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A Man of Many Hats (And I Don’t Mean I’m an Improv Troupe)

Man, there are so many little details about getting a book finished and out, it’s no wonder my former publisher seemed incompetent.

On the other hand, they had a few more guys on staff who didn’t have to relearn the wheel every time, like I’m doing.

Honk Honk, My Darling: A Rex Koko, Private Clown Mystery is barreling down the track of e-publishment. It’s pretty exciting, and might even get here sooner if I weren’t such a doofus and actually read all the instructions, manuals and tutorials that are supposed to help me get it out there.

But barreling it is, thanks to the work of Airan Wright, who did the cover art (and also redesigned my webpages here). I don’t want to put the cover art up yet, but believe me, it is knockout. Or as my friend Jon Eig emailed, “Totally Kickass!” When Airan and I got together last month to talk about the cover of this and its sequel, The Wet Nose of Danger, it took us literally three minutes to agree on a look, feel and color palette. Fonts? Layout? Graphic elements? Check, check, check. Waitress, please, another zinzer torte!

So at least the look will be handled by professionals. The coding for Kindle and its brethren is going a little smoother, too. Honk Honk will be the fifth book I’ve formatted (did one for a friend gratis, though it may have been a little rudimentary). I haven’t really dug deep into coding, but it appears that’s not all that necessary for a straight-ahead fiction book. My copy editing skills from days gone by have come in handy (so has the OCD). My formats might be changed and improved in the future, since uploading new versions is really a snap. Doing it frequently would be a bad idea, though, if I want to keep readers happy.

In addition to this, I’m recording and editing the audiobook podcast for Honk Honk. Audacity is really a great program for it: Very intuitive, easy to undo mistakes and miscues, easy to save files. It DID crash on me when I tried to copy and insert a very big chunk of dialog I had been pasting together. But it wasn’t a catastrophic loss, and I learned (again) the value of saving files. The first episodes will be available shortly. It’s taking longer than I thought, but I’m doing 16 characters in all, which I’ve been editing together from separate audio tracks.

Now, the only things I have to figure out are how to set up merch from Cafe Press, how to promote the books online and arrange book reviews, how to create postcards for it, how to get physical copies made, and how to use social media to better promote me and my brand.

Well, I guess that’s what the afternoon is for.

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Where I Was and How I Heard About It

Fall of Berlin Wall — late Sunday night, falling asleep in front of CNN.

Nelson Mandela released from prison, fall and assassination of Nicolai Ceceascu — on NPR, driving in the snow at night, back to Detroit for Christmas. Developments during the 6-hour drive were regular and dramatic.

Attack on the World Trade Center — on NPR, driving to work. Went out and bought a small TV as soon as Best Buy opened.

Death of the coward Osama Bin Laden — On Facebook, then to CNN, again late on a Sunday night.

I’m very grateful that the fall of tyranny can burn strong memories in my head as vivid as those of great tragedy. It bodes well for my continued sanity. Watching Wolf Blitzer and John King stammer and vamp while waiting and waiting for the White House announcement was funny for a while, but I put up with it because the only alternative was Geraldo Rivera on the graveyard shift on Fox. (I hope he remembered to start the coffee for the morning crew before he left.)

And the college kids in front of the White House butchering the National Anthem made me yearn for a bombastic pro singer from a hockey game to wheel out a PA in a dapper suit and blow em all away. Where’s Fat Bob the Singing Plumber when you need him?

But those were as nothing, compared with watching Obama walk down that red carpet (repressing a swagger, you could just tell) and deliver his news in such calm and measured terms. I wanted more details — how Osama was shot, how many times, who got to chew on his skull first — but will certainly accept his announcement, including his reference to Bush and the reassertion that we were never at war with Islam. Gracious, exact, statesmanlike, cool, and in the end deadly. (The only note that was off was when he called for Americans to show the unity we did back in September 2001. Surely someone on the right is going to chastise him for using this moment to score partisan points! That will be the amusing sloppy seconds for the next few days: watching conservatives find Obama’s failings in this whole operation. Watch for lots of blame going to Bill Clinton for his impotent tossing of cruise missiles at Afghan training camps in 1998. And probably lots of mentions of Jimmy Carter, just to bring up his name to sully this effort.)

I certainly hope Obama allowed himself a WHOOOP when he got back out of camera range. I’d say it called for a drink and a cigarette.

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Well, This is Nice to Receive!

Not much interesting material comes in the regular mail these days. And I’m sure you’re all familiar with the solicitations that are produced by machines that make it appear the envelope has been hand-written.

So imagine how I felt when I received a small envelope last Friday, postmarked from Oakland, CA, a city in which I don’t know anyone. And imagine how I felt when I opened it and found this inside:

Yep, that’s right, Michael Chabon thinks BARDBALL is “very cool”! He’s one of my favorite writers in the entire civilized world, and he took a moment to write — IN PEN! — that he thought our little baseball poetry blog is very cool. If you haven’t read his Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, then you are depriving yourself of a massive treat. I also enjoyed the hell out of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Summerland, and Maps & Legends.

I mailed him a copy of the 2010 Bardball chapbook in the spring, with no greater intention than thinking he might enjoy it. And spank my ass and call me Bieber, but he did! This is going up on the wall, next to my fan letters from Ernie Harwell and a certain ex-president who will not be named but did get impeached.

After all, I can’t namedrop ALL DAY! He he he!!

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Whining about Insomnia

Well. there goes another Monday morning. Any productivity shot down by a night of sleeplessness.

I just don’t get it. This year has actually seen fewer problems than last year, yet since my 50th birthday, I can count on a good bout of insomnia about every month or so. Usually hitting on Sunday night, because of the upcoming workweek, I suppose. This weekend I got it twice, even on Saturday night, after a day with two hours of driving and about 5 hours of hiking around state parks. Despite all that exertion, at midnight my body felt like it was poised to walk into a slam-dunk meeting or defend the house from raccoons or something.

So last night, it should’ve been easy to fall asleep, right? I took it easy, did some stretching before bed, read for 40 mins — and didn’t fall asleep for another 2.5 hours, even after warm milk and a couple of Tylenol PMs.

How ironic is it that the only thing weighing on my mind lately is that I’m not being that productive? That I’m still waiting to get answers from other people before I release my projects for public consumption? That I’m the person in the household with the least amount of pressure in their lives, and still sleep simply avoids me?

And how stupid is it that I feel like a failure for not being able to sleep? That’s the dominant feeling in those empty hours, that I am failing at something that the entire city has somehow been able to do. Grrrr. This is one aspect of getting older that I’m really detesting.

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Patriotic Ice Cream Flavors

One night at dinner, in the days leading up to Liesel’s class trip to Washington, we all brainstormed new ice cream flavors that they should sell in the ice cream parlor in the basement of the Smithsonian.

(You didn’t know there was an ice cream parlor in the basement of the Smithsonian Museum of American History? And that all the Smithsonian museums are free? Then you haven’t traveled in DC in hot weather with young kids.)

Here’s the list we came up with. It rivals the list of rock star ice cream names that we created after visiting the Ben & Jerry’s factory in Vermont a couple summers ago. The kids always come up with the best ones:

Macadamia Monroe
Rocky Roosevelt
Mangobama
French Vanillard Fillmore
Kennedy Crunch
Bull Moose Tracks
Bush Berry
Dubya Bubble
Peppermint Polk
Ulysses S. Grape
Turtle Tyler
US Mint Chocolate Chip
Adams Apple
Martin Vanilla Blueberren
John Crunchy Adams
Lincolnberry
John Fitzberry Kennedy
Cherry S. Truman
Minty Nixon
Raspberry Reagan
Cinnamyndon Johnson

Favorite name: French Vanillard Fillmore
Most eager to try: Mangobama
Least eager to try: Minty Nixon

How about you?

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How to Torture an Indecisive Tightwad

So, this whole self-publishing thing has its ups and downs. For each big plus, there’s usually a negative (especially for someone with 20/20 hindsight like me).

It’s exhilarating to be able to supply books directly to readers, and to receive posts and emails and reviews from them. At the same time, it’s a drag not to have stronger relationships with the bookstores and the people who own them, at least for the projects in my foreseeable future. There’s no better place in the world than a good bookstore, and no nicer people you will ever meet. I hope this is not a permanent estrangement.

It’s also a drag not to have a stronger connection with the NY publishing houses now, though frankly, I’ve never had a good long-term relationship with any of them. There is nothing quite like having a trip to NY underwritten by someone else, when all you have to do is be pleasant and eloquent and funny. But that only lasts, of course, as long as they are making money off your writing. It’s been a long time since they’ve bought what I was selling, so it’s a godsend that e-publishing has developed at this time.

One of the aspects of self-publishing that is both a joy and a drag is that all the decisions have to funnel through one wishy-washy bozo: me. Making decisions will excite the entrepreneurial side of me, but sometimes that side is having an off day, and the creative side of me will start to whine, “Aw geez, I just had to write three pages of copy — I’m tired!” Decision-making is a muscle strengthened through use, but sometimes I easily sprain it.

One such decision involves publishing Politically Correct Bedtime Stories in the UK. While it’s been out of print in America since, maybe, 1998, it’s been in print in Britain for more than 15 years. The reason is that my publisher there, Ernest Hecht of Souvenir Press, is a one-man dynamo, raconteur, and all-around savvy character. His firm’s publishing list is interesting and varied, and he keeps my sales up with subtle but steady promotion and mentions in the press. He’s what every publisher should be. He says his only obligation to his writers is to stay in business. I like that directness. It’s worked so far.

So we talked a couple months ago about the UK rights for the e-book edition of PCBS. We didn’t agree on who really owned them, but long story short, I decided to grant Ernest the rights for two years, with a 50% royalty. My negotiation skills, like my decision-making skills, come and go with the tides, but we were both happy with this arrangement.

Ernest is also planning to release a 15th anniversary edition of PCBS, for which I wrote a new story: The real, honest-to-Jah version of “The Duckling That Was Judged On Its Personal Merits and Not On Its Physical Appearance.” (You can find it in the US e-book right now.) I’m looking forward to seeing how it does, and I’m grateful for his faith in me and my book.

But the hardest decision came just a couple weeks ago. I’ve been selling the e-book worldwide (Hi Turks and Caicos!!) through Amazon since mid-November. All that time, Amazon UK sold three times as many (and sometimes four times as many) copies of PCBS as Amazon elsewhere! It was shocking, but the only explanation could be that there’s still a hard copy in the stores. One is driving sales of the other. This made me further realize that a deal with Ernest was a worthwhile venture (at least it will be if he keeps the e-book price down).

Our agreement forced me to do something that went against my nature. A couple of weeks ago, I had to pull the plug on my version for sale in the UK. I had been putting off doing it because of the sales, but I had signed the contract long before that and said I was going to take it down. Pulled the plug on a moneymaker. Ugh. I still think the deal was the best for the long run (or at least a two-year run), but it wasn’t pleasant to do.

Now you know why I didn’t become a brain surgeon or a spy: my decision-making capabilities are sometimes limited to answering the question, “Should this character be holding a sandwich or a banana when he enters the scene?”

Oops. Now I’ll spend the rest of the morning sorting THAT out!

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They’re Dropping Like Flies

My first new baseball poem of the year, up today on Bardball:

Spring Injury Report, 2011

Zach Grienke’s arm is hinky.
Jake Peavy’s feeling skeevy.
Adam Wainwright’s wing ain’t right.
Rich Harden’s asked for pardon.
Brad Lidge is off a smidge.
That goes ditto for Johnny Cueto.

And an inflamed elbow is causing
Pain for Jason Isringhausen.

Thank God for March,
So these great apes
Have one less month
To fall out of shape.

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A Wee Joke for St. Patrick’s Day

An Irishman moves into a tiny hamlet in County Kerry, walks into the pub and promptly orders three beers. The bartender raises his eyebrows, but serves the man three beers, which he drinks quietly at a table, alone.

An hour later, the man has finished the three beers and orders three more.

This happens yet again.

The next evening the man again orders and drinks three beers at a time, several times. Soon the entire town is whispering about the Man Who Orders Three Beers.

Finally, a week later, the bartender broaches the subject on behalf of the town. “I don’t mean to pry, but folks around here are wondering why you always order three beers?”

‘Tis odd, isn’t it?” the man replies, “You see, I have two brothers, one went to America, and the other to Australia. We promised each other that we would always order an extra two beers whenever we drank as a way of keeping up the family bond.”

The bartender and the whole town was pleased with this answer, and soon the Man Who Orders Three Beers became a local celebrity and source of pride to the hamlet, even to the extent that out-of-towners would come to watch him drink.

Then, one day, the man comes in and orders only two beers. The bartender pours them with a heavy heart. This continues for the rest of the evening – he orders only two beers. The word flies around town. Prayers are offered for the soul of one of the brothers.

The next day, the bartender says to the man, “Folks around here, me first of all, want to offer condolences to you for the death of your brother. You know-the two beers and all . . .”

The man ponders this for a moment, then replies, “You’ll be happy to hear that my two brothers are alive and well. It’s just that I, myself, have decided to give up drinking for Lent.”

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It’s Bee Season Once Again

It’s early spring, so for me, that means at least two things: I’m making props for the school play (more on it later) and I’m officiating at a school spelling bee. Today was the bee, and tonight is the debut of the play, so I got the double whammy.

I’ll say first off that I love doing both of these. It’s never a burden or an imposition. That’s why it’s a little heartbreaking that this will be my last bee. My hearing isn’t getting any better, and while I’ve never missed the spelling of a word b/c of it, I’d hate for it to be a factor in the future, especially since the winner of this bee gets to travel to Washington DC and compete nationally. Point of fact, today’s participants weren’t exactly Ethel Merman in the enunciation department, so I had to watch their lips and listen very intently. Time to hang up my Merriam-Webster and all the benefits the position held.

(For an essay I did some years ago when my son was in the city-wide bee in fifth grade, click here for the audio of the radio broadcast, or here for the text version.)

Today was the Chicago-wide bee for kids in private and parochial schools and homeschoolers. The 25 kids were a handsome lot, but so many different sizes! Ranging from 4th to 8th grade, there was literally a 2 foot difference between smallest and tallest.

The hardest part of judging a bee is that you end up pulling for every single kid, and you get your heart broken when they fall. Some kids were nervous, with quivering voices and loud sighs when concentrating. A smaller number were (or seemed) pretty nonchalant about it. One or two wrote the word out with their finger in their palms, but not as many as I’ve seen on TV. One of the youngest, smallest kids was really crushed when she misspelled a word (I think she was the first to do so), and buried her face in her hands and her collar as she sat down in the group. It was maybe the most upset I’ve seen a participant in my 5 or 6 years of doing this. In time, I noticed the boy next to her try to coax her back into equilibrium and elicit a small high-five out of her. Maybe bees, like sports, reveal character.

One thing about the words this year: Not many of the kids (thank heaven) got stuck with the extreme foreign words that have been included in recent years. I’m talking about really strange ones, like taj, klompen, babushka, sevruga, koan, peloton, Backstein, and aul (if you’re curious, “a mountain or desert settlement in the Caucasus region”, and a homophone for awl, which I wouldn’t think many kids would know unless their father was a cobbler).

Now certainly, the kids get the entire list of words to study, but what’s the chance of a kid spelling a word like mynheer (a Dutch word meaning “Mister”) versus a word he or she might’ve read or seen at some point, like charlatan or vernacular? Familiarity is a reason I would ban certain words like caribou and chipotle, since they are on commercial signs all over town, and thus might be easier to recall.

When it was obvious that the three finalists would be able to go all day on the list of words they’d studied, it was time to go off road and start from the list of words they hadn’t seen. These were all more common English words, but they weren’t a cakewalk, either. One participant fell by the way with her first word, deductible (yeah, how many schoolkids ever have to worry about a deductible?). But the final duo battled it out for about 15 minutes, going through 28 words back and forth before the victor emerged. He’s a 7th grader who placed about 4th citywide last year, so it was good to see him pull it out. But you wouldn’t believe how effortlessly both he and his opponent (a 6th grader) plowed through the word list, picking off desperately, exaggerate, fluoride, leviable and scuttlebutt (TWO T’s at the end!!!) like they were pumpkins waiting for release by a baseball bat.

The top five kids each got a prize, but the fairness of it left something to be desired. Fourth and fifth place each got a $25 gift certificate to Amazon. Third place received a year’s subscription to Encyclopedia Britannica dot com, and second place received the EB.com subscription plus a dictionary. All due respect to the hardworking folks at EB and Merriam-Webster, but these kids ain’t that impressed with your name brand. Numbers 2 and 3 were undoubtedly saying to themselves, “Those two get to spend their money any way they want, and I get a ticket to Research Dinosaurville.” Way to go.

Since it appeared that the words were a little less obscure this year, I don’t have many to give out for you to work into your everyday conversations, as I have in the past. It took a little digging, but here are a few to file under “It Pays To Increase Your Word Power”:

gynarchy — “government by women”
sitzmark — “a depression left in the snow by a skier falling backward” (if you can believe it, the speller got this one right)
hoomalimali — “the art or device of persuasion and flattery” (from Hawaiian)
decrement — “the act or process of gradually becoming less; decrease”
purfle — “a decorated border, esp. an embroidered edge of a garment”

Sparge these into all your parleys this weekend and flummox your conversances!

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New Package! Same Great Taste!

So it’s 14 months into the new decade, so I thought it was high time to do a little sprucing up with the website. I can’t speak for everyone, but I was getting tired of seeing the three-year-old book Recut Madness trumpeted as the “New Book” at various parts of the site. There isn’t much new copy, but the container is New And Improved! and it should let me update stuff a little more quickly than the old battleship.

I kept the color scheme more out of habit than anything else. I have nothing against caramel color, but I don’t know why the designer 8 years ago decided to use it. But thankfully, my new designer — Airan Wright over at From Concept to Completion — made it a little more exciting. The reversing of the colors in my portrait makes me feel like I’m at the Fillmore around 1969, waiting for Blue Cheer and the Moby Grape to come on. Right on!

Now the website should look a little better on people’s iPhones and all that jazz. I hope so. We’ll also be launching a Rex Koko website VERY soon. Airan’s got his designs in place, and all the special features are being created. We’re just waiting for the cover art of the e-book to be finished. When did that start? Don’t ask. I’m an impatient yet unforceful person, so I’ve just had to bite my tongue for a while as things limped along. That should be coming to an end pretty soon.

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SNOMG

That’s the best name that anyone came up with for Chicago’s recent run-in with Mother Nature, SNOMG. I wanted to call it Snowbamapalooza, but it never really caught on.

So we finally got the alley shoveled out this morning, with seven adults and teens working on it. Has the city plowed our street yet? Ha. We’ve been getting nice little emails from the alderman about the standard rank of priority plowing, but no sign of it happening. The sidewalks are all passable, because basically no one went to work yesterday, and we all got out and pitched in. You can tell which neighbors were drinking when they snow-blowed, because their paths are a little more twisty.

But what the hell? Third biggest snowfall on record, and they can’t plow the sidestreets yet? What a bunch of clucks.

On Tuesday night, when the storm was just beginning, a neighbor, my wife and I strapped on the XC skis and headed up the block to a park. It was so totally awesome!! The wind was probably between 40-60 mph, but it helped immensely to have ski goggles. The wind blew the snow over the baseball diamonds ferociously, and you could easily imagine documentaries about the Antarctica with the sinister way the snow traveled. The wind chill might’ve been pretty low, but with windproof clothes, it wasn’t bad at all. Sorry to have forgotten my camera, but the pictures wouldn’t have told much. The park is small, with only a couple small hills or berms, but the thrill was being out in a tropical snow storm, with THUNDERSNOW lighting up the night.

We saw a couple other people out for a gambol, and a few brought their dogs out VERY briefly. After about 90 mins, we three came back and found a guy who’s SUV was stuck in the alley. He had to go all of 75 yards, and he still managed to get himself stuck three times. And this was BEFORE the snow got heavy.

The kids and wife have had two days off of school. Tomorrow, the regular schedule kicks in again, and this will just be an inconvenience to deal with, but for 36 hours, it was one of the wildest events ever in Chicago. (As long as you weren’t marooned in your car on Lake Shore Drive. For some great pictures of that, check out the Facebook album by my friend Will Byington here.)

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My New Yorker Captions are Unprintable

Am I the only one who hates The New Yorker caption contest?

Every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday (with luck), the week’s issue of The New Yorker gets shoved into our mailbox. And when my kids come home, the first thing they’ll turn to when they see the mag is the back page.

There, for the uninitiated, is the Cartoon Caption Contest page. Which I loathe like little else.

I don’t know why it is. Maybe it’s the faux populism that the contest seems to exude. Here’s The New Yorker, letting all of its readers decide what the high-larious caption to the high-concept panel ought to be. It’s almost like being at the Algonquin Round Table — but more akin to yelling punchlines at George Kauffman from the next table.

In a more desperate way, the nightly TV newscast lets viewers send in pictures of cloud formations, and twitter/text their votes about whether taxes are bad or the home team is unbeatable. It’s the dialog that all established media now think will make them indispensable to people’s lives. The only problem is, most viewers can’t take a memorable picture, and most readers can’t write a caption.

Each week, a couple thousand captions are mailed in. Almost without fail, of the three finalists, one caption will be an execrable pun, one will be a play on words that takes three extra miles to get to its point (which wasn’t funny to start with), and one caption has close to the right tone — dry, multiple-layered, au courant but not cliché, and somewhat Gotham-y. By Gotham-y, I mean that it has to do with a stiff upper lip in the face of decay or danger or failure, or a smart-alecky retort that tries to wrangle the absurd to a mundane level. Anything that might refer to a shopping mall, fast food, an open space, a highway without gridlock, or Bass Pro Shops is never going to make it to the winner’s circle.

I’ve read that each of the cartoons used for the contest had already been submitted to the magazine by the cartoonist with a real caption. A caption they actually worked on and shaped with the writer’s innate skill of timing and economy. I’d really would like to know what that caption was. Whatever entries from readers are published might be close, or might be completely off-target, but I’ll never know exactly what the original caption was, and that makes me feel like I missed something. Maybe that makes me a snob, as if reading the magazine didn’t already accomplish that.

But as a professional writer and humorist, I’ve had too many instances of people in person and in print who work really really hard to prove that they are just as funny as me, even though I’ve never challenged them about it. Do people feel the need to show engineers that they know about torque and materials stress? Show dentists that they know how to administer Novocain?

It’s the whole “I crack everyone up at the board meetings — do you think I should try out as a stand-up comedian?” syndrome. If you have to ASK whether you should be a stand-up comedian, then you are sane, and ergo don’t have what it takes to be one. It’s the same with being a cartoonist. Someone is trying to make a living at it, while others are turning it into a parlor game. I feel bad for both sides.

Mostly, I fell bad reading those awful, awful puns.

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Happy Belated Birthday, Ernie!

Don’t know where the week went (or maybe I do, but aint tellin’), so I apologize for a lack of posting. I even forgot to wish Ernie Harwell a happy birthday, which would’ve been on Tuesday.

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Wish I Was Out There on a Slow Friday

At this moment in Chicago, it’s one degree outside. That’s weird to type. Sounds more like geometry than weather. “Two Degrees”, “one below”, “minus two”–yeah, all those roll off the tongue or keyboard. But not “It’s one degree.” Seems like it should lead to more comments or explanation, but it doesn’t.

With a couple exceptions, it’s been below freezing around here since Thanksgiving. The ice on the lake at the cottage must be like a mile thick now. At Christmastime it was strong enough to hold our weight walking all the way across, which was a first in my memory. It was smooth and clear and free of snow or scraping piles of frost. It gave me the chance to try ice fishing for the first time. Here I am with my trusty ice dog:

Man, did my dog have fun running around on the ice. He’s 12 or 13, but he acted like a mad dog out there, running full bore and slipping and crashing. Getting a walk in cold weather doesn’t thrill him, but playing out there with him has always been a joy.

I wish I were out there now, instead of splitting my attention between 15 things around the basement mezzanine office and getting very little done. Of course, out there I’d be getting NOTHING done, but it would have my full attention!