Less Is Not More

Notable News from a Year Ago, June 2, 2009: Nothing of interest, although I’m two weeks away from attending the New York Pitch and Shop Conference.

Of course it isn't, stupid.

I read a lot of reviews, okay?  I call myself researching the market and considering the range of stories, mostly on the New York Times, that are considered worthy or intriguing enough to have a hyperlink affixed to them.  I’m a human and I have an engineering background — I notice patterns.  Overwhelmingly, I notice a preference among reviewers for writing that is concise and works that exhibit an “economy of words”.  In other words, the message I’ve gotten from reading reviews these days: Less is more.

I don’t know why I bristle every time I read a review promoting this weltanschauung.  As I like to say: Revision is my Muse.  Sometimes the only solution for a problem in the text or the manuscript is simply to cut it out and start over, or cut it out and leave it gone.  Stephen King, one of my mentors (unofficial, of course), uses a 10% rule on word count when he’s editing a work, and although I’ve made no hard and fast rules in the process of rewriting, I’m always looking for ways to express my thoughts and ideas in fewer words.  There’s power in trimming the fat.  I cannot, and will not, deny it.

It’s not too far-fetched to say we are prejudiced against ampleness in books the way we are, especially in Western society, prejudiced against obesity in people, most notably in women.  And since women are the largest buyer of books…

Yet, even though I know this, I still bristle when reviewers praise sparse word use over verbosity.  On one hand, since I’ve seen it so much, I get the impression that book reviewing, like publishing itself, like expert analysis in any field it seems, is a copycat trade that has only gotten more pandemic with the speed of information transmission.  One reviewer says something unique, and then every reviewer or expert says a derivative of the same thing, as if the repetition is more indicative of truth than it is of brainwashing.

For instance, in the NBA play-offs [last] year, the Orlando Magic was branded as the team that couldn’t be “trusted” by one ESPN NBA analyst, and then before you knew it every ESPN analyst was saying the same thing, as if “cannot be trusted” was the ESPN-approved view of Orlando. It didn’t matter that such statements flew in the face of observable evidence to the contrary.

Orlando beat Philadelphia in Game 6 in Philadelphia without Dwight Howard — but they couldn’t be trusted to beat the Celtics.  Orlando beat Boston in Games 6 and 7, with Game 7 in Boston — and yet, when they were up on Cleveland 3-2 heading back for Game 6, in Orlando, they couldn’t be trusted.  I’m not an Orlando Magic fan, but the more I see of this critical copycat analysis, the more I am convinced that I have to make my own decisions about what is good and what isn’t, and leave the speculating to the so-called pros.

But, back to the taintless world of publishing and NYT peer and expert reviews.  I suppose this is a very fitting discussion since last week I presented an article on the subtle censorship that exists in trend analysis and forecasting based on historical data, and how that subtlety, especially in the subjective fiction ranks, gets more pronounced when race is an added variable.  It would appear from everything that I read that reviewing is also a subtle form a censorship.  Write a book longer than 450 pages and, tsk tsk, you just haven’t done your job as an author.  On the other hand, write a trim, powerful, 254 pages and, my God, all praise the second coming of Herman Melville.

Oops.  I meant to say Hemingway instead of Herman, but more than likely you don’t believe I made any such mistake; you believe there was purpose, perhaps even prestidigitation, in my name-dropping.  Yes.  I admit it.  I wanted to place Moby Dick and A Farewell to Arms in the same sentence, see how many modern readers and reviewers cringed at the juxtaposition.  I wanted to show how length alone, even in the face of modern fiction’s skew toward Hemingway’s economy, can never be the sole measuring stick of excellence.  Just ask Shakespeare, Alex Haley, or Tolstoy if they feel any differently.  I’m sure they’ll side with me.

Less is more as a modern publishing zeitgeist isn’t even uniform across genre.  For the past two weeks I’ve been preparing for my trip to New York.  We leave Saturday, June 6^th [2009]; the conference starts Thursday, June 11^th [2009]; Monday, June 15^th [2009], we return.  I’ll take with me the pitch that I’ve rewritten over the past three weeks using examples gleaned from the local library, a local Books-A-Million, and the books that I own.

One of the things I learned: the novels in the Cleveland [Tennessee] Public library aren’t very indicative of what’s selling now, and in some cases, what’s been selling for the past two decades.

Second lesson: Even though I thought I had done it before this was first time that I thought critically about where my book should appear in the book store, how it should be categorized, what titles I want to appear next to The Twin Paradox.

Which led to the last realization, which I stated three paragraphs ago: Genre implies length and in some genres, like science fiction and fantasy — which is where, for wont of a more fitting better category, I will market The Twin Paradox as — historically speaking, less certainly isn’t more.

I read more than the New York Times, of course.  As my essay stated last week, I also read Publishers Marketplace, Publishers Weekly, and pretty much anything that I can find with reviews and insight into the state of the industry I’m trying to break into.

Word is, there’s pressure from bookstores on authors of the sci-fi and fantasy community to write smaller books so that more product can fit on the bookshelves.  Moby Dick is great, and so is The Fourth Saga of the Elflund Dragon, complete at 1251 pages; but it costs the same price as Lisa’s New Boyfriend: Or How to be Swanky, Fabulous and Bitchy, Lose Fifty Pounds, Smoke Tobacco-less Cigarettes and Get Any Damn Man You Want and All the Other Haters Can Kiss Your Ass and Blog About it if They Want, You Don’t Give A Shit, which is a crisp, rollicking 212 pages.  So the bookstore can fit 10 of Jenny’s New Boyfriend on the shelf while they can only fit two of The Elflund Dragon.

An economy of words, they claim?  Yes, indeed.  If I’m reading the present trends correctly, before long the subtitles will be longer than the books themselves.

Furthermore, it’s not too far-fetched to say we are prejudiced against ampleness in books the way we are, especially in Western society, prejudiced against obesity in people, most notably in women.  And since women are the largest buyer of books…

I don’t, of course, want to appear insensitive to the needs of bookstores.  If I was a bookstore owner, and was faced with living and breathing extinction as nearly all of them are, I’d want to hedge my bets, make sure my offering was diversified.  I cannot, and do not, blame them for taking this stance.  And, at the same time, as an author who swears by revision (which is why I haven’t published a blog by the way) [it should be obvious why I marked through this statement], I understand the power of redaction, and see my writing improve with each word I erase.

But it is categorically irresponsible, from a reader’s standpoint, for a reviewer to defame a book on the basis of length alone, or make side-angle comments that decrease luster because there were, in the reviewer’s opinion, 10K more words than there should have been.  Perhaps I show readers too much credit and not enough to those who do the reviewing, especially since there are more books on the market and nowhere near the number of reviewers to do them justice.  I just know that, as a reader, if the story is good, if the writing is compelling, I am unconcerned with length.  As a reader, when the story is good, you never want it to end, and the really good stories stay with you long after you’ve finished.  So how, in this context, could less ever be more?

The Weekly Wrap Returns

Missing in action but not soon forgotten, The Weekly Wrap returns like Superman on a five-year search for planet Krypton, or Batman returning to face a darkly comic Joker, or like me retuning to Atlanta after 9 long years away.  I’ve been silent, but trust when I say I have been busy.  Excuses aside, it’s time to get this ball rolling again, so without further ado here it is.  I can hear the rumble in your stomach: The Weekly Wrap.

• I came across this story in CITY JOURNAL while reading comments at Dar Kush, which ultimately led to this story, which ultimately led me to save CITY JOURNAL in my favorites.  I can’t do either article justice here in the Weekly Wrap, but Benjamin Plotinsky’s got some very thought-provoking suppositions.  I’ve seen something similar to the black angel premise in the NEW YORK TIMES piece How the Movies Made a President, but still, that’s like comparing the words Jeep and jeepers (as in jeepers creepers).  Obviously, there’s a relationship, but both words — and both articles — stand on their own.  And the Sci-Fi/Religion piece was phenomenal — just up my ally.  I’ll be watching Plotinsky and CITY JOURNAL in the future.
• Is the world getting more religious?  That’s a question I hadn’t thought about until reading Plotinsky’s “How Science Fiction Found Religion”, but that got me wondering.  I’ve spent the last nine years living in Cleveland, TN — home to the headquarters of Church of God International, and Lee University, a Christ-centered liberal arts school.  Bradley County, where we lived, was a dry county, so to buy cooking wine we had to drive to Chattanooga.  Maybe I don’t recognize the influx of Christianity because I’ve lived so close to it, and also because, personally, I’ve chosen to go in a different direction.  But I’m in Atlanta now — again, anyway — and I woke up at 6:30 AM this Thursday, turned on V103,  and there was Frank Ski doing a devotional.  An hour and a half later, there was Ricky Smiley playing “Order My Steps” and talking to a pastor.  The Ricky Smiley incident was particularly humorous because as soon as the religious segment was over, the next thing they talked about was Role-Playing in the Bedroom.
• But the supposed increase/perceived need of religion in the world has been high on my radar all week.  I walked into Chik-fil-A and saw their mission statement bold and clear: “That we might glorify God by being a faithful steward in all that is entrusted to our care…”  As I was driving to Asheville, NC this week I happened upon 106.9, the Light, and listened as I drove.  Was my heart convicted to the point of conversion?  Nowhere close.  But still I listened.  Still I wondered if there was something that I was missing or being stubborn about.  Especially with in comes to New Age Christian rock music.  As I listened to the Light I found myself thinking about the so-called Motown sound, and particularly, the Motown drummer.  All Christian rock music sounds the same to me, just like how all Motown songs sound the same.  And don’t even get me started on the fact that not once in four hours did I hear a Christian song from another genre — not even Yolanda Adams.  But I suppose it wouldn’t be in rotation if there wasn’t demand for it.  Apparently, that demand isn’t coming from me.

And that’s the Weekly Wrap.

Next Vista: Wednesday, June 2, 2010, “Less Is Not More.”

The Words Not Written

Notable News from a Year Ago, May 19, 2009: I finish writing The Words Not Written, which in hindsight may be the turning point in my maturation as a writer.

A road diverges...

As you can tell, my weekly discipline over the past two Tuesdays has declined and furthermore, if you can’t see the evidence, I’ll share a secret: Today isn’t really Tuesday, May 19 [2009] as the header says; today’s Wednesday, May 20!  A Tuesday Times entry written on a Wednesday — for shame.  For shame!  [Blogging is still a few months away, and I’m still thinking of this as a personal journal called The Tuesday Times.] You could almost think since I barely remembered beyond the last possible moment to fulfill even this entry that perhaps the timing and energy for the project is gone, and that soon the entire enterprise will implode for lack of enthusiasm.

But I wouldn’t go so far just yet.  A brief recap of my activities shows that last week I was in Fayetteville, NC for my job and the opportunity to write escaped during late night dinners with the team.  And don’t even get me started there.  The topic of discussion among my co-workers, always of peculiar interest to me since I am one of the few people in Corporate America (indeed in the world) who does not drink, was a shot called A Finger in Your Ass that someone had had at a club in Florida and liked.  This person being male, well… perhaps you can see what path this conversation went down without much more, uh, prodding.  Human resource types the world over are shuddering at the thought.

And on top of that I was once again testing myself literarily, finishing off a piece on censorship that was, at the time, due on May 18^th.  (Since then I learned that the deadline has been extended, because of judge unavailability, to June 1^st.)  In any case, Author! Author! is an excellent blog in my humble opinion, and I’ve learned more about authorship and the publishing dating game reading it than any before.

Even in the last week, because of what I read on Anne Mini’s blog, I changed my standard manuscript format — because it wasn’t until then that I realized underlining text to signify italics is old hat.  The wealth of information on this blog (and passion, lest we forget) is truly staggering, and for those who know, being confident in format is just as crucial as confidence in authorial voice.  Because if the work isn’t in the format the gatekeepers except to see, they just won’t read it.

Welcome, my pretties, to the world of the beautiful girl who everyone wants to be with, and who can therefore be selective and unreasonable in her demands.

The surprising thing is it’s a contest on censorship and prior to reading about it, which supplements monetary awards with publication on a super-well read blog and barter-esque editorial phone consultations, I hadn’t thought formally about censorship much.  So when I say it was a test it literally was: I wanted to see what I could come up with off the top of my head.  So here it is.  As a treat for me missing the last two weeks and slouching on this entry, I’ll include the entire 1000-word piece as a supplement to this entry.  What else can I say?  Enjoy.

[In lieu of writing the excerpt below, you can also click here and show Anne Mini some much-belated Internet love.  And for the record I don't like the picture, but that's another story.]

The Words Not Written

I’m black but I don’t wear it on my sleeve.  With a post-racial president in the White House it’s not the chic thing to do anyway but inevitably when I write, query, do all of those decidedly non-author tasks like considering audience and marketing, I find myself at an all too familiar fork in the path — a choice between what I think is acceptable for a writer of my genus-blind talents and what the publishing and literary magnates are slobbering (or, more often, not slobbering for) from a writer like me.  I make a choice between the branches because I have to, going with my gut.  Not surprisingly, I write to match.

In addition to my race, I’m also the gambling sort who often mistakes his recklessness for confidence, but I feel neither reckless nor over-confident by claiming a fraternity among authors.  Authorship is a solitary path but far from peculiar.  If you’re reading this then surely at some point in your journey you’ve come to a similar fork in the path — you’ve made a choice.  We all have.  Maybe you recognized when it happened and maybe you didn’t, but the capital A Author you dreamed of being as a child and the adjective author you’ve become as an adult are two separate authors altogether.  Be it romance, sci-fi, black, [fill in the blank with whatever your group is, italics please], or, for the special major among us with many affiliations, MFAs (multiple flouncing adjectives) — whatever the case may be we are a family so lost in the winding forest of specialization and genre and the subtle censorship it employs that our readers need prescriptive directions on how to find us.  Conversely, despite all that flouncing, the adjectives make us that much easier to ignore.

The reasons for this I will leave for an anthropologist to explain (perhaps from the fossilized remains of another unheard traveler who has died along the way) but I recall a famous adage about authors striving to remove themselves from story, which guides my decision at the fork but presents a dilemma when art meets market and the gatekeeper at the conference is saying, “The writing’s beautiful, but [your group]… they don’t necessarily constitute a book-buying majority, do they?”, and I’m saying, stifling my anger because what I’ve written has implications beyond the group(s) I nominally represent, “How do you know that?”, and they’re replying, definitively, “BookScan, of course.  Seventy percent of all hard cover book sales.”  When you’re faced with that kind of irredactable evidence of what the market will support how do forget about the MFA author that you’ve become?  And how do I, when the black, male, married without children, thirty-one year old cheese grits lover that I am says so much about what I should be writing, and what I shouldn’t?

I am, of course, being facetious about BookScan and any other self-corroborating market analysis that willfully ignores the chicken-or-the-egg paradoxes their numbers represent.  That’s a mouthful so allow me to translate: Self-doubt’s a predator in these here woods, and if I spent my energy viewing the future from an outpost constructed from the past I would’ve succumbed to the nighttime caterwauls and weariness a long time ago.  Instead I prefer to believe in a different future, a different world where possibility, even in publishing, is not restricted to those things that can be plotted on a moving average trend chart.  I prefer to be as delusional in my belief as the gatekeepers are willfully ignorant and trusting in their data.  I prefer, in short, to believe in truth that is stranger than fiction.

Just the same, though, as any unpublished author is told to do, I pay attention to national and regional bestsellers lists, and stay abreast of deal making through Publishers Marketplace.  I read the bets that are being made by independent and major bookies alike; I recognize the regurgitation of theme and plot and an infatuation among many for old stories newly told.  I’ve become aware through observation of something I never expected when I was learning to read with Dick and Jane — storytelling as the original green industry.

And I have my moments of weakness.  Gatekeepers want comparables so they can link historical data and establish precedence, but book and author are inseparable entities.  My novel can be similar to another but I have yet to find an author whose passion for cheese grits matches my own, and that difference (among others) invalidates the comparison, and possibly the sell.  Not so in post-racial America, you say, but I’ve been told fiction is a subjective category, and in matters of subjectivity I have to wonder when and where the data parsing stops.  Which makes me linger occasionally at the fork in the road when most of the time the choice is unconscious.  There’s a way to end this interminable wandering, a novel I could write.  I see pieces of it through the undergrowth down the other path, the byproduct of scientific prognostication and market-savvy adjective art run amuck: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man… with fangs.  This high concept novel may be self-explanatory but allow me to translate anyway: Are you telling me in this perilous market climate that some literary honcho wouldn’t clear his or her schedule to read about a teenage, 1930s vampire in an inter-racial relationship (meticulously researched, of course) whose need for blood is just as conflicting as his need for social justice?  Is that your stance?

Wait.  Before you answer, someone in the peanut gallery just keeled over from The Wiz revulsion.  For those who don’t know, The Wiz revulsion is a gag response brought on by an acute sense of entertainment embarrassment that makes your unprocessed food want to get on down get on down the road…

But I’ve lingered at the fork too long.  In truth, the shunned path is neither commonplace nor unremarkable and it’s a lazy man’s game classifying it as such — it’s a personal choice.  Like everything else in these woods the difference between something familiar and something merely cliché is subjective.  I, like every other traveler, must make that distinction and I’ve made it, following a creative process the US Banking system could’ve benefited from, booking my value as an artist on my ability to be original rather than derivative, an A Author rather than a MFA author.  Oh that I have chosen wisely and there is a sigh in this for me somewhere ages hence.  I don’t know that there is — I don’t know if there can be.  I have a feeling, though, that if there is, I’ll rejigger the facts in hindsight à la BookScan and say my choice made all the difference.

<!–[if !mso]> <! st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } –>

Notable News from a Year Ago, May 19, 2010: I finish writing The Words Not Written, which in hindsight may be the turning point in my maturation as a writer.

As you can tell, my weekly discipline over the past two Tuesdays has declined and furthermore, if you can’t see the evidence, I’ll share a secret: Today isn’t really Tuesday, May 19 [2009] as the header says; today’s Wednesday, May 20!  A Tuesday Times entry written on a Wednesday — for shame.  For shame!  [Blogging is still a few months away, and I’m still thinking of this as a personal journal called The Tuesday Times.] You could almost think since I barely remembered beyond the last possible moment to fulfill even this entry that perhaps the timing and energy for the project is gone, and that soon the entire enterprise will implode for lack of enthusiasm.

But I wouldn’t go so far just yet.  A brief recap of my activities shows that last week I was in Fayetteville, NC for my job and the opportunity to write escaped during late night dinners with the team.  And don’t even get me started there.  The topic of discussion among my co-workers, always of peculiar interest to me since I am one of the few people in Corporate America (indeed in the world) who does not drink, was a shot called A Finger in Your Ass that someone had had at a club in Florida and liked.  This person being male, well… perhaps you can see what path this conversation went down without much more, uh, prodding.  Human resource types the world over are shuddering at the thought.

And on top of that I was once again testing myself literarily, finishing off a piece on censorship that was, at the time, due on May 18^th.  (Since then I learned that the deadline has been extended, because of judge unavailability, to June 1^st.)  In any case, Author! Author! is an excellent blog in my humble opinion, and I’ve learned more about authorship and the publishing dating game reading it than any before.

Even in the last week, because of what I read on Anne Mini’s blog, I changed my standard manuscript format — because it wasn’t until then that I realized underlining text to signify italics is old hat.  The wealth of information on this blog (and passion, lest we forget) is truly staggering, and for those who know, being confident in format is just as crucial as confidence in authorial voice.  Because if the work isn’t in the format the gatekeepers except to see, they just won’t read it.

Welcome, my pretties, to the world of the beautiful girl who everyone wants to be with, and who can therefore be selective and unreasonable in her demands.

The surprising thing is it’s a contest on censorship and prior to reading about it, which supplements monetary awards with publication on a super-well read blog and barter-esque editorial phone consultations, I hadn’t thought formally about censorship much.  So when I say it was a test it literally was: I wanted to see what I could come up with off the top of my head.  So here it is.  As a treat for me missing the last two weeks and slouching on this entry, I’ll include the entire 1000-word piece as a supplement to this entry.  What else can I say?  Enjoy.

[In lieu of writing the excerpt below, you can also click here and show Anne Mini some much-belated Internet love.]

The Words Not Written

I’m black but I don’t wear it on my sleeve.  With a post-racial president in the White House it’s not the chic thing to do anyway but inevitably when I write, query, do all of those decidedly non-author tasks like considering audience and marketing, I find myself at an all too familiar fork in the path — a choice between what I think is acceptable for a writer of my genus-blind talents and what the publishing and literary magnates are slobbering (or, more often, not slobbering for) from a writer like me.  I make a choice between the branches because I have to, going with my gut.  Not surprisingly, I write to match.

In addition to my race, I’m also the gambling sort who often mistakes his recklessness for confidence, but I feel neither reckless nor over-confident by claiming a fraternity among authors.  Authorship is a solitary path but far from peculiar.  If you’re reading this then surely at some point in your journey you’ve come to a similar fork in the path — you’ve made a choice.  We all have.  Maybe you recognized when it happened and maybe you didn’t, but the capital A Author you dreamed of being as a child and the adjective author you’ve become as an adult are two separate authors altogether.  Be it romance, sci-fi, black, [fill in the blank with whatever your group is, italics please], or, for the special major among us with many affiliations, MFAs (multiple flouncing adjectives) — whatever the case may be we are a family so lost in the winding forest of specialization and genre and the subtle censorship it employs that our readers need prescriptive directions on how to find us.  Conversely, despite all that flouncing, the adjectives make us that much easier to ignore.

The reasons for this I will leave for an anthropologist to explain (perhaps from the fossilized remains of another unheard traveler who has died along the way) but I recall a famous adage about authors striving to remove themselves from story, which guides my decision at the fork but presents a dilemma when art meets market and the gatekeeper at the conference is saying, “The writing’s beautiful, but [your group]… they don’t necessarily constitute a book-buying majority, do they?”, and I’m saying, stifling my anger because what I’ve written has implications beyond the group(s) I nominally represent, “How do you know that?”, and they’re replying, definitively, “BookScan, of course.  Seventy percent of all hard cover book sales.”  When you’re faced with that kind of irredactable evidence of what the market will support how do forget about the MFA author that you’ve become?  And how do I, when the black, male, married without children, thirty-one year old cheese grits lover that I am says so much about what I should be writing, and what I shouldn’t?

I am, of course, being facetious about BookScan and any other self-corroborating market analysis that willfully ignores the chicken-or-the-egg paradoxes their numbers represent.  That’s a mouthful so allow me to translate: Self-doubt’s a predator in these here woods, and if I spent my energy viewing the future from an outpost constructed from the past I would’ve succumbed to the nighttime caterwauls and weariness a long time ago.  Instead I prefer to believe in a different future, a different world where possibility, even in publishing, is not restricted to those things that can be plotted on a moving average trend chart.  I prefer to be as delusional in my belief as the gatekeepers are willfully ignorant and trusting in their data.  I prefer, in short, to believe in truth that is stranger than fiction.

Just the same, though, as any unpublished author is told to do, I pay attention to national and regional bestsellers lists, and stay abreast of deal making through Publishers Marketplace.  I read the bets that are being made by independent and major bookies alike; I recognize the regurgitation of theme and plot and an infatuation among many for old stories newly told.  I’ve become aware through observation of something I never expected when I was learning to read with Dick and Jane — storytelling as the original green industry.

And I have my moments of weakness.  Gatekeepers want comparables so they can link historical data and establish precedence, but book and author are inseparable entities.  My novel can be similar to another but I have yet to find an author whose passion for cheese grits matches my own, and that difference (among others) invalidates the comparison, and possibly the sell.  Not so in post-racial America, you say, but I’ve been told fiction is a subjective category, and in matters of subjectivity I have to wonder when and where the data parsing stops.  Which makes me linger occasionally at the fork in the road when most of the time the choice is unconscious.  There’s a way to end this interminable wandering, a novel I could write.  I see pieces of it through the undergrowth down the other path, the byproduct of scientific prognostication and market-savvy adjective art run amuck: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man… with fangs.  This high concept novel may be self-explanatory but allow me to translate anyway: Are you telling me in this perilous market climate that some literary honcho wouldn’t clear his or her schedule to read about a teenage, 1930s vampire in an inter-racial relationship (meticulously researched, of course) whose need for blood is just as conflicting as his need for social justice?  Is that your stance?

Wait.  Before you answer, someone in the peanut gallery just keeled over from The Wiz revulsion.  For those who don’t know, The Wiz revulsion is a gag response brought on by an acute sense of entertainment embarrassment that makes your unprocessed food want to get on down get on down the road…

But I’ve lingered at the fork too long.  In truth, the shunned path is neither commonplace nor unremarkable and it’s a lazy man’s game classifying it as such — it’s a personal choice.  Like everything else in these woods the difference between something familiar and something merely cliché is subjective.  I, like every other traveler, must make that distinction and I’ve made it, following a creative process the US Banking system could’ve benefited from, booking my value as an artist on my ability to be original rather than derivative, an A Author rather than a MFA author.  Oh that I have chosen wisely and there is a sigh in this for me somewhere ages hence.  I don’t know that there is — I don’t know if there can be.  I have a feeling, though, that if there is, I’ll rejigger the facts in hindsight à la BookScan and say my choice made all the difference.

Arizona Iced Tea, Arizona Jeans, Arizona Discrimination

Picture from CNN Headline

I remember when I saw this story last week: Arizona passes law aimed at illegal immigrants.  I was unemotional at first because Arizona, to me, is famous for iced tea, blue jeans, and Steve Nash.  Now, it seems, Arizona has come to represent a growing animosity in this country, a supposedly fact-based discrimination.  I’m not sure I’ll ever look at Arizona the same ever again.

I didn’t write at first because I was wordless.  I’ve done more reading since then.  I had a Weekly Vista entry prepared for this week — something about how a year ago to this date I was accepted into the New York Pitch and Shop Conference — but in light of this story, that memory seems flaky, self-centered.

And perhaps because of the job implications of this law, I’m thinking about my own employment.  Nine years ago, when I got my job with 401K STALWART out of college, their policy was 2.75 GPA or higher.  Which was great for me because, at the time, I had somewhere in the neighborhood of a 2.95, and their offer was the strongest I received.

But then, after I signed the dotted line and became a part-time (upon request) campus recruiter and interviewer, 401K STALWART upped the policy to 3.0.  Which meant I wouldn’t have qualified for employment under the new policy.  Which meant I was judging hopeful candidates, the threat of pending student loan payments in the whites of their eyes, by criteria I never had to live up to.  It made me feel like a hypocrite.  Reviewing resumes at career fairs, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had “gotten mine”, and that I couldn’t care less how anyone else “got theirs”.

When I think of this new Arizona law, when I think of the mindless debate in this country about who is a legal American and who isn’t, this is what I think about.

In my opinion, what’s lawful should never be confused by what is moral.  If it were otherwise we would’ve never had need for the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Movement, or any other movement against the impassionate laws of the majority.

And what a difficult place it is to be one of the I Got Mines, and to be faced with teeming masses that desire — who dream in their cribs the dreams transferred from mom, father, grandmother — to follow in your footsteps.  Policy alone can never be sufficient for human problems.  It makes it easier, of course; and it makes it seem, to your constituents, that you are being scientific, and have a grasp for the no-nonsense realities.

But I’m a believer in compassion.  I believe that most of the supporters of this bill who claim their tax dollars are being spent unjustly to support illegal immigrants are mad at a phantom enemy.  I’m willing to bet most of these supporters got a tax return last month; if you asked them on their way to buy a new LCD TV for a dollar figure for how much of their money was spent on so-called illegal aliens, they couldn’t tell you.

So what are they mad about?

They got theirs and they have no qualms about changing the rules of engagement after the fact — that’s what they’re mad about.  In my opinion, that’s not the way to be.

One Day at a Time, Sweet Jesus

Notable News from a Year Ago, April 28, 2009: “Good Times” artist Ernie Barnes dies at 70.

Pittsburgh 2002: My Winter of Discontent

I received the results yesterday for the New Millennium Writings Obama Contest.  Though I’d like to say that, after seven years, I’ve crossed the hurdle into the published author realm, the email notification clearly states that a woman in Pleasant Hill, California won the $1000 top prize and that three others — two women from Massachusetts, and a “Frances” from Portland, Oregon — received $100 runner up gifts.  I saw my name at the bottom of the email, alphabetically arranged among 20 Honorable Mentions so publication is still within plausible range.  But I have to say that I was disappointed to have once again jumped and, once again, missed the mark.

I thought I was getting better managing rejection and then my heart imploded reading the email.  The truth is: if I hadn’t at least received Honorable Mention then I don’t know what I would’ve done.  “How to Change the World” felt right coming out.  It felt true.  But the possibility of not receiving some kind of corroborating feedback from the universe on the accuracy of my own internal quality monitor — I shudder to think what it would’ve done to my confidence.

So this gives me two Honorable Mentions over a seven year span.  I received the first in 2006 for a short story called “The King’s Log,” an entry to Black Madonna’s first annual “Write is Might” Short Story Contest.  Now, in 2009, I receive the second for “How to Change the World.”

A song comes to my mind now and it feels right so I’ll say a verse here: One day at a time, sweet Jesus.  One day at a time.

You can probably count on one hand the number times in your life that you learn the absolute truth about yourself…

Often when I imagine myself as a published author giving advice to others (I imagine this more than is strictly healthy I believe) I don’t think about this old Christian spiritual but rather a Zen phrase: A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.  I’ve used this analogy before in reference to truth (it is, in fact, becoming one of my favorite malleable analogies) but I find it also has applications in the fulfillment of dreams, especially where advice is concerned.

Because Stephen King and every other mentor or advice-giver across all dreams, whether it is writing or losing weight or becoming president of the United States — they can point and elucidate eloquently on the moon and how they made the trip themselves — but the fact is they can’t do it for you.  For those with out-sized dreams of going to the moon there is no roadmap; there’s a finger.  You prove your worthiness by doing everything you can to close the distance, and not quitting until you get there.

“You don’t have control over how long it takes you to get there,” I see myself telling an enrapt, fictional audience.  “Your duty is to walk, to go.  That’s all you can hope for.”  Of course, I’m giving this speech from the perspective of the person who has already been to the moon and back but it’s also an accurate representation of the path I have taken.  When I get there I won’t have a Stephanie Meyer story to tell about a cool dream and over-whelming success with my first manuscript.  Mine is a story of toil, of returning to writing one bleary winter in Pittsburgh.  My story continues today with no clearly defined endpoint in sight.  If I take my own advice (and every advice-giver should do this even if it’s painful) I have to say I’m not in control of how long, or how many manuscripts, it’ll take.

In fact, my “I always wanted to be a writer” story traverses more terrain than a measly seven years, and starts earlier than at the usual age of 12 or 13.  In kindergarten — yes, I said kindergarten — I came home after my first day pissed at the high heavens because I expected, in so short a time, to be able to read.  This is family lore championed mostly by my father (I don’t remember doing this at all) and my dad is a storyteller in the great oral tradition.  There’s a certain amount of fluff you expect him to add for entertainment purposes.  But, given what I know about myself and the out-sized dreams I sometimes set, and given my own reactions to rejections and failures to place in numerous writing competitions, being pissed in kindergarten because I couldn’t read in the time frame I wanted to read in sounds perfectly me in every since of the word.

I’d like to say I underestimated the length of time it would take, but when one year turns into seven-and-counting you have to admit a certain amount of naivety in your expectations.

For the purposes of this entry, however, I’ll skip all the stuff between my first day in kindergarten and graduating from high school — how the interest became talent and then how I forsook it because of the fiscal realities of being an artist — and even the five years I spent at Georgia Tech, a time during which I wrote nary a word of fiction but plenty of technical reports — and focus instead on my return to the craft: my first year and a half working for 401K Stalwart when I realized, belatedly, that writing was a critical part that my soul couldn’t do without.

The catalyst: email.  I had written plenty emails in college but when I had a job, emailing grew in significance and there were times during my first year that, while most people hastily crafted digital letter bombs, I took special effort perfecting every word such that when I finally pressed SEND there was actually emotional content affixed to the action, a spiritual release as it was, and a snarky little voice in the back of my head often said in times like that: That felt good, didn’t it? Or: Geez, are you writing an email or a manifesto?  Just send the damn thing.

I recognized even then that something was amiss but I hadn’t enough evidence yet.  I still believed there was room from me in the upper tiers of corporate America, and that was my two-year plan.  At the time I was working on a development program and I believed, because of the five years I spent at Georgia Tech, that I needed to be in a research environment.  Also, after a year I had identified Six Sigma green belt certification as a possible hindrance to my ascension, and was in the process of earning it.

By all accounts, I should have never achieved this internal certification because while a project was assigned to me, training was refused.  Since I had identified green belt certification as a must-have the absence of the required training didn’t sit too well with me, and originally I was pissed off.  But then, as it has always done when challenged, my mind started to turn and I endeavored to read the fine print.  Lo and behold my tenacity was rewarded and I discovered a loop-hole: Training, it seemed, wasn’t the requirement for certification only a complete project, 25-page written report, and passing of the written exam.  It would be harder to do those things since I hadn’t received the standard training materials, but if I wanted to achieve my goals, this was what I had to do.

So I stopped complaining and found the relevant course materials.  I trained myself on the finer statistical virtues of six sigma quality improvement.  I worked the project, which was a classic paint line setup, perfectly suited, and ended up saving the plant $85,000.  I had to relocate before I could finish the documentation and testing to complete the project, but I was in Pittsburgh where the head of the six sigma program was and I set up a visit with him, explained what I had done, and convinced him to help me tie up all the loose holes.  He agreed, so all I had to do was write the 25-page report and executive summary and pass the written exam, and he would allow me to become certified even though I never went through training.

If you can see where this is heading you are a lot better at this than I was back then.  I was just stoked by the fact that, despite the barriers that had been put in my place, I had overcome each and was close to achieving the goal I had set.  I sat down to write the report and executive summary.  I don’t remember how long it took me but I remember waking up early Saturday morning in Pittsburgh, alone in my apartment, to finish it.  It took me all day, but for the first time in the year-plus that I had been working, I was actually glad and fulfilled by the work that I had brought home to complete.

And, on top of that, I was even astutely aware of the fact that all of the work that I was putting into this 25-page report would go unnoticed and unappreciated by everyone but me.  401K Stalwart cared that I had saved $85,000 and my certification would ultimately be determined by whether or not I passed the written exam (which I did) — but me, sitting their typing happily away at my computer on a Saturday morning in Pittsburgh, I was most proud of the report, which I knew would never be read, and if so only cursorily.  Me: I cared about the art, and more strongly than I ever imagined.

Snarky voice in my head at that moment, seven years ago: Houston, we have a problem.

You can probably count on one hand the number times in your life that you learn the absolute truth about yourself, and this was one of those times.  My authorial gifts fail at this moment to find something that isn’t clichéd to explain the magnitude of that realization.  Writing.  It was what I had to do.  Somehow, someway.  I made a promise then in 2002 that I would follow where writing led, and that I wouldn’t quit until I got there.

Years have passed since that vow, more than is sometimes acceptably memorable.  I can remember during that first, cold winter in Pittsburgh, the coldest in the city in 20 years and the coldest I’d ever experienced, my winter of discontent — I remember believing that in a year, two max, I’d have this writing thing figured out and be well on my way to becoming the next world-renowned author.  I’d like to say I underestimated the length of time it would take, but when one year turns into seven-and-counting you have to admit a certain amount of naivety in your expectations.  Expecting to become published in one year is about as foolish as a kindergartener coming home after the first day and being upset because he still couldn’t read.  And who among us would expect something as fairytale as that?

But I’m still here — I’m still writing.  “Incidental Music” is still out for judging and just yesterday, having finalized my MULA plans for the week of June 8^th, I submitted my application to the NY Pitch and Shop Conference.  I mentioned earlier that there would be a strange convergence in May but actually it happened April 27^th.  I sent in my application to the NY Pitch yesterday afternoon and then went out and cut the grass so I’d stop fretting over it.  When I came back inside, sweating and hot, the email notification for the Obama Millennium Contest was sitting in my inbox.  I wonder what would’ve happened if I had received the notification before I submitted my application — I wonder if I would’ve doubted myself and procrastinated further — but such thoughts will get me nowhere.  The application is out there and so is a second personal essay.  It’s hard to let go of them but what happens to them is out of my control.  All I can do is keep my eyes on the moon and keep writing one day at a time, having faith that one day — some day — I’ll get there.

I Don’t Want to be Robin the Rest of My Life

The blog negligence continues but not without cause.  Last Saturday I was circling Atlanta like a migratory bird in search of a southern roost.  This week I’m home, in Tennessee, but my writer’s motor needs a kick start.  Regardless, I have some vittles for you.  Here it is: The Weekly Wrap.

Batman, you just don't get it. I'd like for people to dream about being me, too.

• I suppose that one of these days it’ll become necessary to tell everyone in no uncertain terms that I’M RETURNING TO ATLANTA.  As a writer I tend to throw out hints when most people, I’ve found, prefer to stay away from the mystery meat.  So there — you know as much (relatively) as I do.   Call me Arnold Schwarzenegger.  I’M BACK.
• How about, last weekend when I was visiting friends, the discussion turned to book writing and I realized once again — in a matter of minutes, no less — that this eight year metamorphosis into CELEBRITY AUTHOR has made me more than a little jaded in the process.  Here they were asking me for advice and there I was on my soapbox, needle in hand, bursting their balloon.  I’ll say it again: I’m a hater.  Never thought I’d be the one fessing up to that, but it’s the truth.  Things are better than they used to be, of course, and when you’re less than 20% of the population how much advancement can you reasonably expect?  But my mind is continually gathering up the haterific details.  In commercials, I’m always noting the token black actor, usually inserted for comedy.  In the book store, I feel self-conscious standing in the African American literature aisle.  When I think of books I don’t see what a standard publishing contract will do to make my career successful when it’s done precious little for my contemporaries.  I dream at night, but not about being Robin.  One day soon, I’d like to be Batman.  Who would you rather dream about being: the hero, or the sidekick?
• Which makes stories like this one, which I found in the New York Times, both enlightening and infuriating in equal measure.  I’d never heard of the Tea Party Movement before this story, but it’s a perfect case of the Batmans of the world — of this country — feeling needlessly threatened by the Robins.  The two items that obviously stood out to me: (1) “25 percent [of Tea Party Members] think that the [Obama] administration favors blacks over whites — compared with 11 percent of the general public”, and (2) the Ignorant Christian/Republican Comment of the Week:

“I just feel he’s getting away from what America is,” said Kathy Mayhugh, 67, a retired medical transcriber in Jacksonville. “He’s a socialist. And to tell you the truth, I think he’s a Muslim and trying to head us in that direction, I don’t care what he says. He’s been in office over a year and can’t find a church to go to. That doesn’t say much for him.”

• I almost spit up my milk reading this story, but I don’t remember if it was because I was mad or laughing at the time.

And that’s the Weekly Wrap.

Next Vista: Wednesday, April 28, 2010, “One Day at a Time, Sweet Jesus.”

MULA Part Three (and Four, and Five)

Notable News from a Year Ago, April 21, 2009: Poor earnings drive the stock on my employer $4.  Job security is an oxymoron.

My my my...

The economic forecast grows darker.

Yesterday before the market opened my employer, 401K Stalwart, reported earnings for the first quarter [2009].  There’s good and bad news here and I’ll let our CEO break it to you: “The good news is that our results were slightly better than we expected at the beginning of the quarter — the bad news is that we experienced our first quarterly loss since 1991.”

Pronouncements of this sort are never good — Ye Olde Foundation in the 401K gapped down $4 yesterday.  Ouch in the 401K, ouch in my TD Ameritrade account.  To establish faith among fickle investors, and also to combat the darkening economic forecast — “We are convinced that the weakness in our end markets will continue through year end with the full year decline in our end markets reaching 15 to 16 percent versus our originals expectation of 10 to 11 percent” — 401K Provider is “adjusting resources within the company.”  In lay terms (yes, that might qualify as a pun) that means a second round of lay-offs and the return of mandatory unpaid leaves of absence, not just for the second quarter, but for third and forth quarters as well.

Ouch, ouch, ouch.

Of course, I’m concerned about my job.  Admittedly, with all these dreams of publishing a novel and earning a living in the stock market, it’s an abstract thing.  Yeah, I want all those things, but it’d a whole lot easier if I kept my paycheck in the process. Word from my manager — we had a reassuring call with him yesterday at lunch — is that at this point in time our team of analysts is still considered an important cog in the mighty corporate wheel.  He doesn’t anticipate us losing members in this round, but, of course, if the decline continues any and all overhead not specifically tied to revenue generation will be drawn into question.

The truth is, a lot of things are being drawn in to question.

Just this weekend my wife and I talked about getting DVR, but now we’re not.  On Friday without the foreknowledge of Sandy’s memo, I scheduled an appointment for my wife’s car and put down $700 for routine maintenance.  Also, per a recent barrage of “thou shalt” emails, cost savings from payroll reductions must be locked in quickly so all second quarter MULA requests (assuming I still have a job then, of course) must be in by May 1^st.  So now, in addition to overall job security, I’m thinking about what week I want to take in May or June, and whether I should take off the week I’m planning to fly to New York for the long-scheduled Pitch Conference.

I’m also thinking about whether it even makes sense for me to go.

This is all conjecture, of course.  I haven’t applied yet so it’s not certain that I will even go (this is a problem I can solve by applying early instead of in May like I planned).  I’m pretty certain that, with only 30K words written, The Twin Paradox won’t be in a polished, saleable format by June 11^th even if I am accepted (but that’s ok, I’ve started to believe the exposure is more important than selling the book).  And I haven’t purchased any plane tickets, so while it’s in my head to go I have haven’t made any concrete plans to follow through beyond writing and revising the novel.  I can say now that it’s not wise for me to go and no one, other than myself and my wife and the few friends that I’ve told (and you), would ever know the difference.

This is the struggle I have, the struggle all people have I believe: how to walk the fine line between genius and stupidity.  Going to New York on my MULA week and getting a fat, six-figure publishing deals sounds like the pitch for a made-for-TV movie, doesn’t it?  Erin Brockervich Meets Invincible, or something like that.  If I ever doubt I’m human all I have to do is think of my capacity to dream in moments like this that the universe is aligning for the betterment of my life and my life alone and the doubt is removed.  I have dreams of this type all the time.  Just a few weeks ago I told you about a mystical convergence of forces for the month of May: two writing contests and my application to the NY Pitch Conference.  So now that I have to submit my MULA request by May 1^st is that verification that all these supernatural forces are gathering just as I said or simply my mind aligning the agreeable data points (and ignoring the conflicting ones) for a fitted-curve that I’ve already drawn in my mind?

Granted, whatever the future brings, we’ll make a judgment on what happened after the fact and call the outcome good or bad with relative impunity — such is also the nature of being human.  If it happens just the way I said you’ll be calling me a soothsayer of unnatural skill.  If it doesn’t, feel free (as if I have the power to stop you) to call me anything in the opposite spectrum, even stupid, even crazy.  But, please, one request: keep reading.

Despite the doubt circling my brain now, I have to say my overwhelming stance is to still go.  I have a goal, and although I can sometimes get caught up in the financial bottom line that is selling my book, the real weakness I’m trying to correct — the reason I even came across the NY Pitch Conference in the first place — is the fact that I’m a relatively unknown quantity.  I’ve been writing in seclusion for the past eight years.  I don’t have any friends or contacts trying to do the same thing.  Other than my wife and Lover Boy, I have no one to bounce ideas off, no one to critique my work.  Somehow I doubt I’ll find a comrade in NY who I can click with instantaneously [and I didn’t], but workshopping my novel isn’t the appeal as much as having the opportunity to meet and pitch my ideas to editors.  I see value in getting a glimpse into their minds, of being around writers and editors and coaches for the first time since I started.  I was thinking about my simplified goals last week: A country boy from Georgia riding the fabled A-train to Manhattan for a writing conference a few blocks over from Madison Square Garden.  It’ll be an accomplishment just getting there, let alone selling my book or finding an agent.

And if I’m not accepted to NY I’ve been eyeing a second option, which incidentally, I’ve known about longer than the Pitch Conference: The Black Writers Reunion and Conference which will be held in Las Vegas this year, June 18 and 19.  Both are viable options but when the thought came to my mind that I needed to get out it didn’t come down across race lines.  And, as I said before, I liked the pitch component of the NY conference better, and from a financial standpoint, since I can stay in Brooklyn and ride the train into Manhattan for the week, the cost between the two become a wash.  I will, however, deeply consider a trip to Sin City if things fall through in New York, but the flip side to that is there are two more Pitch Conferences in NY, one in the third quarter and one in the fourth, so even if I’m rejected from the June conference there is an opportunity to attend the others and I’ve got the MULA weeks to do it in.

Once again it comes down to choices that have to be made without the self-referential benefits of hindsight.  Where to go.  What to do.  I, for one, am sticking with the plan and applying to the NY Pitch Conference.  Wish me luck, but regardless of what happens, there are always options.

The Crisis of Interconnectedness

Notable News from a Year Ago, April 14, 2009: Nothing that I could find, but in 1958 (at least according to Wikipedia), Sputnik 2 falls from orbit.  We’re a lot more connected today than we were sixty years ago because of satellites like Sputnik.  Believe or not — there are people who believe we can get even closer.

The Beginning of a Connected World (courtesy Wikipedia)

I can’t take credit for this entry.  My wife came to me with an alluring thought, and like most writers and journalists I couldn’t resist appropriating it and adding my own fundamental twist.

Paraphrased, this is what she said: “Everyone is upset about the current economic downfall but what this should show us more than anything else is how connected we are to each other despite the differences we love to hate and use as vehicles of separation.  In the end, what we do on the Earth — everything we do or don’t do — affects everyone else.”

That’s a tantalizing thought, isn’t it?  Everything we do affecting everyone else on the plant, born and yet to be.  Makes us seem like short-time gods and it reminds me very fittingly of the article I wrote about a month back, “How to The Change the World.”  In fact, based on what my wife said it makes the length of that article, already short by my standards, irrelevantly long.  How do you change that world?  That’s simple.  By living, that’s how.

The air flowing into my lungs, the food I eat, the food I throw away, the money I have in the bank, the stocks I own, the job I hold, the job offers I didn’t take, the woman I married, the computers I bought, the computers I threw away, the water I drink, the water I waste, the thoughts I think, the thoughts others think for me (like the one I’m pondering now from my wife)… it all plays together in a delicate and hopelessly illogical tapestry of interconnectedness.

Why is it illogical?  Because, try as we might (I’m thinking of all those IBM “let’s make a smarter planet” commercials about predicting the stock market and traffic flow through math — full disclosure here, I own IBM stock), we’ll never understand all the factors and influences be they nature, nurture, environment, or otherwise that explain the trueness of any moment.  Oh, we may think we understand what happened from a historical perspective but that’s after the die is cast — that’s the lazy benefit of hindsight.

IBM can boast about building a smarter world all it wants, and from an investor’s standpoint I’m glad they are, but all the giga- and petaflops in the world won’t get you there.

It reminds me of that famous poem by Robert Frost: “The Road Not Taken.”  I, like many people, remember the penultimate and last lines in that poem: “And I — I took the road less traveled by and that has made all the difference”.  I used to think it was a statement about individuality, and how you should go right when the rest of the world goes left (in fact, I think I even said something to that effect in “How to Change the World”).

But until recently, triggered in the last week by my work and rediscovery on The Twin Paradox, I see Frost’s poem as a self-delusional trick of the mind.  Because it’s double-dog easy to say years down the road with a sigh that yes, you did the right thing with your life.

To this point, I watched a special about Pat Riley the other day called “In Their Own Words” [wish I could find the link now] in which he said something similar about his decision to play basketball out of high school instead of quarterback.  He’s fairly certain sitting here now with — what? — five NBA championship rings that he made the right choice.  No one would argue with him because it’s impossible, logically speaking, to see how he could’ve done anything better with his life.

But that’s the trap hidden in our logical minds.  So five NBA championship rings is the best Pat Riley could do in his life?  Would he turn his back on seven NFL championships?  Would he turn his back on one NFL championship… if he didn’t have the knowledge now that he could’ve won five in the NBA?

That’s the rub — logic reigns supreme when making sense out of the past.  Logic tells you a happy little story (or, if you’re depressed, a sad little story) that no matter how you tell it, it comes out in your favor and makes indubitable sense.  In Pat Riley’s case, as with all of us, as with Robert Frost, it leads to personal mythmaking.

I don’t want to lead the witness here but that says something rather significant to me: the future is an illogical thing.  Forgive me if these thoughts overlap with some of fictional mechanics/world view held in The Twin Paradox, but I’m starting to think time travel into the future is impossible.  Well, maybe impossible isn’t the best word choice.  Limited is better, so that changes my statement to the following: Forecasting the future from logical sources such as computers is limited at best, and at worst it will be downright misleading.

Because, you have to understand, Microsoft Excel has been out for a pretty damn long time.  It’s as powerful and malleable as any piece of software.  If an engineer or computer scientist could’ve created an application that predicted the stock market with any sort of acceptable or repeatable accuracy, they would’ve created it already.  The same goes for supply chain and ERP (enterprise resource planning) vendors.  IBM can boast about building a smarter world all it wants, and from an investor’s standpoint I’m glad they are, but all the giga- and petaflops in the world won’t get you there.

Here’s a secret in case the news I’m sharing makes you feel glumly: You should be glad about that.  In my day job, I work in an increasing global manufacturing world where the mantra appears to be: We need highly automated systems and stupid people to make our business better.  Actually, I’ve slanted that mantra.  It actually says: Companies are willing to invest in highly automated systems, but people, the lowest common denominator, should be replaceable.  (Which is why, as an investor, all I can say is Go Big Blue Go!).  I call it the McDonald’s Theory of Operations.

Case and point: I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had to fight with management because they want the ERP system to include safeguards that prevent the employees from making mistakes.  I don’t have a problem with safeguards, poka-yokes, whatever; what I have a problem with is the utter lack of focus on the quality of the workforce, this blatant drive for profits that is creating the smart system/handicapped employee dynamic across the globe.  As people, as businesses, we focus entirely too much on the system-side of operations.  We’re addicted to technology because we think it can solve all of our problems.  We’ve missed the pungent fact that logic (AKA technology) is gargantuanly limited.

Even where I work, our values and philosophy and dollars don’t jive.  Our philosophy says that people are our greatest assets; our dollars say that, at the lowest levels, our systems should be cogent enough to counteract deficiencies in our dynamic and highly replaceable workforce.  I’ve oversimplified here, of course, because this leads to questions of exempt versus non-exempt, but how can people be your greatest asset and also be highly replaceable?  That, my friends, is what you call a paradox.

But I’ve gotten off track (or have I?).  We started with the financial crisis [and Sputnik 2]; discussed Robert Frost and Pat Riley; I’ve talked about global manufacturing and the relationship between employees and their ERP systems; I’ve talked about time travel; I’ve talked about the impossibility of predicting the future through logical means; The Twin Paradox; Microsoft Excel; IBM; McDonald’s.

Interconnectedness.

How can something as complicated and unfathomably aligned as the universe be anything but illogical?  The crisis, as I see it, is our insistence that technology is the answer to all of our problems, our frequent downplaying of the importance of human participation and interaction in the solutions we seek.  Technology is great.  Computers are great.  But they are not the answer.  We are.  Until we figure that out, we’re doomed.

Bad Financial Thinking, Episode 1

Atlanta Relocation 2010

I’ve been extremely negligent updating the blog for the past few weeks but for good reason, and over the next month the schedule promises to be just as hectic.  But, as they say in church on Sundays, I’ve carved out a few moments today bring you a word, and here it is:  The Weekly Wrap.

• Bad Financial Thinking Story of the Week, brought to you courtesy of Atlanta Relocation 2010 and April 15th — Tax Day: So I’ve been hustling the past three weeks to get our house on the market to sell, and one of the tasks involved Stanley Steamer.  They came over on Tuesday, and after telling me they were not allowed to pick up electronic equipment in our house (the the television, the computer monitors), one of the crew members noticed my iPhone charger and asked if he could use it.  I said OK.  Later, as I was paying, he asked if I liked my iPhone, and I said I was addicted, which is the truth.  He agreed, and proceeded to tell me about this457 Rock Band app that he loves.  He then told me about another app that he uses when he works out.  I said I didn’t pay for many apps.  He said he didn’t either, but Rock Band was a gift to himself from his income tax return.  Of course, I’m thinking to myself “that’s a tiny tiny return if all you can afford to buy is an iPhone app” when he tells me the rest: He has a child with his ex-girlfriend, who left him, so he gave half his return to her. The other half he used for 1) an iPhone 2) Rock Band app 3) a down payment on a car. He claims he doesn’t know what his ex did with her half of the money, but his went to good use.  Not sure what to say in response to this, and not wanting to preach to a stranger, I simply nodded my head.
• What is it about the company we keep?  I have a personal philosophy, which essentially says it’s easier for others to bring you down that it is for you to bring them up.  The Stanley Steamer guy — I’m assuming he’s not a bad person.  But it’s obvious to me that he hangs around people who share a similar mindset about tax returns and what they should be used for.  I know, because I used to fraternize with people who thought that too.  Nowadays I’m looking for a different mindset; nowadays, I thinking it’s foolish to give the Government an interest free loan.  I’m looking to surround myself with people who believe the same thing.
• And what is it about differences of opinion?  What is it about being mainstream?  I was looking for this product called Squeak Ender, and I went to Lowe’s first and couldn’t find it.  Then I went to Home Depot, and couldn’t find it.  But the interesting thing is one of the associates in Home Depot told me that if I couldn’t find it at Lowes, then to I should try Ace Hardware.  In her words: “They seem to carry things like that.”  And it got me to thinking that maybe I’m not a Lowe’s guy.  Maybe I’m not Home Depot material either.  If you look at me, if you look at what I’m about and what I’m trying to accomplish, I’m more like Ace Hardware.  Off the beaten path.  Away from the mainstream.  And truthfully, I like that it better that way.

And that’s the Weekly Wrap.

Next Vista: Wednesday, April 14, 2010, “The Crisis of Interconnectedness.”  And, as a slightly mystical guy, I find it intriguing that in 2009 I didn’t write any entries from 3/24 to 4/14 and that this pattern repeated itself in 2010.  What will 2011 bring?  One can only guess.

Airplane Food

I was of the impression because of how much I have to do this weekend that I’d skip this weekly mashup, but about 10 minutes ago my brain woke up and I thought better of it.  Must be that thing we call discipline.  Whatever the case, here I am from 36,000 feet up in the air: The Weekly Wrap.

• I’ve been flying Delta for years now and I have to tell you — first class food just ain’t what it used to be.  There was a time when I’d bypass lunch or dinner just because of the tasty vittles in first class, but not any more.   A sign of the times: me in first class sleeping through the meal service because I’ve already eaten.  But I love my leg room.  Please, Delta, don’t take that away.
• I had idea for an iphone app earlier today [Friday] and it got me to thinking about beliefs and how, in a very real sense, they are both your strength and you weakness.  I’m not going to give you the specifics of the app because I still might do it, but imagine a place where the products you peddle are not confined to the demographic you represent.  So an unholy man can make a buck selling holy products.  Or a white cosmetics conglomerate, like Revlon, can make millions selling black hair care products.  That’s the power of capitalism.  As my nephew would say: “Get you some.”
• Speaking of capitalism, I finally got around to watching Good Hair, the satirical biopic from Chris Rock, and I came away with some startling revelations.  Firstly, when he’s not on the prowl for whitey, Al Sharpton’s a pretty thoughtful guy.  Secondly, there’s nothing like a global perspective on any topic to illustrate the malleability of truth in the world.  One country’s garbage can be another country’s gold.  In this case, hair’s the focus, but one Indian girl’s answer to Chris Rock’s question is telling.  Asked if she would pay for someone else’s hair, the girl said: “Why?  I already have my own.”
• In fact, the whole thing got me to thinking about our honeymoon, which we took in Riviera Maya in Mexico back in 2004.  There was one place we went too, Tulum I believe, where the guide told us about the excesses of the Mayan civilization.  It was the vogue, he told us, for the affluent to have holes drilled in their teeth and precious rubies and gems inserted.  In other words, there’s no such thing as a new idea under the sun and Lil Wayne ain’t got nothing on the Mayans.

And that’s the Weekly Wrap.

Next Vista: Wednesday, March 31, 2010, another blank entry from the looks of it, but I’ll whip up something and make it worth your while.  Come by and have some!