So I got an iPhone a few months ago. Yes, I love it. No, I don’t have any problems with AT&T’s coverage. Yes, I had Verizon before. No, I had no problems with their coverage, either. Yes, I think the commercials are witty, and no, I don’t like Luke Wilson any better.
Now that we got that out of the way, the point of this is that the iPhone has a free app that mimics the Amazon Kindle. Now some folks have wondered to me about the size of the screen, but let’s face it, the words are the same size as a paperback book, you just have fewer on the screen at one time than on a page. No big deal. So I love the app, and have bought several books for the Kindle as a result. And it was during some of my shopping the other day that I thought “Am I actively devaluing the book by searching for passable free books for my phone?”
Because I have a limited budget, and a stack of books waist-high in my house that I haven’t read, I’m on a moratorium on book-buying. This doesn’t mean I haven’t bought any new books, it just means that I don’t buy nearly as many and have the good grace to feel bad about it when I do. So I finished the last book on my phone, and went looking for another. And I cruised the bestseller list and decided not to pay any real money for an e-book this week, then moved on to the free books. Now most of these books are like crack, one free sample in a series to get you hooked, which I think is a good marketing ploy, but some of the others are just books that people have written that are out there for free.
And some of these are free for a reason. Namely, they suck. I’m all for the idea of allowing the market to determine the relative worth of a product, and allowing consumers to even set pricing for things by their decisions to buy or not to buy something. But I wonder about the market for writing becoming so devalued by the presence of so much free content out there. Already I see freelancers talking about rate cuts, and there’s always another kid coming along willing to do the same work for 2/3 the money, and there’s always somebody willing to sacrifice a quality writer on the altar of the dollar, but I wonder if the same deal transfers.
So am I devaluing my own work by becoming a lowest common denominator consumer? Is this the same as a local store owner shopping at Wal-Mart and feeling guilty? Or am I just overthinking again? I do believe that as people try to survive in a challenging economy, we need to make choices on where our money goes. And we need to make conscious, personal decisions regarding our spending, and on what we value. So I’m pretty sure I’ve answered my own question, and justified buying more e-books instead of grabbing free ones, but what about the bigger picture?
On the smaller picture front, here’s another video from Returning the Favor.
Before I get into the real topic, here’s a question – am I insane for even considering publishing a literary journal? You know, the whole accept submissions, get subscribers, go to press kind of literary journal?
So more and more often I’m going to readings of things that people, myself included, have written. And more and more often I’m less than impressed with the way that writers present themselves when reading their work in public. I know, I know, it’s supposed to be a solitary pursuit full of staring out windows and empty whiskey bottles and perpetual gazing into navels, but folks, if you’re going to read your stuff in public, please take a little time to work on the craft of reading just like you worked on the craft of writing. It’s a set of skills – develop it! So I decided to put forth a few tips on how to improve your reading, based on my years in theatre and performance.
1) Stand up. Most untrained readers will benefit hugely just by standing up, or at least sitting upright on a stool. This opens the airways down to the lungs and diaphragm and allows you more access to air. More air = more volume with less strain. The chest is a big resonant cavity that serves as an amplifier to the voice, use it. Sitting, and especially sitting slouched over like a shy little mouse, compresses the esophagus and makes it harder to get to your Air Supply (and I don’t mean the “guilty pleasures” playlist on your iPod). So get off your ass, or at least, sit up straight like your mama told you.
2) If you don’t have much personality, don’t try to force it. You’ll know pretty quickly if you don’t have any personality, count how many time people look at their watch when they’re talking to you in a normal day. If the answer is EVER, then you’re probably boring. If you’re boring, don’t try to tell stories or jokes, just read your shit and get it over with! You might be the greatest writer since Shakespeare, but painful to converse with. Not necessarily your fault, but there’s no point in standing in front of a room full of people boring the crap out of them when they came to hear you read, rather than tell stories anyway. Now, if you’re a storyteller and still boring, then you’ve got bigger problems.
3) Pay attention to the guidelines of the show. If the producer/host tells you to keep it to five minutes, don’t read five pages of prose text. A page of prose takes several minutes to read, and even longer to read well, and that time is inflated by the size of the page, too. So don’t run long. If an audience is told to expect five minutes and you run fifteen, you’d better be brilliant. If they’re told to expect five minutes and you’re done in four, they feel like you’ve paid attention to the guidelines and have given their time some value.
4) Learn a little bit about technology. In some rooms there will be microphones. Sometimes, you’ll need them, sometimes you won’t. Either decide not to use them and move them aside, or learn enough to use them well. Standing in front of a room full of people fumbling with a mic just makes you look uncomfortable and stupid. It’s less high-tech than your TV remote, take a few minutes before the event begins to figure out height adjustments and how to tighten the mic on the stand. It will make you look like a pro, even if you’re not.
5) Practice. Really. I’m not kidding, practice. I have a very good friend who is an excellent actor, but can’t read in public worth a damn. He has a slight case of dyslexia, and even with text he’s very familiar with, this sometimes bites him in the ass. He has that excuse, and doesn’t read in public often, if ever. You don’t get that excuse, because you are choosing to read in public. So if you have a reading problem, memorize your text. If you stutter, get speech therapy. If James Earl Jones can get rid of his stutter and become who he became, so can you. And be familiar enough with your material to look up, meet someone’s eye in the crowd, and go back to the text without losing your place.
I don’t expect writers to turn into professional actors overnight, but these tips should help you present yourself better when you’re reading in public, and that should help you book more readings and sell more books.
I’m not surprised to find out that there are a lot of bits of sushi etiquette that I didn’t know about, but some of these I think I’ll purposefully ignore moving forward.Now I like me some sushi, but the biggest problem I run into is with rolls. There’s a joint I frequent in Atlanta called Aqua Bistro in Buckhead, and I love a roll they have on their menu called the Yummy Yummy roll. I can be found there pretty much any Monday night that I’m in the ATL, because it’s 2 for 1 roll night, and fat boy likes to eat. But the rolls that I get some places are so big, it seems like it’s impossible to get it all in my mouth in one bite without cramming my mouth full and looking like a huge boor.
Now typically I don’t care, because in many cases I am a huge boor, but I wonder why the rolls are made so huge that I have to try to bite through it, which typically leads to a huge fail on my part. So I try to eat as delicately as possible, but often end up making a huge mess. But back to the rules – some of these just don’t work for me. For one, I like dipping my rice in the soy, so I’m going to dip my rice in the soy. And if you don’t like it, deal with it. And if I’m given disposable chopsticks, I’m gonna rub them together. That’s just the deal. If I get high-tone chopsticks, I’ll trust them to be splinter-free. And sometimes I like dropping a little wasabi in my soy. Not always, depends on the mood.
But more importantly, where are there some other good sushi joints that I’m missing? In Charlotte I love New Zealand Cafe, and Rousan’s is always harmless. But I’m always looking for recommendations in Charlotte and Atlanta, since those are the cities that I eat most of my meals in.
It’s a busy week, and we got some spectacularly good news right before the Just Do It performance last weekend, so here’s what’s up.
Tuesday night – Charlotte Writer’s Club meeting at Joseph-Beth Booksellers at SouthPark. I’ve been going to this for a few months now, and am still deciding exactly what I’m getting out of my membership. The people are all very nice, and the speakers are usually pretty interesting, but there’s not a lot of sharing of member’s work that goes on. I did meet Jessie there, and I’ve since started to enjoy her blog daily, so that’s good. But I think it might not be something I invest too heavily into long-term. Just enough to get a little boost now and then.
Sometime this week I’m trying to get out to CAST to see Our Lady of 121st Street and review it for Charlotte Viewpoint. I like the script, and several of my friends are in it, so that should be fun.
Saturday afternoon I’ll head over to the Charlotte Comic Mini-Con put on by Heroes. I actually worked at Heroes for a while some years back when they were still on Central Avenue. This was back when I was playing Magic the Gathering a lot and I ran the tourneys at Heroes and basically made enough money working there to pay for my comics and my Magic cards. I’ve recently gotten back into reading comics, so there’s another cash-suck in my life, but these little cons are usually good for picking up trade paperbacks ridiculously cheaply, so I can get a lot of volume reading in. Comics have been a part of my life on and off forever, and this weekend I spent a lot of time curled up with Volumes I & II of Absolute Sandman, reminding myself how absolutely beautiful those books are. I think I’ll bust out my Chris Bachalo Death T-Shirt for Story Slam Saturday night in honor of the books.
Yeah, everything is leading up to Story Slam for me this weekend. 8PM kicks off another Carolina Writers’ Night, and this time I’m sharing the stage with a novelist, a guitarist/short story writer and a columnist. It oughta be fun, and there’s always enough beer at Story Slam to make me seem witty, so come on out. It’s only $10, and then you can buy a book later and one of us will sign it for you. If you’re lucky, the one that wrote the book will sign it!
So last weekend, just before I went on for Just Do It, Suzy pulls me aside and tells me that the testing lab called. Now most of you don’t know that Suzy was recently tested for the breast cancer gene, and given the fact that her mother, aunt and grandmother all died of breast cancer, I figured the odds of her not having this particular gene were pretty slim. And her doc had already told her that if she had the gene, then she should seriously consider a double mastectomy.
Now a lot of you have met my wife. There’s a lot of boob there. And I’m a boob man. So telling the two of us that the girls might have to be removed was NOT a happy statement. Besides the scary genetic stuff, and bringing back memories of her mother’s death, telling a woman she’s gonna have to have her breasts removed is a pretty big damn deal. So it was with no small measure of delight that she told me that the test came back negative, and she does not have the genetic deformity that typically indicates a prediliction towards breast cancer, so we can return to our regularly scheduled program of mammograms and routine maintenance. So that was our good news for the day, and it was good indeed.
Talk with y’all later, and I hope to see you at Story Slam this weekend!
Welcome to the “John experiments with the built-in webcam on his Mac” portion of the blog. Since I’ve been writing about writing, and trying to sell my books, but I haven’t been doing a very good job of sharing with you what’s in my books, and since they’re already considered published by most literary journals and are therefore verboten, I thought I’d (in one very excellent run-on sentence) start recording them here and sharing them that way.
And of course because I’m a cheap fuck I didn’t buy a tripod for my new handheld HD camera, so I’m using the built-in cam on the Mac. Here’s the first one, the quality may improve as I go along. Or I may decide this is a huge pain in the ass and just watch football. Frankly, after I get this uploaded I’m watching football regardless.
I’ve been onstage for twenty years now, since my first role in high school when I was 16. In that time I’ve played supporting roles, character roles and leading roles. I’ve done contemporary shows, Shakespeare and modern drama. I’ve performed for full houses and crowds of half a dozen. There have been shows that moved me and shows that barely touched me. By this point, I can walk out in front of a theatre crowd of pretty much any size in pretty much any capacity and treat it as just another day at the office. It’s still special, but it’s not new.
But reading my work in front of people scares the bejesus out of me. It’s very different when I’m reading stuff I wrote. The stuff I do with theatre is someone else’s creation, someone else’s guts and blood spilled out onto the page. When I’m reading my poetry and other writing, it’s all me. And that’s a different level of scary than anything I’ve ever experienced in theatre.
Last night I had a blast at Just Do It. I read two of my pieces that were written specifically for the event, which was themed “Nobody Told Me.” One was titled “Girls Like You” and the other was “Octogen.” Suzy shot video of the performances, but it was overexposed and didn’t look good, so I won’t be posting that here. The first one was a lighthearted piece about getting dumped, and the second was a more serious piece about my aging mother. They were very well-received, and I sold a couple of books at concessions, which is always a plus. It’s always funny to me when theatre people who have known me for years read my stuff or see me read, because most of them have no idea that I write. I’ve written poetry much longer than I’ve done theatre, but with theatre taking up so much of my life for the last dozen years or so, many of my friends are shocked when they see me read poetry that I’ve written. It also helps that I don’t look like the average poet. So while I love reading my stuff, there is still an element of stage fright involved. Not gonna stop me, of course, because that’s the best way to promote my book. So come on out to Story Slam next Saturday to see me!
So last night I was the featured speaker at the Charlotte Storyteller’s Guild meeting, and it was a blast. I read a couple of selections from Returning the Favor, and answered questions about self-publishing and things like that, and that got me to thinking.
I did a lot of things ass-backwards along this journey, and I don’t know if that’s a bad thing or not. The typical route to “success” as a poet in the US is to write a bunch of stuff, polish it either in workshops or solitude, and submit a bunch of stuff all over the place, collecting rejection letters by the pound until a few things start to get published. Then after you’ve had some things accepted by literary journals, who don’t actually pay anything for the publication, or make any profit themselves, you might get one of the small presses that print books of poetry to publish your collection instead of having to do it yourself. Then you buy a pile of the books to sell at readings, and hopefully your publisher can sell a few as well. In the meantime, you continue your life as a stay-at-home parent or English professor, because the number of people who make a living as a poet in the US is smaller than the number of people who actually are profitable on the major poker tournament circuit.
But instead I printed a book, ordered 100 copies, and got seriously motivated to sell them. Turns out that I’m not out much more money from doing it my way than I would have been if I’d gotten a book published in the traditional method and bought 100 copies from a real publisher. Maybe a couple hundred bucks, but not much more than that. I was tech-savvy enough to do all the layout myself, and even though I still missed some typos, I’ve found typos in mass market books as well, so that just goes to show that human beings have to read these things, and we miss things.
The polish is what I missed. I really do think that writing begets writing, and if you have any talent or skill at all, the more you write, the better you write. So obviously I think the stuff I’m writing now is better than what’s in the book, but that’s not the case with all of it. Frankly, if I hadn’t published the book, I wouldn’t have done nearly the work I’ve done getting out there in the public eye as a writer, and that has led me to a lot of good associations, like joining the Charlotte Writers’ Club and things of that nature. It also led to a rollicking adventure yesterday that I’ll write up when the time is right. Suffice to say I could go a couple weeks without eating any more fried chicken.
So I did plenty of things out of order, but I’m okay with that. What I’m not okay with is the paradigm of there being no commercially successful poets except for Billy Collins. Let’s face it, poetry is the same as songwriting, only accessible to those of us that can’t sing. And if Springsteen can get rich playing his poetry, I should at least be able to figure out how to make a little extra coin playing mine. I’m thinking on it. I have no answers right now, but there are a few percolating. If I can make it work, Story Slam will be the place it will happen, because I think they’re on to something big over there. I know I pimp that joint a lot here, but it’s for two reasons. First, I agree with a lot of their stated goals and think they’re cool people who deserve my support. Second, they let me come by and play, and have supported me, which is hard to find. I have no official capacity there, just a belief that there’s something going on that I want to be part of.
Tonight I’m performing at Just Do It! at Theatre Charlotte, which I’m very excited about. This is a series that gives people an opportunity to get rid of the excuses and Just Do It, whatever IT happens to be. In my case, I’ll be reading two new poems written for the show. Tickets are only $5, so come out and see it if you’re in town.
And not the Girls Gone Wild type that have made Joe Francis a bajillionaire.
I keep track of tiny little tidbits of stories and poems in my notebook. But I keep my notebook on my phone and in my computer. I use a program called Evernote to keep track of my multiple to-do lists, and I use one of these lists for story ideas and things I hear that stand out to me. Then when I’m stuck on something to write, I roll these over and over in my head until something falls out. I also think Evernote is a pretty killer productivity tool since it syncs your electronic to-do lists between phone, web and computer, and if you’re as scatterbrained as I am, if it doesn’t make it onto a list, it never, ever gets done.
So here are some flashes that I’ve got in my little notebook right now –
black burkha in the carolina southern sun
standing on one leg on a street corner with no foot left
tie you to my soul with strands of blood and hope
I leaked milk and cried blood into the snow for you.
fly on concrete angel, let the winds of the city carry you away.
porn for breakfast.
she wore her androgyny like a badge of honor
I have walked through the fires of my souls and come through battered scarred but whole
girl can’t afford seminary tuition so she works as a stripper
He sees the world in colors
Right now, the last two are my favorites, the girl who is working her way through seminary as a stripper and the boy who sees the world in colors. That last one is a reference to autism that I saw on some TV show this week. Somewhere there’s a story about the confessional girl, living in a sinful world, dancing for dollars and working her way closer to God. What should I tackle first off that list? You tell me, I’ll write something tonight and bring it back to you. It might suck, but I’ll take the assignment.
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And not Jerry Douglas, either. Bluegrass fans will get the reference, and if you’re not, you should be. One piece of awful news this week – the Neighborhood Theatre in the NoDa area in Charlotte might be shutting down. I find this particularly distressing because it’s one of my favorite concert venues, and is perfectly sized for a lot of the shows that I want to go see. Some of the best concerts I’ve ever attended were at the Neighborhood Theatre, and it would be a shame if no one could step forward and buy the place. I wish I had the resources, but I don’t, but if there’s a consortium of folks that are looking for someone to help with tech and promotions, lemme know.
But back to great concerts I’ve seen there. The first time I ever saw Robert Earl Keen do a whole set was at the Neighborhood. I’d seen REK at the McGlohon Theatre at Spirit Square, but didn’t watch the whole set. This time I watched the whole thing, and rocked out with all the other hillbillies all the way up til the main breaker blew out in the middle of Road Goes on Forever, and the last piece of the show was done in the dark with only monitors for sound. It didn’t matter to the crowd, we were all drunk and knew all the words, anyway.
The first time I saw Great Big Sea was at the Neighborhood. I’m pretty sure I went alone, and sat in the middle of the room and just jammed while the boys from up north put on a helluva show. The John Hiatt show was another one i saw alone, because Suzy bailed at the last minute. John played alone and (mostly) acoustic, with his guitar, a stomp board for percussion and an electric piano. It was pretty amazing. That was his Tiki Bar tour, and I don’t know how they got him there for a solo show, but it was pretty awesome. So was the first time I saw Reckless Kelly, the first time I saw Hayseed Dixie, the last time I saw Sam Bush, when he played a bunch of cuts off his Circles Around Me album, which I think is his best solo album so far, and when Bonnie and I went to see Peter Rowan. We sat in the seats toward the side of the stage, and I’m pretty sure Bonnie scared Peter a bit when she yelled out for “Rain and Snoooooowwwww!” Peter jumped a little, but he played the song for her.
So it’s been a great venue for music in Charlotte for the last ten years or so, and has had a lot to do with the revitalization of the NoDa neighborhood, so I really hope somebody can come along and pick up the lease and keep the place rolling along. Otherwise it’ll be just another victim of the tightening economy.
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