A few weeks ago, publishing and the world lost one of its rare and wonderful beings, and so this month I pay my small tribute to add to those of many others before me.

During the winter of ’79, I went to New York on business. The main thrust of the trip was to meet one of the distinguished gentlemen of publishing, Mr. Larry Ashmead.

Larry’s habit was to be at his desk around dawn, or to have early breakfast meetings at Michael’s. Since I’m a morning person, I had no problem agreeing to the place or the time. By the time coffee was poured–and Michael’s waiters are fast–I knew I had met someone I’d always want in my life. Not only does he know everyone in and everything about publishing, he has a delicious and often evil sense of humor and is a storyteller par excellence. Regrettably, I can’t repeat the stories he has told me through the years, but they were doozies.

I can say this to him: When Blaise Pascal wrote in his Provincial Letters, “The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter,” he knew whereof he spoke. This book I am writing now, for example, began as a letter.

Many years ago, while eating bagels with you at Michael’s in Manhattan, I told you I wanted to write a book about my life. You said, “Take my advice. Wait until you’re famous.”

You would not have discouraged me, Larry, except for good reason. When I think of you, I think about Maxwell Perkins, about the Algonquin Round Table, about the stories you could tell if only you would. I think about your annual gift scrapbooks containing lovingly accumulated publishing absurdities, your love of science fiction and fantasy, and your ability to understand the commercial world of today without losing faith in the values of yesterday and the hope for tomorrow.

Wherever you are–methinks you would like to be in Tuscany–I say to you, I must write it now. I’m probably not famous enough yet, but I am growing long in the tooth and time grows short. I will try to make it a fraction as funny, as sad, as absurd, as intriguing to read, as my life has been to experience. I will jump carelessly between time zones, ages, stages, countries and personas. Because, you see, if I don’t do it now, I am in mortal danger of turning into a shawled Granny, desperately begging everyone to listen to her memoirs.

Meeting and knowing Larry was wonderful, and I will miss him always.

Yesterday, my friend and agent Bob Fleck posted a little essay on his LiveJournal which I liked a lot and asked him if I could repost it here today. Enjoy –Janet

You’ve probably heard about the The PW piece about Joe Konrath’s Amazon deal, and Joe’s understated and subtle response (If not, look here). Notably, in the comments to Joe’s response are a number of people repeating once again that Joe’s experience spells the death of traditional publishing, just as predictably one of the agents PW spoke with said that Joe’s experience was a flash in the pan we’d all forget about in a few years.

Being a somewhat scientifically minded person (I majored in physics and mathematics at college before making the brilliant decision to drop out in favor of a life in publishing), I thought to apply a bit of scientific method to my examinations. Of course, we have Joe’s results on Kindle that he has been proudly touting quite heavily to the world. In addition, a couple of my clients have been doing differing experiments with Kindle and other electronic book sales.

One of these is a wonderful mystery writer client of mine, Vicki Tyley, who’s from Australia. After a lot of effort, I’d been unable to sell Vicki’s THIN BLOOD, in large part because most of the publishers refused to even look at the book. “Americans don’t want to read Australian mysteries,” I was told. At least one conglomerate appears to have this as a standing rule from Marketing to Editorial: Don’t even think about bringing us an Australian mystery.

Finally, last fall, Vicki and I decided on an experiment. Starting with Smashwords, she released the book electronically, with a one-month free promotion. That received such a good response that Suspense Magazine actually selected Vicki as their featured New Author for April–for an electronic book which, at the time, was only available on Smashwords. At the end of April, Vicki made the book available on Amazon’s Kindle, selling for 99¢, and announced it. Really, that’s about all the promotion either one of us did. Then, we waited to see what would happen. As of today, May 25, THIN BLOOD is the #1 Mystery title among all non-free titles available on Kindle, and #20 among all paid titles on Kindle, regardless of genre. (The new Steig Larsson release may have shifted that after I started writing this.)

Now, I remember thinking when Joe started off with his stuff that certainly Hyperion having helped develop his name made a huge difference. But just the fan base from his physical books couldn’t really account for his electronic sales. Now, here’s Vicki, a complete unknown from Australia. No fan base. Just a damn good book, and her sales have grown each day, by huge leaps. 10 books, then 20, then 50, then 70, then more than 130 books in a single day for a completely unknown author. So, let’s toss out name recognition as an assumed cause.

Is it the price? Well, maybe that helps, but look at the top 50 titles on Amazon Kindle and you’ll see that there’s only one other at 99¢, and that’s a guide to the Kindle itself. What predominates the Kindle chart, regardless of price, is a lot of the same big best-selling names that dominate all the other sales charts. Clearly the “we won’t buy books over $9.99″ boycott people aren’t being all that effective, as several $12.99 books are sitting quite comfortably on the charts. So, let’s toss out that assumption.

However, on the other hand, I have my client David Niall Wilson who’s starting to release backlist titles on Amazon from himself and other’s through his joint-venture Crossroad Press Digital Publishing. Dave has been publishing for a long time (I remember having an editorial argument 20 years ago over one of Dave’s stories at the small press magazine I was then managing editor of). He’s won two Bram Stoker awards, he’s written some absolutely amazing books–books that readers have quite literally said changed their lives. The Crossroads Press titles haven’t run up the charts so far, but Dave himself says that he hasn’t gotten onto the Kindle boards to do much in the way of announcing them.

He has posted every new title through his Twitter feed (@David_N_Wilson), which is followed by more than 6,000 people. Joe has a Twitter feed (@jakonrath) that’s followed by about 2500 people. Vicki has no Twitter feed at all.

So, perhaps it’s the announcing of the books on the Kindle boards, but that alone can’t be it. A lot of people announce their books on the Kindle boards. What makes Joe’s books move so well? What made Vicki’s book take off? And why are other books stalled? Perhaps it’s the quality. I certainly don’t have the time to read every new book released on Kindle (I have enough reading trying to catch up with my clients–the prolific, wonderful lot of them).

It seems to me that for now, we need to check all our assumptions at the door. There are too few data points, and they’re often contradictory. I’m getting too tired and out of shape to go leaping to conclusions these days (I’ll leave that to younger and more energetic types). I’m just enjoying the ride while I try to figure out what makes it run.

Here’s more from my conversation with Michael Crichton in December of 1993. I find it interesting to think of where his career did go following this interview.

JB: What do you see in your own future as a writer?

MC: I hope one of these days to write something specifically for children. I mean, my daughter is at the age to start reading on her own. It would be nice to do something for her. She likes Treasure Island right now. I got her an old Disney movie called So Dear to My Heart, and I said to her, “Do you want to see this movie?” She said, “No, it’s got too much love in it, Dad. It doesn’t have any adventure.”

This is five years old. I thought, isn’t that an interesting contrast between love and adventure? But I do know exactly what’s she talking about. She didn’t want to hurt my feelings, because I got her this tape, but she’s not interested in that mushy stuff. Of course, she may never develop a taste for So Dear to My Heart, but certainly now she likes Treasure Island. She likes hiding in the apple barrel from the pirates. That’s where her head is. If I wrote a story for her, it would have to be something like that.

Aside from questions about the possible demise of novels, at least in the form we know best, I’ve also often been asked if I think literature can provide solutions to problems of our society. I believe literature can help, particularly if it addresses issues of importance. There are many novels which address questions which are so familiar, so much discussed, that there is really nothing new to say. I want most of all to write something that is compelling. Something that is difficult to put down. And there will be another Travels. I know that.

Travels is my favorite of my books.

Starting around the early Eighties, I began to realize that people’s perceptions of me were very different from how I perceived myself. There was this sense that I was a kind of stainless steel, high-tech person, who would be really interested in lecturing on the subject of robots, or something. I found myself saying to people that I didn’t have those interests, and that caused a lot of surprise. I began to feel that what had happened, because I had so much early attention for books like The Andromeda Strain–which I really feel were misunderstood, though they were very popular–perceptions of me were of some twenty-six-year-old techie whiz kid. Meanwhile, the experiences of my life had gone in another direction, had been going in that direction for many, many years. The evidence for that, two historical novels in the middle Seventies, had been overlooked.

So I began to think, well, I’m going to have to write something that explains where I am these days. I considered writing about my travels in the early Eighties, but I had not done any autobiographical writing, and wasn’t especially keen to do it. Then, in 1986, I made it my New Year’s resolution to write this book.

I began it a couple days after the new year. To my surprise, I found that I really liked doing it. I wrote various travel experiences, and often finished each chapter with a great sense of relief, something of a burden being lifted. The medical material came in because, when I was fairly well into the book, I thought, it’s implied by a lot of this material. The narrator is now behaving differently than he did previously, or his views are in contradistinction to something else, but we’ve never established what the something else is. So I thought it would be useful to put in the medical stuff. Also because, though it’s not so true anymore, in the Sixties and Seventies it was the most common thing that I was asked about. So I thought, I’ve given a lot of glib answers, and a lot of other kinds of answers, but it would be worth thinking about, and putting down.

That led to the strangest experience. I thought I had a lot of notes from that time. I was sure I had them. In the middle of writing, I’d try to find them, in my office, poking around in the backs of closets. Meanwhile, what was there to do except continue writing all those sections from memory?

The book wasn’t published for a long time after because Sphere was published, though Travels was written before Sphere. Then, about a year after I finished the book, I found this box of notes that was about two hundred pages of a manuscript, a sort of day-by-day journal of medical school. I thought, oh, well, now I’ve done the actual material, and I can revise and correct what I did from memory.

It was kind of creepy. There was almost nothing to change. I added a few little acronyms and little memory aids, things that I had forgotten were in the manuscript, but essentially it was the same. Odd feeling.

The other different experience I had in writing Travels was that it went along for months. I think the first draft took five months. The part that had to do with material that was old I found quite easy to do. As it approached the present, it became more difficult. I think this is a common experience, partly having to do with the idea that it’s not, in some way, entirely processed. Another thing that slowed me down was that, for writing, I think there’s a need to objectify. No matter how much you’re trying to be honest, there’s the sense that you are creating a persona, a fictitious character who serves as yourself–if only because you are eliminating extraneous and complicating details.

And actually you are. It always is that way. That became more difficult to do as events were closer to the present, because my experience of the past, now, is that the person who was doing all those things is another person. I look at The Andromeda Strain, and I think, my, oh my, what an interesting person must have written this book. I have no sense, no real memory of the subjective experiences of writing it. So much has changed, so much time has gone by–a quarter of a century–that it really very much seems like somebody else.

The final thing to talk about, my great problem in writing Travels, was how to discuss the so-called ‘fringe phenomenon.’ There’s no good word for parapsychology or psychic phenomena. All the words are corrupted. Because I felt that this discussion was very much against the views of what was traditionally defined as my way, and that was true, I knew that when I went to do the press tour that would be the most discussed aspect. It was. A large number of reporters who are, like scientists, committed to the perception of a clearly defined external reality that doesn’t move, were very critical of that part of the book. A number of them said to me that I should stop this foolishness and get back to writing novels. In just those words.

I should say something else, too. Travels is related to a book I wrote some years before called Electronic Life, which has a few sections that could very well go in Travels. When I wrote Electronic Life, I sent it to Marvin Minsky. He had been struggling too, writing a book of his own, and was most impressed by the short chapters. He decided that if I could do a book with short chapters, he could, too. So he went and wrote Society of Mind. While he was writing it, he sent sections of it to me for comments, among the other people he sent it to. I reacted very strongly. I liked the book a lot and still feel it’s a most important contribution, but some of Marvin’s positions we absolutely disagree on. His stance is that meditation is a kind of delusion, while I feel that there’s no question that it’s a physiological state. I thought that in a way it was too bad that Marvin was so tremendously interested in performance in terms of music, but totally disinterested in sports performance.

Here’s why. A lot of ordinary sports activities, when you define them objectively, seem impossible. No-one can throw a little piece of leather a hundred yards into a one-meter target, and hit it while eight hundred pounds of charging people are about to smash their face into the dirt. Yet it happens every Sunday. There are people who can do that.

Marvin is very stimulating, but something about the way in which my thinking differed from his was important in leading me to write those sections of Travels. One thing I always have felt about controversial books is that they are going to be around for a while. So, in a sense, you can think of Travels, I mean from a scientific standpoint, as a bet. There’s not yet agreement, but I’m going to bet that ten, twenty years from now, this book is going to look prescient, and not off the mark. And I won’t look off the mark. I’m making a serious bet, and as far as I can tell, I’m going to win.

I said at the beginning of Travels that when I went to a place, when I started to travel to all kinds of exotic places, people said, “Oh, you’re going for research!” That wasn’t true. It’s a writer’s problem that it is difficult to really get away because you’re always drawing from your life. It’s difficult to arrange anything that won’t end up being work-related. I can’t remember being off work, even while having a domestic argument where the pots and pans and words are flying. She would say something, and I would think, that’s good. Remember that. You can use that. In terms of family life, that is one of the most difficult things for writers’ families to deal with. James Thurber’s wife used to look at him down the dinner table and say, “Thurber, stop writing.” She could see it in his eyes. He’d left the party, and he was writing in his head. My daughter says, “When are you going to finish your book,” as if I’m away on a trip. So absolutely, for me, this kind of adventure travel was imagined to be ‘off the clock,’ and in the end it wasn’t.

I’m always impressed with the detail that other people have in their books about specific locales, things like the colors of policemen’s uniforms which I don’t ever get because I don’t keep journals very well. I have kept journals, but becoming too detailed implies that you’re going to make some further use of these experiences. My mother takes this so far, she won’t even take photographs because the act of photographing is another kind of abstraction, and she doesn’t want to do it. She’s quite happy for someone else to take photographs.

I think it’s very helpful to go someplace more than once. That was also in the book. I mean, the good part of ‘pack up and go’ travel is you have all these fresh experiences. The bad part is that you’re entirely unprepared. Very often I’ve felt that I needed to go and have this fresh experience, then go do my reading and my preparation, then go back and have a more informed experience.

There are still many places I’ve never been to. I haven’t been to Israel or, really, to the Middle East. I went to Egypt only because I did my thesis there. I haven’t been to South America, or to what I guess we call the F.S.U., the Former Soviet Union. I don’t have any particular desire to go to many of those places. I don’t know why, but I think that at this point, fundamentally, I’m far more interested in Asia than any place else. I’ve always felt much more comfortable in Asian countries. Physically, it’s often very awkward, because I’m so tall. But left to my own devices, I will only eat Japanese, Chinese, and Thai food. And I guess, left to my own devices, I would pretty much only travel there, with the exception of Italy. I like Italy and I like Greece, so I guess I like that part of the Mediterranean.

So much for future travel plans. I know that what you really want to hear about is what’s next in terms of my work. First there’s Disclosure the movie. I have a finished draft of the screenplay, but finished is always a relative term. Then there’s Congo, the movie and, probably, a sequel to Jurassic Park. I think what everyone is looking at is that there will be a sequel. I don’t believe Universal will permit the most successful movie in history to go without one, so someone is going to make it. Whether I would prefer to do one, and whether Steven would prefer to do one, is irrelevant now, because it is going to happen. Given that fact, and having found the example of the Jaws series very instructive–they were, for the most part, just terrible movies and they didn’t have to be–I have to conclude that protecting your own work becomes important. If it’s going to be done, with you or without you, maybe it’d better be with you. So, that will probably come next.

I’m eager to go on to something new. If you’d asked me a month ago what it was, I would have been very clear. But now, I’m not so sure what’s next. Part of my experience is that you don’t really decide until you have to. It’s a little bit like not perusing the dinner menu for what you’ll have in five hours. I don’t have to make this decision yet, and I’m letting it roll around in my mind. There will come a point when I sit down, and it’s page one, and it’ll have to be whatever it is. I’m not there yet. There’s also the question of economics. In reality, my income, like most Americans, has declined somewhat during my lifetime. With Rising Sun–in today’s money–I earned 20% less than I did in the late 1960′s, when my books were first successful. Certainly I’m very well paid, but not as well paid as I used to be, when America was richer and doing better. In that, I’m like everybody else in this country. I have a family to support, a certain . . . lifestyle.

I don’t want to make too much out of this, but I do have the experience, or the sensation, that there’s a kind of intellectual prospecting that happens. You’re going up and down a lot of hills, swinging your pick in a lot of places that don’t pay off. When you finally get a nugget, that’s going to earn it, that’s your capital for the future. Also, I just don’t want to talk about it. Sometimes talking about it dissipates it.

I will say this. Both Rising Sun and Disclosure were set, as we’ve mentioned before, in high-tech environments, but I would not, by any means, define them as high-tech thrillers. As far as I am concerned, they are a complete departure. They’re both novels of social commentary, which of course, makes me really happy. By the time the movies are done, I might know where I’m going next. I hope so. The possibilities are limitless.

Over the course of the week I spent with Michael Crichton in December, 1993, we talked a lot about writing and craft. This little snippet is from the first day when we talked about how he got started writing and who influenced him.

–

At sixteen, I was writing for the local newspaper. I was also the photographer–I took the pictures and developed them. I covered high school sports. I was very tall, and playing a lot of basketball, just for fun. And I was reading. Conan Doyle. Poe. The classics, that my parents obliged me to read. To this day, I can’t believe that I plowed through Lorna Doone! I can’t remember which of my parents thought it was a good idea that I read that horrible, bad book. Conan Doyle, on the other hand, made a huge impact on me. Generally, I prefer non-fiction. Always have. Particularly to do with building things, making things, building a computer, making an electric motor with paper clips. I made model airplanes until my eyes crossed.

Reading non-fiction was easy, but the notion that I should be involved in fiction was a very difficult sell to me. In a certain way, it still is. There’s a tremendous amount of fiction that I just, for one reason or another, start to read and simply can’t complete. I don’t know whether it’s an aspect of my personality or what. The first fiction that clicked for me was Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes. For the first time, I was reading fiction for pleasure. Not being obliged to do it, not doing it because my parents bribed me with a dollar a book, but actually wanting to, and saying I’ve finished this book, I want another one. What’s noticeable to me about Conan Doyle in retrospect is the pacing of the book. And there is motive. Sherlock Holmes is someone who could easily be real. These books were not “literary,” not Lorna Doone. I liked that.

This watershed implied that there might also be something else out there, other fiction I could actually enjoy reading. I started looking for that “something else.” Someone suggested that if I liked Sherlock Holmes, I’d like Poe, and I did, even though the tone and pacing were so very different. I liked Mark Twain, too. I think Poe and Twain, more than Conan Doyle, had very thoughtful ideas. They are often perceived academically as naive, nativist writers. Twain is seen as one step up from Paul Bunyan, one step up from the fabulous recording of these tales of naive Americana, and it’s nothing of the sort. They were very sophisticated writers. You need only examine Twain’s “The Reader’s Essay on Fenimore Cooper” to realize that he is making remarkable literary distinctions. He knows exactly what he is doing, and he’s tremendously talented. And there’s Poe’s essay on composition. I found that extremely interesting, particularly his ideas about if you don’t need it, exclude it.

And those wonderful, clean sentences. “The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge.” One sentence, and this story is going. No Lorna Doone here. I was drawn to that. I was also drawn to Robert Louis Stevenson. And I think it’s fair to say that in early adolescence I read every science fiction book I could find, though, strangely, I don’t believe I read any Asimov except for his non-fiction. Science fiction in those days was either very much more nuts and bolts, or a sort of Orwellian social commentary. The intensity is kind of a blur. I do remember that I wanted to read it all, but that I didn’t love it all.

During my early reading, my affinity was for styles which bordered on a pulp pace, though I’ve always admired Simenon and I really liked Chandler. Clearly, I owe a debt to Burroughs and Verne, it is there. I have always been interested in taking an old narrative form and making it contemporary. I have done this many times. My novel, Congo, owes its existence to H. Rider Haggard.

Coincident with an interest in girls, I stopped reading science fiction and began to read Hemingway. It was all done in Europe, and every bit of it was wonderful. What was clear by then was that, by temperament and in other ways, I tend to be drawn to relatively terse authors. That’s what I like, and that’s also what I do. Defoe is another one I like. Also Melville’s semi-journalizing, semi-autobiographical account of life on a ship, I just tore right through.

Again, I tend to like fiction where I can feel I’m touching fact, and I am interested in the effect of environment on a character’s actions. I think it is true that I have never been sympathetic to that mode of fiction which elaborates ideas of motivation in a very complex way. I don’t believe it, I don’t operate that way in my daily life, I’m not interested in it, though I think it’s fine that other people are. But I don’t willingly read it.

I am drawn by idea-driven or plot-driven material, by the notion that you can form a complete character based upon the actions of that character. I am attracted to that quality of reality, and the pace of it. You can pay some modest attention to what a specific behavior means in terms of the character, but extensive focus on motivation leaves me exhausted and bored. That’s the way that I was, and it’s the way I still am.

I am a child of the Diaspora. My parents and grandparents, together with a few other family members, fled Nazi Germany in the mid-thirties. The rest did not make it out. Those who did are, even now, spread around the world: Australia, South America, Israel, London, Austria, and South Africa. To say that we were a dysfunctional family is a redundancy, but since I knew no other way and thought all children had homes like mine, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

Am I scarred by it? Probably. Does it matter? Not really, except in that I am who I am because of it.

When I was six, my mother married for the third time.
During her periods of adjustment–which never quite happened–I was sent to live with my beloved grandparents. As I recall, the third one was shortly before Passover. Their flat was a’flutter with cleaning and cooking. My boredom quickly became a nuisance to Oma, my grandmother, who decided my grandfather, Opa, should teach me to play Canasta.

I learned fast. After a Passover game to help digestion after the Seder, I was declared a natural.

“But I didn’t win,” I said.

Oma left to make a pot of tea. “You explain to her, James,” she said in German.

Opa took out his small, oval snuffbox. Delicately, he dipped into it with his left pinky. Holding one nostril closed, he inserted snuff into the other and inhaled. There followed a gigantic sneeze, a shudder, and a satisfied sigh.

“This is the most important lesson you will ever learn in your life–it should only be a long and healthy one. We cannot influence the cards we are dealt in life. What we can do is learn to see the opportunities opened by those cards and have the courage to grab them by the throat and use them. That is what you did and that is why you will be a winner.”

And so they began to teach me — my grandfather about
always being just a little bit kinder than necessary, my grandmother about opportunity, and both of them about the value of listening more than I talked.

A little light-hearted post-Christmas gift idea.

Many years ago, Adam-Troy Castro put together what he called the world’s smallest shared word horror anthology. He called it “Crazy Akbar’s House Of Pain” and allowed us each around a dozen lines for our contributions. His “About the authors” segment read simply “They’re weird.” You were one of the contributors, Dave. This time I‘ve added the backstory.

At the time I wrote the original, I was younger and not in a wheelchair. More than that, we weren’t doing battle over a so-called healthcare bill. Now, it all seems so much more appropriate.

It all began at Denver airport. My plane was delayed because of a major snowstorm. Fortunately, I was in good company, drinking Irish coffee with Ed Bryant and Michael Moorcock. The place was jammed with nice, normal people. As time moved along, we became less nice and normal and became silly—a tendency not unusual for the three of us. Why the subject came up I’ll never know, but we decided to solve the problem of the elderly. We were not quiet, but not so loud that we realized we were being overheard by the people around us. Even if we were, so what, when clearly our tongues were firmly lodged in our cheeks.

After some discussion, we came up with the idea of placing ads in a variety of catalogs. The ads would read as follows:

STAPELTON .45 CALIBER WHEELCHAIR. Self-protection and fun for the handicapped and the elderly. No reason to feel deprived. Our fully automatic wheelchairs come with swivel base, knives on the spokes, one-touch guns, and poisoned blow-darts. Have some fun. Take to the highways and enjoy road rage like everyone else. ORDER B#-OO45.

It took a while for us to become aware of the deathly silence at the tables around us, not that it mattered. We filled the silence by getting noisier
Until—and this is true—security arrived, three men in uniform, inviting us to join them in a march out of the room. Well, it wasn’t so much an invitation as an order.

Were we disturbing the peace? No. We were apparently inciting violence.

Are we on a List? Will there be a knock at the door in the middle of the night? Should I start building my chair? Bet I could sell a few and with the economy the way it is, it may be a good idea. Bet I could sell a bunch of them.

Go ahead. Report me. I could use the excitement.

Friends and relatives around he world sing the same song: “We don’t have Thanksgiving here.” Here is New Zealand, South Africa, England, Israel…and on and on. This year, because we are down to three of us—my guardian angel/chef and one friend who lives alone—I stopped to think about what that means.

“We don’t have Thanksgiving here.”

I’m confined to the house and have been for five years, so I often think about things too carefully.

This time, my thoughts centered around why every day isn’t Thanksgiving. It is for me. I couldn’t survive without a daily listing of the things and people for which I am grateful and of the traditions we have made out own. Every year, we give a turkey to the homeless. There have been years when that means we don’t have one. We give them on other days, too, but there’s something special for me giving one on Thanksgiving Day. Does giving a turkey mean I am an American? I don’t think so. Why can’t those expats do the same thing? I don’t know because I’ve never asked.

How about we each start a tradition and pass it along to countries that “Don’t have Thanksgiving.”

I’m proud to say I did it, inadvertently, some twenty years ago.

I was working three jobs, which included part time teaching at two universities. I was teaching communications, a required course to enter the MS program.

Some weeks before Thanksgiving, the pleading began for the Wednesday before to be a day off. Growing tired of the song, I came up with an idea. Each student had to find a homeless or lonely person, e.g. someone eating turkey and mash at Denney’s, and invite that person to join their dinner at home. If the invitation was refused, the alternative was an invitation to eat together at a coffee shop. Just the two of them. They had to write essays about the experience. Long ones. Detailed ones.

After the groan, there was common acceptance.

The resulting essays were astounding.

I’m told that the exercise has become a required part of the course on all campuses. Better yet, I’ve heard from many student that they lobbied for it at other schools.

Why do I tell you this? Because it makes me feel good and because it’s so simple to implement. Doesn’t have to be turkey. Doesn’t have to be in English.

Looking ahead, here’s one for Hannukah. I used to make each of my kids wrap at least eight of their own toys, no matter how big or small. A book, a marble, a truck. They had to add to the eight for any gift they received. I drove them to a homeless shelter and an orphanage where they dropped them off. Today their children and their children’s friends do the same thing. The world sucks. Why not make it a tiny bit better.

For now, Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.

Truth is, I’ve had a rough time this year. This decade. A lot of pain for little gain. Too many pills and too much introspection. Too many times when I’ve stopped trying—almost; too much thought given to what it means to succeed as an artist in a tough and competitive world and what it takes to keep trying.

The obvious answers come easily to the tongue: persistence, luck, talent, luck, knowing the right people, luck. What I need to remember to mention is that, as per the advice given in the hit song from the Broadway musical the Broadway musical “Damn Yankees,” you gotta have heart.

“You’ve gotta have heart
All you really need is heart
When the odds are sayin’
you’ll never win
That’s when the grin should start
You’ve gotta have hope
Mustn’t sit around and mope
Nothin’s half as bad as it may appear
Wait’ll next year and hope
When your luck is battin’ zero
Get your chin up off the floor
Mister you can be a hero
You can open any door, there’s nothin’ to it but to do it
You’ve gotta have heart
Miles ‘n miles n’ miles of heart
Oh, it’s fine to be a genius of course
But keep that old horse
Before the cart
First you’ve gotta have…….HEART. ”

Thanks to my ten-year-old grandson, Max DeSantis, I’ll never forget it again.

Here’s why.

He’s obsessed by the stage, most particularly musicals. He’s been performing a lot, given his youth. He’s talented and he’s cute.

Here. Judge for yourselves. The first one’s a headshot, the second a recent snapshot he sent to me along with the following poem:

I AM

I am Max who acts.
I wonder if I will make a show.
I hear singing at auditions.
I see people dancing in the breeze.
I want to be in the musical.
I am Max who acts.

I pretend that I made the show.
I feel confident that I will become successful.
I touch the music sheets.
I worry that I did not do well.
I cry when I don’t succeed.
I am Max who acts.

I understand that I will have other chances.
I say I will try again some day.
I dream that I will become famous.
I try to do better.
I hope that I am awesome enough.
I am Max who acts.

Welcome to Storytellers Unplugged. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

by Rick Steinberg

Vincent Price once told me that a beautiful woman with no flaws or scars or bad skin/experiences in her life must make a lousy lay.  And as we wandered on through his gallery at East Los Angeles City College he held to the point.

“Who would not want to spend an hour or so aboard a slice of perfection.  It’s a reasonable request; sexual expression is a form of physical adoration, and in these cases you get the additional nymphet born new experience of encounter bi-singular orgasmic pleasure.”

I had to ask.

“Bi-singular orgasmic pleasures,” he explained, “happen when two people are simultaneously brought to a perfumed stickiness caused by ejaculating over the same person.”

The woman in question.

The act sounds great, you begin thinking, until it suddenly dawns on you that, had you been stricken by Edwardian Sexual Mores, the outcome would have been much the same.  The woman involved would have been sexually sated, and thrilled by her own actions as a receptor.

As well as for her actions as a skilled and “penetrating” actor in the post-Victorian bacchanal.

Now Mr. Price quite gallantly took nothing away from this ability to seduce one’s self into a deeply meaningful sexual conquest.  His only regret was that the now limp adherent seemed somehow cheated.

Consider the quandary facing the “man” in Vincent’s situation, the ethical dilemma:

To try and take something less sticky and more emotionally tasty from his efforts, the man is left asking (more in the tone of a carpenter than an ardent lover) “Was I good for you?”

In fearful desperation not “was it good for you?”

A brief silence while she wrestled her left hand from under the covers, rolled a little on to her right . . . biting her lips as she shifted her weight while moaning something between a vibrato and cat’s purr about:

“No, uhhh . . . no, uh Robert –“

“My name is Brian.”

A coy, girlish smile covers the moment as the movement beneath her blanket causes her to stiffen . . . and then slowly release herself into the covert grasp.

Again.

And again.

“Bobby,” she finally says in a voice still hoarse with passion, “without you, well . . .”

“Yeah,” you ask leaning closer at the sight of part of a breast and a slight “something” stain on the blanket . . . down there. “Bobby,” she finishes as her tongue plays widely with her lips, “there’s beer in the fridge while you, uh . . . oh . . . wait for me.”

And before he can reply in anger, surprise, sexual intrigue or sexual abandonment, she is once again deeply involved with her most perfect lover.

Herself.

So where does that leave us writers dedicated more to what the words are about than we are to their perfect dictionary meanings?  Where the look in the eye at the moment of penetration can reveal far more about characters than where the coitus is staged.

A world wherein people – with their never-ending tastes and journeys – acquire a knowledge and a skill at revealing themselves when they most don’t want.  Or that when they do, that perfect coalescing of time, tide, and words reaps from the universe some basic truths about the ultimate intimacy.

Sharing souls, not sweat.

There is more to say here, and at some time in the future, I will share.  But time and tide covered by pain, medications and singular frustrations forces me to abandon it.

For the moment.

For now, I have learned two great truths about literature and sex.  1) When hardcovers fall off a back-shelf in a long darkened bookstore . . . it is etiquette to help clean-up the mess before leaving.  And 2) Be sure to wear a condom on your member, but not your heart.

Next time:  When sex scenes are required, which should actually be written, and which would be better served by a flashback memory to the Mickey Mouse Club; and a slightly disturbing kiss from “a friend of the family.”

Until then . . . Believe, just believe.