelists too, even the better genre writers. Shakespeare was as close to a god as we had in our household, but Ray Bradbury got his share of veneration too. So I grew up with the idea that a writer was quite a noble thing to be.

It was only later that I learned my mother had wanted to be a writer before I was born, and had even gotten a short story published, before she lost her drive and became an English teacher instead. We do pass on our unfulfilled dreams.

By fifth grade I was already identifying myself partly by my ability to write longer and more elaborate short stories than any other kid in the class. But when adults asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I still had a wide range of answers. I carried the fantasy of illustrating nature books into my teens. I think, really, I saw writers as some other class of being, like kings and astronauts, who we admired from afar but could never become.

Then, at fourteen, I read a book called A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. For the next year I experienced my first real literary infatuation, checking out and buying everything by him I could find. In the course of that I made a fateful mistake: I bought a book that said Edgar Rice Burroughs, Master of Adventure on the cover, thinking it was another novel. Instead, it was a biography of Burroughs written by Richard Lupoff.

It was the first time I'd read a biography, and the first time I'd had a sense that these marvelous creatures called writers actually had lives, apart from the few dramatic events my mother had passed on (Christopher Marlowe being stabbed to death, Keats hiking all over Britain and then getting sick and dying). Realizing that this writer I loved had parents and a childhood, could have been other things but decided to write a book, had to send his book out to publishers and worked other jobs to pay the bills before he could write full time, made me think that maybe "being a writer" was an attainable human goal.

Still, though, I didn't think of making a living as a writer, I think mostly because I didn't want to think about making a living. Really, I didn't want to think about being an adult at all. I was quite happy walking around lost in my own head and touching ground only long enough to eat the food that my parents put in front of me. That was an easy state to maintain for my fifteenth year, because I spent the whole year hanging around the house. I'd been unhappy in school and my mom, being a bit too averse to facing reality herself, just pulled me out.

But reality does come calling. The summer I turned sixteen we were going to be moving to a new town and I'd be entering a new high school. Since the only school I'd been in since seventh grade was a tiny "free school" in the Santa Cruz Mountains with no classes or even classrooms, plunging into a public high school as a junior was a terrifying prospect. It got me thinking about the fact that there was, inevitably, an adulthood ahead of me. Which included, someday, having to earn my own living.

One day in late spring, with my house being readied for sale and the onset of summer weather announcing that the great change was imminent, I was walking my dog along the creek behind our house—I could still find the exact spot—when I decided that I was going to write fiction for a living. I wouldn't have said this at the time, but that was the best way I could see to avoid reality forever.

It helped that my role model had had a charmed career: Burroughs's first book sold extremely well, the sequels sold better, books flowed out of him like water from a spring and money fell on him like rain. It seemed to me that all I had to do was sit down and start writing fantasy stories with the intention of getting them published and everything would fall perfectly into place. I would never really have to leave my own head again.

A few months later I entered Gilroy High School, nearly as out of place among normal American adolescents as if I'd just immigrated from another country. I was scared, but also eager to be liked or at least noticed somehow, so for my defense I used the fact that I was a writer. I was the only kid in school who announced that he wanted to write for a living, the only one who used his spare time to write stories. It didn't take long for my whole identity to solidify around Being a Writer. By the end of high school the idea of Not Being a Writer looked more perilous than anything the writer's life could hold.

I'd already finished the journey to writing and started the journey I'm still on. And even now when I wonder if I picked the right journey and toy with the idea of ending it to try something new, I know deep down that I never will.

Father's Day

2010-06-20T18:03:00.000-07:00

My dad lives in a series of old moments, endlessly looping. At the nursing home we talk about sneaking into the Foothill Theater in Oakland, Sea School at the San Diego Marine Base, shenanigans at Waikiki before the war, driving the length of old Highway 61 with an injured dog in the back seat, memories pretty much all recorded by 1950.

My dad also exists in my own mind a series of old moments. Responding with a genial "Oh yeah?" as I retold funny Bullwinkle lines through the bathroom door, hiking silently up the endless slope to Swiftcurrent Pass as I babbled out some inchoate tale of high adventure I'd just thought of, driving me to see King Kong at a revival house in the depressed heart of San Jose and telling me how he first started noticing that directors had personal styles watching Warner Brothers movies in the '30s (probably at the Foothill Theater he'd just snuck into).

He was emotionally pretty remote but physically present when I needed him and mentally present when I'd talk about something he cared about. He taught me a lot of little things and two big ones. A certain toughness, an ability to guard yourself just enough so you could keep taking punches until the other guy wore down (there was a Marine Corps story about about that too, the day he earned the nicknamed "Rugged Jones"). And how to see things critically but with affection: why good stories work, how characters come to life, when passions turn phony, how to love what you love no matter what it is. Bullwinkle, King Kong, Gunga Din, Benny Goodman, Ernie Kovacs, Mel Brooks, Moby Dick.

The first one has gotten me through a lot, although I learned it only half way; because I also picked up my mom's tendency toward self pity and drama, and, really, because I usually learn more by getting hurt than by not. The second, though, that's still central to me. It's what makes me write and how I look at my own writing.

My dad and I can't share any thoughts about that anymore. We still have Gunga Din, though. That brilliant scene where Cary Grant struts alone into a temple full of murderous Thuggees and calls, "You're all under arrest!" Watching that together, and him making me notice it, is still in his loop of moments and mine.

Distractions

2010-06-15T15:59:00.001-07:00

Just when I'm finally chugging away diligently on The Undressing of America, life decides to distract me. First it was a financial mess, which wasn't particularly welcome. But then came the trip to England, which sent me home wanting to start a new book (among other things), and now comes a graphic novel with my name on it.

This was an odd project: the artist Mark Badger and I were hired a few years ago by a nonprofit group called Privacy Activism to do an ongoing web comic about a blue-skinned college student named Carabella to dramatize issues related to internet privacy. Not the sort of thing a person normally thinks of doing, but that added to its appeal. For a year Mark and I dicked around trying to figure out what to do with this thing, pretending to the people who were paying us that we knew what we were doing, producing a couple of short stories that wobbled between campus hijinks and humorous science fiction. Then this story hit us, about how high-tech interactive shoes might be part of an invasion of Earth that only Carabella could prevent. Actually it came in pieces; I think the shoes were first.

As it came together into a 120-page story, we all realized we really liked it, and now it's being published on actual paper, under the title Networked: Carabella on the Run, by NBM, the oldest graphic novel publisher in the USA. Here's how they describe it: "Some alien invasions are loud and bloody...some are quiet and friendly. The blue-skinned girl named Carabella thinks she's escaping the oppression of her own world, but instead she’s exposing the earth to an invasion so soft and friendly that everyone welcomes it—until Carabella herself sees what's happening and tries to make someone, anyone see that our websites and our cell phones are being used to steal first the privacy and then the freedom of everyone on earth."

(Actually that's how I describe it, because I wrote the blurb. But I was writing as them, which counts for the same thing.)

It just got some very nice exposure in Publishers Weekly's Panel Mania, and now we're working out plans for its release at the San Diego Comic Con late next month. Many distractions from this book, making that 500-word-a-day minimum I've set myself (which I was embarrassed about at the time, because it seemed so easy) difficult and essential. Publication and attention are so seductive that they make the hard work of actually hammering words together into a book seem awfully dull—and yet they're also good reminders that the hammering isn't all there is. An argument, I think, both for and against distractions.

Transparent City

2010-06-05T11:58:00.001-07:00

I just came back from London. Mostly talking to game and comics people in connection with a book I wrote a while ago (Killing Monsters) and a book I'm contemplating starting (a sort of sequel to Men of Tomorrow), but also squeezing in some research on The Undressing of America, because London is where Bernarr and Mary Macfadden met, and the seeds of confessional, exhibitionistic, and voyeuristic media were planted.

Places change when I change: that is, what's in my head changes how a place looks to me. I've been to London many times, starting when I was 14, and it's always been a slightly different city. This time it was a city shaped by this book. I stood in front of the office building on the Strand where Macfadden and his bride had run the magazines that affected so much in our cultural landscape, and everything I saw seemed to reference them.

Joggers carrying on Macfadden's crusade for physical fitness. Women dressed in jeans and t-shirts referring back to his war against corsets and constricting dresses. Cheap magazines and comic books in the newsagents' still bearing witness to his role in the birth of independent publishing. (I dropped in on a comics convention at the Excel Centre.) The seeds of True Story magazine sending up shoots everywhere as celebrity gossip and tabloid journalism. (I popped into a shop with my friend Rachel to buy something to eat, and within seconds she'd vanished from sight; I found her at the magazine rack, where some headline about Cheryl Cole had screamed at her.) And even public pornography: a guy in a pub with a tabloid open to the bare-breasted woman on Page 3.

I was looking at a place I'd looked at many times and not seeing much of anything new on the surface. But this time I could look through it—a city suddenly transparent—to see strange figures of a century ago, building and shaping it.

(Photo by seriykotik1970)

My Dream Book

2010-05-26T22:12:00.000-07:00

This has only happened to me a handful of times in my life: dreaming that I was explaining my book in progress to somebody, and discovering upon waking that what I was saying actually makes sense. So much sense, in fact, that the dream conversation gives me some understanding that I'd never reached consciously but that actually helps me write the thing.

The dream I had the other morning may have been the most useful yet. In it I was telling some poor, long-suffering (but mercifully unreal) acquaintance what The Undressing of America is really all about, at its core. What I was saying wasn't, in fact, what it's "really all about," but it was an important piece that I hadn't really looked at yet: how some people, breaking crossing social boundaries and existing in multiple worlds can befriend such a variety of other people that they become sort of living cultural crucibles—and how there are moments (like early 20th century America) when the culture is changing so quickly and the social lines are so blurred that those people can embody an entire historical moment.

I've always been drawn to the combining of different worlds myself: in my public-speaking bio I used to say that I was the only person every published in Batman comics and The Atlantic Monthly in the same month, and sometimes I'd add that I got onto Fresh Air because I wrote Pokemon. And I know that's much of what drew me to the stories in this book: Bernarr Macfadden, the professional wrestler and carnival strongman who knew Upton Sinclair, Margaret Sanger and Benito Mussolini; Fulton Oursler, newspaper reporter, playwright, and stage magician who knew Conan Doyle in his weird dotage and the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous in their early years of sobriety. I know that's much of what draws me to stories about New York in the teens and 20s in general, where the highest tumbled and the lowest rose up and every connection was improbable. But I hadn't really understand that that was a vital part of the book—that those line-blurring, category-jumping relationships were essential to America's psychological and social undressing. Not until my unconscious got to work on it in my sleep.

Anything like that ever happen to you?

Titular

2010-05-09T18:39:00.000-07:00

I mentioned a couple of posts ago how the title of this book inspired the new direction the book itself has taken, and that's got me thinking about my experiences with book titles. I'd been writing books for over twenty years before I finally came up with a title on my own that actually stayed all the way to publication. Gradually I've realized how much of the soul of a book is held in its title, and how coming up with a title not only requires understanding a book at an even deeper level than just writing it allows (odd as that sounds), but can actually reveal what it's really about.

In 1981, when I was but a young thing, Will Jacobs and I wrote a book to amuse each other, about the supposed efforts of the world's great writers and filmmakers to save Leave It to Beaver from cancellation in the summer of 1963. Mostly it was made up of twenty-five literary parodies, story treatments about the Cleaver family by Tennessee Williams, John Steinbeck, and people like that, but we also described, in a mock elegiac sort of tone, how despite all their passionate efforts, their beloved sitcom was sacrificed to Mammon by soulless executives. I say "sort of" mock elegiac because, honestly, there was a bit of real elegy going on under our smart-mouthed surface. We really did love Leave It to Beaver, and we were both going through bouts of nostalgia for our suburban childhoods (I was 24, he was 26, and the charm of San Francisco fog and buses was wearing thin). So, in that crypto-elegiac mood, we called the book The Summer of the Beaver.

When Peter Cannon at Crown Publishers wanted to bring the book out, he didn't want elegiac, not even mock. He saw our selling point as being the parodies themselves and our ludicrous claim that these lost literary works had just come to light. Both the Pentagon and the Vallachi papers were still alive in the cultural memory then, so he suggested The Beaver Papers. He also strongly urged cutting our wistful (and long) concluding chapter down to a dry-eyed half page. We grumbled as we agreed, wanting to convince ourselves that we were making a tough compromise, but in our hearts I think we knew he was right. There was a little too much of us in The Summer of the Beaver, the parts of us that weren't very funny. And ever since then I've thought of The Beaver Papers as a book I wrote, even though, technically speaking, I never wrote anything called The Beaver Papers.

Next Will and I wrote a history of superhero comic books (which we were both obsessed with at the time) and wanted to call it The Superheroes. Simple, like. Peter Cannon approved of that one, as did the Crown marketing department. But then we ran into a most unexpected snag: Marvel Comics claimed to have a trademark on the word "superhero," and no one but Marvel could use it in a title, not even for a book about superheroes. We suggested using the common alternate form: The Super Heroes. But DC Comics claimed to have a trademark on the term "super hero," and no one but DC could use it. Apparently a few years before, Marvel and DC, the only large publishers of superhero comics at that time, had decided to follow the example of 15th Century Portugal and Spain and evenly divide, not the world, but the word. Marvel wouldn't complain about DC's use of "super heroes" if DC wouldn't complain about Marvel's use of "superheroes," but they would complain loudly if anyone else tried to use either of them.

Obviously that would never stand up in court. Both versions of the word were in use for decades by all kinds of people before anyone thought of trademarking them, and anyway, can you stop someone from using your trademark when they're writing nonfiction about your product? But the lawyers at DC and Marvel told us we'd be sorry, and no one at Crown wanted to get in an argument with lawyers over the title of a book that everyone knew wasn't going to sell very well. So we agreed, with more sincere grumbling this time, on The Comic Book Heroes.

For eleven years I disliked that title (a quiet sort of dislike—it's too boring to work up any real passion around), but there came a day when I was working on the updated and heavily rewritten edition of the book, writing a passage about the generation of artists and writers who'd struggled through bad working conditions and mediocre pay and a total lack of glory to give the world their creations, and it struck me: the real comic book heroes aren't the guys in the silly suits, they're the guys at the art tables and typewriters. Duh. So I slipped in a sentence to clue the reader in that, of course, that's what we'd always meant by "comic book heroes," and suddenly I was very grateful for the petty legal departments of Marvel and DC Comics.

(I should note that by the time I started writing for DC a few years later, the legal staff seemed to be made up of much more reasonable people. One of them, Maura Healy, is still a good friend. I never asked around, but I assume whatever pursed-lipped, narrow-eyed curmudgeon was in charge in 1984 had moved on. And neither company tries to enforce that trademark anymore. Instead, I understand, they now co-own the form "super-heroes," which no one else would want to use anyway.)

Then I wrote a book that I simply could not title. It was the story of TV situation comedies and how they'd been shaped by and influenced the currents of American life. For a while I tried to come up with something catchy, but I can't even remember what I tried. In the end I sent it out as The Sitcom Story. I would have ended up hating that one as much as The Comic Book Heroes, but this time I wouldn't be able to blame it on anyone else. Fortunately, my editor, Bryan Oettel, liked it even less than I did and suggested we both go off and brainstorm. I don't remember what I came up with, but I know none of them were any good. He plucked a cliché out of sitcom land and suggested Honey I'm Home. I agreed that it was catchy, but I wanted the title to say somehow what the book was about. No, he said: the title is just supposed to be catchy and unique—it's the subtitle where you tell them what it's about. As many books as I'd read, I'd somehow never noticed that. I've been grateful to Bryan ever since.

That did, however, bring me to what has turned out to be one of the great hells of writing for me: subtitles. A hell that I know I'll be facing with my current book, because as much I like The Undressing of America I have no idea what words should appear under it to explain what it's actually about. But it's a very educational hell, and next time I'll post about what it's taught me. Or tried to teach me.

The hump

2010-05-01T21:56:00.000-07:00

I broke the 30,000 word mark in my book today. That's always been a milestone for me, I think because when I was a teenager I read in Writers Digest that a novel, in publishing parlance, is 60,000 words and up. (Up through 59,999 is a novella.) Since I was trying to be a novelist back then, I started thinking of 30,000 words as "half a book," and I've never dropped the idea, even though my books have mostly run toward 80 or 90,000.

Where I really am in this draft, I have only a vague idea. Definitely less that halfway through the narrative, based on the outline. But then I know how books can speed up in the latter part if things are set up well in the early part. And I have a lot of stuff to add and a lot of junk to trim, so what I've rough drafted now could end up as 25,000 words or 40,000. But still: it's 30,000 words, and that's been the over-the-hump moment in my gut for 36 years.

It's nice having a computer that counts the words as I go. For about my first decade of book writing I had to estimate by the number of pages. At some point I decided my average typewritten page held about 250 words, so page 120 was my hump page. Now I get to see exactly when I hit word 30,000. This time it was "argument," a pretty nifty milestone word. In the sentence, "And as American culture in general aligned itself with the forces of consolidation and mass community more than diaspora and individuality, the argument seemed to have less force all the time." I think there's a pretty good chance that sentence won't make it into the final draft, taking word number 30,000 with it. Then some whole other word will become the 30,000th, maybe a word I haven't even typed yet. Maybe "metaphor." Or "Macfadden." Or "the."

But right at this moment, that "argument" works perfectly well as my 30,000th word, the word that tells me I got over that imaginary book-hump yet again. And I think that does more to make this book feel conquerable and encourage me to keep going than any conceptual breakthrough or new outline. Because in my experience a book isn't so much a grand structure or monolithic achievement as a trudge. Up slopes and over humps and finally going faster downhill.

The English When They’re Chirping

2010-04-24T20:45:00.000-07:00

I was supposed to be in England today, but I’m not because of a volcano. As much as I like saying that, that my plans changed because of a volcano, the fact remains that I’m not where I was looking forward to being. A friend I’d planned to meet there just dropped me a note saying, “What a shame that you’re not here—the sun is shining and everyone is very chirpy.”

My first thought was, “Good for the English. I’m not chirping.” But then I remembered that I’m actually pretty content. I get to be here when my son came back from his school trip to Joshua Tree National Park instead of hearing an abridged version of it days later. I get to catch up on my work. And my sleep. And I get to feel the San Francisco weather finally turn warm, and hear a fair amount of chirping around here.

Those words “I get to” can save my sanity, when I remember to use them. For a long time I approached most of my responsibilities, especially my writing, with “I have to”: have to meet this deadline, have to write this book. But I “have to” only because I picked this line of work and either created or went looking for these projects. And compared to all the duller ways I could be making my living, being in a position to “have to” write a book is a blessing.

I spent a long time paying lip service to “I get to” without ever really changing my thoughts or my mood. Then, a couple of years ago, life hit me with an opportunity to road test those words under truly demanding conditions. A producer hired me to write a screenplay based on my own book, Men of Tomorrow. The screenplay came out extremely well, everyone was thrilled, and we seemed to be at the brink of putting together a production and distribution deal with one of the bigger companies in the business. Then the producer went bankrupt. He filed Chapter 11, listing my script as an asset, and my script vanished into the slowly grinding wheels of bankruptcy court.

At first I felt like I’d been punched in the face. Went through the usual stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression. Then I started telling myself: I get to go through this. I get to see how bankruptcy works in the intellectual property business, get to see what to do when I adjust my career expectations, and eventually get to see what I cad do with my script in a new market. After a while it started to sink in. In the past two-and-a-half years I’ve learned a lot and written things I wouldn’t have otherwise. And now that it looks I’m finally about to get my script back, I really am looking forward to finding out what comes next.

One of the main things that freezes me when I’m writing is the pinball game of fears and fantasies. One minute I’m telling myself I can produce a book that blows open new doors for me and transforms my career—which means I have to make every page brilliant. The next I bounce to believing it’ll sink without a trace and I’ll be left wondering why the hell I ever decided to make this my book—which means I have to drag myself through this thing just because I signed a contract. So I keep reminding myself: I get to to do this. I get to see what it’s like to keep wrestling with this evolving book, and I get to see what happens when it’s done.

It’s been working this week. I’m grateful to have an unexpected week at home to write my book, and I’m happy to leave the English to their chirping.

The rewards of "I don't know"

2010-04-18T13:03:00.000-07:00

Here's the opening of an early section of this book in progress:

"Although the great forces of history are probably immune to the acts of any individual will and most of what we like to see as turning points are more likely, really, to be the first manifestations of movements already bound to happen, still it’s interesting to speculate on how the cultural history of America may have turned on the shooting of that rabid dog in Winnipauk, Connecticut in the summer of 1862. There were other events to the south that had a more obvious impact on the nation’s course and no doubt deserve the much greater attention historians have given them—the Battle of Antietam and the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation to name a couple—but even so, what happened inside the soul of one young man when he leveled his gun, not at a Confederate soldier but at a foamy-mouthed mongrel, and pulled the trigger would echo through the next five decades and beyond."

In the 19th century historians argued that question a lot—do individuals change history or are they just the way history manifests itself?—often using Napoleon as their example. Clearly he was a singular man of tremendous will who drove events as few individuals ever have. But even without him, in a generation or two, wouldn't the biggest changes he brought about have happened anyway: a burgeoning England and ascendant Prussia knocking France from its dominant position; an uneasy compromise between the old monarchies and the new republicanism; mass armies; a universal system of decimal measurement; American occupation of the Mississippi Valley? Had Napoleon not emerged, the Egyptian wing of the Louvre might be a lot smaller and those little layer cakes would have a different name, but the big forces of economics, politics and population may well have found other men and events to get where they were going.

I'm not smart enough to answer that question, but I am smart enough not to try. It's a question I let roll through the book: did Anthony Comstock shape Victorian America's extraordinary censoriousness, did Bernarr Macfadden really knock down the walls of suppression, or were they just the first surfers to catch their cultural waves? And from there the question spreads out to all of us: when I reveal some part of myself that I've been hiding because I fear the world's reaction, to what extent am I advancing the cause of personal revelation and to what extent am I being carried there by a hurtling mass of social, economic, technological and every other kind of influence too big for me even to see clearly?

It's some of both, I'm sure. But that's the joy of "trade books" as opposed to academic books. I get to intrigue people by raising a topic we can all think about together and I don't have to pretend that I've actually figured out an answer...or that such an answer even exists.

Paper

2010-04-11T10:11:00.000-07:00

Getting interviewed can be very educational, especially when it's an interview about a work in progress. Before I read a piece of this book at the Monthly Rumpus (see video below), Sona Avakian of the San Francisco Examiner interviewed me by email and asked some questions that got my thoughts turning in new directions: thoughts about the book, somewhat, but mostly thoughts about my relationship to the book. The whole interview is here, complete with fun excursions into other topics (the internet, Joseph Pulitzer, superhero comics). But I like looking at what poured out of me about the book itself.

I told Sona I was going to be reading a passage of the book "about how mass publishing swept over American culture like a flood—or a scourge—in the mid-19th century, and how we're still sort of playing out the culture wars that started in response...specifically about how sexual information was the most alarming part of the flood, and who rose up to fight back against the tide of intimate revelation." And she asked, "How did you get interested in publishing history?" Which I'd never quite asked myself. But I found myself saying this:

"It's kind of a weird route. I spent my thirties as a comic book writer, writing superheroes for Marvel and DC and creating my own odd comics for small publishers, but also writing history and criticism about comics. I'd been a huge comics geek in my teens and into my twenties, and a lot of my work in comics was about seeking my creative roots in old pulp. Marvel Comics basically saved me from depression and despair when I was 13, and for decades I was still intoxicated by the smell of the pulp and the look and feel of that cheap, yellowing paper. Most of the founding fathers of comic books were still around then, and I could go into an almost out-of-body state sitting and listening to their stories of the old days.”

Writing about old comics and pulps always seems to make my prose turn purple, because I followed that with: “I learned my dad had been nursed on the milk of wood pulp too—The Shadow gave him an island in a brutal '30s childhood. And then I ended up writing Shadow comic books, and I had this feeling of a river of four-color ink running down through the 20th century, pumping through the veins of generations of wounded kids.” (My friend Rachel said, "I can't work out whether this is poetical or pretentious." She was being polite.)

“So when I got out of writing comics I wrote a book called Men of Tomorrow, about the roots of comics in geekdom and sad adolescence and the violence of American life in the immigrant waves and the economic churnings of the past century. But writing that I caught on that comics were just white caps on a bigger wave—cheap paper and ink were a primary carrier of new ideas, information, values, and driving personal fantasies from before the Civil War to the TV era, and still to a great extent up until the Internet took over. Especially for the poor, the young, immigrants, and the adventurously socially mobile, magazines and newspapers both expressed and shaped people's expectations and self-descriptions.

"And there were wars fought over them: circulation wars where people got their heads bashed in and culture wars where people were driven to ruin and suicide or swept from obscurity to power.”

Sona asked what I meant by that last sentence, which is course is what I was hoping for. One thing you learn in comics is how to write hooks. “The first part's simple: In the early 20th Century, battles over newspaper distribution routes and control of corner newsstands were fought by local thugs who killed quite a few of their rivals. The newspapers played a huge role in the formation of organized crime in this country—Lucky Luciano and Dion O'Bannion got their start doing circulation for Hearst before Prohibition made them rich.

“Second part, I'm thinking mainly of two of the big figures in my book: Anthony Comstock, an obscure dry-goods salesman who became one of the most powerful men in American culture—the chief censor of both the federal and New York state governments—through his unrelenting battle against indecent publications in the late 19th century; and Bernarr Macfadden, a professional wrestler and bodybuilder from the Ozarks who became the most successful magazine publisher of the 1920s, and one whose influence is still being felt in mass culture, by fighting back against Comstock with health publications, sex-education books, and finally the genre of confessional and 'true story' magazines, which he basically created."

Then back to the main thread: “I started trying to get my head around that, to understand just how big this subterranean paper ocean had been, and then these past few years it's really been coming home to me that the age of paper is ending, or at least it's changing fundamentally. So I wanted to write a paean to it, and try to open up some partial revelation of what it had been—because, you know, you can't really see how your family's affecting you until you move out, and you can't really get what publishing meant until it's fading away—by looking hard at one part of it that hadn't been looked at very much. But one part that I discovered was really powerful, the way magazines drove this whole culture of talking about our private selves and talking about other people's private selves that we're still moving through."

At that point Sona asked me something that made a light go on: "Do you think paper publishing has hit rock bottom yet? Can we expect a resurgence soon?" I said, "I don't think paper has hit bottom by any means, but I also don't think it will be a quick or simple fall. There will be bumps and twists and surprises on the road down. Print on paper will never go away, because some people will love it and be willing to go to the effort and expense of keeping it alive. I mean, horses aren't extinct, right? But I'm not holding my breath for them to retake their position at the forefront of transportation, either."

She asked what I thought of the Panorama newspaper that McSweeney's published, and I said that I thought "it was really fun. It's exactly the kind of thing that subcultures produce when they're fading out of the mainstream—expensive, resplendent, nostalgic. Festive, not quotidian. Rodeos became show biz and an art form when the horse culture ended."

It hit me then that that's a large part of why I've opened the book wider and have become so energized to write it now: it's the book under the book. It's the story of some of the people in the era of mass print and their impact on the world. But the writing of it is also kind of a private celebration of an era that's now fading enough that we can start to see and describe the whole thing.

Rebirths

2010-04-04T17:08:00.001-07:00

Part of me thinks it's cheesy to be applying Easter metaphors to my life just because it's Easter. Especially since this is the most un-Eastery Easter in my experience. It's the first year my kid's been totally uninterested in egg-dying and chocolate rabbits (he's just eager to get the comic book convention in town), so his mom and I decided just to do our separate things. She's at a bead and gem show, and I'm contemplating the dandelion plants shooting up out of the lawn and wondering if I really have the strength to fight with them today. And it's gray. And drizzly. In my bones it just doesn't feel like Easter. Not California Easter, anyway.

But maybe that's why the metaphor keeps coming to mind, in a muted way. And since I'm thinking about writing in order to avoid thinking about the lawn (which is a nice reversal of my usual avoidance, I have to say), I'm looking at how this book died twice and both times came back. Not that it ever truly died, not to the extent that I'd decided I couldn't write it and was planning how to pay back my advance, although both times I seriously considered that. But twice the original idea proved to be untenable, and I found myself unable to work on it or figure out what to do about it.

The first rebirth was a narrowing-down: within the broad story of Bernarr Macfadden's life and magazine empire, what I found I really cared about telling was the specific story of True Story magazine and the creation of confessional media. That's when I changed the title from whatever it used to be to The Undressing of America, got my first massive contract extension (thank you, Eric), and launched the draft that I was wrestling with when I started this blog. That version didn't die as dramatically as the first one, but it was dragging and limping and refusing to tell me what was wrong, and then during the summer, early in the period I stopped updating this blog, it just ceased to move. I walked away from it for a few weeks, talked to some friends at the Writers Grotto about it, and then turned around to look at it from a distance.

The second rebirth was an opening up: because the thing I suddenly noticed was the title, which I liked, but it occurred to me that I wasn't really writing to that title. I was writing about a tiny piece of the undressing of America, but there was a lot more I wanted to say about the battles between censors and publishers in those years, about the emergence of this whole "culture of undressing" that we've been exploring for the last century. I wanted to talk about how America got itself so overdressed in the first place and what happened in the early 20th Century to change it. Bernarr Macfadden, I found, was still in the center of the story I wanted to tell, but there were other people who had to be in there, especially the nemesis of his early years, the grand high censor of American culture, Anthony Comstock. Then the book started to roll. And so far it's still rolling, faster and further than it did either time before.

I'm very well aware, sitting here alone on a holiday with a terribly gloomy sky staring back at me through the windows, that this version may die too. I don't think so, but I have to allow it to be. But it dawns on me that I've gotten a lot out of these deaths and rebirths. A better book, better skills, a couple of personal anecdotes I can use in the class I teach on "Finding the Story." And it's actually been kind of fun, when it wasn't horrific. So that's my cheesy metaphor for today: don't fear death, because things come back, usually better. Books can, anyway.

Happy Easter. My kid just called and I've got to go pick him up at the convention center.

What it sounds like

2010-03-30T08:46:00.000-07:00

I had the chance to read a chunk of this book in front of a live and, thank God, largely inebriated audience in San Francisco a few weeks ago. I could feel myself being a bit nervous and uncertain, because this whole approach to the book really hadn't been released from the confines of my own head yet. But I liked what I heard, mostly. This felt like a story I want to tell about and can do a good job telling. And I liked the fact that the story I'm telling is largely about the age of mass print, but I'm telling it out loud to a web-generation crowd in a city at the vanguard of the post-print era. Bobbing on the white caps of history.

I like to think of it as a cocoon

2010-03-26T19:10:00.000-07:00

I’m told that eight months between posts is a disaster in the blogosphere. But the older I get, the more value I see in the adage that when one has nothing to say, one should shut up. So I’m caught between eras…or maybe it’s developmental stages.

Not too long after I last wrote about how hard this book is to write, the book began to flow. But it flowed in directions I hadn’t seen it flowing before, and after a while I began to realize that what was flowing was a somewhat different book. I think my silence was largely about holding my breath: I didn’t really know if this was the book I should be writing, although I hoped so. Even as I wrote the pages I held very still, afraid that either too much enthusiasm or too much doubt might cause it to fly apart. Gradually I came to believe that, yeah, this is the book I’m supposed to be writing. Then, a few weeks ago, I had a chance to read part of the new draft out loud in front of a group of strangers, and I knew I was finally telling the story that I’d been groping my way toward all along.

Which makes me look differently at this whole business of procrastination. Okay, fine, I know I’ve wasted a lot of time. My neurotic self-doubts have kicked in to confuse me and I’ve suffered for my lack of good writing habits. But back then, while I was telling myself I could and should be writing so much more industriously and be so much further along…would I even have been writing the right book? Or would I have been grinding industriously at something that could only have left me dissatisfied? For that matter, could I even have been grinding away at it industriously, or had I run into a simple impossibility that I just wasn’t recognizing yet?

Of course, if I want to keep this mental argument looping forever (and there’s always a delight in that, isn’t there?), I can remind myself that had I been pushing more rigorously up against that wall, had I been forcing myself to write more earlier, I might have gotten to this point sooner. Or maybe if I’d been more brutally honest with myself about how the earlier version wasn’t quite singing for me…

But there are counter-arguments to that too. Things I learned, conversations I had in late 2009 that probably couldn’t have happened earlier and may have been instrumental in opening these new doors. In the end, all I know is that I am where I am. And so, as they say in the Twelve-Step meetings, I may as well assume that “I am where I’m supposed to be.” But no other line of thought gets me anywhere. And the one place I need to get is the next step down the road: the next sentence, the next chapter, the next discovery of what I’m saying.

Tell me if this is neurotic

2009-07-07T19:39:00.000-07:00

I've been blogging less lately about the trouble I'm having writing this book because I'm having a lot less trouble writing the book. But I feel guilty about neglecting my blog so I keep thinking I should make myself put the book down so I can blog about having trouble writing it. And even if I don't actually put the book down my anxiety about neglecting the blog makes it harder to write the book. So here I am now, blogging about my guilt and anxiety about not blogging. Because I'm writing my book.

Maybe I should just start posting excerpts.

Writers do the darnedest things!

2009-06-30T22:22:00.001-07:00

This past week I read some illuminating things about those of us in the writing trade and our psychological peculiarities. One is J. Robert Lennon's essay, "The Truth About Writers," in the LA Times, in which he keeps track of what he's really doing when he says he's writing and discovers just how little "writing time" is spent actually writing. (He doesn't list reading articles online about how writers waste their time, which is now high on my list.) What I like best is how even after he cops to the vast amounts of wasted time, he comes back in the end to that old, foolproof fallback of the defensive writer: "But I am writing! Even if I don't look like I am!"

The other is the cautionary tale of Alice Hoffman, who threw a tantrum on Twitter about a bad review her latest novel got and went so far as to release the reviewer's phone number to the 1,647 people who follow her tweets and encourage them to call and complain. Gawker ran entertaining (if snotty) pieces on the initial rampage and her subsequent half-assed apology. There's no question that her behavior was egregious, but I do understand all too well the feelings that led to it. Remembering a few of my own ill-considered eruptions of bile on Facebook and Twitter and Blogger, I find myself thinking, "There but for the grace of God—or a tiny bit more self-control—go I."

The Hard Road

2009-06-21T17:57:00.000-07:00

My son just finished his sophomore year of high school. Something for any kid to feel pleased about, but for Nicky it was a triumph: for nearly the entire year, starting in October, he's been hammered by severe migraines. He wakes up with them, usually two bad ones a week, usually another one or two not quite as bad. The bad ones come with intense nausea, dizziness, agonizing sensitivity to light and sound, sometimes blurred vision and stomach cramps. Not to forget about the headache that feels like a spike being driven through his skull. Nearly all of them are during the school week—stress seems to be his main trigger, and he goes to a demanding school. It's also a school that puts a tremendous emphasis on showing up for class. It's built around two-hour seminar classes with ten or fewer kids in the room, so there's not much room for just doing work at home and dropping it off. He could be getting straight As in schoolwork but if he missed too many classes he wouldn't get credit for the course.

But he made it. He dragged himself in white as a sheet with big opaque shades protecting him from the light. He got to classes propping himself on the walls with one hand so the dizziness didn't knock him down in the hall. He pushed through the embarrassment and anxiety of being a kid with an unusual impairment at an age when the last you want to be is unusual or impaired. He kissed off everything but schoolwork for weeks. There were small disasters, too, like the homeopathic remedy that made him sicker than usual (the doctor said it should make him better after it made him worse, but after a week of worse he was about to get kicked out of the math class he'd been fighting so hard to pass, so we never found out).

But he made it. With little drama and almost no self-pity, with just a stubborn determination to do it and some unspoken faith in himself that he could make himself succeed, he passed his classes and finished the year. Somehow he even managed to act in the school drama festival in May. He showed courage and discipline at 16 that I'm still struggling for at 51.

My Fathers Day present was just seeing him happy and relaxed, doing his own thing, enjoying the summer moment and not dwelling either on what he'd just accomplished or what he'd suffered for months. He has an instinctive steadiness and humility that I remember seeing in my father. (They do say these things skip a generation.) He didn't do anything but make me an e-card, and I don't care. He gives me more just by talking about the song he's recording or the stupid video he just found on YouTube than any card ever could.

I will admit I had a role to play in his success. So did Jennie, although because she's the 8-to-5er and I'm the one with the flexible schedule, it was mostly my job. For eight months I would wake him up, would reach into his befogged brain and have to drag his consciousness up from the relative bliss of sleep into the stabbing light of awareness. I'd talk to him through his mumbling and moanings and try to figure out how sick he was, whether it was a day he could be left to get himself up mostly on his own or one when I'd have to prop him up and help lift him out of bed or one when we'd have to give up and let him lie there in misery while another absence got added to his school ledger. I kept the symptoms log and supervised the endless and futile medical investigations. I ran some interference with the school administration. But it was a supporting role. I wasn't the one with the pain.

I'll admit that my writing slowed down during those months. I'd like to think I had the courage and discipline (see above) to sit right down and start cranking out my book after two hours of helping Nicky fight through his misery and finally getting him to school, but I learned I didn't. Sometimes it was hard not to just sit there staring out the window wondering how he was doing, or go back to all those online migraine sites, or just go back to bed, until it was nearly time to pick him up. (Maybe it's a measure of my wavering discipline and courage that I rarely made him take the bus when he'd gone to school sick and dizzy. Or maybe that's just what being a parent means.) I know it wasn't just the election and financial issues that kept me from doing much of anything on this book from October until a couple of months ago. But that's not a productive line of thought. Once I was whining about how hard it was to be fully functional and optimistic with a sick kid when my friend Ethan Watters said, "You not only can be functional and optimistic when you have a sick kid—that's when you have to be." I need to reflect back to him the strength he's showing me, and I need to apply that strength not just to the hours I'm helping him get to school but to the rest of my life.

I keep thinking about M. Scott Peck's opening line in The Road Less Traveled: "Life is difficult." Peck reminds me that that's one of life's great truths, although it's one we don't like to embrace. He reminds me that the road through life's difficulty is discipline, and that discipline springs from love. Love of others, love of self, love of growth, love of the world, love of this hard life itself. It's what my son has been learning. Nicky's learning it earlier than I wish he had to, but I believe it will serve him well. And it's what he's been teaching me.

Facebook

2009-06-12T11:47:00.001-07:00

Hardly anybody ever leaves comments here (too public, too permanent, too impersonal?) but most of my posts stir up some interesting conversation on my Facebook page. Track me down and "friend" me there if you want to join the discussion.

Changing light

2009-06-11T23:17:00.000-07:00

When I woke up this morning the gray sky sat low and heavy on my neighborhood, and I felt sluggish and depressed and headachy and unable to stir up the energy to write. Email weather, that's what it was. Then in the afternoon the sun broke through. The stucco gleamed, the windows flashed‚ Frisco wore her finery. Instantly I was inspired: to go to the Post Office, to go the bank, to buy an iced coffee and sit in the sun. I ran into my neighbor Kevin and talked to him about this exciting book I'm writing. My friend Molly walked by and I told her that Kevin and I were talking about my new book. On the actual book I did squat.

Then came the magic hour. The light turned deep saffron, the shadows stretched long, and my imagination awoke. It's always been that way for me, as if daylight is a translucent wall blocking me off from dimly glimpsed ideas and enthusiasm, and as dusk comes the wall thins and thins until it vanishes. Suddenly I was eager to write. Too bad I had to make dinner.

I did actually get some work done, after dinner, as the sky turned dark. I had a good time with the passage where Bernarr and Mary Macfadden cross the Atlantic on the Lusitania, fleeing war in Europe and dreaming of conquests in America. But after a little more than an hour I'm already hearing bed time's gentle nag. I remember those days before parenthood when my nighttime inspirations would sweep me along for hours. That's how my best work days were, kicking in near sunset, rolling right through a primitive dinner and for hours after, sometimes nearly 'til dawn. Not a schedule you can stick to when you've got to start waking your kid up at 6:30.

Is there some way to reset biorhythms? Or some way to make professional discipline stronger than nature? You'd think by now I'd have figured out how to bring writing and real life into concert, but maybe the work itself is so opposed to daylight reality that it just can't happen.

Ionized!

2009-06-10T22:51:00.000-07:00

The black clouds mounted high and the wind howled in from the west and I wanted to write. Does anyone else know this, the weather that fills us like a muse? It's the negative ions, I'm told, some phenomenon associated with the approach of a precipitous front, but it feels more romantic in the moment. Yesterday, on the other hand, I could not write and could not think. Yesterday we were in San Francisco's "summer fog pattern," a state as bleak and boring as the name. Gray sky pressing down, unmoving air, a wet chill in your shirtsleeves that somehow becomes a muggy sweat as soon as you put on a jacket. And then there are the sunny days that are so rare in this town: pale blue with a snapping wind most often, but sometimes bright and hot. Those days fill me with inspiration as surely as the black clouds, though unfortunately not inspiration to sit and pour out words. They take me outside and fill me with remembrance of things I absolutely must get done before I can write.

When I was a young writer I was mysteriously drawn to the North Sea, and would picture myself holing up for a year in someplace like the north of Scotland or the Shetland Islands to write my books. I finally understand why: it was the weather. Since I've chosen to live in San Francisco I'm grateful for having at least a shred of discipline. If I depended on my rainstorm muse, and her negative ions, I'd only work about twelve days a year.

The Romance of Paper

2009-06-09T13:23:00.000-07:00

The San Francisco Chronicle just finished a 144-day retrospective of its first 144 years. It was fascinating and fun, but it also begged a question: why celebrate 144 years? Why not wait for 150? Is there some special, local significance to 144?

No. It's just that the Chronicle may not survive to 150. It's not even guaranteed to make 145.

The death of print surely isn't as imminent as many people are expecting. Cultural phenomena never really die quite as quickly or completely as they're predicted to (with the possible exception of harem pants). But the fact that the Chronicle, one of the dozen or so biggest newspapers in the country, the newspaper I grew up on, is essentially running its own obituary has driven home to me that an era really is passing. The transmission of urgent information via ink and pulp was just a step, just a bridge, just a moment in history.

That hadn't quite sunk in when I started working on this book, but it's coming clear now that one thing I'm writing about is the zenith of paper media, the top of the parabola when newspapers and magazines were the most powerful sources of knowledge, ideas, and change in this country. The story of the newspaper moguls—Hearst, Pulitzer, McCormick, Patterson—has been told many times. A lot's been written about the shiny-paged magazines that set the intellectual and cultural tone of modern America, and ever more is being written about the cheap, fat fiction magazines known as "pulps." I get to touch on those stories, but I also get to plunge into terrain that's rarely been explored—the strange and sometimes heroic story of a group of publishers who drove a wedge into the edifice of old American culture and pried until it cracked wide open.

In 1920, when the first tabloid and the first "true story" magazine were beginning to take off, radio was still experimental and the young movies still mostly played it safe. New ideas about politics, sex, religion, health, and ways of life had to be disseminated on paper. Old distribution monopolies were breaking down, maverick distributors were opening the market to wild experimentation, and the newsstands that popped up like mushrooms on the street corners and in the smoke shops and candy stores of American cities became bazaars of new images and stories and social movements. Things we take for granted now, like movie-star gossip and pop psychology and inspiring tales of personal courage and pictures of women in swimsuits, were created then, nearly all at once. And they changed the way people saw the world. The way they connected with one another. Magazines were the cutting edge of modern culture.

All of which I get to write about. Right now, standing at the brink of the ink-and-paper era, looking back over decades-deep piles of pulp. Another reason that procrastinating on this book may be turning out to be the best thing I could have done, because when I started the thing I hadn't realized yet how close to that brink we were.

It's unnerving to watch the Age of Print fading. But there is a sweet, sad joy to looking back on those forms that seemed like they would last forever.

Brave new story

2009-06-03T21:30:00.000-07:00

From the spring of 1973, when I was not quite sixteen and got it in my head that I wanted to make my living as a writer, until just about a year ago I functioned within the same basic story of how you make it in this business: You write or propose a book, send it to your agent in New York who sends it to editors, get an advance, revise or finish the thing, wait a while, hope for prestigious reviews, go on your book tour and move on from there.

I lived that story from the time I started sending immature novels to agents in 1976 through that day in August 1981 when an agent—a real New York agent!—consented to represent The Beaver Papers, and that day eight months later when an editor—a real New York editor!—decided to buy it, and on through my sale of The Undressing of America to FSG a couple of years ago. There were times I couldn't make that story work for me, and times my frustration with trying to please those New York gatekeepers nearly made me want to give up on books. But the story always brought me back. It had been the defining narrative of the writer's life since before I'd come along—in my twenties I liked anecdotes about Scott Fitzgerald's dealings with Harold Ober and Maxwell Perkins—and I assumed it would go on being so for the rest of my career and beyond. Even when I got into the National Lampoon and comic books and screenplays because I couldn't crash those gates in New York, I was still always trying to come up with book ideas that would interest agents and editors. And when I started to sell books more regularly, I said to myself, "This is it. I can live the story now."

Now, in just the last year, I've seen that story coming unraveled. It's still common, of course, and it may still be the story I live by for a while. When Undressing is done I'll send my agent a proposal for my next book and hope she sells it too to FSG, or some other big New York house. But it's becoming increasingly clear that it's not the way. The book business is shrinking, probably faster than anyone wants to admit yet. The latest scuttlebutt is that Borders Books is running on debt and when its current loan comes due next April it will, unless there's some drastic upturn in retail book sales in the next few months, have to close its doors. The loss of an outlet that big will take more than a few publishers down with it. Meanwhile, purchases of electronic books are skyrocketing, and channels for distributing those are taking forms that look more iTunes or YouTube than any book publisher.

I've been hearing more writer friends than ever before talking about how unhappy they are with their agents and how badly they want to find an agent who knows how to sell them, and bit by bit we're all starting to piece together that it isn't the agents that are the problem, it's the market. Lately the hallway conversations at the Writers Grotto, where I share office space with about thirty other practitioners of the same trade, are less and less about how to find the right agent or publisher, and more and more about whether it makes sense to look into BookSource or Lulu or Scribd or the many other variants on what used to be the scorned netherworld of self publishing.

There's a part of me that likes the adventure of finding new ways to get my words read and new ways to make a living, a part of me that likes the idea of being free of the usual New York gatekeepers. And there's a part of me that's glad I still have irons in other fires, in case books don't turn out to be the main work of my autumn years after all. But there's a part of me that just grieves for the story. As infuriating as the tastes and whims and arbitrary demands of agents and editors could be, as much as I resented their control of the writer's life and wished there were other ways to sell my words, I guess I took more comfort than I ever knew from the continuity of the business, its rituals and rules, its punishments and triumphs. That continuity linked me to my younger self with his wild ideas of "being a writer" and to the long-gone writers who filled my imagination. Print-on-demand and digital downloads may well prove to be lucrative and liberating. They're just not the story I set out to tell with my life.

Schoolchildren Screamed and Cheered upon Seeing the Wax Obama

2009-05-27T19:29:00.000-07:00

That's a photo caption from a San Francisco Chronicle article about the arrival of a Barack Obama statue at the Wax Museum on Fisherman's Wharf. I bring it up here to...well, partly just to share one of the stranger and more delightful captions I've ever seen in a newspaper...but also to emphasize that we live in exciting times. The article goes on to tell how thrilled and awestruck even adult passersby were by the wax Obama. Not many of our recent presidents would have excited that kind of response in the flesh, let alone in wax. Whether you like how things are going or don't or (like me) feel some tense combination of the two, there's a universal sense of engagement in the present and future of the world that hasn't been typical of Americans for a while.

Which, I tell you, makes it hard to put writing a book set mostly in the 1920s at the top of my to-do list. I'm fascinated by American history, especially those decades between the world wars. I wrote another book set mostly then, and I liked it. But that was around 2003 and 2004, the depth of my disaffection from present reality. It was a great escape, writing about the Depression and FDR and the war. Thinking about the Manhattan el and bootlegging and business deals made on steamship cruises. But ever since I started throwing myself into political campaigning and blogging last January, it's just felt...not less interesting, but...less necessary to keep looking back.

So in moving to actually writing this book, I've had to adjust my expectations a little. I've stopped waiting for that intense, escapist infatuation with the lost world and I'm making myself look at what this book says about who we are now and where we're going. And that, like everything in this book that's felt like an obstacle at first, has turned out to be rewarding. The process that The Undressing of America describes—our first mass rejection of the "culture of concealment" in favor of a culture of revealing and exposing and making explicit—has entered a complex and challenging new phase in the last several years. Much of what's happening on "Web 2.0" is a fulfillment of the actions taken by Bernarr Macfadden and his peers ninety years ago.

I wrote a book once about kids and violent entertainment, and something I've been asked by parents at nearly every reading and talk is, "How do I keep my kids from seeing the things I don't think they should see?" The answer now is, "You can't." When they're really little you can, sure. Or if you want to lock them in the house you can. But any normally socialized kid will come in contact, by the age of ten or so, with computers that don't have parental controls. And on the web they can see everything we wish they wouldn't.

We're facing fully now what those publishers and writers in the '20s were first forcing us to consider: that preserving a humane society doesn't depend on what we don't let people know but how we teach them to deal the whole truth. Suddenly in writing about a phenomenon of the early 20th century I'm learning about the underlying principles of one of the big issues of the early 21st. I imagine this is what all those historians writing about FDR and the Depression in this age of wax Obamas are feeling.

Just don't tell me I'm good.

2009-05-19T09:58:00.001-07:00

I'm used to good reviews and blurbs on my books, mostly of the "lucid and entertaining" sort. Sometimes I'll get an "eye-opening" or even "brilliantly constructed." My books are praised mainly (as usually happens with nonfiction) for their interesting subject matter and my ability to lay it out clearly and compellingly. I've rarely gotten much praise for the writing itself, for whatever I bring that's uniquely mine—until my latest book, Men of Tomorrow. I hit something with that one, stylistically and emotionally, that made people notice. There were some head-turning blurbs—"a constant delight" (Michael Chabon), "a magnificent piece of work" (Alan Moore)—and reviews to match, as well as some positively gushing reactions at readings. All of which made me a bit nervous and set off the voices in my head saying, "It can't really be that good." (An easy argument for me to make, because the book was about comic-book history, a subject that's inspired a lot of writing but not much writerly writing, if you know what I mean.) But at the same time it excited me. I wanted to jump into the next book.

Then the worst happened. A great editor told me I was good. And he wanted to work with me.

Eric Chinski came up through Oxford University Press, then moved to Houghton-Mifflin, where he called attention to himself by discovering Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated on the slush pile. He moved to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the most prestigious purveyors of a certain sort of damn-the-marketplace literary writing, where he became editor-in-chief in what seemed (to me) like an absurdly short time. His specialty is literary fiction, and he was once quoted in Poets & Writers as saying, "an editor's job is basically to fall in love with a book and then to help it be more of what it already is." A writer's editor, the kind you fantasize about impressing when you're twenty years old and gradually come to think doesn't exist anymore.

Eric loved the voice and the storytelling in Men of Tomorrow and called my agent to say he wanted to work with me. He didn't want me to write more about comic books, he didn't have any particular subject he wanted out of me, he just wanted to work with me. I had some half-baked ideas in my head about the early tabloids and True Story magazine and Macfadden Publications and ran them by him—still only baked around the edges and pretty gooey in the middle—and he said "go for it." Not literally "go for it." It was one of those, "All of us here at FSG are excited about...blah blah," emails. But the gist was, if it's fun cultural history and it's written by Gerard Jones, then it's what Eric wants.Which was good for about two days of euphoric fantasies about blowing away the critics and making FSG my literary home forever and ever.

Until the terror hit. How could I possibly ever be half as good as this "Gerard Jones" whom Eric Chinski has somehow mistaken me for?

During the same period I was freezing up royally on "the FSG book" (as I came to call it, in a neurotic fixation on who was waiting for it instead of what it was) my office mate Po Bronson started unveiling pieces of Nurture Shock: New Thinking About Children, a book he and Ashley Merryman are writing. The first piece was an article in the New York Times that basically said, "Don't praise your kids." Or, rather, acknowledge them for working hard and doing their best, but don't try to pump them up with messages like, "you're so smart" or "you're so talented" or "you're very, very special." Because a kid will hear, "This is what mom and dad want me to be," which becomes, "This is what I'm supposed to be and if I don't live up to it all the time then I'm no good." And expectations like that...well, to invoke Philip Larkin, they fuck you up. They don't mean to, but they do. Po and Ashley rolled out a lot of hard data showing that kids who've been regularly told they're remarkable tend to perform much less impressively and end up a lot less happy with themselves than kids who've just been encouraged to keeping showing up and working hard.

I think the hardest job I've had in getting from frozenness to fluidity on this book has been shutting up those voices that tell me I'm supposed to be smart or talented or special. Because the truth is, the only reason Men of Tomorrow impressed anyone is that I worked really hard on it. It sounds cruel, but the best thing I can do for myself now is pound home the truth that I'm really not special at all. I just have a fair amount of evidence that if I show up and work I can make something that somebody will like.

So try this for an opening

2009-05-17T11:32:00.000-07:00

It's time to move from the new chapter breakdown of The Undressing of America (too quickly approved, as mentioned before, by my editor) to something like actual writing. Despite advice from many quarters that I should jump to the part that seems easiest or most exciting to me, my gut tells me this is a book that needs to be written in order—or at least needs to be started where the readers will first enter. So let me see how the first part sounds when I bounce it off other people.

First, some kind of introduction in which I suggest how our aggressive shift from the “culture of concealing” to the “culture of revealing” during the 20th century changed our social structures, arts, economies, and even concepts of self. Then I emphasize that the shift didn’t happen simply through infinite small changes or vast, impersonal processes but also through a series of dramatic choices and conflicts, most of which came to a head during the 1920s...

Chapter One. Our “entry viewpoint” is Fulton Oursler, a sort of consummate ‘20s personality: journalist, stage magician, would-be novelist, go-getter, con-man, chain-smoker, alcoholic, raconteur. Arriving in New York from Baltimore at the end of World War I, he enables us to see the city and the new America at the brink of violent change. As he hustles for editorial jobs, we see how newsstand-distributed magazines were becoming the leading edge of our social debates and pop-cultural revolutions.

Then he meets Bernarr Macfadden, the strange, rustic muscleman-turned-publisher who has just brought out the unprecedented and surprisingly successful True Story, a magazine made up of personal stories sent in by readers—the first time the masses have told their own stories in print as opposed to having stories told to them by writers and editors. Although Oursler is everything Macfadden claims to hold in contempt, he quickly intuits that he also has the power to confer something Macfadden has been craving his whole life: the approval of the educated and urbane. Macfadden hires Oursler as his chief editor—and one person who isn’t happy is Mary Macfadden, the man’s far younger wife and unofficial editor of True Story. Intrigue is raised as to who these Macfaddens are and how they came to this position...

Something there?

The Undressing

2009-05-14T15:50:00.000-07:00

One of the students in the writing class I teach, talking about her nervousness at how her family may react to the memoir she's writing, quoted her mom as saying, "In this family we don't air our dirty laundry in public." I could almost feel the shudder going around the room. Every one of us knew what that meant: trouble. Whatever was screwed up in the family would surely be made worse by the prohibition against talking about it. Of course, this was a room full of writers, and writers like to expose things. It was also a room full of San Franciscans, who aren't known for drawing the curtains of propriety around our lives. (There was a mock algebra problem being emailed around several years ago: "If a couple in San Francisco walk 2.3 miles at 1.8 miles per hour, how much time will they spend discussing their relationship in public?") But still, the basic idea has become the norm: that family loyalty shouldn't trump sanity, that someone trapped in a dysfunctional situation should expose it. It's the best escape and it helps other people who are similarly trapped.

Go back a few generations, of course, and this was still a widely distrusted idea. Go back to the early 20th Century and you'll find a whole culture wrapped around the idea that not only should we not air our own families' dirty laundry but none of us should ever air any laundry. The police and the courts would get involved if you tried to talk about sex, pregnancy, prostitution, or venereal disease in a public forum, except in the most excruciating of indirections. The dominant idea of the culture, at least around sex and family behavior, was that if something disturbed us the best thing to do was not mention it. Some argued that not talking about it would make it go away: if children never heard about sex (or alcoholism or gambling or any other vice), then it would simply never enter their minds and they'd never do anything we didn't want them to. Even those who didn't buy that idea, however, held to the notion that discussing something in public somehow places us morally in league with it. It's like Republican foreign policy: talking to your enemies gives them some sort of nebulous "legitimacy" that somehow strengthens them. But refusing to meet with them will surely, eventually, make them buckle.

Ghosts of that idea still persist, as in "abstinence only" sex education. But even that requires us to explain what we want kids to be abstinent from. And that "only" is a tacit acknowledgement that there are other ways. And it's still sex education—attempts at which used to get people thrown in jail for years. Ultimately we have all, wholesale, embraced the idea that the nitty gritty of human behavior, the messiest parts of our psyches and our family lives, can be and should be talked about. You're only as sick as your secrets, we say.

This is a vast change, a revolutionary change, with countless results and implications, and yet we don't look at it much. Not historically, at least, not as a series of events, of a series of billions of choices we've made as individuals that have added up to a few huge choices we've made as a culture. It's almost too vast—too fundamental and at the same too everyday—to get our heads around it. What I want to do with this book (I'm slowly realizing) is cast a little light on that change, enable myself to see it a bit more clearly, by isolating a set of stories that illuminate it. I've found some very compelling stories of a set of people who took big risks to open the curtains, and who found their lives sent spinning in unforeseeable directions because they did so; people who effected the change and were affected by it.The people themselves are weird and interesting, and their stories are wild, but I want us to be able to see through them and glimpse that vast story we all engage in every time we tell a truth that those old family voices might rather silence.

This is a good thing. Really.

2009-05-11T16:43:00.000-07:00

There was a time when the news that someone else was already writing a book about Bernarr Macfadden would have paralyzed me. See, I'm contracted to write this book called The Undressing of America for FSG, about how the "culture of concealing" was overthrown in the early 20th Century by the "culture of revealing"—more specifically, how that change was manifested through the creation of True Story magazine in 1919 and the subsequent explosion of tabloids, confessionals, movie gossip, true crime, and all the rest. Bernarr Macfadden was the publisher of True Story, and a bridge from the radical health-and-freedom movements of the late Victorian years (nudism, body building, sex ed when it was illegal, planned parenthood when it was really illegal) to the sensationalism that overtook and drove forward the love of explicitness that distinguished the '20s and just keeps snowballing through the present. (If you want to finesse a point, you can call him the father of reality media.) He's inescapably significant to the story, and for quite a while I thought my book would be something of a life story of Macfadden, all the big cultural developments to be viewed through him.

To be honest, I wasn't so very interested in writing a life story of Macfadden. His was a fascinating life, but what drew me to the subject were other elements. It just seemed like that's what the book should be. So had the news hit me any time in the past year that Harper would be bringing out Mark Adams's Mr. America: How Muscular Bernarr Macfadden Transformed the Nation through Sex, Salad and the Ultimate Starvation Diet in early 2009, my heart would have dropped through the floor. Especially since my book was originally expected to come out sometime in 2009. Somehow "the second Bernarr Macfadden biography of the year" doesn't sound look good opening buzz.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Mr. America. Actually a lot of things, some not so funny: my son's struggles with chronic migraines, for one, which was the first big reason I didn't start on The Undressing of America when I planned to. But there were a lot of other things, some really too minor to explain my stalling the book, clearly stand-ins for an aversion to doing the work. I just couldn't get my head clear on what this book was supposed to be or why I was supposed to be excited about writing it. By early this year I'd carved out some time and declared my intention either to write this book or give it up. But still I stalled and avoided. Until a friend sent me an email with the subject line "Seen this?" and a link to a review of the new Bernarr Macfadden biography.

I'll admit to some dread and anxiety. For a minute I even kicked myself for not having written my book more quickly, before I reminded myself that even by the original plan my publication would have fallen after Mark's book. That's when I began to realize what a gift this was—not only Mr. America, which turned out to be a thorough and delightful biography, but the delays and procrastinations that enabled me to read it before getting deep into my own book. My editor's first reaction to the news was, literally, "Yikes!" But within a couple of days he was suggesting exactly what I was thinking, and what I think I had been groping toward all along: it's essential now that my book focus not on the long life of Bernarr Macfadden but on the cultural phenomena themselves, on the perfect storm of the '20s, on all the peculiar characters who swirled around Macfadden and competed with him and tried to shut him down. Especially since Mark's book focuses mainly on Macfadden's first career as a fitness and diet guru, with only a passing mention of his time as a publishing maven. Suddenly William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Medill Patterson, Fulton Oursler, and Anthony Comstock have much bigger roles. And suddenly I was able to turn out a detailed chapter breakdown in a hurry that my editor approved in an instant.

When things like this happen I find myself believing that some sort of literary God is watching out for my career—a comforting thought, especially when I tend to great every stumbling block with dread and self-criticism. Although why He decided that my Men of Tomorrow screenplay, the best thing I have ever written by far, would be trapped for a year-and-a-half in my producer's Chapter XI nightmare has yet to be revealed.

Too easy

2009-05-09T17:45:00.001-07:00

So, after a great deal of stalling and avoiding I finally wrote the new chapter breakdown for my book, The Undressing of America, based on a new direction my editor and I realized I had to go. By committing to jump on it right here in this blog, I actually managed to have it done and off to New York by the end of the next day. My editor wrote back immediately, telling me I'd "done a good job" of shifting the emphasis, that the story now "opens up into a larger look at this cultural moment" just like we'd agreed it should. I skimmed the positive stuff quickly, eager to get to the "but." You know the but: his concerns about where I'd chosen to enter or leave the narrative, how I really shouldn't start in 1921 and jump back to 1905 and then still later have a sort of flashblack to the 19th Century. All the stuff that would make me so nervous I wouldn't have to acknowledge the good part.

But the but never came. A few sentences telling me how I'd done just fine and was on the right track and then a sudden, stunning "Best, Eric." I wrote back immediately: "Thanks. But isn't there anything you're concerned about? Or think should be done differently? Even if not, would you like me to flesh out this breakdown some more? Or should I just start writing?"

And almost as immediately comes his reply: "Hi! Yeah, start writing!" And that's it. As if all a person has to do was start writing. Doesn't he understand the importance of having an endless series of hoops to jump through, the writer's need for countless little steps to tackle so he can tell himself he's working on the book while still not committing to a single word of actual prose?

You wonder how some people get to be editors.

That actually worked...

2009-05-06T18:58:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I said I was going to do some work on my book so I'd have something to blog about...and damned if I didn't do just that! Within an hour after posting the entry I was forcing myself into the new chapter breakdown my editor requested a few weeks ago, and then I hit some kind of momentum and I kept hammering at until I went to bed. Unfortunately, most of that work was squandered on a bizarre idea I had that the first five chapters would essentially go backwards—each one earlier than the one before, going from 1921 back to about 1875. But by the time I closed the computer at midnight the churning in my gut was telling me that, no, that was not as slick an idea as it sounded, and when I woke up the next morning the pieces fell quickly into place in a much saner order. By the next bedtime I had it mostly done, and now it's with my editor in New York.

I guess the blog isn't the only reason. I'd also stated finishing the thing a goal with a support-group I'm part of at the Writers' Grotto. But I will say that the prospect of either coming back to this blog in a few days whining about my latest procrastination, or, even worse, disappearing for weeks and then having to come up with another clever post about starting over, helped a lot.

Re-Uptake Inhibitors

2009-05-02T14:53:00.000-07:00

Where did those three months go?

Actually, there are reasons for my departure from blogging about this book. Last fall I gave most of my time to the Obama campaign, and after the election I discovered that my financial situation had gotten so bad that I had to take on some work-for-hire jobs to keep my family's head above water. Most of them are fun, especially an online comic strip I'm doing with Mark Badger for a non-profit called Privacy Activism and kids' book series based on the Japanese Dragon Ball comics that I'm writing for Viz, but for a while they kept me so busy that I didn't have time to procrastinate on this book. (Oh, and the election came out well, by the way.) I also wanted the get the whole of the two humor books I'm writing with Will Jacobs online, a process I made far more elaborate than it had to be, adding cute introductions every week and uploading hundreds of photos to illustrate one of the books. For a few months that took up all the time and energy I had for blogs. And then my son hasn't been well: frequent, severe migraines for the last seven months. That's been brutal, and he's needed a lot of support.

The truth is, though, that I've had time to get back in gear on the book for a few weeks now. And I have some pretty insistent incentives, too: an editor waiting for it, a need to have a new central project defining my work, and some changes in the publishing landscape that have forced me to rethink the story and pretty focus significantly (more on that later). But I drag. I find myself seducing friends into long email or Facebook dialogues. Commenting several times a day on Self-Styled Siren's movie blog. Scanning the TCM schedule on TiVo, then deciding to watch a little bit of that Una Merkel comedy from 1934 I recorded last night, then falling asleep on the couch. Filling my day with as little challenging, scary work as I can until it's evening and I can watch Dr. Who with my family. Which I know, very well, is because I'm depressed.

Here I wonder if I'm supposed to write about my long, complex relationship with depression. There are entire books like Girl Interrupted charting writers' relationships with their depression. The trouble is, I find my depression really boring. I put off hard work. I fall asleep on the couch. I've been on Lexapro for a while but I question whether it's really doing my any good and now I'm thinking about asking my psychiatrist about Wellbutrin. I'd feel better if I started jogging again but I haven't been able to get motivated.

Sure sounds like a bestselling memoir to me.

No, I think examining the reasons I'm avoiding my most important work isn't very useful at this point. Just like running: I won't get anywhere thinking about why I'm avoiding changing my shoes and going out for that first half-mile to see how out of shape I am. So here I write this blog entry, starting with nothing but a title. And knowing I'll need to have something to fill my next blog entry in a day or two, I start looking for some work to do on the book that I can tell you about...

Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow

2009-01-01T23:43:00.000-08:00

Talk about deadline problems: this started as my Christmas post, and I'm finishing it on the night of New Year's Day. But, as with The Undressing of America, which was originally due to my editor over a year and a half ago, being late is no excuse for not finishing....

I like this time of year. I like the fact that my son, at 16, is still enough into Christmas to whip his mom and me into some enthusiasm. I like the chintz: the lights, the tree, the wooden Santas, the stop-motion Rudolph, the Bing Crosby, the mucous eggnog. I like the way we draw inward as a family but also go caroling with friends, and I like the fact that the friends we carol with are mostly Jews. (One year an annoyed woman yelled at us, "We're not interested! We're Jewish!" And half our group yelled back, "So are we!") I like my own odd rituals, like wrapping presents at 2 or 3 AM Christmas Eve with the over-familiar dialogue of It's a Wonderful Life running in the background. ("Paste it, Daddy!") Most of all I love the day after Christmas, year after year my favorite day on the calendar, when all the crap is done and I can lie on the couch under the red-and-green knitted blanket and watch something like Remember the Night or Holiday Affair for the too-manyth time and not feel a single stab of panic that there's something I haven't done.

But it's not a simply "merry" time. I've always felt a deep, sweet melancholy around Christmas, too. I loved Christmas as a kid, but for several years they were very lonely: my depressed parents liked to disappear into the high desert, just the three of us in a deserted campground far from anywhere. Sometimes I feel sad for my kid, being an only child (a sadness he doesn't seem to share, fortunately). I wish my mom was still around, and I'm sorry that my dad is so unaware of everything around him now. I'm sorry that it's so hard for me to make myself go see him.

I always feel an end-of-the-year sadness: the sun swings low and the days are short, and I remember so much I haven't done (this incomplete book is huge this year). This year everything's scarier and tougher because of money issues. Nicky's been having a brutal wave of migraines since October, and his winter break is weighed down by academic worries and make-up work. It's a time that the sad and the uncompleted and the frightened stand in sharp relief against the Christmas lights and the shiny new calendar.

All season long I've found myself humming the most melancholy Christmas song of all: Someday soon we all will be together, if the fates allow. Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow...so have yourself a merry little Christmas now. Hugh Martin wrote it in 1943 (maybe with an assist from Ralph Blane) for Judy Garland to sing in Meet Me in St. Louis. The movie was set in 1904, and the sadness of the song reflected the uncertain fate of the characters in mid-story, but clearly it was channeling the mood of World War II, the uncertainty of the future and the separation of loved ones. Faithful friends who are dear to us will be near to us once more. It's just a pop tune, but it's been a wise advisor.

Where this comes into play in regard to this slow, late book is here: in many years past I'd have responded to a shortfall like this by making frantic new year's resolutions to jump on the book instantly and intensely in January, to push it through to completion as quickly as possible. In fact, last year precisely that about this very book. But of course I fall through. Already these next few weeks will be consumed with catching up on this kids' chapter book I'm contracted to write and staying a stope ahead of the artist on this on-line comic strip I'm writing for Privacy Activism and helping my son get back on top of his school situation. So any resolution to make Undressing happen quickly and immediately is a set-up for frustration and renewed despair. I need to stay with Anne Lamott's advice, to write it bird by bird.

Will it be true, as the song holds, that next year all my troubles will be out of sight? Not likely. But it's a calming thing to pretend at the beginning of the year.

View Blog

2008-12-28T11:59:00.000-08:00

So I've had all these blog entries forming in my head for weeks: the researching my book in London one, the post-election one, the what-in-hell-am-I-thankful-for one, the Christmas one. But having too much in my head makes it scary to click on "New Post" and enter this empty rectangle. So today I thought I would just look at the blog. Which I did, and then suddenly it didn't seem that hard to write a post about the effect of looking at the blog.

I think this is a problem with the book, too. I have so much stuff in my notes and my head, but when I start work it always takes the form of "the book." I should think, not, "I really ought to work on the book" but "I really ought to work on the scene where Mary meets Bernarr in the train station." As if that was the whole project, a stand-alone scene were Mary meets Bernarr in the train station. Go back to that Bird by Bird stuff, as Anne Lamott called it.

I met Anne Lamott a few months ago. It was an at Obama fundraiser. Nice lady.

Earth's Grandest Heroes

2008-11-15T00:07:00.000-08:00

Speaking of sex...

Which we weren't...but it's running through the part of The Undressing of America I'm working on right now, about Bernarr Macfadden's battle with the censors of his sex-education books at the start of the 20th Century, and suddenly it's running through My Pal Splendid Man too. Will Jacobs and I just uploaded the seventh episode of that silly book, in which we meet that Dusk-Lit Detective, that Calico Crusader, known as Catman. It's an episode I've always particularly liked, but now it also seems to be bringing the two books together. I don't want to give away too much, but it's kind of about sex and innocence and the way we will ourselves not to see things that are right in our faces. It's funny too, I think.

From England

2008-11-03T22:47:00.000-08:00

I've just come home from London and Nottingham. The Game City Festival flew me to the latter to talk about video games and the culture of childhood, so I carved out a few days in the former to fill in some research on the birth of True Story magazine. It was in London in 1913 that Bernarr Macfadden published Beauty and Health, mounted the Britain's Perfect Woman contest, and so met Mary Williamson, the Yorkshire girl who would marry him, flee to America with him, and with him conceive a publishing revolution. I got my British Library card and sat there in a pencils-only reading room, pouring through piles of weird old health magazines, and I walked in the frigid wind through Red Lion Court and Wine Office Court and Aldwych, where Macfadden had his offices. All of which reawakened this book.

The English mostly wanted to talk to me about the election. I even got to be a political pundit for a few minutes on the BBC in Nottingham. (More about that in my other blog, The Second Act.) And I still had to keep up with some of my short-term deadlines, my bill-payers, even there. But I found myself able to get past the concerns of the present as I hadn't in months. I could get one foot back there, into 1913. I like that state as a writer, when I'm standing in my own world and someone else's at the same time. It reminded me of something my friend Caroline Paul says: "Writers block usually means I just need to do more research."

Everything but the book?

2008-10-15T00:05:00.000-07:00

I'm coming back up from the ocean of deadline-driven work and campaign volunteering to do some blogging again: notes on John McCain's mental state at The Second Act and a new episode at My Pal Splendid Man. Meanwhile, things that readers of this blog have said to me over the past few weeks rattle around in my brain: I am a puer aeternis. This book is kind of like Seabiscuit. Oh, and something Hillary Clinton said the other day: "Bloom where you're planted." These are all sort of...clicking together somehow.

Ed and Johnny Make a Movie

2008-10-01T00:01:00.000-07:00

I continue to stick to my regimen of meeting deadlines, campaigning, and resisting the temptation to blog (and it's so hard to resist during this insane election!), but I'm also continuing to upload chapters of Million Dollar Ideas for those who want to keep following the adventures of Ed and Johnny in '40s Hollywood. In Chapter 9, "It's a Minsky!" the boys finally get the chance to make a movie out of one of their anachronistic ideas. I hope you have a chance to check it out.

Will my work be remembered a thousand years from now?

2008-09-14T00:00:00.000-07:00

That's the question Will Jones, the protagonist of My Pal Splendid Man, is asking in "Literary Lad," the episode I just uploaded. To answer the question, Splendid Man takes him a thousand years into the future, where he meets that team of heroic teenagers known as the Array of Splendid Striplings and...other stuff happens. It's all pretty absurd, but right at this moment I'm seeing something more than the absurd in it. No, let me say that differently: absurd, yes, but also very true, and class to my heart. Because, you know, I don't worry about whether my work will be remembered in a millennium, but I do think way too much about outcomes that are beyond my control. I find it incredibly hard to give myself to a project unless I can convince myself that it will sell well, bring great reviews, open new doors, something. The simple thought that "This feels like the right thing to do and I have reasonable hopes of a reward" is rarely enough to motivate me to action. And yet, that's the only true thing I can think, the only thing I can be sure of and that doesn't require fantasy and self-deception. It seems like such a simple place from which to start a book: I want to, it seems like a good idea, I'm being paid for it, so do it and find out later what the pay-off is. But I invest so much of myself in the future instead of the present that that's really hard for me.

Anyway, I didn't really expect to get such a slap in the face (or poke in the ribs?) from one of my own humor stories, but it's a good one. I think the next time I find myself wondering why I'm writing this book I should remember what a moron Will Jones is, and then remember that he's me.

Books for Barack

2008-09-12T21:20:00.000-07:00

Ayelet Waldman is blogging about her work for the Obama campaign, most recently a fundraiser she's running called "Books for Barack." Dozens of contemporary authors are sending her signed copies of their books to be auctioned off at various fundraising events. If anyone can contribute books or bid on them, it's a good way to help the Democratic campaign. As Ayelet says, "Seems that there are lots of writers who, like me, think that a Palin/McCain presidency (and I use that order on purpose; who in their right mind thinks he's the driving force of that ticket?) would be a colossal nightmare for the entire world. You don't have to be in the intellectual elite to know what's coming if those jokers win the election." Check out her site here.

To accept the things I cannot change

2008-09-11T23:55:00.000-07:00

At my other blog I talk about why I'm not likely to do any more news-driven political blogging for a while. The short version is that putting too much of me "out there" into the mass media and the blogosphere keeps me from focusing my energies on what I can actually do.

Meanwhile, now that I've purposely taken my mind off The Undressing of America, I find all sort of useful insights and even passages of prose bubbling up spontaneously. As always, right? I'll be jotting those down shortly.

Now I'm going to go check out a Kay Francis movie on TCM. I forgot to mention that Kay is their star of the month, several of her movies showing every Thursday night in September. I love Kay.

What matters right now

2008-09-08T20:53:00.000-07:00

This is my Palin bounce: Today I know for sure that this election will not be an easy coast to victory for the Democrats, that it will be won only if those of us who care get out and fight. John McCain and Sarah Palin have taken the lead in the polls. I'll leave the analysis for my other blog and keep it personal here. My big issue for the past couple of months has been getting started on The Undressing of America, but right now I can't worry about the book. In less than two months we Americans will vote in a tremendously important presidential election. I don't believe that John McCain is a "change agent." I believe he will perpetuate the policies of the Bush-Cheney administration, and that if he dies, President Palin will be even worse. I believe that an Obama victory offers hope for a national renewal; but even if that's too optimistic, I believe it will bring hope, at least, for simple sanity. I believe this election matters profoundly to the future of this country and the world, and now I know that John McCain and Sarah Palin may win it.

I'm not happy with the way Obama and Biden are running their campaign. They're still way too nice, way too cautious, way too slow to respond to Republican attacks, even though that's what destroyed Kerry and Gore. Obama and Biden seem neurotically compelled to praise John McCain to the skies before they say anything against him, undermining their own argument. Obama is still too vague on the issues, and he keeps allowing McCain to drive the debate, arguing about "earmarks" and reform when voters are mainly worried about the economy. Hillary Clinton, based on her performance earlier today, is obviously not going to be the fierce anti-Palin warrior I hoped she would be. (And who can blame her, sitting on the biggest "I told you so" in American political history?) I don't think this election is going to be won by the brilliance of the campaigners. It's going to be won, if it's won at all, by the army of volunteers. As Obama himself said, "This election isn't about me. It's about you."

So. As of today I'm shifting my energies away from the book and toward the campaign. I'll still pay the bills, still get my kid to school, still walk my dog, still upload chapters of the books I've already written with Will Jacobs. But the work has to be stripped down to what will sustain daily life while leaving time and energy free for volunteering. I've been hesitating over a job, but now I'm going to sign the contract: writing a series of early-readers chapter books based on a Japanese cartoon. They'll go pretty quickly and pay pretty well. I've got some comics work I can hustle, too, with a good dollar-to-hour ratio. I know I'll still work on The Undressing of America when my mind goes there. I'll probably still blog about it occasionally when things occur to me. But it's going on the back burner. So is the political blogging, because what this campaign needs is not me thinking and opining but me raising money and registering voters, unless I experience something in the campaign that seems important to pass along, or my fellow volunteers think may time will be better used here than on the phone.

As I've been thinking about this, I've wondered a couple of times if this was just an excuse to get away from the rigors of writing a difficult book. But I really believe that for me to let anything non-essential pull me away from the Democratic campaign at this moment would be irresponsible and selfish.

After all, the problems of one little narrative non-fiction writer doesn't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

Million Dollar Ideas Chapter 8

2008-09-07T21:53:00.000-07:00

I nearly forgot to mention it, with all these political and creative issues swirling through my brain, but Will Jacobs and I have just uploaded "Don Juan Fights a Duel," the latest chapter of Million Dollar Ideas, in which Leona Sands returns, and the lives of our plucky screenwriters are thrown upside down. Some fine supporting-actor work from Errol Flynn, too.

And just one week ago (which I think I did forget to mention), we added a new chapter to Million Dollar Ideas--The Photonovel, this one an illustrated companion to "Ed and Johnny Hit the Skids," featuring some great location shots of LA in the '40s. Check them out if you get a chance!

Same drama, then and now

2008-09-05T23:42:00.000-07:00

Coming up from under back-to-back conventions, politicked up and politicked off, trying to get back into The Undressing of America. It's been hard to keep my mind on that early 20th Century story with the early 21st Century being shaped around me, but coming off Sarah Palin I see how that story is this one. The backdrop to Undressing is the "purity movement" that bullied America in the late 19th Century, the golden age of moralistic censorship, when cultural watchdogs believed that vice would disappear if we were never allowed to mention it. True Story magazine, and from it the whole culture of tabloids and reality media, came out of Bernarr Macfadden's obscenity conviction for publishing a story about VD. It's a battle Americans keep having to fight, between realists who want to talk about what's there and righteously indignant control freaks who want to make us all pretend. The futility of censorship, the weird marriage of courage and cheap titillation that fights against it, the politics of sex and denial--seeing how it went once I can understand a little better how it's going now. And what I'm fired up about now can fuel the book.

Book? What book?

2008-08-28T23:05:00.000-07:00

I'm euphoric about the Democratic convention. (You can check out my along-the-way reactions over at The Second Act.) Tomorrow I start my campaign phoning and talk to the local volunteer coordinators about how I can help. In the back of my mind is this question: How do I get myself focused back on this book set in the 1920s when all I want to think about is the election of 2008? But maybe I don't have to right now. The world's full of books, full of writers telling themselves that the story they're telling is the most important thing in the world. But what story is as important as the one we Americans are living together right now? To paraphrase what the man said tonight, it's not about me—it's about all of us. Every voter I bring to the polls for Obama is a better story than anything I've ever written. Am I right?

The Convention

2008-08-25T15:31:00.000-07:00

A couple of months ago, needing to get rolling on this damned book, I had to promise myself not to blog about politics for a while. "At least until the convention," I said, knowing how hard it would be to resist the urge once people started making speeches in Denver—and especially once I started making phone calls and doing other campaign volunteering. Happily, these two months of blogging exclusively about the book have brought me huge progress, so I feel safe in allowing my blog-consciousness to split a little bit.

On this page I'll continue to write (and write about) The Undressing of America, with occasional pitches for my other posts. The politics I'll take back to my original page, The Second Act. And of course I'll keep uploading chapters of my humor books on My Pal Splendid Man and Million Dollar Ideas. Meanwhile, as I start ramping up my political conscious again, my friend Ayelet is blogging about her experiences as an Obama delegate in Denver on the New York Magazine website. Her first dispatch is already up, about the solid support for Obama she's seeing among Clinton delegates and the artificial nature of the "divide" that the news industry loves to exploit. It's inspiring stuff, so please check it out.

I'm so excited! We're actually going to elect a progressive Democrat President of the United States! It won't be as easy as we thought (and, yeah, he won't be as progressive as we thought), but still...we're going to do it!

Will and Gerry March On

2008-08-24T00:00:00.000-07:00

I swore I'd upload a new installment of one of the humor books Will Jacobs and I are writing every Sunday this summer, and I haven't missed one yet. Today it's My Pal Splendid Man Episode 4, "Splendid Man the Movie." This is a short and sweet one, in which we riff on the contrasts between the old-style heroes of our youth and the darker, messier ones we seem to go for today...

Learning in public

2008-08-21T12:51:00.000-07:00

I have this problem with always wanting to look like I know what I'm doing. So I sell the idea for The Undressing of America to FSG and I immediately assume my duty is to turn in a draft that shows what a great investment they made. I'm impressed with my editor, Eric Chinski, and promptly think, "I can't send this guy anything less than brilliant." Which by itself accounts for about a year's worth of abortive drafts.

But as I blog about these questions I have around the strangeness of Bernarr Macfadden, the surprising ordinariness of his wife Mary, the implications of picking a beginning point, I realize how much learning I'm doing with this book—not just about the subject, but about writing itself. There's some tricky new stuff for me to master here, and that's what's best about Undressing right now. (And yeah, I do mean Undressing and metaphorically "undressing.") Whether I knew it consciously at the time or not, I took this book on not as a chance to prove what I'd already learned but to learn something new and hard. And working with Eric—whose reputation is as a brilliant text-editor—is a chance not to impress him but to learn from him. Starting today, stop thinking of this as my masterwork and think about it as a school project. Show some humility for a change, and come out of it with some tools I would never have found on my own.

Something about Mary

2008-08-20T19:32:00.000-07:00

Mary Williamson was not a girl you'd expect to change the world. She could swim, that's one thing. Not at any sort of Olympic or national championship level, but she'd win loving cups at local events and finish ahead of most of the pack in the crowded Thames races. And she'd come into her athleticism through hard work, at her father's urging, after a sickly childhood; that was the one part of her story that might have been worth telling. Otherwise she was strikingly ordinary. A middle class girl, finished high school with acceptable marks, then went to work in various shops and the local carpet mill while she decided who to marry. Her most likely suitor was the local church organist. Her dream was simple: lots of babies and a comfortable home. Attractive in a way that wouldn't haunt anyone's memory, occasionally sharp-tongued without being any great wit, a Yorkshire lass among many, many Yorkshire lasses.

I think it's her ordinariness that interests me so much, that makes me want to view this book through her. Or I should say, the way her ordinariness made possible her one extraordinary contribution. Maybe it's too much to say she "changed the world," but she did conceive True Story magazine, one of the most influential publishing events of the early 20th Century. Whole magazine genres came out of that, most of what we think of as "tabloid culture," the seeds of reality media, an altered relationship between the consumers and producers of mass media, a new way for ordinary people to interpret the importance of their own stories. Maybe it all would have happened anyway, in some form or other, but it took the shape it has because history's great forces worked through Mary Williamson of Halifax.

Her husband, Bernarr Macfadden, who actually pushed the idea of True Story to completion, may be the least ordinary person I've ever tried to write about. He's like a living satire of himself. Mary may be the most ordinary. My narrative will be most fun and surprising when I can hold them both in view at once. When I can capture those dynamic spaces where they came together—on stage, in bed, on the beach when she told him her idea for a new magazine—I think the book will jump to life.

My guess?

2008-08-20T00:39:00.000-07:00

John Kerry.

Where Do I Begin?

2008-08-18T20:13:00.000-07:00

I have to know where a book starts before I can write. Writer friends say quit worrying about it, write it in any order and move the pieces around later. My head agrees, but it never works. I need something firm to push off from: This is the first thing I tell the reader, then this, then this. I know I can cut and paste when the draft is done, but I can't do a draft until I commit to an order and see it through. This book's been especially hard for me to figure out, I think because the story has so many movements. In my wild stabs at drafts so far I've tried a few starting points:

Barney McFadden as a beaten little boy in rural Missouri, in church seething about the hollowness of Christianity, breaking away from the farmer who makes him labor him, running across the fields and into the bog where he feels an upwelling of the earth's "magnetic power," finding his new religion in his own body.

Bernard McFadden on the midway of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, a small-time professional wrestler and fitness instructor, unemployed gym teacher looking for a way to make it big—when he sees the Great Sandow, the father of modern bodybuilding, perfect showman of the naked body, and is reborn as the seraph of Physical Culture.

Anthony Comstock, head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and special inspector for the Postal Service, grand high censor of America, on the day in 1906 he made enemies of both George Bernard Shaw and Bernarr Macfadden, kicking off a climactic battle in the Victorian war against truth.

Macfadden's flight from New York to Chicago, across the border to Toronto and then to London, with the postal authorities coming after his publishing company, his shot at wealth and influence seemingly gone.

All good hooks. And I couldn't figure out why none of them were working, until I realized that all of them forced Bernarr Macfadden to be the eyes through whom we see the story. The poor reader would be asked to inhabit that strange, impenetrable, narcissistic man. Forget the reader—the writer would have to inhabit him. I needed someone I could live with like a conjoined twin. So the book starts with Mary Williamson, the 19-year-old Yorkshire lass who rode the train from to London to compete in Macfadden's "Britain's Perfect Woman" pageant and never went home to the life she thought she was going to lead. Then Bernarr is viewed from the outside, as an enigma, as nearly a force of nature or history, changing people but never really connecting with them. The story I write, and people read, is a human one.

We open as Mary. The nervous train ride from Halifax is fresh in our memories. We're at Kings Cross. We see Macfadden in his "long rabbical overcoat." We step out. We greet him. And he takes our wrist.

But first, a bit of Ed and Johnny

2008-08-18T12:50:00.000-07:00

I'm breaking the soil on Chapter One, page one of the new draft of the book, and will blog about that later today...but just to buy myself a little more time I've posted Chapter 7 of Million Dollar Ideas, that satirical novel Will Jacobs and I are writing. This one's called "Pinks and Finks," and in it our screenwriting heroes discover that their anachronistic ideas have led them afoul of the FBI in Red-Scare era Hollywood. It was a lot of fun to write...and I hope it will be to read....

Happy birthday, Bernarr

2008-08-16T19:55:00.000-07:00

Today is the birthday of the central figure of my book: Bernarr Macfadden, publisher of True Story magazine and prime mover in the "undressing of America." He'd have been 140 years old if his natural health ideas had worked as well as he said they would. I think I'll toast him by starting work on the next draft, the first "submittable draft" of Chapter 1. He was never a guy who shied away from reckless action, after all. And certainly never a guy who wasted time thinking....

The Writer Whisperer

2008-08-16T11:17:00.000-07:00

I just found my new words to live by—in PetCo. I had to buy a Ph test kit for my kid's aquarium (for months the water's running acidic, and then I give it a little NaHCO3 goose and it jumps to pure-blue alkilinity—I figured I should buy a new test in case the old one was going whacky, but no) and while I was standing in line I started reading a poster advertising a new book by this guy who calls himself the Dog Whisperer. Three big words, his guiding principles, across the bottom:

EXERCISE. DISCIPLINE. AFFECTION.

And I thought, "That's what I need." I roll out of bed and go straight to my computer—until after Labor Day, when I'll roll out of bed, wake my kid up, drive him to school, and then go straight to my computer—check my email to make sure I still exist and didn't fade away during the night, mess with my Facebook page (which of course I only use to "promote my work"), check Google News ("Oh my God McCain's closing the gap again!"), and go to my blog pages and Red Room to see if anyone's commented. Somewhere in there I'll drink coffee, maybe eat something, and walk the dog. Then maybe I'll blog about how I'm not getting enough work done. For some reason.

But these are things that I know from experience make me feel better and lead to more productivity: Running. (Lately I've been using the old "I'm too busy" excuse. Except that I secretly know that when I was running every other day months ago, 30-70 minutes per run, I was getting more work done than now.) Having to do work now because I have a deadline. (Best thing I've ever written was the Men of Tomorrow screenplay, up against the wall of the Guild strike.) And community. (In person, not electronically mediated. Sharing pages with writers. Meetings of this spiritual group I'm in. Talking to my family without a computer on my lap and one eye on the screen.)

Exercise, discipline, and affection make me happy, relaxed, productive, and well-behaved. But by some perversion of personality or old habit I pull toward indolence, chaos, and isolation. I need somebody to show up with a leash, that's all.

Our of Sheer Masochism

2008-08-12T16:05:00.000-07:00

Now my friends are all jumping on me as I write about my procrastination: "Snap out of it!" "Quit complaining and write!" What no one understands is what a strange pleasure it is to be caught in that suspense: haunted by the book, putting notes and words down, throwing them away, never quite able to pull that trigger, say "This is it." It's an electric place. Tremendously alive. Full of possibilities that can't be grasped, ghosts in the corners. Agonizing—but sweet. Not the high of pouring out good material, but a lot more fun than just doing work. And things come out of it too. All those insights I had in Ojai, about Bernarr and Mary Macfadden acting out the 20th Century drama of the Self, which shifted the orientation of the book and keep opening to new ideas—those came because I was fretting about the book but wasn't in a flow working on the book as it was. As much as I grind my teeth and say, "I should be months into the actual writing of a draft," the truth is that the draft I would have started months ago may not have been nearly as good as the book I'm still building up to.

My favorite book about writing is Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage. Which is actually a book about not writing. Dyer told himself that he was going to write either a critical biography or a novel about his literary hero, D. H. Lawrence. What he actually did was squander years of his life, and a significant amount of his publisher's money, "researching" the book and frantically, angrily, insanely procrastinating. The title comes from a quote of Lawrence's, who went through similar agonies trying to write about his own hero, Thomas Hardy, before finally writing it "out of sheer rage." But Dyer's rage—although it builds relentlessly and poisons every last experience—never even drives him to write the Lawrence book. It only drives him to write a book about not writing the Lawrence book. And it's funny as hell. In a nauseating sort of way.

This is the single most-recommended book about writing among the writers I know. But never quite out loud: it's never assigned at a writing workshop or listed on the website of any writer trying to sell his services as a coach or teacher. It's whispered about at intimate parties and passed from hand to hand in communal workspaces, like The Gulag Archipelago in the USSR. Because it tells a terrible truth about the writerly personality: we don't just have terrible neurotic blocks to getting our work done. We love having terrible neurotic blocks to getting our work done. The pain just feels so good.

But of course that doesn't make our suffering seem noble, or even like just a minor neurosis to be banished by "shut up and do it" homilies. It makes us look like a bunch of freaky masochists. So please...don't tell anyone!

The Waste Land

2008-08-11T23:16:00.000-07:00

Caroline Paul's writing-as-toilet-cleaning analogy has struck quite a chord, based on responses to my post of a few days ago. Therein I reported on a meeting of this "Borstian" group at the S.F. Writers Grotto, in which Caroline urged us all to stop thinking about why we're procrastinating on our writing and just get down on our knees and do it. "Sometimes you just have to approach writing as a chore that has to be done," she said (approximately). "Like cleaning the toilet." Many readers have since shared with me their own excretory metaphors for the literary process, most of them either equating writer's block with digestive irregularity or bad first drafts with odoriferous ordure. (Come to think of it, it was at that very same meeting that Elizabeth Bernstein described her recent victories over procrastination as "as if I'd taken creative Metamucil.")

What is this association of literary production with physical ejecta? I've never heard artists and musicians so routinely compare their work to colonic function. I don't mean calling their bad work "shit." Everybody does that. I mean these elaborate recasting of one process as the other. Is it because we sit and strain? Is it because of the way verbal material seems to build up within us and then come surging out? Or are we writers revealing some deeper sense of self-disgust?

Any insights will be appreciated. But right now it's enough to chase me back to my Sisyphus metaphor. At least he worked with his hands....

With brush in hand

2008-08-08T18:01:00.000-07:00

As I got to work today, all the repellent implications of Caroline Paul's "sometimes you have to approach writing like cleaning the toilet" became clear to me. If writing is like kneeling on the floor with a round-headed brush, then what exactly are the words in my first draft?

Nothing I didn't already know they were, I guess...

But here's the good thing I've discovered: if you approach writing as cleaning, then the bad stuff, the feculence that must be effaced, is something to do. For the first time I can welcome lousy sentences. That ridiculously self-conscious opening paragraph that strains to create a mood of urgency but says nothing concrete—it doesn't mean I failed! It means another piece of glittering porcelain to be revealed! Which means that I don't have to be afraid of...of...producing bad writing. I owe it to myself!

(I was going to say I don't have to be afraid of putting out crap. But every metaphor has to know when to stop.)

Just Do It, Act As If, Don't Think Throw, etc.

2008-08-07T11:41:00.000-07:00

At the SF Writers Grotto about twelve of us are in this mutual goal-setting group. We meet every other Wednesday, tell whether we met our writing goals for the previous fortnight (you get a star on a white board if you did, you have to kick in five bucks to a group kitty if you didn't), spend most of an hour sharing thoughts on why we did or didn't and how to improve our work habits, then set new goals for next time. We call ourselves the Borstians, because it's a spin-off of a workshop we did with a great coach and consultant named Martha Borst. Our basic operating principle is that if we're having trouble getting work done, it's not going to help to keep beating ourselves up about it, worrying about it in solitude, or thinking endlessly about "what's wrong with me." The way to get something done is to decide what we're going to get done by when, tell other people about it who we trust not to let us off the hook, and do it. And if we don't do it, take responsibility for that and move to the next set of goals.

It's pretty basic stuff—but it's infernally hard. For some of us, at least. Yesterday's meeting was full of wisdom, a lot of which boiled down to "Stop thinking about your book and just sit down and write it," and everything anyone said shot through me with an "Of course!" I talked about how I was feeling a bit overwhelmed or intimidated by new insights into the theme of my book, and Ethan Watters said how the only really effective thinking for him occurs in an interaction between his thoughts and the words on the page. You can bring head-stuff to the work, but nothing really happens until you try this, discard it, try something else, discover it works, keep going from there. "Of course!" I thought. Then when Ethan himself started spinning off into thoughts about why he keeps worrying that he mastered his subject adequately to write about (despite months of research), Caroline Paul cut through them. "Sometimes you just have to approach writing as a thing that has to get done. Like cleaning the toilet."

We all jumped instantly on that one. So humbling, so quotidian, so elegantly inelegant; no false glamor or self-aggrandizing agony could survive it. A way better than Sisyphus—no French novelist ever wrote an existentialist essay about cleaning toilets, as far as I know. We all reminded each other of the importance of just taking action and not chewing over why we weren't taking action, and when we adjourned I felt lighter and ready to work. But then a feeling of familiarity stole over me. How many times had I said and heard phrases like that? Never as elegantly apt as Caroline's toilet, but still—the words are all around us. Advertising says it: "Just do it." Recovery programs say it: "Act as if." "Do the next right thing." Entertainment says it: "Don't think. Throw." (My friend Karen Green reminded me of that line from Bull Durham the last time I was fretting about my inaction.) We say these things to each other all the time, not just writers, everybody. And why? Because we can't fucking get it, that's why. Because the excitement of realizing yet again that action is the answer is such a big mental thrill that it alone can take the place of action for hours. And by the time the thrill wears off, we're back in the thinking again. Why am I unable to apply that epiphany about the toilet bowl again...?

But it is true, I know that. And when I wake up and start work again, it's Caroline's analogy I'll reach for first. I have to confess, though, when Caroline said that about the toilet bowl, my first thought was to wonder if I can get my cleaning lady to write my first draft.

The feeling of rock

2008-08-05T15:30:00.001-07:00

A reader reminded me that Sisyphus could enjoy the feeling of the rock under his fingers and steal other pleasures under the gaze of the gods who meant to punish him. (See the comments on yesterday's post for the whole wise thing.) Which is something I reminded myself of in my first Sisyphean post a few weeks back. It's the easiest thing for me to forget, the pleasure of hard work without thinking about the big picture and whether it will ever be done or not. I get so anxious worrying about outcomes. Will I ever actually finish this? Will it be good? Will it get reviewed in the Times? Will it break 100,000 copies and enable me to sign a six-figure two-book deal? Will the UK rights sell for big money so I can talk my publisher into sending me to London for a signing? Will it get a screenplay development deal? Will they attach Philip Seymour Hoffman as Fulton Oursler so he and I can hang out? Will a beautiful woman recognize me in Whole Foods from my author photo and tell me how my book changed her life? There's so much to think about.

But today: I spent an hour (so far) reoutlining the "thematic underpinning" of the book, lining up my recent ruminations on the 20th Century self and personalized truth with the story, looking at Bernarr Macfadden's actions through that lens, figuring out that I need to change the emphasis a little—suddenly his horrible childhood becomes more relevant, and his eminence grise, Fulton Oursler, really does sit right in the middle of the book. (Weird thing, narrative nonfiction. You're doing all the plot work of a novel except you can't actually change a single event. You just move things back and forth on the stage and redirect the lighting.) It brought a surge of panic—so much new work to do! But I was able to say, no. This isn't about the work yet to be done. It's about the work I'm doing right now. Fretting about what this work implies is like going to the gym and thinking about the fact that I'll probably never be able to exercise as much as I should and no matter what I do I'm getting older and I probably can't expect to accomplish anything through exercise except slightly stalling the incursions of decrepitude and someday I'll end up dead. I don't do that at the gym. I feel my upper body waking up and my anxiety dropping and I think, "This is good what I'm doing. Just this."

So now I go back to it. Another hour of work, maybe. Another three sets of ten reps. Another few feet up the hill. And I'll enjoy the tingle in my deltoids.

Welcome back, Mr. Sisyphus. Your rock is waiting.

2008-08-04T22:21:00.001-07:00

Got back from the road trip late Friday night, spent the weekend sleeping and doing stuff around the house. Today was my first "work day" in two weeks, but as usual after a vacation, the first day's work is email. Tomorrow I'm out of excuses. I mean, I can waste a few hours on email, and there's someone at the Grotto I'm going to meet with, but I can't really justify spending less than a couple of hours on my book. I've got my new realizations from my road trip, still very exciting, but I can't just sit around admiring them. I've got to write, you know? Even if it's just new outlining or deep notetaking on those insights, it's still sitting down with no immediate audience, no quick gratification, and writing.

There's a passage in that humor book Will and I are writing, Million Dollar Ideas, when Johnny, trying to write a screenplay on his own for the first time without the insane enthusiasm of his collaborator, has a terrible realization: "No matter how good the script was, he couldn’t ignore one inescapable fact: He wasn’t having any fun. Even when he told himself it didn’t matter a damn whether the rest of the world was ready for his ideas or not, he just didn’t enjoy it. Who could have ever foreseen such a thing? Who could have thought that writing would ever feel like work?"

Sigh.

Remind me again why Sisyphus is a lucky bastard and pushing that rock for eternity is the best thing he could be doing?

Another Sunday

2008-08-03T08:00:00.000-07:00

While I continue to alternate Big Revelations and Big Obstacles on my non-fiction book, my humor work with Will just keeps rolling along. If I could make a living at that I might not even write non-fiction, but maybe it's just as well, because people keep telling me that this or that non-fiction book has been truly valuable to them. Maybe this is like a Higher Power thing: can't sell the silly stuff so I have to keep working hard at the heavier stuff. There's probably a sense to all this that I'll appreciate someday.

Actually, Will and I have finished both books already and are just uploading what we've done. But we're also doing some rewriting on both of them, a lot of it guided by the response we've gotten from our on-line readers, that isn't showing up in the Blogspot versions. Million Dollar Ideas we're giving a pretty heavy reworking in the first seven chapters to make it more novelistic and less episodic. And apart from a few hair-pulling moments, it's just a hell of a lot of fun to do. It makes me very happy whenever someone likes it, especially when they leave a comment on the page.

A week ago we uploaded "Ed and Johnny Hit the Skids," Chapter 6 (and one of the most fun to write) of the above-named Ideas. Today, "Will and Splendid Man's Double Date," Episode 3 of My Pal Splendid Man, just hit the web—and if there is such a thing as an "important" chapter in that book, this is it. This is where the big subtext of the book, which we just barely, barely hinted at in the first two installments, begins to come out. Note that subtle but revealing wording. It comes out.

Hope you get a chance to check them out.

The Haunting

2008-08-02T14:47:00.000-07:00

This is the phase of every book that I call the Haunting. Actually, I've never called it that, I just all of a sudden thought of it. But it fits. It's when everywhere I go, everything I see, reminds me of the book. Even when I'm not writing it, even when I'm strenuously avoiding it, I find myself trying to connect every experience to it. I would say that's a good omen for actually getting it written except I'm afraid of jinxing it.

What the book's haunting now is Ojai. My son and his mom flew to San Diego to meet me for half of the comic book convention and we spent a few days driving back to SF together. My first visit to Ojai, which Jennie's been wanting me to see for years. It's my kind of place, all right: hill-nestled oak valley, hot dry summer, white stucco, Spanish revival buildings, Arts and Crafts furniture, a main street colonnade, working fountains, outdoor dining, orange groves, ancient pepper trees, old Hollywood connections. My personal heaven, right this moment, would be Ojai with a gift certificate at Hacienda Antiques. But what put me in mind of the book was the role Ojai played in the history of 20th Century spirituality.

The Theosophical Society was a Victorian "spiritualist" group, one of those séance-and-medium deals, a lot of clairvoyants with huge beards and black-garbed ladies with scary gleams in their eyes, but one that opened up to an interest in Buddhism and Hinduism before such things were fashionable in America and England. They were a weird bunch, mixing valuable scholarship and social work with a cultish belief in the imminent coming of the World Teacher, the new incarnation of the Christ. Then, in 1909, one of their leaders discovered a beautiful, dreamy, gazelle-eyed, 13-year-old Indian boy named Jiddu Krishnamurti and declared that this was Him for whom they waited. The Theosophists persuaded the boy's father to allow them to adopt both him and his younger brother, and for the next thirteen years Jiddu was raised to become the new Christ.

Part of the job of the World Teacher turned out to be lecture tours. In 1922, needing rest after an exhausting world circuit, concluding with a long voyage from Sydney to Los Angeles in the close company of his Theosophical handlers, Jiddu was allowed a little R&R in a cottage in a secluded California valley—Ojai—owned by one of his followers. His handlers mostly left him alone, and in the company of his brother and some Ojai neighbors and a few lower-level Theosophists more inclined to honor than indoctrinate him, he began to see things in a new way. He experienced the first of a series of spiritual crises that would eventually lead him to break from the Society and deny that he was any sort of Christ. He was no more, he realized, than a man with the opportunity, the knowledge, and the temperament to bring the philosophical insights of Hinduism and Buddhism to Western awareness in a way that was relevant to the modern world. He rejected organized religion as a whole, even the Hindu guru tradition, and gave his life to teaching an ethical and personalized spirituality that he hoped might lead to individual freedom and universal peace. "Truth is a pathless land," he said. The marriage of Eastern philosophy and Western individualism that underlies so much of modern spirituality and psychology was shaped more by him than any other teacher.

Krishnamurti lived in Ojai until he died in 1986 at the age of 90, and around him the town grew into an artistic and spiritual center. It's still full of spas, art galleries, lecture facilities, and philosophical foundations, not to mention a lot of shops selling those big pink crystals and the rest of what I think of as the goofier accesories of individualized cosmology. Looking at all this in my current haunted state, I started lining up Krishnamurti's story next to the story of The Undressing of America. While the Theosophists were preparing the world for The Coming, a wave of natural-health gurus were seizing the American imagination, and just as young Jiddu was being drafted for his holy role, Bernarr Macfadden reached the first peak of his fame. Krishnamurti began to rethink his destiny during the same years Macfadden rode True Story and its tabloid children to a new kind of power and influence. And as Macfadden began to behave more weirdly, finally throwing away his own empire, Krishnamurti was coming into his own as a teacher.

Suddenly some patterns started to emerge, and I had another one of those thrilling "So that's what this story's about!" moments. You have the messianic zeal of the early 20th Century, with all these charismatic eccentrics saying, "I have the Truth! Follow me and be saved!" Then the frightened pause of the War, and afterward a huge turn toward individualized, relativistic, experiential journeys, illuminated but not led by teachers who encouraged people to examine their own stories.

Macfadden had always told his readers that listening to their own bodies and their own experiences was the best way to health, but in his earlier days he always drowned that out with his louder, "But of course what you will discover are the Laws of Nature, which I have already mastered." But with the publication of True Story, and its subsequent overshadowing of his health crusade, he became an intermediary for people to tell their own stories and learn by reading their peers'. Soon enough the true-story industry, the confessional culture, could roll along just fine without him, in the same way that Krishnamurti's message spread far beyond him until even his death was just a historical footnote.

Then I started seeing the same wide cultural turn all over the place around the same time. Like how Bill Wilson and his fellow drunks seeking a spiritual solution to alcoholism made their slow, painful break from specifically Christian organizations in the early '30s to create the Twelve Step Program, the "higher power," "God as you understand God," a program that just keeps splitting and spreading and rambling along anarchically in the hands of a bunch of addicts with no leaders. Each story reveals the mechanisms, the rewards, and the costs of the same profound shift in our relationship with self and truth.

I have a lot of those "So that's what this story's about!" moments, to the point that I could probably list twenty things the book is "about." But what starts to happen in this haunted phase is that those abouts all start to hook up and overlap, turning into one big—still probably too big, but at least comprehensible—story. Which reminds me that there may be a real reason to delay and procrastinate on writing the thing. It may still need something I haven't found yet. Like a trip to Ojai.

Free Hugs

2008-08-02T02:03:00.000-07:00

I discovered a new cultural phenomenon at Comic Con that I find really sweet: the Free Hugs Campaign. You probably already know about it, because it's been on Oprah and all, but it was new to me. I understand it had a presence at last year's Comic Con, but not big enough that I could see it through the rest of the visual clutter. This time it was unmistakable: dozens of people, mostly teenage girls, some guys, a few grown-ups, even one kid about seven, holding hand-made "Free Hugs" signs, in some cases waving them enthusiastically at passers by. And they delivered, too, if anyone approached them with arms spread. One young woman who saw me looking at her sign started beckoning me over and grinning and waving her cardboard offering frantically as if giving me a hug would be the most gratifying moment of her day. (I just waved and smiled.)

My aging peers knew nothing about this, nor did my teenage son. I checked with an online friend, a teenage fantasy writer in London who seems quite plugged in to each emerging form of global nerd culture, and she hadn't heard of it either, but she did know how to Google it. It's a genuine grassroots movement, and it's really as simple as it sounds. A few years ago, a guy named Juan Mann (such a name for a global grassroots humanist!), feeling lonely and depressed, started walking around Sydney with a Free Hugs sign. Most people ignored him or made fun of him, but a few availed themselves of his hugs and said they felt better for it. Pretty soon other people were jumping into it, enough that the Sydney city government felt compelled to ban it. Governments don't like large numbers of people doing the unexpected. Petitions were signed, letters were sent, and the government rescinded the ban. Meanwhile, a local rock band, the Sick Puppies, built a music video around footage of Juan dispensing his hugs, and they put it on YouTube. As we say these days, it went viral. And global.

The idea's very simple: People like hugs. If we are happy we like to share it. If we are hurting or lonely we are soothed by contact with someone else. So hugging is good for both givers and receivers, and what's good for both is good for us all. The knowledge that one is participating in a worldwide generational movement, one that even compelled change from an overreactive government, gives it a greater power.

I doubt that it will be any sort of transformational movement, or even that it will be still be with us in a few more years. As sweet as hugs are, there's a quality of self-conscious performance to the signs and the ritual that will probably exhaust people pretty soon. My friend in London defended the idea to me as more than the "fad" I had called it, but then added, "On the other hand, I really doubt I'd walk up to some random stranger and hug them, free hugs sign or not." But still, it's a nice reminder that people can and will push through the inhibitions that usually circumscribe our actions. We really can risk offering affection, risk receiving affection, and risk having our offer ignored. We can even escape the boundaries implicit in that word "stranger."

It's another form of public undressing, mutual undressing—and like so much I've been noticing lately, it's essential to this book I'm writing. If I get it right, what The Undressing of America should portray is the triumph of the the modern Self in the 20th Century. The True Story revolution, as I keep thinking of it, was all about the glorification of our self-directed, self-defined, over-specialized, over-dramatized Individual, fascinated with its own life story. But as our Selves have grown bigger and more idiosyncratic and further apart, we have continued to yearn for contact with others. More than ever, in fact, because the Self is a very lonely place. The other part of this story—also expressed through the tragedy of Bernarr and Mary Macfadden, also demonstrated by the urgent chatter of the tabloids and the confessionals—is how we have sought to connect with another despite the burdens of our towering, baroque, and most breakable Selves.

(Photo by Anime Banzai.)

Full-Frontal Nerdity

2008-07-31T23:07:00.001-07:00

I realize I kind of blew my anecdote about the guy at Comic Con who compared the prices of Little Nemo collections and call girls. I think he came off as crude, indulging in some sort of locker-room bonding. I didn't capture his fragility and cautious neediness. He was an older Chinese man, thin and small-boned, at once timid and abrupt, who first avoided eye contact and then held it (through very thick glasses) with a slightly unnerving determination. His voice was soft, with one of those accents that play unexpected tricks with rhythm and emphasis. Not "CALL girl" but "call-GIRL."

At first he seemed to view my friends and me as nothing but obstacles to be shooed so he could get to the Nemo volume, but instantly he made what I've come to think of as the Nerd Shift: Sensing that the person next to him might be open to listening to his interior monologue, might even turn out to be a kindred spirit, he pounces on the opening. From my Comic Con experience, I'd even guess that his "Can I get to that?" or whatever it was he said, oddly, instead of "Excuse me," was an opening to start a conversation. I know it's even possible that he had no interest in Little Nemo at all, and that any $120 book would have done to open a conversation about call-GIRLs. Because it did seem to be the call-GIRLs he was hungry to talk about, the passion he wanted validated by other men at the Con.

Earlier the same day I'd experienced another Nerd Shift, though one not quite as disorienting. While my friend Joe was waiting to pay for some old comics, I found myself glancing over a wall full of autographed 8x10" glossies. It was a shot of Adam West as Batman, grimacing and lifting a smoking bomb over his head, that caught my eye, but from there I moved on to see what other ghosts of my childhood were enshrined. Suddenly I heard someone next to me saying, "I can't believe he's gone." At that moment I was looking at a picture of Sebastian Cabot from Family Affair, so in fact I had no trouble believing he was gone—but then I realized that my neighbor, a 30-ish, heavy-set fellow laden with rolled-up posters sticking out of plastic bags, was talking about the portrait next to Cabot's. It was of a younger, hipper actor I didn't recognize, wearing some kind of modern science-fiction costume.

"I didn't know he'd died," I said. I do that a lot, letting myself be led into conversation where I'm totally at sea. Partly from excessive politeness, but partly because I learn a lot that way. And I learned that this actor had died suddenly in his early forties, and that another actor from the same show had also died recently. Then, as if sensing that my interest was more polite than genuine, my new acquaintance asked, "Do you watch Babylon 5?" I admitted that I did not, but it was sad that those men had been cut down so young. "Yeah," he said, and walked away.

This wasn't rudeness. It's the ethos of the place, the way of the Con. Most Con-goers, I suspect, are there to walk the endless aisles, look at displays, see people in costumes, pick up free stuff, hope to catch a glimpse of a TV star, pick up some buzz about the next Superman movie or Lost season. But the true nerds, the heart of the whole show, are there for one, or both, of two clear goals: to acquire more objects for their collections and to find other people who share their ruling passions. That's what my son did, when he flew down to spend the last two days there with me, hunting for vinyl Godzilla toys and using the shopping process to open conversations with dealers and fellow customers who knew them as well as he does. "What do you think of the new six-inch Bandai Hedorah?" Or whatever the hell he was asking.

It's what I used to do, when I was deep in the comics world. My social skills are more nuanced, so I could juggle a much wider range of conversational topics before making my own, much more subtle, Nerd Shift. Or maybe it's just my compulsion to be liked that led me to validate other people's obsessions first ("How about those Padres?") before leading them to what I really wanted to talk about: like DC western comics from the '50s in which Carmine Infantino inked his own pencils.

Walking through the Con is like trying to get through the Ginza at rush hour, and in response I usually develop a Japanese-style self-containment. Don't stop, don't stare, don't make eye contact, don't make any wild arm movements. But sometimes I like to see the people I'm passing. Meet their eyes, even, and try to catch a glimpse of who that is inside the t-shirt reading "I Want to Believe" or "Why So Serious?" or "Property of Dharma Initiative" or "Talk Nerdy to Me." Typically, when I make eye contact, there will be an instant in which it is returned, usually with a hint of a question—who are you, are you going to speak to me, do I know you, should I know you? And then it will shrink away, the eyes narrowing a little with a soft pain, shifting to the side.

Like me, these are shy people who want to make contact. But where just any small talk might be pleasant elsewhere, it's not enough at the Con. For four and a half days at the Con, where a fellow worshiper of nearly every pop-culture fetish can be found, it is possible and essential to seek people who will share our obsessions and our vast bodies of esoteric knowledge. There is no time to waste with people who only want to engage in pleasant small talk when there is someone else out there, perhaps in the very next aisle, who will instantly be able to reflect back our own devotion to Babylon 5, Carmine Infantino, Godzilla. Even the sad collecting of call-GIRLs. For the pop-culture geek, for the collector or obsessive whose emotions are deeply entwined with a body of bigger-than-life characters and vivid iconography, this is human contact at its most intense. That's why packs of fans will swoop by talking so loudly and so quickly and so all at once. They're riding the crest of a high.

That's why dressing up at the Con is also undressing. Shedding the disguise of shorts and t-shirts that says, "I'm pretty much like the rest of them," and instead standing naked as a lover of Pirates of the Caribbean or Shrek or Cowboy Bebop. Sure, it's about showing off and attracting mass attention too, but the real satisfaction is connecting in an instant, at a glance, across a room with people who get exactly why we are Jedis, Klingons, samurai, vampires, wizards, Spartan IIs, Jokers, Harley Quinns. This is the way we live now: specializing, self-identifying, collecting, acquiring, branding, niching—and then yearning for reconnection.

(Photo by Kevin Baird.)

The Value of Books

2008-07-25T02:09:00.000-07:00

Okay, here's a Comic Con story for you. I'm in the Bud Plant Books booth with my friends Joe and David, looking at all the gorgeous new reprints of early newspaper comics that have come out in the past couple of years. I reach for the magnificent Little Nemo in Slumberland—So Many Splendid Sundays, edited by Peter Maresca, reproducing some of the finest works of Winsor McCay, one of the true artistic visionaries of the comic strip form. When between me and the book appears this little guy saying, "Can I get to that?" Asian guy, pushing 60, a bit down at the heel, with a slightly odd, sort of abrupt manner and a slight accent. He reaches for this elegant book, but his hand stops just shy of it...

...and he turns to me and Joe and David and says, "I almost bought this. But 120 dollars!" "Yeah," I say, "that's an expensive book." "120 dollars!" he says excitedly. "That's what you pay for a call girl! For a one-night stand!"

My first thought is that he's saying how ridiculous to pay that much for a book when the same amount will buy you a session with a prostitute. (Actually, that's my second thought. My first thought is, "You can still hire a call girl for 120 bucks?") About all I can think to say it, "Yeah. But...after you buy this, you still have the book." And he grins and makes a gesture in the air like a puff of smoke. "But a call girl," he says, "you forget!"

Then I realize what he's saying is what a great entertainment value a book is. Or at least I think that's what he's saying. And I think that in that brief exchange lay more than you probably want to know about men, about collectors, about pop-culture geeks, about the consumer society, and about the San Diego Comic Con.

I-5 Idea

2008-07-23T10:04:00.000-07:00

I was driving down Highway 5 yesterday and I had a great idea for a book. A book that I really felt I must write. I'm not going to tell you what it is yet, because sometimes great ideas start feeling kind of thin after a week or so and then I have to keep explaining why I'm not writing that great idea I was spouting off about. But it got my blood pumping, which is good, and it also, even better, shed a bright light on the theme of Undressing. Basically it has to do with the 20th Century cult of the Self, and how we're still wrestling with that, still trying to valorize it and get out from under it at the same time. Which is kind of the heart of Bernarr Macfadden's life story and the True Story revolution. But more on that later.

I love that drive, from the time I turn off 101 at Gilroy until the freeway starts mounting up the hill around Lebec. Coffee and fruit-shopping at Case de Fruta, then past the rock towers at Pacheco Pass and down into the great alluvial horizonless flats. The Valley is just so flat, and so vast, and so unexpectedly changeable in the shifting light of afternoon. A hamburger at Harris Ranch, where the prosperous old farmers and ranchers eat with their families, the success stories of the old Valley. It's hot and the shade of the trees around the parking lot is dense, and when a breeze shifts to the south the air is sweet with the smell of cow shit. Then south again, always straight, straight south, to watch the sunset over the low hills from the hot metal chairs in front of the Starbucks at the truck stop in Buttonwillow, huge semis shifting in my ears as they build up momentum to get back on 5. The entire life of the highway is that for all of us, shifting up to climb back onto and keep with the speed, shifting down and drifting right to get off at its rare designated spots for food, coffee, toilets. Life is simple on the highway. Linear.

I've had a lot of good ideas driving up and down 5. Some of them hold up, too, turn into good work. That linear simplicity is part of it. So's the openness of the sky, I'll bet. But I think I'm feeling some kind of return to my core, too. I grew up in the Santa Clara Valley, Los Gatos and Gilroy, back before those towns were as big and urbane as they are now. Different from the Central Valley—you could see hills on both sides of Gilroy—but far more like it than San Francisco, where I live now. SF is lovely for its hills and romantic for its fog, but neither suits me at that native level that the flat hazy heat does. I'm not leaving SF any time soon: my kid's school, friends, Grotto, neighborhoods I can walk to and buy good coffee and have good conversations in. But something happens to my body when I'm in flip-flops and a t-shirt in 95 degree heat and I'm looking past row crops and orchards to yellow-grass hills. It calms down. And then my mind starts getting to fundamentals.

The Big Con

2008-07-21T17:48:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow morning I'm driving to San Diego to attend Comic Con International. This will be my 25th straight year there. The first time I was in my mid-20s, my first book had just come out, and I was researching my second, a history of '60s comics. I was also a rabid young comics fan, thrilled at the new directions the medium was taking in the '80s. Over the subsequent years I went back as an upstart comics writer networking like crazy, as one of the most prominent writers in the business locked into one signing or panel after another, as a burned-out comics writer bitching and moaning about the business, as a former comics writer skirting along the edges, and most recently as a comics historian honored by a small core of long-time fans but unknown to all the new fans in the field. And in the last couple of years I've started to meet young writers and artists who wanted to shake my hand because they'd "grown up on your comics, Mr. Jones."

I've gone there umarried, married but no kid, with a baby, with a little kid who wanted to look at toys, in various states of marital break-up and reconciliation; this year I'll be there with a 15-year-old son. I've been there too broke to buy the comics I wanted, able to buy huge stacks of the things, loaded with cash but not wanting anything, and broke again.

I've seen the convention change too, from a few thousand fans—mostly actual comics fans, and of the old nerdy school of hard-core collectors before comics got cool—in the dumpy old downtown convention to 120,000 people filling and overfilling the jet-hangar-sized center on the harbor. I've seen comics fans and creators become hipper, slimmer, more attractive, more ethnically varied, and more likely to be female, as I've seen the comics themselves pushed to the edges of the convention by the movies, TV shows, cartoons, video games, and collectible toys that have become the heart of the convention. I've seen the Klingons, Imperial Storm Troopers, superheroes, and other costumed oddballs come back every year but every year vanish deeper into the crowds of families in t-shirts and shorts. I've seen my generation of young turks become middle-aged veterans, seen the middle-aged veterans I admired become old-timers, seen the old-timers of another day become fewer and fewer.

I can chart the course of half my life by just recalling each of those 25 sets of four days in the summer in San Diego. And this year, as most years, I go there in an interesting place, my career unfixed, opportunities open and closing like Venus fly-trap lips. I'm pushing these on-line humor books, wrestling with the nonfiction book that's given me the most trouble of any project in my life, and talking up the screenplay I've written about the early days of the comics business, which I know is a good piece of work—but which I'll also have to admit is trapped in a legal and financial dispute of the producer's.

I never know how I'll feel about any of this as I talk to other writers there or as I think about it on the way home. I never know who I'll meet, either, because as the Con grows amoeba-like it slurps up more and more chunks of the culture outside it. I've just learned that several of my "real novelist" acquaintances will be there this year.

So I'm going to let my Sisyphean obligation roll to the bottom of the hill and sit there for a week. This is no time to let my view of life be blocked by a big rock. I'm going to let my head empty out in the liminal state of the long I-5 drive. Then I'll plunge in, eyes and ears open, and find out who I am this year.

Georgia on My Blog

2008-07-20T14:16:00.000-07:00

This font is Georgia, at "large" size. Is this pretty comfortable to read? The severity of Times gave my words sort of an aloof quality, I thought, and Trebuchet was so inelegant. Of course, there are other options I haven't played with: Arial, Lucida Grande, Verdana. But I'd like to give Georgia a good try first and hear what you think. I do think it's very important that I work these things out, for the sake of effective communication. I mean, it's not like I'm...wasting time...or anything...

Where the Blue of the Blog Meets the White of the Text

2008-07-20T12:49:00.000-07:00

This azure background is a little easier on the eyes than the black one, don't you think? Let me know if it's still hard to read and you think I should switch to something even lighter...

Friends of Will and Gerry

2008-07-20T11:31:00.001-07:00

Here's a direct assault on my problems with isolation: a website for uploading short fiction and humor by other writers I've talked with in the process of promoting the new on-line humor books I'm writing with Will Jacobs. It's fun—like being a magazine editor with none of the headaches—and it gives me that sense of writing as a participatory act that I've been craving. I know one of the first two contributors through the Writers Grotto—Joe Quirk, who writes real science in a very funny way—and the other through the comic book business—Mindy Newell, who brought a human (and feminist) quality to Wonder Woman and Catwoman that those characters have rarely enjoyed. Next week I should be adding something from Chris Wright, an English humorist I know only through the on-line community. Pretty interesting stuff for an old guy like me who wrote his first few books with a typewriter and a few thousand sheets of Co-Rec-Type.

Meanwhile, I've also made an addition the most inspired excuse for procrastination I've ever come up with: Million Dollar Ideas—The Photonovel. While claiming to be "promoting" my new humor book I've actually given myself a pretext for spending hours on line collecting cool pictures of Hollywood in the '40s instead of writing. I'd love it if you'd check it out and make comments...so I can rationalize doing the next chapter...

Undressing

2008-07-19T01:12:00.000-07:00

Somebody just pointed out the obvious to me: that in writing about this Undressing of America I'm also undressing myself. Shedding the cloak of competence that writers reflexively draw around themselves. Tom Barbash once read a short story to a bunch of us at the Grotto with a writer for a protagonist, a depressed writer whose wife has just left him. A friend asks him how his book is coming and he answers something like, "The research is taking a little longer than I expected but it's coming together well." And we all laughed because we knew writerly bullshit when we heard it. I always want to look like I know what I'm doing, more so when I'm having a hard time. So this is unnerving for me, this undressing—but exciting too, because it's new turf. I get to be the hero of my own True Story article. "My Secret Shame...Procrastination!"

Collaboration

2008-07-18T11:48:00.000-07:00

I think one reason I'm having trouble surrendering myself to this book is that I'm just burned out on the loneliness of the writing life. When I was a kid I was really isolated and had a lot of social anxiety, so pulling into myself and making things up was a great comfort. This, obviously, had a great deal to do with my decision to devote my life to writing. I climbed out of my hole in my early twenties, and as part of that started collaborating with another young writer, Will Jacobs, on humor books, light mysteries, fan-boy non-fiction and comic books. That was a true joy: We'd spend days at each other's houses, brainstorm and plot together, go off and write separate chunks and pass them back and forth, and read a lot of our stuff to our friends. Books got written, but it seemed to happen through play. And when I began to move back to solo writing, the doors I'd opened with Will led me into other collaborative work: comic books, where most of my artists and editors wanted to be real creative partners, and screenplays for hire, where regular meetings with eager young development execs punctuated the stretches of solitary work.

At first it was a relief when I started carving out time to write my own books. Days of uninterrupted thought! The freedom to make huge structural changes without having to persuade an editor! I even took some comfort in retreating back to the solitude that had gotten me through anxious times as a kid. And even then there continued to be collaborative efforts. In researching Killing Monsters I did storytelling workshops with kids in classrooms, about as far from a quiet, lonely experience as I could get. Then, before I'd even started the writing in earnest, I began getting invitations to speak at conferences on media and child development, and I found myself part of a sprawling international conversation. Men of Tomorrow required a tremendous amount of face-to-face interviewing and regular email conversations with other comics historians. Big parts of that book felt like massive multi-player collaborations.

But The Undressing of America, set further in the past (the heart of the story is the 1920s, and the principals were nearly all dead by the end of the '50s), allows for a great deal less interviewing. Although there are other students of the tabloids, the confessional magazines, and old health crusades, there is no vibrant subculture constantly arguing the details. There's a lot of library research, and I do like library research—but dear God! To fly to New York and walk through midtown and spend the day in that windowless room with those effing microfilm machines (whrrr—klak—whrrr—klak) when I could be out drinking coffee with my snappy Manhattan friends or looking at the spring light flashing on the Empire State Building? Whose idea was that?

Fellow writers are my greatest comfort. Being able to talk about all this with my pals at the Writers Grotto has kept me sane and gotten me through some of the worst resistance on the book. But here's a perverse twist: When I'm having trouble with the writing, I find it hard to show up at the Grotto. Or at least be open about what I'm going through. Part of it's that I don't want to be the whiner in the room. And part of it, as my friend Jennine Lanouette helped me see recently, is that I punish myself by isolating. I get down on myself, feel like other people don't want to hear about this shit, tell myself I'm better off just staying home and working at the kitchen table where at least I have my dog to keep me company, and so I hold myself in that juvenile space where I resent the book and resist entering it. (I'm at my kitchen table, not the Grotto, as I write this.) It's easiest for me to be at the Grotto when I'm washing dishes after a party or leading a meeting of the goal-support group some of us have formed. Collaborative efforts again.

No shock, then, that I seized on the chance to start collaborating with Will on humor again. Or that I find it easier to blog about writing my book, with the payoff of quick comments from other people, or at least being able to imagine readers out there the instant I hit "Publish Post." And I make comments on other people's blogs, post other writers' humor pieces on my Friends of Will and Gerry blog, and...collaborate with the blogosphere.

So here's the big thing for me: For 35 years I've been running on the unexamined assumption that I'm basically a loner who should be happiest when he's producing personal work in solitude. In fact, I think I'm a lover of people and a natural collaborator with some moderate social phobias who got set on the wrong path when my mom—in her alcohol-muddied anxieties—pulled me out of the world at a crucial moment. And who has been able to ignore that disconnect because most of my writing career has, in fact, been far from solitary. The idea that I would someday be a Real Writer (which in my mind has meant the generation of work from some lonely internal singularity) has sat there like a vision of manifest destiny. But really: It ain't me.

This is a good book I'm writing, and I believe that the people I'm writing about deserve to have their stories told. I think it will add something to our understanding of how we as a culture got where we are. And suddenly I realize I'm doing it a disservice by making it "my book." How do I get it out of my head? How do I make it into a collaboration? And with whom?

The anonymous writer

2008-07-17T18:20:00.000-07:00

One thing I wrote about when I started this blog was that most of my professional writing so far has spared me a lot of critical scrutiny as a writer. I've sold my non-fiction mainly on my knowledge of the subject matter, thus taking the spotlight off the writing itself. Writing comic books I can hide behind artists and established characters. But with this book, about subjects that few people are aware of, I'm really forced to present myself as a "writer," to succeed or fail on my ability to capture and hold readers through my narrative. This is the first book I've sold because an editor wanted to work with me and my literary voice as opposed to a subject matter.

That led me to think that my challenge here was to deliver a powerful enough voice and authorial presence to justify the book. To put me at the center of the process, demanding attention as me and then delivering a strong enough authorial presence to justify the attention. But now I'm starting to wonder if I don't have it backwards.

My thinking's been shifting since I spent the past weekend at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Friday night I saw Harold Lloyd's The Kid Brother. Saturday it was William Desmond Taylor's Soul of Youth, René Clair's Les Deux Timides, Carl Maria von Dreyer's Mikäel, and Paul Leni's The Man Who Laughs, with Conrad Veidt. Then four more on Sunday: Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed, Coleen Moore in Her Wild Oat, Teinosuke Kinugasa's Jujiro, and the King Vidor/Marion Davies/Marie Dressler The Patsy. Movies ranging from the good to the incomparable, with superb live music and a Castro Theater full of joyous worshippers. The effect of the whole was transcendent.

The emphasis of the introductory speeches and the program notes was almost entirely on the directors and actors, with occasional mentions of cinematographers, producers, and studios. Almost never was a writer mentioned, and yet silent movies had writers. Between the desire of Universal Pictures executives to adapt Victor Hugo's L'Homme Qui Rit and the astonishing on-film work of Paul Leni and Conrad Veidt lay a writing process, no doubt hard and chaotic and hair-pullingly fraught, during which at least four scenarists had to chop a sprawling, wordy, twelve-volume novel down to about a hundred pages of visual continuity. Events had to be cut, rearranged, stripped down, and invented. Image and movement had to be substituted for conversations and exposition. Characters had to be sharpened to points of light. And then, to convey the information that only words could carry, a fifth writer was brought in to script the intertitles, in each of which a transition had to be carried or a backstory evoked in a third as many words as a typical Hugo sentence. A great silent movie was also, usually, a writerly triumph.

But of the five writers on The Man Who Laughs, I'd heard of none of them. And I know a fair amount about old Hollywood, too. Only one of the five, whose name I can't remember now, got credit on screen.

Sometimes you'll hear a spiritual writer speak of writing not for personal glory but for God. Those silent movie writers were doing that, in a sense, although the gods they were giving expression to were Paul Leni and Conrad Veidt and Olga Baclanova and "Uncle Carl" Laemmle's Universal Picture Corp. Their motives were scarcely holy, of course, but what they asked of their talents was the same: They turned their writing not toward expressing themselves or calling attention to themselves but toward making a larger project work. They directed their art through others because it was through those others, those actors, those crew people, that the story would be revealed.

All of which puts my own past work in perspective. Whether I was subsumed in a collaboration with cartoonists or serving as the vessel for some non-fiction subject matter to find its way to the readers interested in it, my relative anonymity was a gift to the project. I was far more useful leading the readers attention away from me instead of toward me. So now I'm thinking that even in this book, in which the author and his skills and his voice are so much more important than in past work, I might still do best to make sure that the process is not about me. Maybe the best thing I can do is forget not only about the readers' eyes on me. Let go of both the fear of not living up to critical expectations and the hope of receiving critical accolades. Be just a conduit for the story and for the immortality of the people I write about.

And what do you think of THIS font?

2008-07-14T19:30:00.000-07:00

This is Times in "large." Seems easier to read without looking so round and naive...

Unexpected interview

2008-07-11T13:49:00.000-07:00

A blogger asked for an email interview with me about the humorous fiction I've been serializing on line. I've done a million interviews before, but they've all been about finished, published work and I have a sort of mental template for them. Being asked about work in progress, work I'm not even sure how to market yet, sent my thoughts into some new places. I also answered the questions very quickly, late at night, so there was no sculpting going on. It sounds peculiar, but reading the interview myself just now made me think about some things I feel like I've never thought about before--some of them about the paradoxes of finding it so easy to write collaborative humor right now and so difficult to write my customary non-fiction. Anyway, I'd be thrilled if anyone has time to check it out:
http://talkingwithtim.com/wordpress/2008/07/09/gerard-jones-on-his-return-to-comedy/

What do you think of this font?

2008-07-08T12:20:00.000-07:00

I was having a hard time reading my own posts so I thought I should go for a bigger font size. But this one is so big...and there's no size in between, as far as I can figure out. So I thought maybe a different font face would be better, like maybe a Times New Roman would make the bigger font not look so damned big, or a Lucida Grande would make the smaller font clearer. But nothing looks quite right in Preview. So then I started wondering if this white-on-black lettering is just inherently a problem. Like it's always going to be either hard to read or obnoxious-looking. I wanted some variety from my other blog pages, where I always have darker letters on a light background, but variety's not worth it if it's hard to read. Of course, I'm 50 years old, so maybe most of you can read it more easily or you're more used to these dark-background blogs or something.

I'd welcome any comments on this. Because then I could spend time reading your comments and responding to them. I've managed to avoid writing my book for over an hour by messing around with my fonts, but there's a limit to how long I can stretch that out. You know?

But what's the book ABOUT?

2008-07-07T16:26:00.000-07:00

My friend Todd Oppenheimer at the Writers Grotto asked me this recently. Todd and I are in a sort of mutual support group that meets every two weeks to set and compare personal writing goals. "You've been talking about this book for a while," he said, "but you always call it just 'the FSG book.' You've never said what it's about."

I had two reactions to this. My first was, "Screw you, Todd." That's the one I didn't say.

The one I said was, "That's a really good question, Todd. Thanks for asking that." Then I explained that although I was very clear on the subject matter and the central characters of my narrative, I felt I was still in the process of zeroing in on the major points I wanted to make and the specific focus of the story, and so I was still wrestling with issues of timeline, entry point, structure, voice, and point of view. As a result of this, I was still uncertain about my title—I'd gone through True Story, American Madness, and Mad Fortune on the way to The Undressing of America—and so tended to refer to it as simply "the FSG book." But now that Todd led me to think about it, I saw how that vagueness only compounded the problem of writing chapters that I could commit to well enough to send my editor, and how referring to it in terms of the publisher that was waiting for it only kept me locked in thinking of it as an unfulfilled obligation rather than a book unto itself.

So I made a resolution, right there talking to Todd, that I would settle on The Undressing of America as a working title, at least, and refer to it by that. (It helped that I'd already run it by my editor and he liked it.) That's why I chose the name of the book as the name of this blog, so that every time I came here to write about it I would be engaging with the book itself at least nominatively, instead of some new, separate entity like "It Sure Is Hard to Write a Book" or "The Agony of Being Me" or "Out of Sheer Pique." And I told Todd what I knew for sure about what the book was about. Not so fully or so neatly as this, but in essence:

In 1919, a husband and wife team named Bernarr and Mary Macfadden published a magazine that transformed American culture. It was called True Story, and although few remember it now, and cultural historians are inclined to give it a passing nod at best, it became the best-selling and most widely imitated magazine of the 1920s, upended publishers' perceptions of what the public wanted to read, shifted the relationship between media "producer" and "consumer" forever, and discovered a vast new market among young women negotiating a changing moral climate. And it accomplished more than any other enterprise to shatter the culture of Victorian concealment and usher us into a "culture of the explicit," a culture that still shapes our public discourse, in which increasingly frank confessions of our private emotional struggles become essential threads in our social fabric: guides to living, subjects for bonding, moral crucibles, self identifiers, class identifiers, entertainment, titillation, grist for outrage, commodities. True Story's immediate descendants were the tabloids, true crime stories, celebrity gossip rags, "women's issues" magazines, and the mainstreaming of soft-core pornography (and the Macfaddens published all of those in their earliest days). Its longer-term descendants include almost everything we lump under "reality media."

Bernarr and Mary Macfadden themselves had hardly any idea what they were doing. He grew up an abused, neglected, and sickly farm boy in the 19th century Ozarks who discovered body building and turned himself through sheer will and desperation (desperation to be something, to be noticed, to have power over his life, to drive away the illness that take his parents from him as a child) into a paragon of health and strength. He knocked around the carnival circuits of mid-America for years as a strongman and a professional wrestler before he went to the 1893 Chicago world's fair (the "White City" fair) and saw people making a killing on the new "fitness" fad. Over the next decade, Bernarr made a modest success of himself selling exercise gadgets, running health farms for rich hypochondriacs, opening health-food restaurants, and publishing Physical Culture, the first magazine to call attention to body building as a pursuit and a subculture and the first to demonstrate that you could sell a lot of magazines with pictures of nearly naked men and women if you did so to demonstrate exercises. He reached the second tier among health gurus, grinding out book after book on his self-generated ideas for health and happiness, rejecting traditional medicine, and getting himself on the AMA's enemies list

It wasn't the AMA that drove him to the edge of bankruptcy and forced him to flee the country. It was the censors, led by the great "social purifier" himself, Anthony Comstock, who had developed a special enmity for Macfadden. When Physical Culture ran a serialized novel dramatizing the causes and costs of venereal disease, Bernarr was convicted of peddling pornography, and when he fought back he became a cause celebre, an opponent of the early 20th Century equivalent of "abstinence only" sex education, the mad idea that is always held up by cultural conservatives that we would not have any moral or sexual problems if we just never talked about them. In the end, the President himself pardoned him, but the opponents of sexual discussions would not relent, and in 1912 Macfadden fled to England.

There, at the age of forty-five, he met and pursued and married a nineteen-year-old amateur swimming champion named Mary Williamson. He won her by staging a pageant called "Britain's Perfect Woman," promising a glorious tour of England to the winner, knowing full well that his object was to secure a young bride who would bear him heirs, a "Phyical Culture Family" to promote his program for achieving perfect health. Mary herself was a young woman of simple goals, a carpet-mill worker, a Yorkshire lass who just wanted to swim, enjoy the days, and raise a family. She was lonely, too, having been kept house-bound by illness for much of her childhood, and susceptible to a man who seemed to need her every minute, who told her how to live her life, who spoke of the crusade they would lead to restore mankind to health, who was sexually insatiable, who wanted to be her father and lover at once.

The Macfaddens had just begun to build their new life in England when the Great War came. They retreated back to America, back to poverty and trouble. Bernarr tried every trick he could to boost the sales of Physical Culture, to launch a new health farm, to invent a new exercise gadget that would make him rich. Everything backfired. Then Mary had her idea. Physical Culture published letters from Macfadden's followers in which they described their own struggles with illness and triumphant returns to health. Mary help select and edit the letters, and she knew very well that young women like herself would be most interested in those that veered into moral and marital and emotional issues as well. No other twenty-five year old, lower-middle-class woman in the world was in a position to create a new magazine, and perhaps no one else could have imagined True Story. It was an instant success. Within a few years it had turned the Macfaddens into milloinaires and inspired Bernarr to go head-to-head with William Randolph Hearst for mastery of the newsstands.

Then everything began to change. A new figure entered Bernarr's life, an amateur stage magician and crime novelist named Fulton Oursler who began to whisper things in Bernarr's ear that Mary didn't like. Bernarr came to see himself as man's salvation and diverted his resources to a man run for the presidency. And there was the terrible thing that befell the Macfaddens' baby son, thanks to Bernarr's devotion to his own odd health precepts....

By the time I'd reached that point in my quick summary of all this to Todd, he was nodding enthusiastically. "It sounds like a great story," he said. "And it sounds like just the sort of thing you'd do well, like it's right in line with your interests and your strengths." I thanked him for that. It did sound like a compelling book when I described it, and the decisions about what to include and how to present them didn't seem so daunting after all. Then Todd asked, "But what's the 'ah-ha' of the book? What is it that's going to make it stand out, that's going to get you the NPR interviews, the reviews, the attention that a book needs to get anywhere these days?"

And I thought: "Screw you, Todd."

Notice how I try to distract you...

2008-07-07T00:18:00.000-07:00

While I'm taking some deep breaths and getting ready to tell you what The Undressing of America is about, you might want to drop by Million Dollar Ideas to check out the new chapter of the humor novel I'm writing with my old friend Will Jacobs. This is the stuff that comes easily to me: light, goofy, sunny, collaborative. Whatever insights it may give into the nature of creativity or American cultural history it achieves entirely by happenstance, whereas such insights are inherent expectations of this other book...

...which I'll tell you more about very soon...

...really...

So what's this book about, anyway?

2008-07-06T01:42:00.001-07:00

You just had to ask that, didn't you? But, you see, you've cut to the central neurosis of the whole thing...

Leaning in

2008-07-04T00:49:00.000-07:00

Today was Day 1 of the Joy of Sisyphus. That's my new program for writing this book: lean into the boulder, forget about the top of the hill, and enjoy the shoving. Today I would call a modest success. Very modest: almost no measurable rock movement. But a success: I roughed up my hands, cracked my back, raised my heart rate, and enjoyed the straining. In other words, I wrote some words that weren't very good but I actually enjoyed my time in the company of the book and didn't beat myself up about how hard it all is. And if I don't beat myself up for how hard it is, then it isn't actually that hard, is it? Tomorrow I get to take the day off work, set off cheap fireworks with my son, and think about how hard it wasn't.

But here's something I just realized: I keep not telling you what this book is about. For nearly a week I've been telling myself that that would be my "next post." Obviously trying as hard as I can to stay on the surface of the rock and not think about how big and heavy the damned thing is.

Sisyphus rocks

2008-07-01T23:44:00.000-07:00

A Facebook friend was comparing herself to Sisyphus this morning, which got me thinking about the old stone-roller's dilemma. You know the myth: the arrogant king whom the gods punished by making him roll a huge stone to the top of a hill, only to have it slip away from him right at the crest and roll all the way back to the bottom every time. Anyone who's ever tried to write a book can identify. I've thought about old Sis a few times myself while pushing The Undressing of America toward completion.

But today something new occurred to me. What turns Sisyphus's task into torture? The disappointment and frustration of seeing the rock roll back down the hills, right? So his problem is the expectation that one of these times, maybe this time, he's actually going to get it to the top. But what if he changes his attitude? What if Sisyphus says to himself, "Okay. This is what I'm doing with my eternal life. This is who I am. I push a rock." Maybe then he could start to enjoy it. You know: fresh air, exercise, the feel of the rough stone against his palms, the smell of the loam as the boulder's weight breaks the soil beneath it, the regular break when the rock rolls back down, the pleasant walk to the bottom to start over again. And no worries about what he's going to do next. After all, it's not the destination that counts, right? It's the journey.

So starting tomorrow, I'm reinterpreting the Sisyphean challenge of writing my book. After all, as Olympian punishments go, this one's pretty sweet. I'm not a bodiless shade drifting through a lightless limbo. I'm not being tantalized by food that's snatched away. I get to wake up every morning and push my rock, and if I don't get all worked up over how it's all supposed to come out, what's not to like? If Sisyphus has learned any wisdom and humility in all those centuries in Tantalus, I'll bet he's pretty grateful to the gods for the assignment. Am I supposed to rage against the job they've given me? What's that but arrogance?

I almost forgot...

2008-06-29T21:33:00.000-07:00

If you're one of those readers who switched over here from my other blog, The Second Act, I should let you know that I haven't completely shut the old place down. I'm just laying off the political and cinematic ramblings while I switch to this book. I'm still posting miscellaneous stuff over there, like snippets of my son's new stop-motion movies and news about my new humor books. Just thought I should let you know. In case you don't have enough excuses of your own not to get back to work.

The glamor of insanity

2008-06-26T08:00:00.000-07:00

There are two ways for me to be as I write my book: I can go to my office at the Writers Grotto, open my laptop, type a sentence, then type another one, then type another one, noticing that some of them are good and some of them of them are bad but remembering that I can go back and make the bad ones better, and keep doing that until I'm exhausted. Then I can do it again for a bunch of other days until I have a book. I can work, in other words. Like a guy with a job. Like my dad.

Or I can open my laptop and stare at it and slam it closed and get up and pace around and ask myself why the hell I can't come up with a good enough opening sentence. I can take a long walk with my eyes on the sidewalk trying to cut to the theme at the heart of the book. I can screw around on my Facebook page or burn a movie from my DVR to a DVD or try to read a Patricia Highsmith novel without actually comprehending any of the sentences I'm looking at or go back to bed for "just a few minutes" while I wait for more clarity about what I'm going to write today. In short, I can get nothing done for days while I hunger for the moment of galvanic insight or self-loathing fury or shallow-breathed, tunnel-vision terror ("My editor hates me! My career's about to end!") that will force me, just force me, through the walls of my resistance and send me exploding through the book with the unstoppable momentum of passion.

Which would be my mom's choice. Not that she ever really lived it. She went to work every Monday morning through every Friday afternoon too. But she hated it, and she drank herself to sleep every night until she returned, and she was constantly looking for that new approach, that new specialty, that new way of approaching the whole thing that would inspire her to love it. She wrestled for years with the question of what to do with her life before economic logic and sheer resignation drove her to teach high school. Tried writing for a while, before her insecurities beat her. Always loved artists and their stories of struggle. And never quite trusted the ability of so many people (like my dad) just to keep plugging until the job was done.

The downside to such madness is pretty obvious: not much work gets done. Oh, but what an upside! Life is so much more entertaining in the throes of artistic agony! When do you think I feel more alive, when I spend the night wrestling with demons and angels or when I'm sitting at a desk typing? When am I more fascinating to others, when I'm pouring out the fear and anger and self-loathing that turns every day on this book into a psychological drama or when I'm closing my door and saying, "I gotta work, I'll be out at five"?

I'm sure you can understand, then, why I choose the glamor of tormenting myself over my book to the ordinariness of writing it. But there's a problem with that kind of glamor: it looks pretty tawdry once the game's been exposed. I mean, how do I sustain the charisma of the tormented writer after I've outed myself as a drama junkie? What the payoff for all my effort then, except for a few blog entries?

So the only real reward left is the book. Just showing up and getting it done, like a regular job. Like my dad. God damn it.

But I know that's ridiculous

2008-06-24T00:59:00.000-07:00

Of course I know that all the crippling expectations I wrote about yesterday are entirely in my head. I can pull any non-fiction book I like from the shelf right next to me—Neal Gabler's A Kingdom of Their Own, Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses, Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces, Jason Roberts's A Sense of the World, anything—and it will be full of sentences that serve to move the story forward and explain the characters' world and are not fussed over and sweated over until they are adequately "literary." When a writer does try for such relentless literarity—say, Nick Tosches when he gets carried away—it's exhausting for his readers.

And of course I know that if I discussed this with my editor he would remind me of it forcefully: I'm a good, clear storyteller and I have a story worth telling, there are some larger points to be made and I'm good at making large points pretty simply. But of course I don't discuss it with him, because some part of me is in love with those crushing expectations.So here's the question I go around and around and around and around on: are the expectations stopping me from writing? Or are they just a glamorous excuse to dodge work and do something more fun...like write my blog?

Great Expectations

2008-06-23T13:06:00.000-07:00

I know exactly when I froze up on The Undressing of America: when the publisher bought it. Through my whole career I've been able to keep a pretty low profile, hiding behind modest expectations. Writing comic books, I could win the approval of my editors and most readers by meeting the expectations of the genre in a fairly workmanlike way; subtleties of technique and depth of character were appreciated by a select few but generally not missed if I didn't deliver. Writing pop-culture oriented humor, I had to be original and funny, but no one was really paying attention to the writing as writing. Writing non-fiction about TV comedy, violent entertainment, and comic books, I had to show that I knew my material, saw it in some unique ways, and could construct a convincing argument; whatever literary virtues I brought were always viewed as an extra, worthy of an "and it's surprisingly well-written, too." But I avoided putting myself in positions where I would be judged on the potency of my sentences, the reality of my characters, the truth of my voice. I was a writer who managed not to be judged on his writing.

The writing mattered to me. I always much preferred hearing a fan say, "You write the most human characters in superhero comics," or, "I really like this line," than, "Your Green Lantern stories were really true to the classic DC tradition." But what mattered most I kept partly concealed. I found a safe place where my efforts could be noticed if readers wanted to notice them, but if they didn't I wouldn't feel so exposed in my shortfall. I could always say to myself, "Well, the goal is to deliver a solid comic book story, and didn't I do that?" This protected the part of me that felt was most precious from the world's judgment and indifference. Which was swell, except that it also held me back from really writing as well as I could.

I sold the proposal for my last book, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book, based on my non-fiction credits and my knowledge of both comics and American cultural history. But the book turned out to demand a lot more, because at the core of it were four intertwining and powerful human stories: the two businessmen who had pulled themselves up from Lower East Side poverty to lay the foundations of the comic book business, and the two nebbishy teenagers from Cleveland who created Superman, the idea that sparked that business to life. They were dramatic stories, suspenseful stories, and in three cases pretty tragic stories, and I had to pull out all the abilities I had to tell them well. As a result, I started getting a new kind of attention. Blurbs from novelists I respected, reviews that led off with the quality of my writing, readers who said they never thought they could care about the history of comics except for the power of my telling. And finally Eric Chinsky, a well-respected editor from the well-respected house of FSG, contacted my agent and said he'd love to work with me. He and I had lunch, and he made it clear that although the subject matter of my next book would matter, of course, what he wanted me to come up with was an idea that would enable me to showcase my own talents as a writer. For the first time in my career, an editor didn't want an idea that could be dependably well executed by me. He wanted me.

Which meant that I was going to be on display. I as a writer was going to please him or disappoint him—and if I pleased him well enough to see print, then I was going to be applauded or criticized or (worst of all) ignored by readers. As I chose my topic and worked on the proposal I was able to distract myself from that terrible fact by worrying about whether I'd found an idea worthy of publication. But as soon as he said "yes" I had nowhere to hide.

So now I find myself able to write pages and pages of the book as long as I tell myself, "Oh, this is just a rough draft to get the story down, no one's going to see this." But when I start writing sentences with the intention of sending them to my editor, the weight of expectation brings me to knees within a few pages. Suddenly I find myself unable to believe that there can be such a thing as "just telling the story," as "just explaining the facts." In fact, I can no longer believe that there is such a thing as "just a sentence." Every moment must be as vivid to the reader as the sharpest memories of his or her own life. Every line must flash with the fire of divine inspiration. Every word must add to the wit and poignancy and irony and profundity of the whole.

Because if they don't, I really suck.

A long and splendid journey

2008-06-22T13:14:00.001-07:00

Before I beat myself up too much for taking two years to face the fact that I'm not getting my new book written as fast as I thought I would, I should acknowledge a lesson I just received in the mysterious tides of creation.

It will probably come as no surprise to you that some books take longer to write than others. A research-heavy non-fiction book, like this Undressing of America, can typically take three or four years to complete. But another book may have a completely different timeline. A humor book, for example, written by two collaborators in a white heat of inspiration and excitement. Last night I uploaded the first episode of just such a book—My Pal Splendid Man, my new collaboration with Will Jacobs—on its own website. And how long did My Pal Splendid Man take to write, from conception to completion?

Just a little over twenty-seven years.

In January, 1981, a young Will Jacobs was sitting in his apartment on Geary Boulevard in San Francisco looking out at the gray sky and drizzle, having just finished reading a few old superhero comics, and a scene flashed into his mind. There's this frustrated would-be writer named Will, see, sitting around catching up on his self-pity, and suddenly there's a knock on his door. He opens the door and a friend walks in, a guy in a blue business suit and glasses who looks unprepossessing enough—but there's something special about him. Something that does not immediately meet the eye. And after some cryptic dialogue between Will and his pal, we suddenly get it: this guy is a superhero, the most powerful superhero in the universe, in his secret identity. And with all the great crises a hero could and should be tackling, this one, for some reason, had come around to help Will snap out of his funk.

Our young Jacobs wrote a few pages, liked it, and called up the even younger Gerard Jones to read it to him. Jones thought it was funny and intriguing and asked what happened next. Jacobs had no idea. He'd have to let it sit and see if the next scene came to him. Jones said he'd love to hear it when it happened. Back in those days, you see, Jacobs and Jones had written a few unpublishable things together for fun, but they didn't think of themselves as any sort of humor-writing team. Whereas now if Will Jacobs has a humor idea his first thought is, "I wonder if Jones will want to work on this with me?" and if Gerard Jones likes an idea of Jacobs's his first question is, "Can I help?" back then their friendship was still on a "Well, let me know when you've got more to share" basis. So those few handwritten pages of story on lined paper went back into Will's stack of fragments and notes.

Four or five months later, however, our young Jacobs and Jones found themselves starting a humor book together—they called it The Summer of the Beaver but it would eventually be renamed The Beaver Papers—then finishing it, then sending it to agents and editors, and finally selling it to a real publisher in New York. As neither of them had ever sold anything to anyone before (aside from used books and discount jewelry), this had a tremendous effect on them. They decided that they had a talent for writing humor together, and so they looked for the next funny idea they could develop. One of them, they no longer know who, remembered those few pages about the would-be writer and the superhero. They figured out what the odd friendship would be based on, they developed the characters, and they hurled themselves into the stories with the aforementioned white heat.

By the end of 1982, Jacobs and Jones had written several inter-connected stories about Will Jones and his god-like and supremely virtuous pal. (Who was not yet named Splendid Man. He's gone through a couple of names along the way.) Some of them were pretty lame, but some of them were actually quite funny. Unfortunately, even the better of them somehow didn't add a book. Our young writers had become extremely fond of the characters and the style of humor and the narrative voice, but they just couldn't figure out how to bring it all together. So they put it down for a while. And then, in the fall of 1983, they got a job with The National Lampoon, and life carried them on.

Occasionally over the years they dusted the pages off to see if they could do something with them. They got a few of the stories printed in a little comic book fanzine. In 1987, when the now not-so-young Jacobs and Jones scored some success with their comic book The Trouble with Girls, they got a publisher quite interested in adapting My Pal Mighty Man (as it was briefly known) into a comic book. But when the publisher almost immediately folded, they moved on again. A few times in the late 1990s, Jacobs would have an inexplicable brainstorm and crank out another My Pal Whoever story or scene, and Jones would say, "Hey, that's funny." But by then it was just a hobby.

By the time Checker Books contacted them in 2006 to ask about reprinting their old Trouble with Girls comics in graphic novel form, our now middled-aged friends had ceased to write humor together at all. But the knowledge that their collaborations were going to be seeing print again got them missing the days when they had regularly made each other laugh and fall in love with preposterous characters. So Jacobs pulled the old superhero stories out of his desk drawer. "You know what?" he said to Jones (emailed, really). "Some of these are really good. And I'll bet with what we've learned about storytelling over the past couple of decades, we could figure out what it's been lacking."

The first thing they did was come up with a character name that made them laugh: Splendid Man. Which opened up a whole new subplot that, they suddenly realized, would tie all the stories together in a wonderful way. (I'm not telling you what it is. I want you to read it.) Suddenly they were able to throw themselves back into the stories in a white heat of inspiration and excitement that belied their advanced years. They showed it to some people and heard that it was very funny but not quite ready for publication yet. So they set it down, wrote a whole different book (Million Dollar Ideas) in a heat of comparable whiteness, and came back to it. This time they—we—think we've really got it. We're putting it on line, one story every three weeks, to draw attention to it and solicit some reader comments. And already we're hearing very nice things.

What struck me most forcefully when I scanned the Splendid Man website this morning is that the initial spark from 1981 is still alive in it. (You'll recognize the original scene described above as the opening of Episode Two.) And yet there's so much else in it that Will and I have learned in the journey from our twenties to our fifties. It's a rare gift to be able to connect so intimately with one's own past, and to bring something back to life that I honestly thought I'd have to put down.

I need to remind myself of this whenever I catch myself falling into the trap of dropping each new day that I don't write The Undressing of America onto the scale of my self-worth. Sometimes books happen when they happen.

Unfortunately, there is that problem of the contract with FSG...and that other half of the advance that would sure come in handy....

My new book, and the writing of it

2008-06-20T15:14:00.000-07:00

Over two years ago, I sold a book idea to Farrar, Straus & Giroux, one of the most respected publishers in the book business. My editor was very praiseful and encouraging, and I liked him. I expected to jump right in and turn it around quickly. But I haven't submitted a word yet. I've written a lot: written long segments and thrown them away, written others knowing that I was just trying to get my thoughts down and that they weren't good enough to submit. But I haven't yet produced a chunk long enough and good enough to feel I should send it to my editor.

It's a good idea for a book, I know that. And I believe I'll do a good job with it. When I talk to other writers they tell me that not only does it sound like a good book, I'm just the guy to do it. But so far the book defies me. It will allow itself to be written only if I don't commit myself to the "real writing." When I commit to the "real writing" it laughs in my face.

This blog will be the story of how I got here, an exploration of what the book is, a showcase for excerpts, a platform for your comments and advice, a confession of my madness, and, in the end, the vehicle through which the book gets written.

It had better be, anyway.