Blogging in 2017 was again marked by another foray into the world of Kindle Scout, this time for my Bridge Daughter sequel Hagar’s Mother. That year I also ran a three-part series discussing the crossover between writing fiction and writing code, and some short entries on how I use a writing notebook when preparing to write a novel.
The most popular entry from 2017 was, by far, on Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. I first read this groundbreaking book in the 1990s, and have reread it at least three times since. McCloud wrote (and drew!) more than a treatise on how comics work. It’s a manifesto praising comics as the ultimate communication form ever devised. As I wrote, McCloud is “not merely comics’ Aristotle and ambassador, he’s its evangelist. Understanding Comics may be the first foundational lit crit text written by a fan boy.” I followed up a month later with “Blood in the margins,” which takes some of the lessons McCloud offers and back-ports them to fiction.
The 2017 entry I’m most proud of is on David Kidd’s memoir Peking Story: The Last Days of Old China. Originally anthologized in 1961 under its original title All the Emperor’s Horses, David Kidd’s classic is one of those remarkable nonfiction books that’s largely flown under the cultural radar. I have a theory why.
Kidd was an American, born and bred in the Midwest, who traveled to China at the end of World War II, where he married into a prominent Chinese family. When the book opens, he joins them behind the walls of their mansion compound, where they sip tea and reminisce about their family’s illustrious past. Meanwhile, the Communist insurgency is beginning to assume control over the country. Kidd pines for China’s past and mourns the loss of its ancient cultural traditions to the incoming revolutionaries. This is why I call the book “a literary eulogy.”
On the surface, it’s a wonderful read, with economical prose both graceful and straightforward, and lots of well-drawn authentic detail. Structurally, it’s as classical in its design as the Parthenon. As far as I can tell, it’s the only book Kidd authored, but what a book to rest your laurels upon.
As I wrote, Kidd was an unusual narrator for his memoir: “There are moments that read like a Graham Greene novel, the world-weary British expatriate turning up his nose at the dreary reactionaries and their anti-imperialist manifestos.” An uneasiness grows as you read between the lines. You sense that Kidd is, on one hand, a snobby and mildly myopic WASP, and on the other hand, an unrepentant Sinophile infatuated with China’s exotic past. His new in-laws, while not nearly as wealthy as their forebears, live a rather luxurious life compared to the peasants in the fields and the servants washing their clothes. Kidd seems as blithe to to the inequities as his in-laws are. When I reread Peking Story for the blog post, I kept wishing Kidd would at least once acknowledge the disparity. The acknowledgement is never really offered.
And that, I think, is the stain that prevents Peking Story from becoming a true classic of nonfiction or New Journalism. It’s not due to political correctness gone amok, but a lack of social awareness that modern readers expect from authors. Kidd should be the outsider peering in, but no, he is such a Sinophile, he eagerly jumps onto the garden divan to loll about with his new Beijing family. Even Fitzgerald—who never met a person of breeding he couldn’t caricature—had the necessary introspection to offer the reader asides on the absurdities of the ultra-rich.
As much as I admire Kidd’s masterpiece, I can’t help but sense that the shadow casting a pall over it is not from what he wrote, but what he left unsaid.
When I started this blog years ago, I made a private agreement with myself: I would avoid writing topical political content. Substack, social media, and the blogosphere is saturated with political commentary, providing lots of heat but little light. I don’t like trafficking in outrage, which is the fast-track to success in political blogging.
However, I did write a novel about missile defense set during the Reagan Era in a town hosting a nuclear weapons research laboratory. That’s pretty political, even if the politics are fairly retro.
Due to recent events in the Middle East, the topic of missile defense has come up again, primarily thanks to Noah Smith’s Noahpinions (via). Smith’s piece on recent successes in missile defense tickled a nerve in me, mostly because this is a topic I’ve followed off-and-on for forty years.
To clarify, while my book is tinged with autobiography (I did indeed grow up in Livermore during the Reagan Era while the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was being developed), it’s also fiction (neither of my parents worked for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), although almost all my friends’ fathers were scientists there).
This is why I reacted strongly to Noah Smith writing this:
…for most of my adult life, I believed that ballistic missile defense was a hopeless, failed cause. From the 2000s all the way through the 2010s, I read lots of op-eds about how kinetic interceptors — “hitting a bullet with a bullet” were just an unworkably difficult technology, and how the U.S. shouldn’t waste our time and money on developing this sort of system.
He quickly adds,
Even the most ardent supporters of missile defense don’t think it could stop a nuclear strike by Russia or China. … critics of missile defense were right that missile defense will probably not provide us with an invincible anti-nuclear umbrella anytime soon. But they were wrong about much else.
Fair enough—Smith is differentiating between defense technology for stopping short- and medium-range ballistic missiles armed with conventional explosives (such as the type used to protect Israel from Iran’s attack in April) versus technology for stopping long-range nuclear ICBMs, which was the problem SDI was supposed to solve. Over the last forty years critics of missile defense have muddied these categories, taking the problems of developing an ICBM defense system, which must deal with missiles launched into the upper atmosphere, and translating them to conventional missiles, which fly at altitudes similar to prop planes.
With this proviso out of the way, Smith goes on to argue that “the way in which critics got this issue wrong illustrates why it’s difficult to get good information about military technology — and therefore why it’s hard for the public to make smart, well-informed choices about defense spending.” He proceeds into the history of short- and medium-range missile defense and its uninformed and myopic critics. It’s a thoughtful piece, well-reasoned and well-researched.
What’s my beef, then? It’s his assertion that the critics getting their prognostications wrong make it “hard for the public to make smart, well-informed choices about defense spending.” I disagree.
What I saw during the SDI years, and continue to see in 2024, is a dearth of public involvement in defense spending or development. How can the American public make well-informed choices, given the lack of transparency in budgeting or the research process?
This is not a bleeding-heart appeal (such as the 1980s bumper stickers Smith references: “It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber”). Simply put, the public is not informed on the decision-making process, has not been invited into the process, and is not wanted to be involved in the process.
The evidence for this is in the history of missile defense itself. Even with four decades of critics piling on against it (which Smith thoroughly tallies), the short- and medium-ranged missile defense technology they mocked was approved, funded, developed, honed, and deployed. As far as I can tell, no one was voted out of office for supporting missile defense. No referendum on their development or funding was held.
Smith theorizes that with missile defense,
the information about how good America’s weapons systems are gets kept behind closed doors, unveiled in secret Congressional briefings and whispered between defense contractors. Meanwhile, everyone who wants to criticize U.S. weapons systems is on the outside, squawking loudly to the press.
My skepticism originates from Smith’s belief that the problem is an “asymmetry” between the military, which is secretive “in order to avoid alerting America’s rivals to our true strength,” and mouthy critics of short- and mid-range missile defense, which have a poor track record for predicting its failure.
Now, Smith’s point is a defensible perspective. It’s equally defensible that the reason the military is so hush-hush about their research projects is to keep the American public in the dark. When defense budgeting is discussed publicly, it’s about funding for more bread-and-butter expenses, such as better meal rations and outfitting soldiers with body armor. Who’s going to argue with supporting our troops?
“A shield, not a sword.”
In the 1980s, the public was well aware of the SDI project. It was highly publicized. Reagan announced it on national evening television. What the public did not know was how the LLNL planned to stop those nuclear missiles from reaching American soil. One of the earliest approaches they explored was a theoretical X-ray laser fired from orbiting satellites at the incoming missiles.
(Defenders of ICBM missile defense point out that the X-ray laser was merely one of many approaches considered. That’s true, but it’s also true that it, and so many of the other technologies considered, were discarded as impractical, unworkable, or simply dangerous. The history of SDI and its offshoot Brilliant Pebbles goes into the many misses and problems.)
To return to the X-ray laser: How was it to be powered? The proposal was that each satellite would hold a thermonuclear device. To fire the laser, the internal device would detonate. The contained thermonuclear explosion would shed X-ray radiation, which was redirected toward the intended target.
It’s easy to satirize this proposal (which I certainly did) as though a plot point in a hypothetical Dr. Strangelove sequel. My point here isn’t to knock research that sounds ludicrous, or which didn’t pan out during development. The history of technology, science, and engineering is littered with wild ideas and failed approaches.
My point is: SDI was highly publicized, but the energy source of the X-ray laser wasn’t revealed until years later by a whistleblower. The public could not make an informed decision, because the most vital information about the project was being withheld. Was it withheld because the U.S. military didn’t want to tip its hand to its enemies? Or because the details would be tremendously embarrassing—H-bombs in space to defend America from H-bombs in the sky? I lean toward the latter explanation.
How many voters today are aware that anti-ICBM research is still ongoing in 2024? The SDI project was renamed multiple times over the decades, as a cynical way to sneak it through the budgeting process. It was never defunded, although, again, as Smith and others recognize, “even the most ardent supporters of missile defense don’t think it could stop a nuclear strike by Russia or China.”
Rather, I think the military learned a lesson from Reagan and SDI: Don’t tell the public about your darlings. From a perspective of secure funding, there’s more harm than good from having your pet research project on the cover of Time.
To be fair, Smith doesn’t advocate for giving the U.S. military carte blanche on spending and research: “There’s no easy solution here, other than simply being aware of these difficulties and trying very hard to counteract them. We pundits should talk to and listen to a variety of experts, not just the loudest and most confident.” I agree, although I think his advice should extend well beyond the sphere of the punditry.
And Smith’s also right about the poor track records of critics of conventional missile defense. In the case of SDI, though, the polarity is reversed. Journalist William Broad’s first book on ICBM missile defense, Star Warriors, was a hagiography of SDI and the scientists at LLNL. From the tone and tenor of the 1985 book, a reader might think ICBM defense was simply a matter of getting the brightest and best minds together in a room with a whiteboard and a pot of hot coffee.
Broad’s later account, 1992’s Teller’s War, tells a very different story, revealing not only the research failures, but more critically the deceptions, exaggerations, and maneuverings used to sell the project to Reagan, Congress, and the American public. Broad barely references his earlier Star Warriors in the later book. In fact, reading between the lines of Teller’s War, its tone comes across a little like a scorned partner who realizes far too late that their spouse had baldly lied to them about an infidelity years earlier.
A postscript. When I wrote “the public is not informed on the decision-making process, has not been invited into the process, and is not wanted to be involved in the process,” that largely assumes the public wants to be informed about defense budgeting.
In an era of political gamesmanship, where “owning” the other political team is more than important than actual leadership and problem-solving, I’ve seen very little interest from the public in how our defense dollars are being spent. Perhaps the military doesn’t need to be secretive at all any more about its research projects.
2016 was a busy year for blogging. Amazon accepted Bridge Daughter for their Kindle Scout program, which entailed a month-long nomination process before they agreed to publish it. It was the start of a fairly intense roller coaster ride, most of which I captured in blog posts along the way.
Amazon’s imprimatur on the novel opened many doors. With a single email sent on a single day of the week to a mere sliver of their customer base, Amazon could generate hundreds of book sales, as though rubbing a lamp to summon a djinn. Amazon’s backing also led to a movie production company inquiring about film rights. They read the book and they asked questions, but ultimately they passed.
(Amazon dismantled the Kindle Scout program in 2018, which I still consider a tragedy.)
Of the long-form blog entries in 2016, I produced three that I remain proud of. I’m torn which to feature here. My account of Don Herron’s Fritz Leiber tour still evokes nostalgia. Don Herron is the creator of the classic Dashiell Hammett tour in San Francisco. Getting a chance to meet Herron and take his lesser-known Fritz Leiber tour was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, as he no longer leads it save for special occasions.
Another piece I’m proud of is my review/analysis of the Generation X cult classic Slacker, one of my favorite films. This entry has an untold side story: A few months after posting it, an online film aficionado site on Medium asked if I was interested in adapting the review. Unfortunately, what the editor wanted me to write about wasn’t what I found interesting about Slacker, and the opportunity fizzled out.
On Literature by J. Hillis Miller
The third is a blog post I keep returning to as a kind of manifesto: “Fiction as a controlled experiment,” a write-up of my thoughts on the book On Literature by J. Hillis Miller.
Miller was a scholar at Yale and U.C. Irvine, and known for promoting deconstruction as a means of literary criticism. I discovered On Literature on a shelf of used books in a Tokyo bookstore, and assumed it would be thick with postmodern terminology and abstruse theories. Instead, On Literature is personal and ruminative. Parts of it read like a confessional. Miller admits to a lifelong love of reading, and writes in glowing terms on several children’s books he marveled over in his youth.
What caught my attention the most, however, is when he confesses to viewing a work of fiction as a “pocket or portable dreamweaver.” He describes books as devices that transport the reader to a new “hyper-world” for them to experience. The way he describes it reminds me of the linking books in the classic video game Myst.
Myst linking book
This quaint vision of narrative is unfashionable in the world of literary criticism. Miller’s vision is also, in my view, charitable to lay readers, who are less interested in high theory and more interested in enjoying books, and curious why some books are more enjoyable than others.
But I do think this vision—”a pocket or portable dreamweaver”—is also a useful guide for an author developing a story or a novel. Miller insists a work of fiction is not “an imitation in words of some pre-existing reality but, on the contrary, it is the creation or discovery of a new, supplementary world, a metaworld.” That is what the creation of story is—not merely revealing or reporting an already existing world, but creating a new one in the author’s mind, and, in turn, recreating it in each reader’s mind. These multiple worlds are similar but never exactly the same.
Miller died in 2021 due to COVID-related issues, one month after the death of his wife of over seventy years. Reading On Literature makes me wish I could have enrolled in one of his courses. Whereas so many of the European deconstructionists seemed intent on subverting the power of literature, Miller was plainly in awe of the written word, and strove to promote it. We need more readers like him.
This is the much needed backstory of the character of Stapleton from Conan Doyle’s “Hound of the Baskervilles”. It is exceedingly well done and in keeping with Conan Doyle’s original story. … Heartily recommended for lovers of Holmes and those looking to add to their own Sherlock Holmes collections.
Thanks, Melisende! Full review here, more information on the book here, and Amazon page here.
Baskerville is my take on the Arthur Conan Doyle classic. Told as a journal penned by the original’s villain, it relates his life story from a pauper’s childhood in the Empire of Brazil to life on the run in Panama and Costa Rica. He lands in England determined to confront his family and claim his place at Baskerville Hall. All the while, he lays out his plan to settle a score with Holmes and Watson, whom have taken him for dead after their confrontation on the bogs of Dartmoor.
A review copy of the novel is available to NetGalley members upon request. Please note, I’m currently seeking NetGalley members who actively review and crosspost to other sites (Goodreads, Amazon, book blogs, etc.)
In November, Amazon opened a beta program for Kindle Direct Publishing authors called Virtual Voice. It may be the biggest upheaval to independent publishing since Amazon launched KDP over a decade ago.
Virtual Voice uses synthetic (i.e., computer) voice technology to produce audiobooks. On first blush, that sounds like a pretty crappy experience—who wants to listen to a robot narrate a book? Know that automated voice technology has advanced tremendously in recent years, to the point that people have trouble distinguishing between it and a human voice.
It’s tempting to go into my thought process over the pros and cons of synthetic voice audiobooks. At this moment, I’ll just say I find the possibility alluring.
I’ve done audio in the past. I recorded Everywhere Man at Fantasy Studios, a dreamy, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that was quite expensive and exhausting. A few years ago, I made a concerted effort to hire a voice actor to record Bridge Daughter. I was put off by the terms dictated by every actor who responded to my call for bids. Both experiences impressed on me the risks of producing my own audiobooks, risks of both cost and rights.
Synthetic voice audiobooks eliminate a lot of the question marks. If I’m reading the Amazon announcement correctly, a KDP author chooses a voice from a catalog of voices, previews a sample, and names a sale price. My guess is, the final audiobook will be ready in a few hours. Audiobooks created with synthetic voices are labeled as such on the Amazon market and may be previewed, so the buyer knows what they’re getting.
It sounds like a no-cost, risk-free offer for independent authors. I’m more than curious. Unless Amazon botches the roll-out—a possibility, they’ve botched things before—I predict we’re going to see a Cambrian explosion of audiobooks on the Amazon market soon enough.
Illustration from Erotic Review for “At the White Sands Motel, 1956”
I once wrote erotica by accident. Writing and getting the story published is a wild tale.
If you know of anything of my output—my novels, my interactive fiction—that might surprise you. You’ve probably never read anything by me that remotely involves the sex act: No kinky sex, no ho-hum sex, not even missionary style. Generally, I shy away from that kind of thing. Getting a story published in an erotica magazine still tickles me to this day.
The story-behind-the-story begins in a creative writing class. The instructor offered us a list of writing prompts. We were to select one and write an opening.
The first speed bump in this tale is that these prompts were communicated to us orally. The prompt I selected regarded a teenage lifeguard named Hamke. Years later, I learned I had misheard the details. The prompt did not include the name “Hamke” or anything about a lifeguard. How I managed to screw up so much remains a mystery lost to the shroud of time.
In any event, the name and occupation stuck. I assumed it was a German name, as I’d never heard of it before. (Apparently, I’m not alone.) While I enjoy swimming, I’ve never known a lifeguard nor worked as one. Why this prompt caught my interest, I do not know. Over the following week I roughed out a first draft about a teenage Hamke standing guard over a motel pool in Nevada. In need of a title, I jammed one onto the front page of the manuscript: “Living It Up at the White Sands Motel.” (I believe it was a riff on the quip about a cheap lodging being a “low-rent Shangri-la.”)
Around this time, I dated a woman also enrolled in the creative writing program. She was experimenting with poetry about the body. She read many of my stories, which is generous—even when you’re dating a writer, that’s no guarantee they’ll actually read your output. She called my work cerebral, and noted that my characters seemed “detached” from their physical nature. She challenged me to write a story where the main character’s physicality is centered.
Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean “write about sex” or “write about someone with a smokin’ bod.” It could mean the main character is physically challenged, or has suffered some grievous physical damage they’re recovering from. It could mean some aspect of their body defines them in a material way (which is something I had in mind as I wrote my Bridge Daughter series of books.)
In this case, I went for the obvious: Hamke would have sex. More than that, he would lose his virginity.
I poked and prodded at the manuscript—draft after draft—trying to tune all the off-key notes. In workshops, peer writers would scratch their heads trying to figure out what to make of this strange story. There was a lifeguard with a flat-top and a weird name, an empty motel in the desert, and an older couple from New Jersey who invites him to their air-conditioned room for an afternoon romp. By this time I’d renamed it (still flailing for a proper title) “At the White Sands Motel, 1956.”
I submitted to the usual literary magazines, searching high and low for a place to land it. The rejection slips came back a bit more quickly than the other stories I’d sent out. Perhaps the complaints I heard in in the workshops (“‘Hamke?’ Is that Jewish?”) was now confounding editors. The sex was not graphic, but it was on the page and not merely alluded to. The wife was acidic and domineering, and her husband frustratingly passive. Wide-eyed Hamke, who was simply “along for the ride” (so to speak), was not a character to stand up and cheer for.
Enter London-based writer Saskia Vogel. By chance, she came into the bar I tended while working through graduate school. She was working on a study of kink; I despaired over a short story about a lifeguard losing his virginity. We swapped email addresses and kept in touch after she returned to England.
Around this time, fellow grad student Lizzy Acker mentioned off-the-cuff she was developing a new San Francisco reading series with the theme “funny / sexy / sad.” The work writers presented had to feature one of those elements.
“You know,” I said, not entirely innocently, “I have a story that’s funny, sexy, and sad.”
It’s true: Hamke’s fumbling and awkward loss of innocence is funny. The wife impatiently orders Hamke across a tour of her body as though teaching him to drive a stick shift. It’s sad, too. As one workshop instructor remarked, the boy is robbed of a positive formative experience.
Lizzy included me in the series’ opening night line-up, and the reading went uproariously well. Maxfield’s House of Caffeine was packed. The audience reacted with every twist and turn of Hamke’s awkward journey. They burst out laughing at all the right moments. Red-faced parents held their hands over their children’s tender ears. People were moved by the ending, and a couple of tears were shed. The applause knocked me off my feet. It was, by every measure, the best reading I ever gave.
How the hell could I not get this story published?
Then, an interregnum. I separated from the girlfriend who challenged me to write about the body. I separated from my appendix, and a few months later, I busted up my right shoulder. I separated from graduate school. (Well, a degree was conferred, how’s that.) Hamke’s story remained a magnet for rejection slips. Meanwhile, medical bills ate through my meager bartender savings.
With no more excuses, I returned to full-time employment. The first year with my new company, the sector we were involved in hosted their annual conference in, of all places, the Canary Islands.
La Palmas de Gran Canaria. (Photo by the author.)
That’s how, six months after staring down bankruptcy and unemployment, I found myself on a semi-tropical island in the Atlantic a mere 500 miles from Marrakesh. I rented a cheap open-air room overlooking the Las Palmas promenade and a pristine sunning beach. After the conference concluded, I stayed for another week to explore the island and write.
During this vacation I received an email from Saskia Vogel in London. She heard from an editor friend that the UK-based Erotic Review was in need of fiction. Didn’t I have a story about a guy having sex for the first time?
In that low-rent Shangri-la, the couch doubling as my bed and the drapes billowing from the breeze coming off the beach, I hustled one more edit pass out of my aging Hamke story. Thankfully I brought my writing notebook computer with me. This was not a time when Wi-Fi was a sure thing in a rented room, especially in an out-of-the-way place like Gran Canaria, but I in this case I was set. I emailed my little story to editor and publisher Jamie Maclean.
Before I did that, though, I used the Wi-Fi to study up on just whom I was submitting to. My search revealed I was not soliciting some amateur outfit. ER had been around since before 1995, and had published numerous erotic books on top of a monthly subscription-based magazine. Their readers spanned the UK and North America. Not only had I never published a work of erotica, I’d never been published by a magazine that survived solely off subscriptions.
With a healthy taste of self-doubt in the back of my mouth, I pressed the Send button. Then I did what I usually do after submitting a piece to a magazine: I got my mind off things. I went downstairs. I walked the promenade. I had a couple of drinks at a beach bar, and got my toes in some sand.
When I returned to the room, I of course checked my email, fully expecting to find nothing. Instead, an acceptance email waited in my inbox. Compared to the usual turnaround times for literary magazines—one sent me a rejection two years after submission—this was lightning fast. Later it dawned on me that my accidental vacation spot had contributed to the quick response: I was in the same time zone as London, where ER was published.
Three months later, a contributor’s copy of Erotic Review and an international money transfer arrived at my apartment in California. My Hamke story was out there.
And that’s how I became a writer of erotica, scribbler of filth and peddler of smut.
Postscript:
My tale might be seen as a reversal of Ray Bradbury’s strategy to seek out unusual places for his work (such as Gourmet publishing his “Dandelion Wine”). I sought out unusual places to publish an erotica story, and eventually found a natural home for it.
Being published in an erotica magazine has become a point of pride for me. I never set out to write erotica, and I’ve never considered pursuing it since. I once read that no one writes erotica under their real name. Well, I did, although when you have as generic a name as “Jim Nelson,” perhaps it doesn’t matter.
Erotic Review is a class act. They continued to stay in touch. I received editorial updates and invites to ER parties (which, sadly, were all in London). They even sent digital Christmas cards, such as the one above.
Recently ER changed hands and is now retooling under a new editorial staff. If you’re interested in supporting the relaunch, visit them at ermagazine.com.
