Techically speaking, Wolf Pascoe isn’t represented in the book of short plays shown on the right. Nevertheless, I designed the book, cover and all, and one of my pieces appears therein under my actual name.

As a piece of work, I’m pleased with the collection, as are the other Dog Ear playwrights. I’m glad to hit the Kindle lists with another incursion into the brave new world of indie publishing.

Some weeks ago, a Tinderbox writer friend and I rented space in a corner of a booth at the L.A. Times Book Festival on the U.S.C. campus and set up shop for the weekend. We had a pretty good run–between us we sold thirty odd books.

This was my first visit to the festival since it moved downtown from U.C.L.A. five years ago. I’d stayed away on account of the parking problem. But L.A.’s new rail line–the nearest station just a hop, skip, and jump from my house–now runs direct to U.S.C. in fifteen minutes. Go Metro!

My friend and I took turns manning our corner and wandering the grounds. The big change in the festival from its U.C.L.A. days is the independent presence. Gone, as far as I can tell, are the huge booths from Big Five publishers. A host of independent houses and authors has replaced them.

Sad to say, another host of booths fronted for Author Solutions, including a big one displaying hundreds of titles that no one was buying, although the unfortunate authors had paid thousands for the shelf space.

Writerly update: Have I mentioned I’m working on a novel about anesthesia? It’s finished, sort of, and lying fallow in a drawer while I contemplate my next move. Agent send out? Small press submission? Kindle direct? I haven’t made up my mind, so expect nothing soon. Every post I read on the Interwebs about the importance of hustling the next book tires me out, and convinces me to slow down a little bit more.

Which reminds me of a story about the great poet William Stafford, who wrote a poem a day. His method: he started in the morning, worked an hour, and put the finishing touches on it before bedtime. A student once asked him how he could adhere to his schedule if the poem was uncooperative and refused to be finished. “Oh,” said Stafford, “Then I just lower my standards.”

Just for fun, I did up a cover:

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“Show Your Work,” says Austin Kleon, a writer who draws.

I’m deep into my anesthesia novel, which I haven’t talked about here yet. Soon. Just for fun, and because Austin’s given permission, I thought I’d share a bit about my writing process.

Last weekend I made war on adverbs. I’ll explain the context in a bit, but first a question: Can you write completely without adverbs? That’s the whole problem right there. Let’s run it by again. Can you write without adverbs? Which sentence do you prefer? Actually, I prefer the second one. There’s the problem afresh. I prefer the second one.

Somebody once called adverbs weasel words. By this he meant qualifiers. And their effect is to drain power from sentences. Hemmingway hated adverbs. (He wasn’t too keen on adjectives either. I mean, nor was he keen on adjectives.) Nor is my poetry teacher, Jack Grapes, keen on adverbs. When I took his class, Jack charged a quarter per adverb. He’d let you keep an adverb in a poem, but it meant you owed him a quarter. An adverb here, an adverb there, pretty soon you were talking real money.

Okay, context. I’m finishing the draft of my new novel, getting ready to send it to some folks I trust for feedback. But I noticed it was kind of heavy on adverbs, so I re-read the draft last weekend and circled every adverb I ran into. Then I made a pass to see how many I could get rid of. I got rid of a lot, but I worried that I’d missed some. So I did a global search on ly. I found another slew to make war on.

Final score: Pascoe 190. Adverbs 11.

I recommend this exercise. It will improve your writing, but not the way you think: It will teach you to love your adverbs. I love my darling adverbs. I wasn’t sorry to see them go, but I was grateful to every last one of them. Why? I discovered they weren’t weasel words. They were precision words. I had put them into my sentences as a shorthand way to refine my thinking. They were “Under Construction” signs, little notes to myself along the way that I was grinding hard about something, and needed to complete the thought.

Adverbs belong in a draft. They’re a step towards precision. I don’t want them in a finished piece any more than I  want to walk around with my underwear showing. But I do want precision in my sentences. Sometimes, when I revisit an adverb, I find I’ve already done all the thinking I want. I can lose the adverb and the sentence still works—the precision remains. Other times—the more years I write, the less this seems to happen—I conclude the adverb helps. I leave it in. And sometimes—I live for these moments—I find a way to say what I want in a sentence that retains or heightens the precision but drops the adverb. Let me show you four examples from last weekend’s wars:

“Alex struggled against the recalcitrant airway for three precious minutes before the tube finally found its way home.”

Alex is an anesthesiologist struggling to get a breathing tube into a patient. The question is, does finally belong in the sentence? I put it there to indicate Alex’s thank-God-it’s-over feeling. Except I’ve already got a recalcitrant airway and a precious three minute struggle in that sentence. Do I need to tell the reader how relieved Alex is when the battle is over, or can I trust her to figure it out herself from the circumstances? I think finally is gilding the lily here, making sure the reader gets it. Out it goes.

“Alex struggled against the recalcitrant airway for three precious minutes before the tube found its way home.”

Better. Punchier. Let the reader have her experience without my interference.

Here’s another:

“[The long snake of Propofol] joins the dark river of Mrs. Campbell’s blood in a languid flow along the interior of her arm, turning sharply at the chest wall toward her right heart, where it mixes with more dark blood and is forced into her lungs.”

I’m describing the flow of an anesthetic agent, Propofol, through a patient’s body. Considering it’s dry, technical medicine, I’m pleased with the sentence. But sharply sticks out to me. It’s accurate, but a mouthful. Is there something else, say, a verb, that reflects a sharp turn? Here you go:

“[The long snake of Propofol] joins the dark river of Mrs. Campbell’s blood in a languid flow along the interior of her arm, cornering at the chest wall and making for her right heart, where it mixes with more dark blood and is forced into her lungs.”

Cornering for turning sharply is a clear win. It means the same, but it’s more economical, and it adds the implication of a vehicle scooting along. I get my quarter back, plus a free racing car.

One more:

“Gradually and imperceptibly, the mysterious power he’d come to regard as his own worked in turn on him, as if day by day Alex absorbed the anesthesia into his own system and it began to etherize him.”

My main character again, suffering a side effect of his profession. I thought long and long about gradually and imperceptibly. The two adverbs working in tandem say exactly what I want, and the sentence would suffer without them. Still, two is a lot. I suppose I could have done with one, but I didn’t want to choose between them. I tried thinking outside the box by looking for a metaphor that contained both. Here’s what I came up with:

“With tapeworm stealth, the mysterious power he’d come to regard as his own worked in turn on him, as if day by day Alex absorbed the anesthesia into his own system and it began to etherize him.”

I like this result. Tapeworms are gradual and imperceptible, they’re in the medical game, and they have the added benefit of creepiness, which serves well here.

Finally, here’s an adverb I kept:

“’Any questions?’ the man said, apparently to Alex.”

Here I’m describing the first time Alex saw an anesthetic performed. Up to this point, the anesthesiologist seemed oblivious to him. Now it turns out he noticed Alex the whole time. Is anyone else in the room? Yes—but Alex is the only one who’s been watching the man. Apparently implies all this. That’s a lot of mileage to get from an adverb. It’s worth my quarter.

There you have it. We’re all writers, after all, even if only of grocery lists. And you don’t want adverbs on grocery lists. I haven’t talked about how one comes up with new verbs and metaphors. Perhaps another day. Good metaphors don’t grow on trees (my point exactly) after all. Is there a metaphor store? I wish.

Is there an anti-adverb dictionary? Sort of. Type in your adverb or adverbial phrase into a reverse dictionary and see what you come up with. Here’s a good one: One Look

Finally, I apply everything here to narrative, not dialogue. If my character is an adverbial type, I let him be.

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I confess to being the proud owner of the workhorse pictured to the left. It’s an Olympia SM3 DeLuxe, made in West Germany in 1958. It weighs a ton, and is arguably finest mechanical typing machine ever.

Here’s what it can do that your printer can’t: fill in a form, write a check or postcard, make a note on paper of any size.

Am I writing my novel on it? No, I am not. Am I writing notes to my wife? You bet. Do you know, there’s an etsy shop which sells typewritten notes? And not just one. Today there were 472 of them. Do you know, old manual typewriters have no numeral l? You use a lower case L, as I just did.

THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG.

I can’t tell you how many times I pecked out that sentence in Mr. Urfrig’s 7th grade typing class. When the term was over I was zipping along at a peppy 15 words a minute. My speed took a huge leap when I got my first portable electric in high school–never, I swore, would I touch a manual typewriter again. By the time I graduated college I clocked in at 60 words a minute.

A couple of years before the Mac was born, I traded the old portable in for a full size electronic wonder, the Hermes 808. It had one of those interchangeable whirling globes with the letters and numerals poking out of it. Miraculous!

I couldn’t bear to part with the Hermes when I bought my first computer, so I set it on a shelf at the back of a closet. There it remained for decades while I romanced my way through one newfangled keyboard after another, ultimately discovering perfection in the Apple wireless that comes with every Mac. Rest your fingers on the keys, they resist. Exert the barest pressure, they give an eighth of an inch. Bingo–you fly like the wind.

SPEED OF THOUGHT

The Apple wireless keyboard is what I’m writing my novel on. I go at about 100 words a minute, which tracks the speed of my thoughts. But good as it is to move fast, it won’t help you fill out a form, which is why I got the bright idea to take down my old Hermes a few months ago.

Surely it would start right back up–I’d barely broken it in before setting it aside. Alas, no. Something about electric typewriters doesn’t mix with years of idleness. Worse, no spare parts are available. For the I.B.M Selectric, yes. But the Hermes 808, no.

Never mind. What one wants is a manual typewriter, the kind that populated the desks in Mr. Urfrig’s long-ago class. You can get parts for manual typewriters, and you can find repair shops. Ribbon is cheap. There’s even a Chinese company that makes new typewriters, but they’re junk. In the 1970s, manufacturers started cutting corners and using more plastic. From then on it was downhill.

What is it about typing on the Olympia? I dunno. It just feels good. All that effort into pushing down the keys, the weight of it, the slowness, the unforgiving typo–everything I used to hate about it I now love. It’s a marvel of inefficiency, a giant step backward, a beautiful, downwardly mobile metaphor.

What’s a word shop without one? Amaze your friends.  Get a typewriter.

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Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty. — Anne Herbert

Passing by, you might have seen them in the neighborhood. On the front lawn, little houses made of wood: glassy door, bookshelf inside. Something about miniatures there is, drawing you in. Must be the fairy folk who build them.

The Little Free Library movement is barely five years old, and already there are thousands in fifty states and forty countries. Now there’s one in our front yard. Feel free to drop by and browse. Take a book, leave a book. No hurry.

Never for sale, always for free.

I’m smitten with Little Free Libraries because they’re beautiful.
Because they’re whimsical and free.
Because they provoke delight and gratitude.
Because they encourage sharing and community.
Literacy schmiteracy. I suppose there’s that too.

They make books cool.

You don’t have to build the library yourself, though many do. But a carpenter I am not. I ordered one from the Little Free Library people. The problem was mounting it. I asked my friend David, who built my son Nick’s treehouse, if he could help.

“What’s a Little Free Library?” he said.

While a few neighbors watched, we sank a 4×4 into a two-foot hole in the front yard. Ever dig a two-foot hole and compact the dirt back in? You should try it.

The Talmud obliges a person to do three things: raise a child, write a book, and put up a Little Free Library. Actually, the third thing is plant a tree, but it’s the same.

Nora and I selected some books from our over-stuffed shelves to set up shop. Next morning I couldn’t wait to see what had moved. Nothing. No business all that first day. No business the second day. Who has time for books? I thought.

The third morning, My Antonia was gone. So was the volume of Proust. War and Peace stood in its place. There was a note:

Dear L.F.L.,
I have borrowed My Antonia and will return it next time. You have thrilled me to the core.
xox,
D. G.

From this, I deduce a thing or two. Libraries, even little ones, run in real time. And real time is slow.

Alack, the author! The webby world being what it is, one might say there is an oversupply of words. The market for those words–the people who actually read–comprises, in the parlance, a relatively small base of demand. Into this vacuum rushes a witches brew of marketing remedy–social media, advert, search engines and what-not.

From this, I am not the only writer who gets indigestion.

Write your books with the idea that no one will ever read them. — Hugh Howey

Let the beauty we live be what we do, says Rumi. Make time real, says I. Let us market our books the same way we write them, as we want to live every day. Let us become librarians.

Two nights ago I set out a copy of Breathing for Two. It was gone this morning.

I’ll probably do it again.

__________

A longer version of this essay is cross-posted on Just Add Father.

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Canadian author, editor, filmmaker, and book-blogger Paul Sean Grieve has posted a review of Breathing for Two on his website: Sean Paul Grieve.

Grieve gave Breathing for Two 4.5 stars, and wrote:

Breathing for Two is a work of hauntingly beautiful prose, deftly weaving elements of medical history, human anatomy, mythology and etymology into an indelibly suspenseful narrative that had me biting my nails.

In an evolving literary environment where more and more authors are choosing to publish independently, book bloggers such as Grieve play a key role in calling attention to new work. Authors can submit their books to bloggers, or (as in this instance) bloggers proactively scour the web to find material that calls to them.

Wolf Pascoe comments:

Grieve is a thoughtful and perceptive reviewer and I learned something about my own book from his piece. I’m very pleased to be included on his site with other respected independents such as Roz Morris, JF Penn, and KK Rusch. If you like good books and want ways to navigate the current flood of published work, check out the reviews on Paul’s blog.

Paul Sean Grieve Blog
Paul Sean Grieve Book Reviews
Breathing for Two Review

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It’s done. Breathing for Two, the Audiobook, is a wrap. You’ll find it on Audible.com here, in time for Christmas.

I’ve written in various places about my love of audio, and audiobooks. I wanted to make this one myself. I was narrator, director, recording engineer, editor, and producer.

An act of creative madness, you say? I agree. A lot more work than I planned. Listen to the sample on the Audible page and see what you think.

SPECIAL PRICE

Amazon, displaying its customary marketing shrewdness, is currently discounting the audiobook to $1.99. That’s right–it’s cheaper than the ebook. On the other hand, you can get a used version of the paperback for $999.00. You read that right: nine-hundred ninety-nine simoleons. Go figure.

None of these prices are under my control. I have no idea what they mean.

A HARD DAYS NIGHT

I recall an interview with John Lennon in Playboy, published shortly before he died. The interviewer asked him his assessment of the Beatles’ music. Lennon essentially answered that he couldn’t be objective about it, all he heard were the mistakes.

My sentiments precisely.

Were I to do this again, I would use a different microphone for starters. I would stand to record rather than sit. I would eliminate chocolate from my diet.

It would be nice to install a soundproof home studio as well, although a friend who composes for film assures me that sound studios fall short of perfection. You record in them one day, then come back on another doing everything the same, and the sound comes out completely different.

But still, I’m pleased when I look at the book’s Amazon page, which lists all three editions–Kindle, paperback, and audio. Bless me, it seems an accomplishment. Audible was pretty picky about what they’d accept–a sample file I’d sent them contained a slight buzz I’d overlooked–they told me to re-do it.

FURTHER

I think I’ll always want to do an audio version of any work I publish. I might still want to be the producer, though I’m not sure I’d cast myself as narrator again unless, like Breathing for Two, the work is non-fiction.

If you want to ask me anything about my experience of audio production, shoot me an email. And if you do pick up a copy–the recording is an hour and forty minutes–I’d be grateful if you leave a short review on Audible.

Meanwhile, I’m going to take some time off before my next project.

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Not much to look at, my sound studio. It doubles as the bedroom closet.

There’s my laptop at the bottom, and to the left the iPad I read from. Smack dab in the middle behind the pop screen is the mike, a Rode NT1 I picked up a couple of years ago and which is kind to my voice.

That’s about it. And the clothes, of course, which are essential to deaden the sound. That’s what you want in a studio, dead sound.

Here’s a raw sample:  credits

Yes, I’m deep into the audiobook production of Breathing for Two. Have I mentioned that I love audiobooks?

I’m done with the recording–that’s the easy part. Now, the editing. So many choices, so little time. I’m hoping for a release date before Christmas.

A few years ago, after listening to audiobooks for many years, I began thinking seriously about sound. I wrote about it in Undercover Soundtrack, a lovely venue where writers talk about how music affects their work, hosted by the British author Roz Morris.

I said:

Sound—all sound, music or otherwise–goes to a part of the long-ago brain, the brain older than words, older than thought.

I once played Lenny Bruce when I was acting. To prepare, I got all his recordings. It was overwhelming at first–I couldn’t even understand him. I was in despair. But as I listened more and more–to one album, over 100 times–I could feel myself getting closer to him. Not just to understanding his words, but also to his character, and then–no other word for it–to his soul.

Something in recorded voice captures far more than a photograph. What would we hear if Lincoln had lived long enough to have been recorded by Edison?

Alas, we don’t have Lincoln. But here (most experts believe) is Whitman, recorded by Edison in wax. Listen for the Brooklyn accent:

Acting and writing are very similar in respect to voice. Finding a character as an actor is just like capturing a character’s voice as a writer. Both processes–the translation of inner voice to outer–inhabit the same, deep structure in the brain. When you apprehend  someone’s voice, the sound travels the same path back.

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I once asked a film producer what his job was like.

“You keep throwing merde at a wall,” he said, “And wait to see if some of it sticks.”

I didn’t understand him at the time, but of course he was right. The merde throwing process obtains as well for writers and artists, where it is called “getting the work out there.”

I once heard the poet Allen Ginsberg sum it up this way: “I spend 25% of my time writing and 75% being Allen Ginsberg.”

Now Breathing for Two is published, I’ve lately been spending 75% of my time being Breathing for Two’s author.

As perhaps a million new books are published every year, the trouble for an author boils down to something called discoverability. A Mickey Mouse Club sort of concept, if ever there was.

Readers suffer the reciprocal trouble of sorting wheat from chaff.

In the old days, publishing houses were the gatekeepers of quality work, the submissions they discarded or wouldn’t even read comprising the slush pile. Now the slush pile is self-published along with the quality work on Amazon, and everyone must sort things out for themselves.

Amazon features best-selling work, of course, but that’s not the same as quality work. Amazon reviews, a good idea in principle, are largely faked. What is this world coming to?

Enter Compulsion Reads.

Compulsion Reads, Awesome Indies, Indie Reader, Brag, and probably a lot of other websites I haven’t discovered yet propose to put a stamp of approval on new and worthy books by author-publishers such as myself.

It works like this: an author sends his manuscript to the website and one or more reviewers read it. If the book passes muster, it’s given a seal like the one above.

I sent Breathing for Two in to Compulsion Reads and they liked it. It’s now featured on their website, and they published a review which closes with this paragraph:

Breathing for Two is a short and sweet gem. I worry that some readers will glance at it, think—What do I care about anesthesiology? – and pass on it. You will care about anesthesiology when you read this book, I promise. More importantly, Pascoe writes so well that you will get the opportunity to step in his shoes and see the world a little differently. What more can you ask for in a book?

Compulsion Reads has also given me their seal, which I’m free to put on the cover of my book. As seals go, this one is pretty classy looking. There’s a seal for the Nobel Prize too, but this one looks classier.

Of course I’m grateful to Compulsion Reads because they liked my book. But I’m also grateful because their process worked. As a playwright, I’m used to sending my manuscripts out to different venues, some of which actually asked for the work, and then never hearing back one way or the other, the play disappearing into a black hole.

These guys were respectful and purposeful. They answered emails. They did what they said they would. I’ve looked at other books they’ve endorsed and they’re good ones. I believe Awesome Indies, Indie Reader, and Brag function in the same way, and are motivated by the same idealism.

If you’ve looking for a good book, you could do worse than give any of them a try.

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Breathing for Two has been selected as a Compulsion Reads choice. Compulsion Reads is a reader service which independently evaluates new work and selects and features books meeting its high standards. From their mission statement:

The Compulsion Reads LLC mission in a nutshell is this: Support the indie book movement. Support good books. Give readers the excuse they need to try a new author. We show our support by offering something the indie book industry desperately needs: quality standards.

The Kindle book cover of Breathing for Two now proudly displays the Compulsion Reads seal.

Visit the Compulsion Reads page featuring Breathing for Two, which includes an interview with Wolf.

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Actually, what I did on my summer vacation was to make the above Breathing for Two trailer.

If you like it, I encourage you to share it using any of the links below.

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