I'm actually doing 750, but there was no badge for that....

There's no half glass full - fewer people are reading fiction.

I've seen a quote attributed to Steven Jobs several times over the last week, concerning how few Americans read books. I traced it back to an interview with the NY Times in January of this year. Yes, he did say that “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.". As an aspiring writer, I find that depressing as all hell. Please, let him have his facts wrong. Searching further, I can't find what his source for that number was, but I did find a study published in 2004 with data from 2002 by the National Endowments for the Arts. Maybe Mr. Jobs has slightly more recent numbers, because it turns out that 56% had read a book, but that's only if you include non-fiction. If you're only looking at novels, short stories, plays, or poetry, just 46& had read a book. And that's not a steady figure. It's almost 10% than ten years earlier. The closest thing to any good news for a fiction writer in the NEA study is that the actual number of readers has stayed approximately the same because of population growth.

Oh, and if the hard facts that there are fewer people reading literature isn't a dark enough cloud, there's this little tidbit from the study - more people are writing. Goody. More competition.

Week 3, exercise 6, 3 of 3

I want to describe the sparkle, 
but those eyes are cold and black.
This story will have no happy ending
the demon muse has come back.

In my mind I see day kissed skin,
two bodies entwined as one.
But the story that he would tell
Is from a world with no sun.

My plot would have you call a lover.
But you simply will not obey.
You are every bit the hunter,
a spider that lures its prey

I loathe to write the lines that follow,
when he cowers in your heat.
I've been in this dark space before
No partner deserves such mistreat.

Week 3, Exercise 6, 2 of 3

The Closet

Little boy lost, little boy found
Little boy, in the ground.
Gotta grow up
gotta do you thing.
Little boy lost
Gonna be a big man.

Try to do the right thing
try to act the same.
Gonna marry your sweetheart
do the other on the side
Do the right thing
Gotta be a real man.

Look at all the pretty girls
Don’t you want a turn?
Stop doing what you do
Never should have gone that far 
Little boy gotta learn
The lies they call a man.

Week 3, Exercise 6

I  restarted Eric Maisel's The Creativity Book two weeks ago.  One of the exercises for this week is to "Settle into mystery" and to do that, I am to write a poem a day for three days.  Sure, I could write them and file them away in my laptop.  But that's one of the problems I'm trying to address - the confidence to publish.  Before my inner critic can talk me out of it, I send one raw and first draftish poem out into the everlasting world of the internet.

Negative energy

I don't know enough about physics
or the natural world
to say where this energy comes from.

I only know that I can feel the pull
when you are here
And when you are gone there is none.

You are a mass, a gravitational pull
At worst, a black hole
I’ve tried to balance too long.

When you are gone I move along
I have found the center
of my own universe. It is me.

But what have I read lately???

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A tiny post to keep the bedsores at bay.

"The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once." -Albert Einstein

Books 39 - 42

39. Death of an Ordinary Man by Glen Duncan - A dead man observes his family at his own funeral and wake, looking for clues as to why he died. His recently departed stature gives him the ability to see but not be seen, as well as to hear some of the thoughts of his family. Their grief triggers memories of another death in the family, one that no one dealt with nearly as well they seem to be handling his passing. The presence of two people he doesn't recognize is what troubles him most, and until he finds the connection, he can't let himself move on. In a less brave author's hands, this story would have been turned into a predicatable story of bad things happening to good people. But Duncan isn't afraid to twist the story, to veer off just when you think you see the path he is following. He's an author who creates characters strong enough to tell their own story.

40. Fielding Gray by Simon Raven - Set in 1945, this is a story of what happens when the acceptaed school boy flirtations and crushes develop int0 something stronger and less accepted. **, an upper level student at an all boy school, is attracted to a younger student. He pursues him, seduces him, but isn't ready when the younger boy wants to continue the relationship over the term break. An unhappy home life convinces ** that is is good to be wanted, despite warnings from other classmates that he's wrong to encourage the younger student. By the time he's ready to face the younger boy, something he feels responsible for setting in motion had gone horribly wrong. A very fast read, sad but honest.

41. The Outcast by Sadie Jones - If Ian McEwen had ever been a sixteen year old girl, this is the book he would have written. A young boy loses his mother, and no one around him has the tools or the heart to help him recover. Instead, they all have their own levels of disfunction to travel through - all except one, who fanfic readers will recognize as a Mary Sue of the highest calibre. That's not to say this isn't a good read, if you enjoy a pretty good gothic mixed with a heavy dose of romantic idealism. My complaint is that Jones paints her characters in such obvious broad strokes that you know what they're going to do pages before they do it. Also, there's a gender bias so broad (women = silently suffering victims, men = brutes that can't help themselves), it might have worked for a story set in the 1850's, but not the 1950's, The author is capable of letting characters reveal their flaws through subtle actions, there are some very moving passages of this book that prove it. It's when the story is dragged back onto a "love conqueres all" path that it becomes difficult to read.

42. The Birth House by Ami McKay - l checked this historical fiction out at the library after having a "Well, I've never read a book about that place or topic!" reaction to the cover flap, and I'm very glad I did. Set in Nova Scotia shortly before WWI, this is the life story of a young woman, the only girl in a large family of boys, who learns the art of midwifery, at first out of lack of any other future, but later out of love and respect for the other women in her town. This was the point in time when medical science had discovered how to turn child birth into a medical procedure instead of a natural event, and our protaganist runs head on into a doctor who is all about business and nothing about health or well being. There's a lot of interesting homepathic history in this book, as the village midwife dealt with all parts of women's health, from infertility to after-the-fact birth control. There are plenty of multi-layered characters in the book, and every one of the main ones has a complete and believable arc, something that few historical fictions accomplish.

Books 36 - 38

36. The Other by David Guterson - I had to remind myself over and over that this is a novel and not a work of non-fiction, not only because the characters are so well drawn and the plot an incredible natural arch of humanity, but because I wanted to believe that what happened to our narrator, Neil Countryman and his friend John William Barry really happened. This is a story of paths taken and not taken, the tenacity of a friendship that could have expired many, many times, and in no small part a sort of Into The Wild with less rebellion and more dialog. This book also succeeds in telling us how it all ends from the very beginning, but that doesn't stop you from wanting to see the journey unfold.

37. The Virgin of the Small Plains by Nancy Pickard - A young woman is found naked, bloodied and dead in a Kansas pasture by the local sheriff and his sons. Secret and lies follow until 17 years later when a now grown up resident of the town starts asking questions. The characters in this book are drawn with more detail than your average mystery, and thats a plus as well as a minus. More depth means it is easier to identify with all of the characters as the narrative cuts from before the discovery of the body to the lives of all those affected by that discovery. However, more depth points a big ol' neon arrow at the killer, in my opinion. There's an interesting side story of how the dead girl, now called "The Virgin" earns status as a implement of miracles, especially when a tornado passes through the town of Small Plains. To really like this story, you're going to have to practice some suspension of disbelief when it comes to murder investigations in rural Kansas, but if you can do that, this is a not too taxing look at the havoc people can cause in the name of good.

38. I, Lucifer by Glen Duncan - Very funny, very intelligent and very original! The tag-line for this book (when did books start having tag-lines, anyway?) is "Finally, the other side of the story." and that is exactly what we get. Lucifer is offered a chance to return to live in Heaven, by God, if he can live on Earth, as a mortal, and not cause trouble, for one month. The body he is given as his instrument of redemption belongs to a writer, and that inspires Lucifer to use the time to tell his version of Creation, Adam and Eve and original sin, Jesus Christ (or Junior or Jimminy Christmas or a bunch of other nick names the Devil uses for the guy who got in the way of Hell being a capacity crowd), and a lot of other things that we mortals haven't gotten quite the truth about, in his opinion. With the power of clairvoyance, it's quite easy to gather an entourage of just the type of people we've all suspected were one step removed from the dark one - commercial film makers and their ilk. Underneath Lucifer's manipulations, there's a surprising sweet story of how the Angels (fallen and un-fallen) are similar to a lot of big families where the father reigns supreme. When that subplot turns into a very satisfying ending, you know you've read a story by an author who wasn't afraid to go full out.

Books 33 - 35

33. Hero by Perry Moore - I was hoping for something beyond a "coming of age" plot from this winner of the 2008 LAMBDA Fiction for Young Adults, and I wasn't too disappointed. Thom, the main character, has more pressing matters than coming to terms with being gay - he's got super powers, and although that's not all that unusual in the world Moore has created, it's not all that easy, either. Super powers don't make the other people any smarter or less judgmental or less likely to have problems of their own, as Thom learns when he's accepted to train with an organized group of crime fighters. And dealing with his father's fall from public grace and his mother's abandonment are still crappy facts of life, even if you hang out with people who can fly and throw flames and all kinds of other cool tricks. The book isn't especially strong on writing style (I wondered if Moore equates writing for young adults to writing like a young adult) and the world Thom lives in is a little grey when it comes to sense of place, but as a story about how we're all the same in that we're all different, it's a pleasant read.

34. M is for Magic by Neil Gaiman, read by the author - A collection of short stories by Gaiman that have all been published previously, this time collected with the Young Adult reader (listener) in mind. There's a definite building of story depth as you progress through this book, from the beginning "The Case Of The Four And Twenty Blackbirds", a noir crime fiction using some of the best known names in nursery rhymes, to the final "The Witch's Headstone" that brings together all sorts of dark magic that doesn't end badly, if not well. Gaiman is one of the very few writers that I know of that is also an excellent story narrator. (For evidence of that, listen to The New Yorker's podcasts of authors reading their favorite authors!) Every story in this collection by Gaiman has the sound of being told to entertain - and they do.

35. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Jazz Age Tales by F. Scott Fitzgerald, audio book read by Grover Gardiner - I'd like to be more positive about these stories, but as the collection progressed, a single, sad thought kept coming to my mind - Fitzgerald really was a one hit wonder. That might be unfair, in that these stories are his early works, but they were published, so they do stand as a part of his body of work. The titled story is pretty good, especially in concept. And the arc of the main character gives an interesting look at what would happen if we really were more mature when we were younger rather than older. But the story never goes too deep, and the supporting characters are more like backstops, there to bounce dialog and action off of, but never adding structure. The stories are all surface, glitzy and wordy and overwritten, and if you try to look deeper, you'll discover Fitzgerald didn't go any deeper. I suppose that's a good portrait of the era he was writing in, but beyond their historical significance, I'd have a hard time recommending this collection to anyone.