Merry Christmas

I hope that you all had a Merry Christmas (or if Eastern Orthodox, will have in about a week). Mine was great, including a whorl-wind trip from Georgia, through the world's worst airport (CDG), two days on the ground with my wonderful wife and kids, and back. I reindeered my way back and forth, spreading as much Christmas cheer as humanely possible...and I even worked on my NIP on the plane, and the train, and sitting on the floor of the terminal of the worst airport in Europe (CDG).

Yes, It was a little cloudy in Paris, but no lines at the tower!

Good listeners

One of the things I enjoy the most about performances in Tbilisi is the audience. Performances that I have attended in the States,ballet, classical, opera have much more staid responses (with the exception of country and rock concerts of course- those people go nuts). But not here, Georgian audiences are really generous. And it's a heartfelt generocity that seems to be part of the culture. I attended a Concert at the Didi Darbazi (Grand Hall) with some friends Saturday night. The 200th Anniversary of Liszt played by Alberto Nose (this is a performance with orchestra in 2005 but last night he was up there all by himself), a well noted Italian Pianist. His performance was great (though I was on the lookout for the Hungarian Rhapsody -how can you have a Liszt concert without that?) but alas, other pieces were played that I didn't know. The audience didn't seem to mind. After the performance they wouldn't stop with the clapping. Poor Alberto came out for four ovations after.

The only thing that would have made it better would have been if my wife could have gone as well, but alas, she's back in the states. I'll join them for Christmas in less than a week. So excited...

Oh, and I'll have the long, long flight, with the long long layovers to work on the WIP. You keep telling me you want to see it done, and I'm trying to be a good listener too.

Crunch before Christmas

Another weekend and another Ballet. Yay. I feel so cultured. This one was 'Laurencia', a rousing tale featuring a peasant uprising against the oppressive Spanish aristocracy. It was put together during the Soviet period (you remember that don't you, proletariat's of the world uniting to overthrow the bourgeoisie and install a criminalized despotic ruling class?). But they did put together some very classy music and dance!

My favorite part of the evening was seeing the wave of little girl audience members, in their best outfits, all practicing pirouettes in the lobby after. Very cute.

Most people get to this time of year really look forward to the holiday. Me too, but I also dread the two weeks before Christmas where I try to pack in as much extra work as I can into the short space I have before the holiday weekend, so that I can enjoy it guilt-free. (Probably not much novel writing in my immediate future.)

But I am hoping to make time for a Lizst concert next Saturday here in Tbilisi. The old boy would have been 200 this past October, after all.

Infamousness

Seventy years ago today at zero-seven-forty-eight in the morning, a vanguard of ninety Nakajima B5Ns preceded a Tsunami-like wave of aircraft which a swept into Pearl Harbor and changed the course of history. You all know that right, today was Pearl Harbor day, the day that went down in Infamy?

The world would likely be a very different place if not for the events of that one day, that one 'AI' strike on the conflicted, politically complacent, isolationist pond of post-depression America. All those ripples. I wouldn't be here if not for it. Okay that might be a stretch, but my father was an Air Force NCO, and he did go to Germany in the 1960s because America still had troops stationed there, which we had because the Allies won WWII, and while there he met a hot dutch chick, and the rest is my history.

International relations theory teaches us that there are essentially four elements of National power; Diplomatic, Informational, Miltary and Economic (DIME). Nation-states exert power or ensure security through these four means. Primarily. So what motivated the Japanese politico-military decision makers to believe that they had exhausted the DIE and were ready to exert the M? Much good scholarly work out there if you're interested.

And what of the young men that participated? Both sides. What did Captain Fuchida think as he led his men in that loud, slow 'Kate'? If he was like most Aviation Captains I know (or was) he had compartmentalized most everything else and was desperately trying to make sure he didn't screw it up. Keep formation, stay on vector, hey watch your altitude Mitsuo, where are the American planes and ADA, which target should I select, did I arm the Torpedo release squibs...

Little things and big things, eh?

Ogres

I don’t think it will come as a surprise to those of you who really know me that I enjoy classical music. You wouldn’t know to look at me, I know, and it doesn’t seem to fit with the kettlebell post, nor the Army experiences, but hey what can I say? I’m complicated. Ogres are like onions, right? Anyway, one of the nice things about living in Tbilisi is that they have a really vibrant arts scene. (I’ve hit 2 ballets, 3 opera’s, 6 concerts and a symphonietta since the end of September!) All lovely, some really good, some a little lame, but I attended another performance on Friday that I really really enjoyed.

I think I’ve mentioned that being notified (in English) of events is a challenge here. The system works for the locals, but not so well for the uninitiated, so I often stumble upon these performances. The Friday performance was like that. I saw a poster on the side of the Grand Hall (didi darbazi-it says so over the door in the picture) of the Tbilisi State Conservatory, (it’s on the same street as my gym) and puzzled out that it was a young lady named Irma Gigani that played piano. Fortunately there was an English-speaking gentleman in line who turned to me, and out of the blue said, “You are American.” How did he know? I thought I was blending in sooo well. Well, I pointed to the poster and asked if he knew anything about the performance. He read it and said, “Some girl is graduating from her high school and this is her performance.”

I thought that would be sweet. I’m a Dad, I’ve been to dozens of my children’s performances, so I thought it would be nostalgic. I got tickets for me and a coworker (and her partner) and we went. It wasn’t what I expected. Apparently Miss Gigani is a 15 year old child prodigy, has played all over the world, comes from an arts family, etc. A far cry from what I expected. She played Chopin’s Piano Concerto with symphony. Awesome job.

I also hit another performance Saturday night. Shuman and Shubert. Also good. I know, I promised not to let these distractions get in the way of the next book (people are starting to ask when it will come out) so I promise to work on my book today, need to get it up over 60K words. There’s a ballet tonight, but it’s interpretive and I think I’m all cultured out. I might have to catch up on an episode of ‘Spartacus; Blood and Sand’ instead... Fit better?

Oh and the irony of my pointing out that I find it ironic that others have a preconception about my tastes and abilities, in a post where I had a preconception about a high school students abilities is not at all lost on me…ogres love irony too.

Ode to the Kettlebell

A friend of mine mentioned he had seen the picture of the Gym I go to in Tbilisi. Real proud of you, I say. But the subject came up as to what sort of equipment it has. Pretty basic, plates, bars, benches, racks, nothing fancy. Not as good as the gym I have in the loft of my barn, but fine. Oh, my barn gym; I spent a year collecting used gym equipment from the DoD DRMO. DRMO is the place where obsolete or broken DoD equipment is offered to the public (remember those apocryphal tales of jeeps still in the crate?). 'Obsolete' is a silly word to use for cast iron dumbbells and plates that soldiers used over the years. Wire brush the rust, a coat of black spray paint and it's beautiful. And it weighs the same as it ever did.

One thing I don't have in my gym that this gym has is a set of kettlebells. I have two 25pounders, but nothing like they have in the Tbilisi Gym. 16, 24 and 32 kilo Kettlebells. (35, 52 and 70 pounders). Remember we talked about Poods before? 1, 1.5 and 2 pood kettlebells. The reason I don't have more in my gym is that they're too new a fad in the US for me to find used ones (yes, I'm that cheap- but its really more of a sport). There are many here in Tbilisi, as in the US it is called the 'russian' kettlebell.

Anyway if you have a chance to grab one of these, or they have them at your gym (or you have a big coffee can, nylon rope and some concrete) I recommend it. The workouts are great to rotate into your routine. (Check these out) I guess you can tell I just got back from the gym right?Remember though, this isn't a magic piece of equipment. You have to use it. Alot. Consistently. And if you do, the results you realize will be 'owed to the kettlebell'. *

(Ah, I kill me!)

* Just because I linked to a cross-fit vid, doesn't mean I want you cross-fit-fanboys thinking I'm drinking the cross-fit coolaide... even if your workouts are tough they're still silly...and of course predispose you to repetitve stress injuries (torn rotator cuff, torn bicep, herniated discs) and rhabdomyolysis...just sayin, there's a balance between working hard enough and too hard.

Publishing

We all know what happened when the music industry coupled digitization of music formats and the internet: Chaos. (From a business perspective). Napster. File sharing. Torrent. College kids going to jail for sharing their music collections over the web. Anarchy. But the publishing industry seems to have eased into both digitizing books and the web in a little more orderly fashion. I'm not talking about Amazon, or other distributors of paperbooks on the internet, but rather digital publishing and distribution of 'ebooks'. (Which Amazon had a hand in with the kindle, of course).

In the 'olden days' (last year) authors would write a book, seek representation (an agent), find a publishing house, work with an editor and the marketing department, the book would be launched and sell hundreds of thousands of hardback copies, followed by hundreds of thousands more copies when it was released in paperback. Now, not every book went down this path, but this is more or less the Rube Goldberg process. I went down this same road, got really positive feedback from agents (but no representation) shopped my book at the big houses (positive feedback, but no thanks), the medium houses and then small presses (more than one offer to publish each book from small presses). Both STG and GOB were, as you know, published by small presses.

In order for a publishing house of the Old Guard to invest in a book they have to really believe that it will make them money. Cold hard truth; it isn't about literary merit, or the story that is told, it is about being able to move merchandise. (Most celebrity kiss and tell books have very little merit for instance, and their 'authors' rarely actually write much of the book- but... everyone wants a copy of Justin Beaver's autobiography, right?) Every rejection letter I received contained a phrase related to not being able to sell many copies. No sour grapes on my part, they were right. My books have sold in the hundreds of copies, not thousands (combining print and ebook sales). Now with stronger marketing support they might have sold more, but ...

There are other publishing venues. 'Vanity presses' for instance have been around for years. These are publishing houses that you pay to publish your book through. Some authors have done this with the thought selling their books (and there have been commercial successes). I didn't want to go down this path because I think it's easy to get myopic about your own work, and I wanted an external gut check. My Mom liked the book, my friends liked my book, I believed in it and it was the best book I could write at the time I wrote it, but how did it fair as a subjectively ranked, competent work of genre fiction?

Hey guess what? They did fine. Almost universally positive reviews (one guy really panned STG due to the editing- which has been fixed), consistent sales (though not super high) volume, and the people I meet that have read it say they really enjoyed the reading experience. Which is what I was shooting for. Now don't get me wrong, if Baen or Random house wanted to give me a big fat advance to stay home and write books I would be sorely tempted (and externally validated), but most likely I wouldn't quit my day job, as I believe in the work I'm doing in Georgia (but this is a blog about my writing life, not about being a program manager on an assistance program- so I'll get back to my writing point...maybe... perhaps...).

So, dear reader, what does all this have to do with digital publishing you ask? I have told you in previous posts to be patient, I will eventually meander back to my point.

Publishing a print book costs a lot of money. With POD (print on demand) technology it's much cheaper, but there is still a cost involved. With electronic publishing the costs are negligible. So now writers don't have to meet an agent's or publisher's subjective quality threshold (sales being the metric). But they don't really have to meet any threshold, do they? And oh my goodness, there are some self-deluded people out there publishing some real ebook stinkers. But there are also a number of competent writers who have decided to go into ebook publishing on their own, with low prices points, no middle man, and they're doing quite well, in terms of sales (which is a metric), reviews, etc.

Novlr is blog that delves into these issues in much greater detail.

So my point is that I am flirting with the idea of going it alone with my current WIP. I am a member of 'Goodreads', (part of my 'online presence') an online community for book readers and writers and I am being inundated with ebook offers, many free (the idea being to build a fan base just like Randolph Lalonde did).

So I don't know how that would work out in terms of getting my own work out into your hands (or on your eReader device). My motivation is not necessarily maximizing ROI, or sales volume, though I think running off copies of my work and passing it out on the street corner for free wouldn't meet my self-imposed vision of being a competent genre fiction writer. Hmmm, I'll have to ponder that one.

There are many examples of authors who have written competent books and are getting them out to readers with this POD/eBook/Indy renegade author directed publishing movement. Smashwords is an ebook publisher that makes it almost painless... Most likely I will give this a trial run. I have seven short stories that I have sold to various anthology markets, online publications, etc, that I have thought I might like to collect into a small (40K word) anthology of my own. All have my signature hard-boiledish, and mostly manly action-oriented prose, and like I said they were good enough to sell once...(though one sold three times- and funny it was my only short story with a female main character. What does that mean? Do I need to spend more time in the gym? Tell me the truth, do these sweat pants make me look fat?)

The accidental Opera

I have mentioned before my challenges buying tickets for Georgian venues. It's a challenge finding out about things because there's a big word of mouth component here (and I don't really understand the words too well). Then there is the challenge of communicating at the box office (as I will explain).

I saw a poster for the Georgian Symphonetta hosting a dutch oboe-playing soloist. I fortunately also found an English language version of the same poster near the Tbilisi-State Conservatory. I went to the box office on Friday, to buy the ticket for Saturday night's performance. Well, having thought I achieved success, I looked down at my purchase...it was for an opera on Friday night. That night. I went back, and knowing that an exchange was beyond my communicative talents, I opted to buy another ticket. The box office lady clearly thought me daft, but I was successful. Two tickets...So what did I do with the opera ticket? Well, I went. No idea what it was, who wrote it, but it was Italian, and cute. I am calling it the Accidental Opera.

I also made it to the Symphonetta and saw the oboist perform his solo. Mozart, Bach, Gluck and Boyce. Good seats; I sat right behind the First Lady of Georgia. (Should have figured she might come, as she's dutch).

I can also report that I have put the Thanksgiving holiday to good use, and pushed well through the middle of the WIP. Sitting squarely at 56K words, it feels like when you're on an old wooden roller-coaster and you're clank-clank-clanking up to that first big drop, the first car is nosing over the edge, the last car just finished with the chain and you get that slowly-speeding-up-as-you-go-over-the-top feeling...knowing it's going to be a wind in your face, stomach-losing dash...that's what getting through the middle feels like.

Pushing through the middle

There are many tough spots when writing a novel. Getting started, feeling like you have the characters, the basic story arc, this takes a while but really isn't that tough. Getting over the 30K word hump is a bit of challenge because that's the point at which I feel the novel is really establishing the 'voice', I know the characters, I'm getting confident with where the story is going, the basic 'vibe' is there. Often I'll tweak and futz, and cut, and uncut, and recut, and reuncut, and reorder, and insert and delete, and change, and use the 'find' function alot to make sure idiosyncracies of dialog, or naming conventions are consistent, and...and......and at some point between 25K and 30K I'll say...yah, that's what I wanted.

Then there's the middle part (about 45K-55K) where I start to second-guess myself, I can see the tempo of the story (I like the vibe, but is there enough action, do I spend too much time on character or scene development, not enough? is Cooper's subplot too overdeveloped, etc) but I reevaluate if this is really what I was thinking about for the story arc in that brief flash of inspiration several month's to a year ago, and...well that's where I am now; pushing through the middle.

As you know (if you've been following the blog) I've taken an expatriate assignment managing a project in Tbilisi, Georgia and it's a bear of a job. Overseas, new area of business, trying to meet family obligations (I know wahhh...). But the reason I bring this up for this little essay is that I'm writing much more slowly than I did in my two previous novels, so this particular angst-ridden patch is telescoping on me.

But it's not all bad, spending more time with my inner-author-insecuritites has allowed me to spend more time with the characters too, and one of the things I have realized is that my bad guys really need a voice. I've struggled with this for a while because the alien's voice, or the alien itself maybe, comes across as a Lovecraftian villain, and this inherently conflicts with the more hardboiled/pulpy/sparse voice with which the rest of the novel speaks.

The military scifi novel features an expeditionary infantry battalion investigating a seeming natural disaster (series of meteor showers) on a colony world. The 'natural disaster' is actually an alien invasion and told from the POV of Salome (a colonist), Captain Vogel (a pilot) and Sergeant Cooper (a Grunt), with a few cameo POVs. The 'alien' invaders are based on Dictyostelium fruiting bodies, and through them I explore some of my thoughts on memes, identity, 'self' and the nature of conciousness (but don't worry- there's lots of gun-play, gallons of testosterone, a strong and independent female MC, a romantic triangle and not every body dies at the end, almost not everyone...). I've been strugling with how to convey the alien POV here in the middle of the book (see, stay with me, I usually have a point!), so I decided to include the enemy as a POV character...hey, it's a big step for me, I don't just give up my POV to any character that comes along with a winning smile and a catchy line.

Anyway, I think I've reached a compromise that works, but you, dear reader will have to be the judge.
I have also include for your amusement, a snapshot of my Tbilisi Gym.

Through a dark alley, down a rickty flight of stairs, in a moldy sub-basement, thousands of kilos of mismatched plates, dumbbells, kettlebells (measured in Pood), is my lifting heaven. These are the bench presses; two vertical pipes sunk into the concrete floor, welded rebar supports hammered into the wall, and bolts to rest the bar upon. Simplicity in form and function. Now all you have to do is pick the bar up off the pegs, lower it to your chest and put it back...many, many times.

And the tough part for me, right?

Yes, you guessed it... pushing through the middle part.

No really...

The second thing I have to say after I tell people I went to the ballet.
The Tbilisi Ballet put on a production of Minkus' Don Quixote at the Griboedov Theater. It was my first time at the Griboedov, lovely place, great dancers, I had never heard of Minkus before but most of the music I enjoyed.

The funnest part of the whole expedition was trying to buy the tickets. Once you know how, where the box office is, the hours of operation and how to communicate in pigeon Georgian for the purchase of 'erti tiketse, baletze, didi madloba' , it's a breeze. It took some doing, and the help of a Georgian coworker but I had it all worked out...until I got to the box office.

The little old lady at the counter was not impressed. I even tried my winning smile. Nada. She rebuffed my feeble georgian-ticket-purchasing overture and raged at me in staccato Russian..'Ar vitsi rusuli' (I don't know russian) I pleaded. Again, the same Russian sentence, but slower and louder (see it's not just we Americans who feel that if you speak your native tongue slow enough and loud enough to people who don't speak your language they will suddenly understand you).

I caught a single word in the phrase; 'djevichka'. 'Djevichka?' I said. "GoGo?' (Georgian for Djevichka) and she nodded, 'Da..russian..russian..russian..djeveichka..russian..' finger wag from outside to inside. Ah...I was getting it, 'Gogo modis?' (the girl is coming) with finger point. 'Da' said she, and shook her head at me like I needed an entrance application to a state program for the feeble minded.

Well, I waited patiently and sure enough, the djevichka/gogo/girl came in and saved me from mission failure. When I got back to the office, one of my coworkers had let me a text that he wanted me to pick up 2 tickets for him as well. The next day I went back, and getting the tickets was almost a breeze.

As I said the ballet was enjoyable, Dato and Nato and I went to the Marriott had we two boys had no desire for white wine spritzers (proof that we weren't panziefied by the experience). But just to be sure I spent an extra hour working on one-rep max bench press at the Gym the next morning. You can't take chances with these things.