if only you could see through my eyes.

I've told you many times that I compile my blog into printed-on-paper books. There are currently 4 of them. Three are outrageously overpriced, but one is priced so low that when I see that not one of you has bought one, it makes me want to tell you all to go fuck off.

But then I remember that none of this is real, that I'm just a brain in a jar and some creature is running experiments on me and poking at me with bits of his lunch.

But for my latest book, I paid an extra $39 for a professional account to get Createspace/Amazon to open my book up to other sellers. Some POD books are only available in limited places, but I thought it would be worth the extra money to see what this would do.

So my book is available through other channels and I did a Google search for "Perfunctorily, Me" to see what I'd find. Which is the title of my book that you haven't bought.

The first surprise is that Jessamyn West mentioned my book on her blog and didn't say that it sucked. But maybe she'd been drinking. After all, she says she read it on the way home, probably in a plane and probably after 3 vodka tonics.

After 3 vodka tonics is how I recommend that everyone read my books. Because that's how I write them, and it helps if we speak the same language.

But then I found my book on Amazon UK and Amazon FR, listed in Pounds and Euros, £4.05 and EUR 6,90 which looks pretty damn cool to someone who never leaves the USA. And even Yen, ￥811.

I just don't understand why more people don't publish as print. I guess you're convinced that online publishing is just as good as print? Where does the Library of Congress store that electronic copy of your blog? Oh, it doesn't. But it would take your paper book and stick it in some box in the corner for future humans to discover and burn for heat.

I'm only bringing this up, AGAIN, because I see that Book Blogger Appreciate Week is coming up. And it made wonder why there isn't a Blog Booker Appreciate Week. And the answer is that there aren't very many blog bookers, or people who (re)publish their blogs as print books. Or even ebooks. Dennie Heye turned some of his blog posts into a book (my book is cheaper), but I don't know of anyone else.

If fact, that reminds me that I need to upload my stuff to feedbooks and have it kindleized.

So how can I convince you to make books? I've told you how cheap it is ...seriously cheap when all you need to buy is the proof copy and pay for shipping, for me, less than $10 total.

I'm not crazy. I know I'm not going to get rich from these books, as evidenced by all of you cheap bastards. Don't any millionaires read this blog?

It's like my CafePress ("buy some effing crap") store. I don't make a penny from those shirts, but it's just awesome when someone thinks they are cool enough to buy.

So, buy my book or don't buy my book. I just can't understand why you all don't want to save all your work in print to put on your shelf and flip through every once in a while and wonder, "What the fuck was I thinking?!!"

The Rules of the Game.

I've given up on ever becoming a writer. I wanted to be one all my life until I learned that it took work to be good at it. But with the help of the Internet, I have become one.

It used to be that one needed an agent to get noticed, a publisher to get distributed and a reviewer to become known. But the internet is the great equalizer.

I mean, how do you recognize a great book? Sure, you know now because someone taught you. But how would you recognize a great book if you'd never read one? What if you grew up reading crap? And that was all you knew? There would be no way to convince you that a great book was great.

I've seen this happen already with movies. You ask someone who's been raised on Saw or The Fast and the Furious or Pirates of the Caribbean to watch something like The Philadelphia Story or The Battleship Potemkin or Sunset Boulevard and see how bored they get. Like I can't get my girlfriend to watch 10 minutes of La Cage Aux Folles, but she watches The Birdcage every time it's on TV.

I don't mean that these movies are crap, but it's an impossible task to convince someone of something when there is no reason to believe. There is no longer a good reason to be a film snob. When I can put Armageddon in my Netflix queue right next to La Règle du Jeu, then how much of a snob can I be?

So what about reading? How many generations do we have left before no one has the desire to read a great book?

And worse, what happens when someone Googles for books and finds something written by the.effing.librarian? And then doesn't know enough to not read it? And then reads it first. And I become their writer of choice, their Armageddon?

There will come a time when no one knows what's good because the internet doesn't have any reason to tell them. The internet doesn't care. We will watch clips of babies dancing and think they are great. We will read some downloaded book because it had good comments on Amazon.

And you might think that's sad, but you will be gone. I don't think this will happen in your lifetime, but soon after, when no one remembers. I guess people will still read the great religious books, including the Bible, Torah, and Qur’an, but only after someone add vampires. Sparkly, sexy vampires.

We haven't changed much.

So the banality we find on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook isn't simply the product of a culturally overfed, yet intellectually undernourished generation. Sometimes I wonder whether our excess of stimulation, of TV, internet, print media, etc., just forces us to excrete overly simplistic world views, OMG!, via microblog and email. We truly have nothing in history to compare with our lives. Almost no record of day to day life exists from which we can learn just how our earthly predecessors thought.

Yes, of course that's bullshit. These records exist, but like you, I won't spend the time to research them. But thankfully, some people in England are making some of the research easier for the rest of us.

Check this out: the University of Cambridge Scriptorium Project is scanning and transcribing personal documents, hundreds of years old, and offering us a glimpse into the private lives of people who had probably no free time and minimal education, and they have discovered that those people from the Fifteenth Century are exactly like us.

One household record (according to the MSNBC story) lists what the recorder served for lunch: "gruel, boiled meat for my lord or lady, puddings, or a calf head." Yum. Do you get the whole head with that order? Because after the lips and an ear, I'm stuffed.

How about "oystyrs in gravy" and a Diet Coke. And then there's something about "dayes after gyff her sporge & þat shall open her bowels" which usually happens to me when I eat oystyrs; the opening of the bowels is a revered tradition around our household.

So people jotted down what they ate and passed this information down through the family, from parent to child. They wrote down jokes and quotes and sonnets and cures for ailments, and all this, at a time when paper was rare and expensive.

I knock Twitter for giving us a window into the shallowest of our souls, but it seems that modern humans have always enjoyed telling others about their day so far. It's important to report to the world that I exist. I think, therefore I am. I think we just want tell people what we're thinking because we can.

It's like that Steven Wright joke:

Two babies were born on the same day at the same hospital. They lay there and looked at each other. Their families came and took them away. Eighty years later, by a bizarre coincidence, they lay in the same hospital, on their deathbeds, next to each other. One of them looked at the other and said, "So. What did you think?"

Sometimes when I read what people have to say about their lives, those trite exchanges that seem like a promise wasted, like our species has plateaued and we will never reach our true potential, I now understand that our sucking isn't really sucking at all, it's just being human.

We have no potential to be something greater in the sense that we might one day travel to distant worlds or construct delicious tacos with our mind power. We are what we are, a creature with severe physical limitations but also with vast untapped capacity for emotional change and caring.

Which is just more proof that knuckle-bumping, air-kissing, annoying, gossiping space aliens crashed onto our planet 100 million years ago then humped some large rodents to create the creature that eventually became us. So tweet on, ratboy, this could be the best we'll ever get.

LISNews essay contest

The first ever LISNews Librarian Essay Contest invites librarians to write an original essay about issues that impact librarianship. The contest will run for the entire month of February, 2010, with the fabulous prizes awarded...

My contribution appears here, Patron Expectations vs. Librarian Expectations in Library Service.

And there are a few others on the main essay page.

You can read and vote and leave comments on all the submissions, and you can submit your own essay after you read what I wrote and realize how easy it is.

Any extended blog post with a central theme is essentially an essay, so it's not that big a deal to submit one; most of you write this stuff every day.

So go support LISNews by voting or commenting or writing. But don't feel bad when I win the grand prize (which I believe is a foot massage from Blake).

My girlfriend expects a writing credit for The Vampire Bat.

So my girlfriend just became a Twihard or a Twilighty or whatever you call fans of the Twilight series.

We were driving and she was telling me about the book and the movie and the action figures and she said she was at the part where the vampires were playing baseball during the thunderstorm.

And I've seen the movie, so I said, "Yeah, whoever wrote that knows nothing about physics. To hit a ball that hard so it sounds like thunder would just shatter the wooden bat. And what vampire wants to be near a hunk of wood shaped like a dagger."

[Yes, I now know the vampires use metal bats in the movie. Which makes sense, fear of stakes and all. I'm just relating our discussion as we had it.]

And she said the bat wouldn't break because it's a vampire bat. They have special bats so vampires can play baseball. And then I said, "Okay, so the vampires leave a vampire bat in the woods and a human boy finds it. And he takes it to his next baseball game, and he's normally just an average hitter, but now he finds he can hit home runs nearly all the time. So he realizes it's the bat. It looks like a normal bat, but every time he hits a ball, it flies about 300 feet or more.

And just when he's getting used to all the fame his hitting is bringing, he's now the most famous player on the team at his school, the vampires find him because they want their bat back. Humans aren't supposed to have these things and they ask him to give it back. But he lies to them and says he doesn't know what they're talking about.

So that's our story. The Vampire Bat. Or my story. Copyright protection only kicks in after you write it down.

Notes: the story probably only works as a juvenile book because of the goofy nature of a "vampire bat." It could work as an adult tale like "The Natural" if you want the story to be about loss and redemption instead of vampires.

And the usual devices must be included:
protagonist has a weird friend who if fascinated with some area that has been fruitless until now, and his or her help become useful in battling the current threat, or he's just around to be funny;
a girl or boy who likes our hero but the hero does not recognize the importance of the relationship until later;
a desirable partner usually out of the hero's reach, who is suddenly interested because of the hero's new found fame, i.e, the "hot girl";
parents who are non-existent or oblivious to the problem;

possible plot twists:
parent or teacher who knows about the threat or has similar childhood experience as the hero;
the bat only works at night;
the bat needs blood, or has other powers;

...Yeah, I'll get on this as soon as I finish all this important sleeping and eating I have scheduled and as soon as I can verify that RL Stine didn't write this same story ten years ago.

On the destruction of the writer's spirit

I was listening to NPR: All Things Considered today and one of the segments praised a book by an author who I took a creative writing class with (okay, "with whom I took") about twenty years ago, and who on the first day of class did something that made me decide he was a complete ass.

You might say that being a good writer doesn't make one a good teacher, so I'll agree with that and move ahead.

I tried to get into the creative writing class with James Hall (who doesn't seem to have a Wikipedia page (wtf??) ), but at the time, everyone signed up for that one so I took what was available.

So this other guy, who is not James Hall, opens the first day of class by asking what everyone is writing.  And the first person to chime in reads her story which was something like this:

Arcmage Thelia Ravenshield raised her golden bow to her eye in line with her target.  The Iceblack Lord could feel the air vibrate with the tension of the bowstring being pulled taught.  The arrow was forged from metals belched forth during the one thousand year eruption of Mt. Killak, metals rumored to have the godlike powers of restoration or destruction.  The Iceblack Lord was as old as time and no mortal weapon could injure him, but this arrow, so it was told, could pierce his stonelike heart and finally extinguish his reign of terror.

Pretty awesome, huh? Ugly chicks can really write. And then person number two reads her stuff:

Professor Dumbledore eyed Harry's wand suspiciously, "Are you positive you have never used this wand to make Hermione's breasts larger, Harry? Not even a little?"
"No," Harry protested.  "I think Ron's got her preggers."

And he stops the class and says, "No. This class is about Contemporary Fiction.  Elves and wizards are not part of contemporary fiction."

This was 1990, not the pre-Hobbit world of 1920.  Elves and wizards were definitely contemporary fiction.  So the class didn't get off on the right start.

So when I heard his name on NPR today, I was a little annoyed.  Because he sucked the life out of (at least) two budding novelists.  You know, I don't read non-Batman fantasy fiction or non-Batman gay-lesbian-transgender fiction or non-Batman Christian fiction, but I would never say that some author's orcin gangbang is craptacular bullshit.  So when this guy did that, it just killed my spirit.

And I never wrote another word again. 

On the plus side, I learned two important things from that class.  The first is that in storytelling "only trouble is interesting."  And the second is that there are only two basic plots: "A stranger comes to town," and "A man goes on quest."  I don't remember anything else because I never did the assigned readings.

But I never wrote another word again.

Electronicless log.

I'm trying to find the current term for writing thoughts on paper. Is it "offline blogging" or "ink blogging"? Since the Internet is changing everything and sometimes creating new names for old things, do the old names for old things change?

Me: I was writing in my journal today...
Not Me: I leave notes on Facebook, too.
Me: No, not Facebook.
Not Me: Twitter?
Me: No, a book journal. On paper.
Not Me: Oh. Does anyone read that?
Me: No, it's private. It's not online. It's just in this book that I keep at my desk.
Not Me: [?]

So what is the term for when you have private thoughts that you write on paper and don't include links to other stuff unless you tear something out of a newspaper or magazine and comment on it, but it's completely self-contained in that you don't need to look outside the pages to understand what's going on, and you don't intend to publish later and you keep other people from reading the thoughts because they're meant for you alone?

Maybe we're not at the point yet where paper is so rare that we are unable to imagine that writing upon it is unnatural. Paperless means something today, but maybe we're not at the point where there's an antonym for paperless. Is netless a modifier? Computerless? Electronic(s)less?

anatomy of a blog post

I know you probably don't care, but I always wonder where blog posts come from. I can't tell from day to day whether I will ever have anything to write. So now that it's fresh in my mind, I'm going to break down my last post and give some commentary on how the.effing.librarian composes a joke.

First, I had nothing. I rarely have anything to say. I need to just read what's already out there and hope that it sparks some opinion in my brain that I can use to say something, whether funny or not. I did a search for librarian and saw a post from some guy on the Annoyed Librarian selling out by taking up with Library Journal. That's what I usually do when I can't think of what to write about; I put librarian or library into Google and see what comes out. In this
case, I'm not even sure if I used Google since I was reading a story about Ask.com, so I might have been searching with Ask.

So I read the guy's opinion. I can't even find it now. It was some blog I've never read before, but he was mad that the AL sold out. So I jumped over to read, or just scan, AL's latest post. It seemed forced, but I won't pick on her first professional post. She got the gig based on her past stuff, so that's all that matters.

Now, at this point, I still got nothing. But I have the "selling out" angle and also "getting paid to write."

There are many staples of comedy: the pie in the face, the Jack Nicholson impression, the Captain Kirk, the minority stereotype; these are things that are easy to work into a joke. And when the "Penthouse letter" popped into my head, I was surprised that it was a gag I'd never used before. The only negative side of writing a parody of a letter is that it can get dirty really fast. And I didn't want to write anything too suggestive. Don't know why, but I made that rule.

So I wrote the first obvious joke, using the word "stacks" and linking it to a women being "stacked." That comes right out of Chapter 14 of the joke-writing manual. Then I needed a reason for being in the library. I thought of cooking books, but didn't think of anything funny right off. Remember, this isn't a professional blog, my jokes only need to satisfy my sense of humor. If you don't laugh, tough shit. One day, when we all have webcams, and I can get a pop-up alert that you are on my blog reading something, then I can log in, enable the camera, and see if you laugh. But until that day, I'm just going to assume that you think everything I write is pure gold.

I picked the Kawasaki repair manual because in a Penthouse letter, the guy wants to seem macho. I did a quick search and found that a "650" looked like a a credible model. I initially had "600" in the letter as a guess since I don't know anything about motorcycles. I went back and added "badass" to confirm my machismo and add credibility to my story that I would nail a librarian.

At this point, I realized I was going to write this. Up to now, I could have given up. But I had most of an idea and it seemed worthwhile to keep going with it.

I picked the title, "We all serve somebody" because my point was that we all need to do stuff to make a living. Not funny, but my titles usually aren't. They're often the last thing I write just before I click, Publish.

About now, I knew my ending was going to have to do with making up stuff and writing something about how the Annoyed Librarian will need to make up new stuff compared to the.effing.librarian never needing to make up anything because it's all true.

Again, I went back to the comedy basics and wrote the part about the "tight ride" adding the double meaning for the tight librarian. This is what we imagine would be in the quintessential Penthouse letter, the weak double-entendre or tired pun. Ditto for "tense."

When you realize you're spending brain energy to mimic a forty-five-year-old unemployed high school dropout who lives in his parent's basement and spends his days imagining that all women worship his oversized belly, his bald head and his tiny penis, or worse, some fifteen-year-old, who, himself, is making up crap to send to Penthouse, then you become disheartened: "Fuck, I studied Coleridge in English Lit for this?" But you soldier on to honor the labor of all those writers who went on before you; comedy is hard.

After I finish the letter, I go back to sweeten it by adding color, adjectives or things to add visual truth, like the lip color and the "no cell phones" sign. And I double-check to make sure it's not too dirty, just in case someone out there might be considering hiring the.effing.librarian for a professional job. I read my posts two ways, one for how it sounds in my head, and another for how the words appear on the screen. I often go back and add or remove words to adjust narrative pacing. Unless it's late and I don't proof at all.

Then I got lucky and came up with a better title for the post and changed it. Sometimes when you overthink something, the obvious eludes, but the new "fame and fortune" title was simpler. And because of the new title, I went and added the line about "What she said wasn't Fiction" because I need another "F word."

Damn, now you know that what I wrote in the Penthouse letter was fictional.

Unless what I'm writing now is made up and the letter is real. Hmm. You can't really know what's the truth, can you? So assume the letter is real and all of this, made up. Yes, that letter is real.

Okay, I lied about not using old stuff anymore.

Here is part of a letter I wrote to Will Manley in 1995 and part of his column that used my letter:

I'm a reference librarian, and I know I should be tolerant, but I find my patience evaporating as days go by. Some people are too, too stupid. Just this morning a guy called for a value on a used Chevy half-ton pickup truck. What model, I asked. Doesn't know. Engine? Not sure. Long bed? Don't know. Gun rack, hound dog, Confederate flag in back? Yep, he knows that. So I guess and tell him what a specific model costs; if the truck he wants is that model then he's in luck.
What the hell else am I supposed to do???

I'm constantly being pissed off by people who think that everything is on computer. Don't you have the Internet? Don't you have the CD-ROM? Can't you just type some keys and give me every damn thing I want??!! DON'T YOU HAVE ALL THIS TECHNOLOGY THAT I REFUSE TO PAY FOR BY NOT VOTING TO PAY MORE IN TAXES TO SUPPORT IT??? ISN'T MY LOUSY $15 A YEAR ENOUGH TO GET ME WHAT I WANT WHEN I WANT IT???

That's what pisses me off. A demanding public which demands things it can't possibly get because it doesn't have the capacity to understand that it's not free. Technology takes money and knowledge requires effort, dammit.

Yeah, what is it the kids say? "Angry, much?"

And here is what appeared in his column:

Thank you, thank you, thank you to all the hundreds of readers who answered the survey from my July/ August column (p. 736) on the vexations of reference librarianship.

• A man called the reference desk of a southern public library and wanted to know the blue-book value of a Chevy pickup truck. "What model?" asked the librarian. The patron didn't know. "What size engine?" The patron didn't know. "Long-bed or short-bed?" The patron didn't know. "Well," said the librarian in exasperation, "what can you tell me about it?" "Oh," said the caller, "it has a gun rack, a hound dog, and a sticker of the Confederate flag on the back window."

So there you have it, the earliest evidence I can find that I was destined to become the.effing.librarian.

And to those of you who've purchased t-shirts and coffee mugs, wear them and sip from them with pride. (And GB, really, one shirt??!! I mean the exchange rate for $ to £ makes the shirt practically free!) Tell your friends. Take a picture of you wearing the shirt or holding the mug, send it to me and I'll post it!!! I'm desperate for attention, and if I need to live vicariously through a t-shirt to have some, then I'll do it. Send me pictures!

Friday life-savers

We at the.effing.librarian are all about helping. So when I read this post, Writing blunders, I thought of some things I can do to help all you struggling writers out there:

#8 Pain don't hurt: Flat descriptions about someone's emotional state bring tears from editors, not readers. Now, don't look to me for fixes on this, I'm not the best with emotion, but I do know you can't just say "His accusation made her feel bad." Describe the feeling bad through images or actions. Did her face heat up with shame, or did it cause ice to form in her gut, or did she flee to the bathroom and sob into her scarf?

(now this is me helping)

"...I almost screamed."

"You almost screamed?" He stressed the "almost" to tease her.

"Yeah."

"Well, what did you do when you almost screamed? I've never seen anyone almost scream. Do you mean that you wanted to scream, but you didn't?"

"What are you talking about?" Her voice got loud like when she argued with her mother. "What's your problem. Just go back to cutting our lawn."

"I'm not fighting with you, but I need to know. How do you know that the next thing you would do is scream? Did you feel the scream coming and you covered your mouth in case you screamed, so no one would hear, but covering your mouth distracted you from screaming, so you didn't? Did you think about screaming, but realized you weren't really terrified enough to scream?"

She looked off as if she were remembering. "Well, yeah."

"Good. Now tell me what you did. Exactly. What did you think?"

"Well, I was scared. I thought something was going to jump on me or hurt me. But nothing happened."

"You mean immediately, right away."

"Yeah, nothing happened right away. It was like I saw something scary, but nothing happened, nothing went with it. It was just something I saw."

"So you didn't scream."

"Yeah."

"So you were just startled. It scared you at first, but there really was no threat, so the scream never came."

"Yeah, that's right."

He turned from her and felt around in the nylon sports bag that lay on the seat of the riding mower. When he found what he needed, er showed it to her, its blade sharp and ready for work. Then he grabbed her throat and held it tight.

"That's good, but now I really need to hear you scream."

There. Problem solved. The next time you want to write about someone almost screaming, use that. Go ahead. It's all yours, totally free. But I guess the person I stole it from might object.

#11. So that's why you wrote this: I've read stories where the most precise language and evocative imagery is saved for the all-important pudenda-shaving scene as the heroine gets ready to go to the library. I'm not knocking your kink, I'm just wondering why so much word-weight is put into a personal hygiene choice in a story about tracking down Shoggoths.

Looky, a library reference! I once wrote a whole story just to use the line, "she receded into darkness, and as she waved goodbye, she seemed to pull at the air like a drowning ghost." I love that image, like a drowning ghost. Don't steal that, you stealers!

And for some reason which I can't rember, I found my way to afghan-cap, the "Ageless, Faceless, Gender-Neutral, Culturally-Ambiguous Adventure Person." And I can't remember why, but I wrote this (maybe it was meant to poke fun at the choose your own adventure games, but I don't know).

As the first-born child of the leader of the Thraals, your favorite pastime is folding laundry.

"But I hate to do the laundry," you think.

I realize that you might hate to do the laundry, but this is what the Thraals are know for. They can fold and press a ladies pleated button-down silk-ramie blend blouse faster than anyone.

"So, I don't care."

You may not care about folding blouses, but it really is important. Just go with it. It will be really useful later on. Okay?

"I guess so."

Now, if you use starch, turn to page 44, for no-starch, turn to page 12.

So there. Any way I can help.