I do hope I can provide some entertainment. But if Obama loses, it’s not my fault.

I do not have that kind of power.

(now I have to figure out if this thing is even legit… or run by the Romney people. Pretty sure the Santorum people don’t read books.)

Everyday there’s a headline or news item that makes me shake my head. Like Penguin deciding not to sell e-books to the company that sells e-books to libraries. Why? Penguin, channeling forgettable Hollywood movies, says “It’s complicated” and “difficult.” Really? More difficult than people bypassing you altogether and digitizing a book themselves?

The publishing industry had the luxury of sitting back and watching everything that happened to the music industry and they learned almost nothing. They had 10 years to watch record stores vanish, the rise and fall of Napster, the felling of empires (hello, Mr. Bronfman!), downloading, the rise of the indie artist, the uptick in touring, everything, all of it happened to a comparable industry a decade earlier and the publishing industry…dithered. They watched what happened to Hollywood and the video industry and they…dithered. A collective Nero playing the violin.

And now? Let’s see, the bookstores are in trouble if not crisis. E-books are just about equal (in sales) to print titles. Thousands of authors (too many, frankly, but the gates have fallen, the amount of content being pushed is normal) realize they can bypass the system entirely and sell directly to the public. Instead of seeing the change in technology as an opportunity, the establishment publishing industry, like the music industry before it, is seeing a lot of what is happening as a threat.

It’s all happened before.

And so the publishing industry (or, in American parlance, the “Big 6″) has gotten more conservative (if that’s possible – I’ve written about this before), and…. one of the largest publishers in the world decides they are going to plug this dike by ditching the outfit that provides libraries with e-books. It’s kind of funny. And if I weren’t a writer trying to publish a book right now, I might even laugh.

Might.

What if he’s just a dink? A dinky old fashioned dinosaur. So what if his books sell millions of copies? His being a dink has nothing to do with his talents as a writer. When I read about his views on e-readers I had this thought: Jonathan Franzen has become the new Malcolm Gladwell of stupid opinions. Gladwell has made a lot of money by writing very well – and intelligently – about some very obvious things. At least that’s my take on him. And now, here’s Franzen, confusing his work – the words and story – with an object, a delivery system. That’s what a book is.

I love books. Don’t get me wrong. Love may not be strong enough to describe my feelings for them. And I have found that I can’t read fiction in e-form. Don’t ask me why. I need the pleasure of the physical book to aid and abet my reading experience. But non-fiction? No problem. I now prefer my iPad. I love the feel of magazines but reading one on my iPad is no problem. It feels less lush to me, sure, but that’s me. Print is easy luxury.  The convenience of the iPad (or any e-reader but to tell the truth, all the other ones feel flimsy to me – and the Kobo sucks; it feels like something out of a Cracker Jacks box) might trump that luxury but it doesn’t make it “better.”

I’m not a nostalgic person. But I still miss albums. I decry the loss of sonic quality everyone accepts because of the iPod and those dreadful earbuds. New technology doesn’t necessarily signal an improvement. Sometimes, as in the case of digital music, we decided to sacrifice quality for convenience. That’s an interesting trade-off but one that didn’t need to be made. There is an aspect to Franzen’s argument I sympathize with. He believes that “consumers had been conned into thinking that they need the latest technology.” There’s an amount of truth to that. We all want the latest stuff without thinking whether or not the new stuff advances our lives in any way. But in the case of e-readers in general, I do think we’re seeing a democratization of the reading experience – even if e-readers are expensive (for now). And I think the amount being read by all people is going up. Even as we hurtle toward a “Post Literate Age” – which is exactly what Franzen fears most.

Many people have made the mistake of comparing the work to the delivery system. A book is a beautiful and near perfect object. But in the end, does its beauty do anything to the words printed on it? And does the “permanence” of a book have no digital counterpart? Again, I would disagree. But then again, Franzen says a lot of things to disagree with. Lovely writer though.

Totally different topic: follow this. A year in the life of a small(ish) but hugely important publisher. Sort of a look to see how publishers (that aren’t multinationals) are faring today.

I wonder if this one might be better off with a male editor, or someone with a slightly different sensibility?

This from an editor at a major publishing house. And this wasn’t the first time he’s received a response along these lines. A few weeks earlier:

this novel is a little outside my comfort zone as an editor. I wonder if it’s just a little too male for me and might be a better fit with a male editor

And then, just yesterday, an article appeared in Salon that basically said male authors, especially new ones, are having a real hard time right now. That outside of heavyweights like DeLillo and Franzen and Eugenides, male authors are having a difficult time across the board. This is admittedly an unpopular argument to make, especially since the likes of Jonathan Franzen are still making the cover of Time magazine. But we’ve heard for years how book readership overall skews heavily female. Men, in general (and in a HIGHLY generalized statement) don’t even like fiction anymore and hardly read at all. And perhaps the entire concept of fiction turns men off. Which is a crock but still. Stats don’t lie right?

Now, I’m not even close to giving up. Even though this novel’s trip has been long and arduous (my current agent? He’s my third one.) and seemingly without end. I remember years ago, at a writers’ workshop in beautiful Saratoga Springs, NY, a poet, looking rueful (as poets are wont to do) suddenly asked “Why do we write poetry anymore?” He was drunk, sure, but he was also very, very serious. And besides the usual, poetic answers, no one had a “good” answer. Good in the “this-makes-sense” kind of sense. Logical. That’s the word I’m looking for. And I wonder if today, some young dude, a fiction writer, would ask the same question. But not about poetry.

U2, back when they were just starting out and were young and Bono hadn’t yet had those ridiculous wrap-around shades tattooed to his face, sang the prescient line about a place and time where “fact is fiction and TV reality.” And we have come to that. We live in a world where real life is good enough to satisfy our fictional urges and Snooki inhabits a kind of fictional space even though she is very real (or especially because is she is very real – she, and the entire Jersey Shore, is honestly nothing more than today’s commedia dell’arte), and where our fiction has to be REALLY fictional, with zombies and vampires and ghosts and cowboys and aliens (or better yet, all of them at once). I write realistic stuff and I’m a man, both negatives at a time when neither is sellable. I won’t apologize for being a man. And I won’t apologize for first realizing I wanted to write while being mesmorized by Raymond Carver. So. Two strikes against me.

Because all the storytelling now is about selling product.

Sorry. Did I write that? I was just being cynical.

For years, after any meal in a Chinese restaurant, my father would reach for the fortune cookies and say “Let’s see what the Creative Writing graduates are writing these days.” In the spirit of his comment, I say this to the editor(s) and their response to my agent’s query: Fuck Off.

The big irony would be Random House, or one of its myriad divisions, picking up my novel. And I mean irony in an Alanis kind of way. Not real irony. No one does real irony anymore…

2011 was interesting for all the wrong reasons.

If it’s going to be winter, let it be winter. Drawn out autumn-ish weather stinks. The rink across the street from my house isn’t done yet because of the weather. If we’re going to live in Canada, snow is part of the contract.

Never mind winter, Canadians have a love/hate relationship with weather, period.

I don’t get the emotional attachment to college sports or to the sporting exploits of any youngster that is not YOUR kid. In Canada, this includes the World Junior Hockey Championships, a kind of holiday-tv event nationalism projected onto teenagers that is as sickening as the pedestal Americans put college sports (and even high school sports) on and, well, that’s exploitation on a massive scale: money coming in to schools because of kids who will never even graduate. What I’m saying: the tribalism of sports affiliation is fine as long as you’re supporting highly paid mercenaries upon which to project your own inadequacies and hopes and dreams. Like the way I do with my beloved (and infuriating) Habs.

How do the brave people who toppled Hosni Mubarak feel now?

They risked their lives for change and then the people who sat back and watched on TV went out and voted in religious conservatives. So it is any coincidence the security forces are now beating women?

With a kind of impunity we didn’t even see before?

Those who think the reaction to Steve Jobs’s death was over the top kind of missed the point. People were generally mourning a man who unleashed the creativity in millions. And so they mourned in a creative way. Now, Kim Jung-Il’s death, that’s a different story.

Is it just me or did no one see any actual tears from the mourners? I mean, the soundtrack to the funeral was the buzz of mass crying. It was a rather amazing sound. But there were no tears. That much crying creates snot and other bodily fluids. (and let us pause here to reflect on the passing of this pop culture icon – his portrayal as a puppet in Team America

was smarter than anything else – and a reason that Kim-Jong-Puppet has lived on as an artifact far longer than any other character in that movie).

 
I hope to live in a world one day where people stop confusing “weather” with “climate.”

I’m pretty sure we’re going to find a planet with life on it soon. Sooner than a lot of people think. That’s going to affect some people’s cosmology. I hope in a good way.

Hollywood receipts are down because the amount of sequels are up. It’s simple. And it’s why all the great writers want to do TV now. (another request: can we start ranking movies based on how many people saw them? The money coming into theatres is a massive distortion and amazingly dishonest).

Plastic remains evil.

Social media is heading for some kind of tipping point. There’s too much out there. There are more and more ways to share, more time to spend, except that time itself, at least how we live it, is finite. We have the big boys in social media and now everyone else is just fighting for niche. Niche is good. But it’s niche. In that sense, social media is going to become like every other form of media, if it isn’t already.

In 2012, my novel will find a publisher. I kind of know this.

I’m going to do something with my Twitter stuff. I just wrote a short story based on a tweet. First time. I’m going to do more of that. I have a screenplay starting to get mapped out based more or less on the Twisters. I want to find an awesome illustrator and perhaps do a little book with them. My wife also wants to make coffee mugs with the tweets on them.

I’m going to finish the TV treatment I’ve half-written based on one of the stories in Squishy.

I am a lucky man. I come home every day to a home where I am loved (most of the time). I have a roof over my head and a comfortable life. I earn a decent living in a line of work that takes me places, allows me to meet interesting people and create things that I genuinely enjoy. I earn enough to give to causes I believe in. I create work that has touched people I don’t even know and might never know. I have wonderful friends and family. I have you, reading this, a gift like no other.

Thank you to everyone who comes here, who takes the time to follow me on Twitter, who have read my work in whatever form in whatever forum, who have reached out with a kind word or even criticism – who have engaged in other words – and who continue to allow me to enter their busy lives.

Have a productive, lovely, peaceful and joyous 2012.