Planes, Trains, and Automobiles—A Travel Memoir

                   

"And by the way, you know, when you're telling these little stories? Here's a good idea -

have a POINT. It makes it SO much more interesting for the listener!"

My wife and I are on an extended vacation that traverses five states and a couple of countries. (Can you vacation in retirement?) We started with meeting high school friends in Carson City and then my wife’s brother in Garnerville, Nevada. Since many of the Steve Dancy novels take place in and around Carson Valley, I always enjoy visiting the area to get ideas and check up on how Jenny is doing. From there we flew to San Diego for a week of surfing and beach-style laziness.

After SoCal, we were supposed to return to Omaha for a week, but schedules got messed up, so we stayed home only overnight before flying to New York. Well, not exactly. Seems SouthWest had a computer glitch that turned every airport in the nation into serpentine lines of anxious travelers trying to figure out a new way to get from point A to point B. Due to family commitments, we had to get through this goo of snarling humanity or miss our opportunity to see all six grandkids together. Unfortunately, when we got to the front of the glacial line they told us the only available flight to New York was two days in the future. Bummer. Our son saved the day by booking us a car to drive us to Chicago for an early morning flight the next day. As we tooled along the highway in splendid exasperation, he even got all six of us flight reservations—my wife and me, my daughter, and her three kids. Since it was seven in the evening, our driver assured us he could get us to Chicago by 3:00 AM.

After a few hours’ sleep at an airport hotel, the six of us boarded a crowded flight to JFK. As a special treat for our 50th wedding anniversary, the kids had rented a house in South Hampton. Unfortunately we arrived too late for the train or jitney, so once again we piled into a mini-van for a sluggish ride out of New York City on a Friday night.

Now things came together beautifully. We arrived in time for a late grilled dinner in the backyard. The grandkids, together again, went bonkers. They laughed and ate and played and swam and generally made us feel old. A drink took the edge off, another put us to bed.

The world looked different after a good night’s sleep. We had four days ahead of us to do nothing but try to keep up with six kids under twelve years old. We even went surfing. Crummy wind-blown waves, but it was fun having three generations in the water. I lost a bet with my grandson that I would catch the better wave, but we had only wagered an ice cream cone, so I had enough money for the rest of the trip. The experience reminded me of Warren Miller’s admonition that “you only ski better than your kids one day in your life.”

All good things must come to an end. On Tuesday evening, we took the jitney back to New York. Our travel hobgoblin had not retreated into the woodwork. After leaving the Jitney, we flagged down a cab to take us to our timeshare. (Hotel costs hampered visits to see our NYC grandkids, so a few years ago we bought into a timeshare-like arrangement.) The cab driver’s mouth dropped open when he saw all the kids and enough luggage for Duchess Kate Middleton. Then he started dancing in place and begged me to allow him to drive over to McDonalds to pee. Having been there myself, I said yes. I didn’t know McDonalds was ten blocks in the wrong direction. It was late, we were tired, and our cabbie took us on a prolonged detour (meter off, of course.) I didn’t complain because we were piled in well beyond the legal limit for a single cab.

Our next travel adventure was beyond inconvenient, it was dangerous. In Times Square we signaled for an Uber, but a pirate pretended to be our car. Dumb us, we didn’t verify the driver’s name before jumping in. Trapped in gridlock, a small gang of teenagers started banging on car hoods and then threw Pepsi on our driver’s car. He immediately jumped out yelling and took after the boys. They jeered and threatened him, so he returned to the car and I saw him pull a cheap steak knife out of the driver’s door. Oh Shit! He brandished the weapon and the boys went on to harass sane drivers. When he finally dropped us off, he delivered the coup de grâce by demanding $30 for a twenty block ride. I had already seen the knife, so I paid him sans tip and we bailed out as fast as we could.

I have a chocoholic granddaughter, but instead of venturing back to Times Square to visit the Hersey store, we decided to take a train to the mother lode of all things chocolate, Hersey, Pennsylvania. By this time you would think we had learned our lesson and stayed put. No way. Except for jostling crowds at Penn Station, comatose Amtrak employees, rude train passengers, WAY-overpriced snacks, and a first-time Uber car that ran around in circles because our driver didn’t have a clue where to find the biggest amusement park in Pennsylvania and felt looking out the window at big signs was a sign of weakness or something. The trip was as pleasant as an emergency trip to the dentist. I exaggerate … a bit. The good news is that once we arrived, everything went like clockwork and we had a great couple of days wolfing down chocolate and getting the bejesus scared out of us on rides engineered by sadists.

When we returned to New York Penn Station, I lost it with a driver who yelled at my daughter on the phone because we couldn’t find him. He kept telling her that he was parked right behind the police. I asked him to look around and tell me where he didn’t see police. He had no answer.  After our sullen journey, I over-tipped because I felt guilty for yelling at him, only to discover that my daughter also tipped him heavily to make up for her rude father.

We celebrated our 50^th anniversary with the kids early because for some odd reason, school now starts in mid-August, and what we really wanted as a gift was to see all of our kids and grandkids together. On our actual anniversary, we decided to do our own private celebration in Paris. What seems like a long time ago, I ran an operation in Paris. My wife joined me on many business trips and it’s a city with a lot of memories for us. Because our schedule got shoved forward, we are now waiting in NYC for our flight to the City of Lights. After our travel experiences so far, I wonder about flying over vast amounts of very cold water.

As I write this, I am sitting quietly in my timeshare. My daughter and her family have returned to Omaha. Our other grandchildren are still on Long Island. We see little of our son in the city because he works day and night.

We are alone. It’s quiet. It’s peaceful. We don’t travel again for another week.

I’m bored.

Back From a Fun Trip to Peru

My wife's photo of Machu Picchu

I like traveling to places my wife and I both enjoy. She loves history and art, while I prefer to see how people in other countries live today. This makes Egypt and China two of our favorite destinations because she can gaze in wonder at the pyramids or walk the Great Wall, and I get to witness a completely different culture.

Peru falls into this category. The 14th Century Inca ruins fulfill her need to touch and feel a culture long gone, and I get to enjoy the lively and complex Peru of today. I kidded her by saying she liked dead Peru, while I liked live Peru. That's an over-simplification, of course, but it's not too far off the mark.

Another Peruvian benefit is plenty of exercise ... at high altitude. When I got back to sea level I felt energized with all that oxygen.

Peru was wonderful. Friendly people who know how to preserve their heritage.

Oh well, vacation's over. Better get back to writing.

Steve Dancy Wants to be Pals with Jack Reacher

There have been some memorable fictional characters. Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Hercule Poirot, and Harry Potter to name a few. (I’d like Steve Dancy to climb into this group, but I need a few million more sales. A little help, please.) The above names are make-believe people, but known the world over. How does a branded character come about? They must be difficult to create because there are so few of them. Strong characters are not rare. Think of Elizabeth Bennet, Tom Sawyer, Captain Ahab, Rhett Butler, or Hannibal Lecter. But for the most part, these were one-offs, while a branded character returns time and again, frequently leaping from the printed page to screen and stage.

The inventors of Holmes, Bond, Poirot, and Potter didn’t want for material things. Sherlock Holmes has been portrayed on screen more than any other character, and that excludes the House television series. Spanning 54 years, James Bond is the longest running film series with a human protagonist. (Godzilla is the longest and most prolific film series.) Agatha Christie used Poirot to propel herself to the #1 Bestselling author of all time, while Harry Potter is the #1 bestselling book series.

These are worldwide icons. Yet they’re fictional. They sprang from the imagination of authors. How in the world do you do that? One author has told us.

I recently reread Killing Floor by Lee Child. In a new introduction, Child describes how he developed the Jack Reacher character, who was introduced in this novel back in 1997.

“I liked some things, and disliked other things. I had always been drawn to outlaws. I liked cleverness and ingenuity. I liked the promise of intriguing revelations. I disliked a hero who was generally smart but did something stupid three-quarters of the way through the book, merely to set up the last part of the action.  Detectives on the trail who walked into rooms and got hit over the head from behind didn’t do it for me. And I liked winners. I was vaguely uneasy with the normal story arc that has a guy lose, lose before he wins in the end. I liked to see something done spectacularly well. In sports, I liked crushing victories rather than ninth-inning nail-biters. 

To me, entertainment was a transaction. You do it, they watch it, then it exists … for me the audience mattered from the start.

G. K. Chesterton once said of Charles Dickens, 'Dickens didn’t write what people wanted. Dickens wanted what people wanted.'"

Child sat down and came up with three specific conclusions.

"First: Character is king. There are probably fewer than six books every century remembered specifically for their plots. People remember characters … so my main character had to carry the whole weight.

Second conclusion: If you can see a bandwagon, it’s too late to get on … it’s a crowded field. Why do what everyone else is doing? … The series that were well under way … lead characters were primus inter pares in a repertory cast, locations were fixed and significant employment was fixed and significant. I was going to have to avoid all that stuff.

But the third conclusion, and the most confounding conclusion: You can’t design a character too specifically … a laundry list of imagined qualities and virtues would result in a flat, boring, cardboard character … I decided to relax and see what would come along. Jack Reacher came along.”

Child goes on to explain that Reacher has the following characteristics:

• Fish-out-of-water because he had previously only known military life
• He’s huge, utterly sure of himself, with intimidating presence (opposite of flawed protagonist)
• Old-fashioned hero: no problems, no navel-gazing
• Owns nothing but the clothes on his back—literally
• No ties to family, friends or location
• Ex-military cop to give him plausibility with investigative techniques
• Rootless and alienated in a giant country (Child is British)
• Reacher as Medieval knight-errant
• First name is simple, ordinary, blunt, and straightforward
• Certain nobility based on rank of major in military

Child wrote: “I wanted the kind of vicarious satisfaction that comes from seeing bad guys getting their heads handed to them by a wrong-righter even bigger and harder than them … so Reacher always wins.”

I started by asking, “How does a branded character come about?” It appears by creating a character unlike all the other series protagonists. Not a unique trait, but opposite in every detail. At least it worked for Reacher. A Forbes study discovered that Jack Reacher is the strongest branded character in fiction, and Lee Child has the strongest reader loyalty of any bestselling author.

Top 10 Tips for Book Gift Giving

A book is always a great gift … especially if you take the time to match the recipient’s taste in fiction or nonfiction. Suddenly, your thoughtfulness becomes part of the gift. Whether your relatives or friends are interested in the Civil War, literature, romance novels, westerns, paranormal fiction, railroads, guns, cooking, collecting old comic books, antique automobiles, or anything else, there's always a book that will bring a smile to their face.

Here are my Top 10 Tips for Book Gift Giving

1. Write a personal message on the flyleaf that won't get tossed out like last year's Christmas card.
2. Search out an author signing for your recipient’s favorite author or give a collector’s version of the recipient’s favorite book.
3. If you need professional help or want something unique, shop at an independent book store, or specialty bookstore.
4. If you subscribe to Amazon Prime then shipping is free, or mail books early to take advantage of media class at the Post Office.
5. Give a book as a piece of art, like a fine print book, unique coffee table book, favorite book as a child, or collectible cover art.
6. Make a highly personal photo book with ShutterFly or Apple Photos.
7. Give a bookseller gift card for e-book and audio book enthusiasts.
8. If you’re giving a gift to a college student, tuck a crisp $100 bill into the flyleaf as a bookmark.
9. If your friend or relative already owns piles of books, give a unique set of book ends to hold them in their proper place.
10. One final tip that comes close to re-gifting—find an Amazon print book that includes a “Match Book” deal. Gift the printed version and download the e-book for yourself.

Children's books are also great gifts. We search for autographed storybooks for our grandkids. Bookstores always have children book signings around the holidays, and this is one area where we join the crowd. The icing on the cake is that we get to read from one of these books when we visit.

Books are a great entertainment value. They provide hour upon hour of personal pleasure, and then they can be passed on to another person. What could be better?

You might even gift one of these.

How to make a cowboy hat

Looking the Part

I'm not a hat person. Although I own dozens of hats, I seldom wear one. I don't even like helmets. I grew up in a generation where you just wheeled your bike out of the garage and went riding without a helmet or spandex regalia. When we pulled our long boards to the beach behind our bikes, we wore flip flops, board shorts, and little else. I ski with soft head gear and when I surf, so far I can still rely on my hair to keep the sun from burning the top of my head.

That said, I like cowboy hats. I own one but seldom wear it because after all these years, it still looks new. I bought it at Wall Drug, and it immediately blew off my head and rolled down the center of the street for a quarter mile and still looked brand spankin' new*. I envy tattered, sweat-stained cowboy hats that scream authenticity. Mine says tenderfoot in neon. I know, I know, if I wore it more, it would eventually look like the genuine article. I'm just not a hat person.

For western head gear, I prefer Resistol, but here's a video from Stetson about making cowboy hats. Betcha thought it was a lot simpler.

* I'm a bit obsessed with phrases. This is an interesting article about the origins of brand spanking new.

The More Things Change ...

I moved to Omaha last year, so I found this 1877 article from the Omaha Herald interesting. For those who loath TSA, tiny seats, and surly airlines, take heart, travel was far worse in the good-ol’-days.

Here are a few of the Herald’s tips for stage travelers.

• Don't growl at food stations; stage companies generally provide the best they can get.
• Don't keep the stage waiting; many a virtuous man has lost his character by so doing.
• Don't smoke a strong pipe inside especially early in the morning.
• Spit on the leeward side of the coach.
• If you have anything to take in a bottle, pass it around; a man who drinks by himself in such a case is lost to all human feeling.
• Don't swear, nor lop over on your neighbor when sleeping.
• Don't ask how far it is to the next station until you get there.
• Never attempt to fire a gun or pistol while on the road, it may frighten the team; and the careless handling and cocking of the weapon makes nervous people nervous.
• Don't discuss politics or religion, nor point out places on the road where horrible murders have been committed.
• Don't linger too long at the pewter wash basin at the station.
• Don't grease you hair before starting or dust will stick there in sufficient quantities to make a respectable 'tater' patch.
• Tie a silk handkerchief around your neck to keep out dust and prevent sunburns. A little glycerin is good in case of chapped hands.

The article ended with a good piece of advice for modern travelers.

Don't imagine for a moment you are going on a picnic; expect annoyance, discomfort and some hardships. If you are disappointed, thank heaven.

I thank heaven every time I'm not seated next to Del Griffith!

The Steve Dancy Tales Goes Audio

Honest westerns filled with dishonest characters.

My son reads magazines and listens to books. He doesn’t have a lot of time for recreational reading, so he listens while he runs, works out, or drives. He keeps telling me that I’m missing a big audience by not having audio versions of the entire Dancy series. Well, we rectified the situation and you can find the audio books here.

I love audio books, but they’re only as good as the narrator. For more than 35 years, Jim Tedder has read Voice of America (VOA) news and features. He has hosted a number of VOA morning programs and is responsible for the VOA Pronunciation Guide. Before joining VOA, Jim worked in broadcasting in several major markets in the United States. I sure Steve and the crew are in good hands.

The Steve Dancy Tales has sold well in print, e-book and large print, and I’m sure it will do well in the audio format.

A guy from the East ventures west. Where have I heard that story?

Looking for a Father's Day gift?

The best gift is a vacation … and the least expensive vacation is a book. A novel effortlessly transports the reader to another place and time. With a good book, dad can take a fifteen minute vacation or while away an entire afternoon. Either way, he returns feeling refreshed and more content with life.

Gift books don’t have to be fiction. A respite with a nonfiction book about a special interest can also be relaxing. The great thing about books is that there are numerous ones for every interest, hobby, sport, or enthusiasm. If for some reason, your dad can’t get away to fish, golf, or whatever, he can frequently find a few minutes to read about his favorite activity. A good book allows him to indulge himself and possibly pick up a few pointers.

There is another reason I like to give books as gifts: I can write something personal on the flyleaf that won’t get thrown out like an old greeting card.

The most important thing is to remind your father that you love him. The perfect book is far more personal than most gifts because it’s aimed directly at what you father enjoys. Put some serious thought into the right book to show you really tried to please him.

Here are a couple previous blog postings about Father’s Day.

Father's Day Tribute
What to give for Father's Day?

P.S. It's Saturday. Forgot to shop for a Father's Day gift? It's not too late. Support your local independent boookstore and get dad something he'll really enjoy.

10 Tips for Holiday Book Giving

Books are a perfect gift ... and a great way to avoid the crowds. 

At times, friends and relatives can be hard to buy for. Some seem to have everything. Due to age or illness, others may be less mobile than in years past. Some don’t really want much. Families scatter across this huge country and selecting a gift, packaging, and shipping can be a chore.

A book, however, is always a great gift … especially if you take the time to match their taste in fiction or nonfiction special interest. Suddenly, your thoughtfulness becomes part of the gift. Whether your relatives or friends are interested in the Civil War, literature, romance novels, Westerns, paranormal fiction, railroads, guns, cooking, collecting old comic books, antique automobiles, or anything else, there's always a book that will bring a smile to their face. 

1. Shop or search online for a book specific to the interests of your relative or friend—Goodreads is a good source for ideas
2. Write a personal message on the flyleaf that won't get tossed out like last year's Christmas card
3. Give a bookseller gift card for e-book and audio book enthusiasts
4. Search out an author signing for your recipient’s favorite author or give a collector’s version of the recipient’s favorite book
5. If you need professional help or want something unique, shop at an independent book store, or specialty bookstore (like the Poison Pen in Scottsdale that specializes in mysteries)
6. Remember, if you subscribe to Amazon Prime then shipping is free, or mail books early to take advantage of media class at the Post Office.
7. Give a book as a piece of art, like a fine print book, unique coffee table book, favorite book as a child, or collectable cover art (I collect early 20th century Western pulp fiction books for the cover illustrations)
8. Make a highly personal photo book with ShutterFly or Apple iPhoto or Apple Aperture
9. If you’re giving a gift to a student—or me, for that matter—tuck a crisp $100 bill into the book as a bookmark
10. Finally, if your  friend or relative already owns piles of books, give a unique set of book ends to hold them in their proper place

One final tip that comes close to re-gifting—find an Amazon hardcopy and that includes a “Match Book” deal with the simultaneous purchase of the e-book format. Gift the printed version and get an e-book for yourself.

Books are the best entertainment value. They provide hour after hour of personal pleasure, and then they can be passed on to another person.

Children's books are also great gifts. We search for autographed storybooks for our grandkids. Bookstores always have children book signings around the holidays, and this is one area where we join the crowd. The icing on the cake is that we get to read them a story from one of these books when we visit.

Here are Amazon links to bestselling books in a few categories. There are many more categories a click away. Topic searches also work with Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers.

Golf

Carpentry

Children's books

Cook books

Crafts & Hobbies

Action Adventure

Romance

Westerns

Amazon Bestsellers

If you choose to gift one of my books, thank you.  I appreciate it.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays. And have a great 2015.

Interview with Author’s Academy

The Author’s Academy is a subscription website dedicated to teaching “authors how to write, produce, and market their books successfully.” On Wednesday, Grael Norton interviewed me in a teleconference titled "How to Sell 1,000Books this Holiday Season." The title of the talk comes from a few seasons ago when I sold over 1,000 print copies in December. Today, this is not a large number for me, but my holiday sales are now heavily weighted toward e-books.

You can also read a summary of the interview at Writ3r Addiction.

Despite the popularity of e-books, print books still make outstanding gifts. You can choose a fiction or nonfiction book that precisely targets the interests of the recipient. A book in their favorite genre or about their hobby can make them happy, plus it shows you cared enough to pick a gift just for them. For a reasonable price, a book gives hours upon hours of enjoyment and can even be revisited in years to come, and unlike a Christmas card that gets discarded or thrown in a box, a personal inscription on the flyleaf of your gift book lasts forever.

This holiday season, give a book to someone you love … preferably one of these, of course.

Sojourn in New York City

My wife and I just returned home from seeing our son’s family in New York City. He and his wife have three young kids and because they grow so fast we try to visit at least once every three months. This was a great trip. We like Manhattan and we love my son and his family. What could be better than that? Here are some random thoughts on our trip.

• It’s difficult to write in airports, especially LaGuardia. Before retirement, I wrote all the time in airports, but nowadays it seems much more crowded. It’s even difficult to find an unoccupied seat at LaGuardia. Maybe it’s me. I’m getting older and perhaps I’m finding it more difficult to focus. Naw … it’s everybody else’s fault. 

Ellen DeGeneres

• It’s impossible to write on airplanes. I used to whip out my laptop all the time, but now I find it difficult to find room for myself, no less a supposed portable device that must have been designed to watch movies from twelve feet away. When I fly, I read my trusty Kindle. 
• Why do electronic components keep getting tinier and tinier, but electronic devices keep getting bigger and bigger? I took my grandson to the Apple store to shop for his birthday present. This was my first encounter with the big screen iPhones. The big model will hardly fit in a teenage girl’s hip pocket. My new laptop has a 16’ inch screen with Dolby sound and myriad other bells and whistles. I wanted one like my old 14’ model, but my preferred manufacturer no longer made this petite version. I’m a writer. I don’t need all this fancy stuff. Give me light weight, reasonable size, and MS Word. They can even make it black and white and I’ll be happy. I don’t want to sound like a curmudgeon, but I lament the demise of the Motorola Razr. Now that was a mobile phone. It was so light and thin you never knew you carried it until it buzzed with an incoming call. Okay, I am a curmudgeon.

Hurricane Sandy about to get unruly

• Although I had floated around it many times, I had never been to Statue of Liberty Island. We took our granddaughter and her friend. We discovered Disney World lines managed with government efficiency. Next time, if there is one, I’ll pick inclement weather. At least, that’s what I thought until I found this picture of the island with Hurricane Sandy looming on the horizon. Still lots of people. Maybe next time I’ll just float around it again. 
• I was walking the dog with my son when he pointed out a townhouse with narrow, one-car garage. He thought it would be wonderful to have a private garage in the city. I told him I owned three of them in Omaha. He asked if they were in front or behind the chicken coop. 
• All bookstore have small Western sections, but NYC stores have relegated Westerns to a single shelf in the most obscure corner of the stacks. Since New York is my third largest sales region, I think they are missing a bet.

The Real Wild West

An Editor on the Comstock Lode by Wells Drury

Previously, I wrote that Mark Twain is my favorite Western writer. Twain actually experienced the West at its rowdiest and Roughing It describes his experiences with humor and a touch of the storyteller’s art. Owen Wister is another author who experienced the real Wild West, which gave The Virginian its authentic feel. Wells Drury’s An Editor on the Comstock Lode is yet another great source for Western lore. In fact, its organization and humorous writing makes it an indispensable reference source for Western writers. Drury’s time as a newspaper editor in Virginia City gave him a front row seat to the goings on in that raucous town. His book covers:

• Everyday life in the West, including entertainment, food, and city services
• Practical jokes galore and lots of Yarns
• Saloon life and etiquette
• Gambling
• Bad-men and bandits, gunfights, and stage robberies
• Mining
• Financial history and shenanigans
• Journalism, including Mark Twain
• Politics
• Western Terminology
• And sketches of the prominent people of the Comstock Lode and Nevada politics.

My favorite, of course, is the chapter he dedicates to Candelaria and its suburb of Pickhandle Gulch. This mining camp figures prominently in my Steve Dancy Tales, but I chose to call the main town Pickhandle Gulch because I liked the name. Fiction writers get to bend history to suit their story. It’s one of the fun parts about being a novelist. I suspect Twain, Wister, and Drury did a bit of bending themselves.

Honest Westerns filled with dishonest characters.

Why print books are different

Mike Shatzkin

Mike Shatzkin has posted a discerning article about how print books are different than digital books. It’s common to assume that books will proceed along the same path as the digitization of music and film. Shatzkin disagrees. He claims books are very different from their digital cousins and make a number of good observations.

• Readers routinely switch between print and digital
• Whether digital or analog, music and film require power and a device to be consumed. Books require neither.
• Compared to the digital variety, Shatzkin contends print books are easier to navigate, and that navigation is not a critical function for music or film which for the most part are consumed serially.
• Print presentation can be more aesthetic. Digital book devices inhibit interior design. For music and film, there is no difference “between the streamed and hard-goods version.”
• Motivation is different for book buyers. Music and film are consumed mostly for entertainment.  Books are frequently bought for educational purposes, making the ability to browse more important. This gives bookstores an advantage over online retailers.
• Digital music and film is superior to analog which drives digitization. This driver does not exist for books.

Shatzkin argues that there are innate differences between books, film, and music which will alter each media’s adaption to the digital world. One of the most significant being that ebook readers still buy and consume print. Music and film buffs seldom go back to the prior generation technology.

Although I tend to agree with Shatzkin, he did miss a few advantages of e-books. First, they’re lighter. I’m reading a big, heavy print book at the moment and I don’t take it to bed with me because my hands get tired holding it up. Currently, I fall asleep with Tom Wolfe on a kindle. A second advantage of e-readers is the ability to read them one-handed. My wife makes fun of me, but when one of my hands is busy shoveling breakfast into my mouth, I turn the page on my Kindle by bouncing it against my nose. Try that with a print book.

Life without Kindle

I carry my Kindle with me almost everywhere I go. Now, instead of fuming at airport security, I read or shop for my next book. If my wife asks to run into a store, I wait in the car and read. I even read in the interminable lines at Starbucks where no one seems to know how to order a cup of coffee with less than fourteen words. I cheered when the FAA finally ruled that my Kindle wouldn’t cause a fiery crash if I forgot to turn it off. Now I can read during that bouncy ride down the tarmac while the aluminum behemoth decides whether it wants to fly that day.

In other words, my Kindle became an appendage. Until I forgot it in San Diego. When I got to Lindbergh Field, I discovered I had left my trusty device in our condo. Darn. I couldn’t figure out what to do. Then I remembered the good ol’ days when I used to read words on paper. In short order, I bought the Jack Reacher novel Never Go Back by Lee Child.

The first surprise was the paperback price of $9.99. No wonder I liked my Kindle. The second surprise was how much I enjoyed reading a real book. It instantly brought back memories of sand chairs beside Bass Lake or the Pacific Ocean, reading in bed, and getting lost in a story on an airplane. Really lost. Once, I didn't notice that we had aborted two attempts to land until the pilot interrupted my trance to tell us lowly passengers that if he couldn’t land this time he was diverting to another airport. What? Where had I been during all of this? Reading a paperback.

That got me thinking. I have never been that lost while reading a Kindle. There is something about the mechanical nature that interferes with total absorption. In a real book, I never think about flipping a page; I never stop to look up the definition of a word; I never adjust the little light bulb thingy; and I never glance down to see how far I am from the end. I wondered: are real books superior?

Then I thought about my son. I thought about how hard it is to tear his attention away from an electronic device. I thought about how automatically he jets around content, moves between reading different devices and even effortlessly switches between text and audio books. For me, reading a paperback was nostalgic, for him it would be foreign. Did I look back on good times with paperbacks the way my mother insisted that screenwriting was better when television broadcast in black and white.

I’d think some more about this, but I’m lost in a Jack Reacher novel I picked up at an airport.

Westward Ho!

My granddaughter catching her first wave

Tonight, I head west. At least until I hit the Pacific Ocean. My plan is two weeks of surf, sun, and debauchery. Okay, the debauchery part was hyperbole. At my age, an hour in the water exhausts me. I’ve come to associate an afternoon sea breeze with naps. Surfline says the waves are tiny, but the weather is warm, the winds calm, and the surf glassy. I can’t wait to get my TSA/airplane ordeal completed and slide my key into the door lock of my condo. Tomorrow morning I'll take a walk to the bakery for twice-baked almond croissants and check out the waves from my balcony as I eat breakfast and sip coffee.

Since I’ll also be working on Jenny’s Revenge, I may get into some debauchery after all. Jenny’s shenanigans have surprised me, and I don’t think she is up to any good. I can’t wait to see what she’s up to next. Whatever it is, it won’t be good for Steve or Virginia.

"Weird Al" Yankovic - Word Crimes

Now, this is fun.

Reading to a child instills a love of books

Cartoon by Grant Snider

As Grant Snider so apply illustrates, a child is likely to fall in love with a single book. At least, initially. Still, no matter how many times I read the same story, a child curled up in my lap feels like I found  Ponce de León's elixir.

We moved to Nebraska to be close to our grandchildren. It was a great decision. We experience unexpected tidbits of joy every day. I've made a discovery, however. When my wife or I engage in a new activity with any of our grandkids, the initial fun wears out far earlier for us than for them. They can go on forever. That's one of the reasons reading to a child is such a good idea for grandparents. The child learns to use their imagination and reading becomes a pleasurable remembrance they carry throughout their lives. And grandparents get to sit in a comfy chair—something I can do longer than my grandkids.

Reading: The Struggle … Really?

Reading a struggle? Tim Parks writes that modern man’s addiction to electronic gadgets means reading is relegated to odd snatches of time. His advice is that we dinosaur writers need to adapt and learn to tell a story in fewer words than were used in the theme song for The Beverly Hillbillies. (The 87 word tune at the beginning of The Beverly Hillbillies is famous for terse storytelling.)

Park opens his New York Review of Books article by writing, “The conditions in which we read today are not those of fifty or even thirty years ago, and the big question is how contemporary fiction will adapt to these changes, because in the end adapt it will. No art form exists independently of the conditions in which it is enjoyed.”

Adapt? Writing a story using Twitter might be fun and even creative as hell, but it would not be a novel. Park doesn’t actually suggest that writers restrict themselves to 140 characters, but he does predict that a novel “will tend to divide itself up into shorter and shorter sections, offering more frequent pauses where we can take time out.” To a great extent, this is because Park apparently believes fiction is art and must be studied, rather than merely enjoyed.

He writes:

“Let’s remember just what hard work it can be to read the literary novel pre-1980. Consider this sentence from Faulkner’s The Hamlet:

‘He would lie amid the waking instant of earth’s teeming minute life, the motionless fronds of water-heavy grasses stooping into the mist before his face in black, fixed curves, along each parabola of which the marching drops held in minute magnification the dawn’s rosy miniatures, smelling and even tasting the rich, slow, warm barn-reek milk-reek, the flowing immemorial female, hearing the slow planting and the plopping suck of each deliberate cloven mud-spreading hoof, invisible still in the mist loud with its hymeneal choristers.’”

Could he have found a more writerly example? Mark Twain would never write a sentence like that. For that matter, neither would JK Rowling, Stieg Larsson, or Raymond Chandler. Good grief. Maybe it was pompous writing, not texting that drove people away from long format fiction.

Except that people have not abandoned novels. Novels are increasingly popular. Instead of the novel adapting to modern lifestyles, our lives have adapted to reading in a different manner. Many of us do our reading on e-readers that we bring with us all the time because they weigh less than a Little Golden Book.  

A good novel is the best stress reliever ever invented. A good novel captivates the reader. A good novel instantly transports the reader to another place and time. And a good novel is inexpensive and accessible. 

A novel provides a unique escape from the relentless pinging for our attention. Despite what our ego may tell us, being constantly tethered to an iThingy is not obligatory. The world will not miss you for an hour or so. When you need a break, just turn off your other devices and open a novel. Give a storyteller some dedicated time and you’ll be able to handle your concerns and responsibilities with aplomb.

My sojourn in direct marketing

I semi-retired early and went into consulting to forestall boredom and to help make ends meet.* I ended up consulting for a Boston direct marketing travel company. I expected to consult with them for a few weeks, but ended up working for them for over a decade.

Direct marketers are a different breed of retailers. This travel company never advertised and you could not buy their trips through a travel agent, yet they were the largest tour operator in the country. All of their sales came through their call center. How did they get customers? Like Land’s End, L.L. Bean, Crazy Shirts, and other direct marketers, this company promoted its products primarily through paper and online catalogs … and then depended heavily on repeat business.

Direct marketing is a specialized segment of the retail business and it is far more data-driven than store-front retailing. Because everything is ordered directly, they know each customer and how they behave. They know what they buy, how often they buy, their price sensitivity, and their product satisfaction level. They are fixated on customer data because their business models are based on what they call lifetime value. Once a customer is acquired, they know statistically how much business that customer will generate in future years. Since they focus on lifetime value, direct marketers are obsessed with customer satisfaction. They are constantly measuring every aspect of their business, analyzing the data, and adjusting their practices.

What brought this to mind was a New Yorker article by George Packer: “Cheap Words: Amazon is good for customers. But is it good for books?” Amazon is arguably the best direct marketer in the world. The following alleged comments by Bezos may or may not have been made in 1995, but they fit perfectly with the direct marketing business model.

“Bezos said that Amazon intended to sell books as a way of gathering data on affluent, educated shoppers. The books would be priced close to cost, in order to increase sales volume. After collecting data on millions of customers, Amazon could figure out how to sell everything else dirt cheap on the Internet … Bezos had realized that the greatest value of an online company lay in the consumer data it collected. Two decades later, Amazon sells a bewildering array of products: lawnmowers, iPods, art work, toys, diapers, dildos, shoes, bike racks, gun safes, 3-D printers.”

I believe Amazon has been good for books. The Kindle—and other e-readers—have revitalized reading. Amazon has, however, been bad for bookstores. But whenever I start to feel bad for Borders, Barnes and Noble, et al., I just download a streaming copy of You’ve Got Mail from Amazon.

*  I’m interested in etymology of phrases.  “Where it (this phrase) comes from is hard to be sure about. It’s often said that it’s from bookkeeping, in which the total at the bottom (“end”) of the column of income must at least match that at the bottom of the expenditure column if one is not to be living beyond one’s income”—worldwidewords.org

“Everything has to come to an end, sometime.” ― L. Frank Baum, The Marvelous Land of Oz

Everything is working just fine. The grandkids in New York and Omaha are great, our electronic gizmos have not rebelled against humanity, and Jenny is up to mischief.  Jenny, of course, is a character in the next Steve Dancy Tale, tentatively titled Jenny’s Revenge. As you probably guessed from the title, she’s not a bit player.

Jenny was a character from The Shopkeeper—the first in the series—and her absence has been long. Absence has not made the heart grow fonder, however. She’s on a tear, and I can’t wait to see what she does next. Which brings up a question: if I’m the author, why would I not know what Jenny is going to do? When I start a book, I know the beginning, the end, and the players, but I do not map out the middle. I get the characters started, and then type like crazy to see how they will take me to the predetermined end. (There was an instance when my characters got ornery and discarded my ending for one of their own.)

I’m not suggesting this approach to all writers. In fact, for Tempest at Dawn, I outlined every single day of the four month duration before writing a word. For me, the amount of pre-planning depends on the subject of the novel. This is going to sound odd, but it also depends on how much I trust the characters. I created Steve, Jeff, Joseph, Virginia, Maggie, and Jenny. These characters would never let me down. I know them better than they know themselves. I can rely on them to act out a rousing story and to stay pretty much on the path I set for them. George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Roger Sherman, and even good ‘ol Ben Franklin might reject my fanciful plot for one they actually lived. In this case, it’s better to lay everything out in advance.

I participated in three panels at the Tucson Festival of Books. I was asked how I found inspiration to write. My answer was vague because every writer has to find what works for them. For me, it’s getting back to my friends and seeing what they are up to. And that’s the real reason I don’t outline the entire plot—writing wouldn’t be as much fun if I knew what was going to happen.