Tag: art

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I Met Christopher Hitchens in Heaven


Today, in the early morning of my 48th birthday, I dreamt of Christopher Hitchens again. Instead of writing “again”, Hitch would have written “as I sometimes do.” Read and listen to him enough and you start to write and speak in his patterns, as one violin resonates with another. He spoke in complete sentences with a professorial British accent. You could hear every comma, semicolon and period. 

I disagreed with him intensely over the idiocy of the Iraq invasion. (Christopher — never Chris — would have said “wisdom”, not idiocy.) For someone so against religion, his unwavering faith in that war still baffles me. His books were researched deeply and well-written. He shone brightest in debate and was always erudite and witty. I miss him. We met again today in a good, safe place.

In the dream, I’m some sort of documentarian but I’m helping him mow a massive lawn. He rides a huge mower and cuts a massive swath with wide blades. I have the same small red lawnmower from Canadian Tire I had when I was a kid. The metaphor for that didn’t strike me until after I awoke. (“I must caution you,” as Hitch would say, that’s a writing metaphor, not a penis metaphor. Hitch was a titan. I write amusing little stories for a tiny audience.)

The setting was a summer cottage, though here, it is always summer. Hitch confessed he enjoyed mowing the expanse on the big tractor so much he often mowed neighbours’ lawns, as well. That’s a joy difficult to imagine for him in real life. That was my first clue I might be dreaming.

He was friendly enough, but he was still Christopher Hitchens — before the cancer took him — so I was cautious with my words and mostly listened for fear of wearing out my welcome. (Hitch would have said, “…for fear of growing stale in his company.”)

He showed me his sanctuary where things were most quiet. I expected a large office with walls of books. Instead, we tiptoed past his sleeping wife so he could show me an incredibly white and clean bathroom off his master bedroom. In one of those Felliniesque details that makes you wonder about the gnashing teeth in the spinning gears of the subconscious, the toilet appeared to be filled with milk. I didn’t say so, but I thought he must have thrown up in that toilet a lot because of the chemotherapy. Reading my mind, he said that chemo and all pain was behind him now.

We sat outside in Adirondack chairs on the freshly cut, green grass and sipped lemonade under a warm sun. Wanting to appear game, I mentioned it was my birthday and told him how strange it was and how little I’d changed. “What’s the evolutionary advantage in not adapting? I haven’t changed much at all. In university, I studied the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history. Seeing so many civilizations rise and fall, it’s impossible for me not to be fatalistic about the fate of our own. Writing books is the closest immortality.”

“How have you changed, really?” he asked. “You must have, some.”

At 24, I was immersed and obsessed with violence and at 48, I’m a crime novelist. In sublimating my rage with humour, I’m creating art instead of bloody noses. I’m happier now. I laugh more and make others laugh. I was afraid all the time then, though I still can’t afford new glasses. 

I became lucid then and I knew I was having a conversation with myself, not Christopher Hitchens. Disappointing. Though neither of us believe in heaven, the melting illusion saddened me more because Hitch after death was more placid than he ever was in life.

“Is fear of mortality what this dream is all about?” he asked.

“I’m still young enough that I fear failure more than death, though the two are inextricably linked.”

“‘Inextricably’, hm? Even though you know I’m not here, you’re still trying to impress me.” He didn’t say it unkindly.

“I’m not awake yet,” I said, though I could feel the real world pulling me away. I fought it, but once begun, that process can’t be stopped.

“I think I just answered my question,” I said. “The adaptive advantage of our minds changing so little and thinking like a young person is that I can still focus on achieving things in the future instead of worrying I’m going to drop dead any minute.”

“Try to stay young until the end. It goes easier that way.”

But that’s me talking to myself and I’m almost back in my bed with weak, gray light filling a cold horizon of snow and ice.

“You should write more,” he said, and toasted me with his glass of pink lemonade.

“I know. Thanks.”

I awoke thinking, time’s running out. I got up right away and wrote this.

And now, back to my books…

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NSFW: Fiction (and video games) are not the problem

Warning: NSFW means Not Safe for Work. There’s lots of swearing in this video amid the points about the safety of video games. If you don’t want to hear Penn Jillette swearing, don’t play this video.

Fantasy. Reality. There is a difference.

(I talk about larger issues around fiction and the assumptions we make about writers from reading their books in this post at ChazzWrites.com.)

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Manifesto: The Value of Writing and Reading

Within every book secrets are revealed, but there are deeper treasures buried beneath what you see. The book is a solid thing you can hold. The story is a  sparking, fleeting experience daring you to give chase and to catch fire.

A story is a progression through possibilities, a dense connection of ideas that ignites new electrical connections in your brain, tripping switches, releasing dopamine, letting tears slip and laughter burst. You create worlds with the author, meeting the writer’s mind amid the small words to share great visions. You are not simply decoding the language on the page. In reading, you open hidden portals to new variables: Data, information, knowledge, wisdom, lies, truth, lies that tell the truth, experience and, ultimately, choice.

Books offer novelty, chance, escape, distraction, transcendence, freedom and stimulation like no other art. Books are a uniquely cooperative, requiring a deft  weaver, yes, but also an audience willing to be gentle. Readers are dance partners. Lose yourself in the movement. Let go of counting one-two-three, one-two three. Instead, look in your dance partner’s eyes and embrace them. Enjoy the dance. Hold tight. Hold so tight you let go.

Promise: You will be transported through space, whirled in time and transformed with emotion, but you will always waking in your own bed, deposited where you began and a little regretful you aren’t in Oz anymore. It’s okay. When you come back, you aren’t you anymore. You never walk through the same door twice and remain unchanged.

For those doors you choose to open? Walk through, tread lightly and learn how to live from people who have never lived. Meet and be among characters with whom you would never dare to speak. You will witness terrible examples of how to interact in reality (…whatever that is. Imagination is a much clearer path.)  Through the heroes and heroines you meet, you will know pain and loss, sacrifice and triumph. Stories are the matrix of our desires, fears  and dreams. Books are simulations and wise guides, asking you to  draw your own conclusions.

Your mind evolved with your bare feet in the cold dirt, haunches aching, as you basked in the heat of the campfire. Amid the smell of burning meat, you listened to soaring legends about the milky pearls shining and reaching down from the black infinite. You listened to tales of the hunt and, in telling your own stories of bravery, searching and loss, reached up to touch the infinite. We tell stories to illuminate the darkness.

The careful words we pull to ourselves in the form of books are comforts in a world where, elsewhere, words are casual weapons. In the patient future, you will lie upon an overstuffed couch under a cozy blanket by your fireplace, listening to a storm’s rage and, gratefully, you will disappear into a book. Stories are journeys through mythology, revisited for the depth of our common visceral experience, touched on repeatedly to remind ourselves we are thinking, reaching, grasping animals.

The most valuable treasures slip in when you are sleeping in the reader’s trance. Meditate on theme. A book yields more than what you read. A book is a still lake on a warm summer day: Watch the rippling wind write on its surface; spot fish darting beneath in cool water; see your reflection; stretch your awareness up to the ponderous turn of clouds; lift yourself beyond, back to the infinite. Think. Reach. Grasp. 

Books are valuable because they reach into your mind and become part of who you are. Our books are ourselves. The mind does not distinguish between reality and fantasy. You know this is true of dreams, your fears and what you read. I am a writer, giving you the bones of the structure of a world. You fill in the rest, seeing my broad brushstrokes in minute detail.

Your mind is a magnificent camera that runs on black-and-white words. Your camera does not simply  record my words. You are much more important than that. Your camera co-creates in color. No two writers write the same story. A secret: No two readers draw the same word pictures from one writer. Reading is creation, too.

Books are more special than we recognize because they are no longer rare. Were novels new, they would not possess mere novelty. They would be seen as powerful. Books release staggering magic from within you, a fire once lit that must be fed.

I am a whisper in your mind. Thank you for letting me in. Amplify my words and make their thunder shake the everyday world away. Hold my book in your hands, enter the story and feel electricity’s hum. I am lightning on the horizon of your consciousness. Through this curious magic, I will meet you there. I will become you.

This is the only divinity I know. 

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The economics of art

THIS IS A REPOST FROM MY WRITING BLOG, CHAZZWRITES.COM. IT PROVED SO POPULAR I THOUGHT I’D REPOST IT HERE FOR PEOPLE WHO FOLLOW THIS BLOG ALONE. ~ CHAZZ

A forum post out of the cyber-ether really irritated me,

and not just because the person who posted was biased against self-publishing.

She was horribly misinformed and self-centered.

Her complaint is about “all these self-published authors begging for likes on their Facebook pages” and that apparently angered her by…okay, I’m not sure how that could bother her so much. Cluttering up her world, I guess. The strength  of venom I detected is usually found in a rattler’s fangs. Anyway, let’s flesh out the ugly misconception in her deluded subtext:

1. It’s not just indie authors. All authors with a Facebook page ask for “likes”. The more important likes are the like and buy buttons of our Amazon pages, but we all want to be liked. Most traditionally published authors understand that their publisher’s publicists are already stretched too thin, are often less effective than publicity that comes directly from authors and what resources that are channelled toward their books tend to be minuscule and fleeting.

2. It’s not begging. It’s asking politely and you often get something in exchange, like free entertainment, free education (like this post) and books that are much cheaper than what you’d pay a traditional publisher. All my books are currently priced at $2.99. That’s couch change — an impulse buy — for professionally published books. For less than the cost of one Starbucks coffee you get hours of entertainment I am happy to provide. I am an artist, not a beggar.

I’m not asking for loose change in exchange for nothing. I’m offering you a chance at relaxed Sunday afternoon with a book when it’s too hot to go outside; a cozy read on a winter’s night when you can’t sleep; suspense that won’t let you go to sleep;  a euphoric discovery that will delight you and might even change you. Yeah, you betcha that’s a bargain. If you refuse, no hard feelings.

3. Providing you with information or the opportunity to help out is not spam. It’s a question you don’t even have to answer. Get over yourself or turn off your Internet connection and take a break. I’m sorry the world isn’t catering to you. It’s not catering to me, either, but I suspect I hate fewer people than you do. I’d define spam as bombarding people with ads that provide no value, are out to scam you and a steady stream of blaring that gives you no opportunity to opt out. (i.e. You don’t get to complain if you decide for yourself you’re going to read it.)

4. Ignoring  the request takes nothing from you. Simply ignoring a request takes the bare minimum of tolerance. This person must be a nightmare in real life. How would she handle a real problem?

5. Why all the animus toward authors? Helping out costs nothing and I don’t think authors have any bad feelings toward those who don’t bother to “like” their books on Amazon, click “Agree with these tags” button on Amazon (it’s toward the bottom of each sales page) and “like” their Facebook page. (Thanks for helping to spread the word. And if you didn’t, no hard feelings.)

6. Ads are only irritating if you aren’t interested. On the computer, I click away. If assailed by the TV, I ignore it, fast forward, check my email or get up from the couch and get a glass of water. Indie authors (well, everyone) deserve more compassion than the complainer was willing to bestow. Sadly because the complainer might even love our work if she gave it a chance.

7. Despite my frustrated tone here, I know authors are not entitled to sales any more than Wal-mart or Toyota “deserves” your sales. We don’t even “deserve” your attention. That’s the myth of the entitled author I hear so much about. I honestly haven’t met many authors who suffer that delusion.

We get it. It’s a book. To most, “just” a book. We write them and lots of people don’t care. A lot of people don’t even read! Still, we stand behind our work and hope to find our audience. We hope our audience finds us. If I’m speaking to a crowd, I’m not speaking to everyone and I know it. Please be patient and polite while I direct my audience toward my books. I promise I won’t take long doing it and I’ll be as entertaining and quick as I can as I ask these things. You can always opt out.

Whether you’re indie or traditionally published, the promotion for your book really is up to you, your tribe, your followers and your readers. Publishers do very little for most authors. Stephen King gets a big promotional budget. That’s right. The authors who need the promotion least get the biggest boost because it’s a simple business decision: the publisher banks on the biggest title. Big publisher or small, these are the evaluations we all have to make.

I make that same evaluation every week. I have two very new titles just released in June. One is a short story

Get Bigger Than Jesus

collection bundled with a novella, The Dangerous Kind & Other Stories. The other is my crime thriller, Bigger Than Jesus, the first in a series. Which do I spend my limited resources promoting? Obviously, the crime thriller.

No short story collection will sell as well as a thriller. In all likelihood, my short story collections’ sales (there are three collections in all) will come after readers decide they like my flavor by discovering the novel. Some of the stories include characters and references that cross books, so there’s cross-pollination going on, too.  The short story collections are great, but they’re harder to sell (though they will be a valuable long term sales avenue.)

Yes, we have to interact and connect and make connections and help others to be heard.

Endure a little promotion amid all that for art’s sake.

Everybody’s trying to make a living

and civility is the grease to the gears of civilization.

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What We Can’t Do is Wait

I used to be entranced, like a deer in Time’s headlights, with the idea of “paying dues.”

People in positions of power, older people, and a lot of losers used that phrase a lot. In case you’re wondering, I fell into the category of loser because I believed it. A lot of people denigrate the “kids” in the Occupy Wall Street protests. We’re told twenty-year-olds don’t have fully developed brains and when we’re young we don’t know the ways of the world. Well, fuck that. A bunch of twenty to twenty-five-year-olds were largely responsible for getting Apollo rockets into space. The young may not know the ways of the world, but they have adult responsibilities. Very young people are killing for their nations, going to jail, getting executed and being kept down by the established order. No wonder they’re pissed. (Thankfully, after the young led the charge, many much older people are recognizing they, too, are the 99% and have joined in the cause and lent their experience from the sixties civil rights struggle.)

If you’re young, don’t wait for someone else’s approval to follow your heart’s desire. Take action. If you’re old, please don’t dampen their enthusiasm with caution. (You probably didn’t. A bunch of you went to war.) Being young is risky and it’s the perfect time to risk more, not less. When I was in my twenties, I did a lot of low-level grunt work in newspapers and magazines and books. I once went to a job interview where the publisher told me I wouldn’t get to have an opinion for seven years. He figured it would take that long before I would be worthy to even utter a single opinion. Really. I told him I guessed I’d just go to med school. At least there they let you start saving lives much earlier in the learning process.

I believe in learning. But I believe in learning by doing. For instance, I went to journalism school for four years, but two weeks on the job at a daily newspaper pretty much equalled those four expensive years. University, for me, was not ultimately about getting a marketable skill. It was to enjoy myself for four years while delaying entry into the workforce. And no wonder. Look what awaited me. Grunt jobs where some self-regarding asshole tells you that you don’t get to have an opinion until you’re thirty-three.

Life is short. We don’t have time for delays. We think of Einstein as a much-lauded old man, but he came up with the theory of relativity when he was young and surprisingly sexed up. The brilliant people I know now in their forties were just as bright and ready to contribute in their twenties. Young people change the world while older people often try to keep things the same. (Not all old people, but there’s an easily recognized pattern there.) Instead of being active mentors, many mid-level managers try to dampen youthful energy in the name of systems and organization. Meanwhile, the CEO started the company out of his parents’ garage when he was seventeen and packed full of that same creative enthusiasm for innovation.

Sadly, in my twenties, I wasn’t one of the strong ones. I believed the lies that respected established power and past accomplishment more than new, personal and future accomplishment. I was told to wait and I did. I kept apprenticing while a young Kevin Smith went out and took risks and made movies and a young Neil Gaiman wrote comics.

I’m writing full-time now. I wish I’d started younger. I wish I had a time machine. (I’d also stop myself from buying parachute pants. That was also a terrible mistake.)

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago.

The next best time? Today.