Featured

My Grand Tour of Europe, 2022

Featured / J.A. Jernay

During the 18th and 19th centuries, the sons of noble families often booked a slow journey across continental Europe. Usually traveling with a private tutor, or sometimes even with their families, these very privileged young men would pack heavy trunks, board ships or wagons, and sail or ride to the western end of the continent. For British travelers, this usually meant sailing across the English Channel, then hiring a French guide to escort them to Paris and across the country, through Switzerland, and down to Italy. This was the most typical route, but there were many, and of course Germans and Poles and other ethnicities chose vastly different paths.

The bright red line traces one possible British itinerary.

During this long travel, these well-heeled offspring absorbed culture, admired art and science, and chased local girls, in no particular order. Catholics sometimes pursued different routes from Protestants, though both presumably dragged themselves through a lot of churches and cathedrals, down naves and transepts and apses. It was expected from all the young tourists that they would return home from the journey carrying books, scientific instruments, objets d’art, and other artifacts. Later in life, these items would be put on display to impress visitors with their worldliness. Young painters and writers usually did a much lower-cost version of the same itinerary.

Anyways, this tradition was called the Grand Tour of Europe. More than a few enterprising 18th-century publishers sold guidebooks targeted to these young art tourists, making them the precursors to Lonely Planet, Rick Steves, or Moon. When railroads became widespread across the continent in the mid-1800s, the cost of travel was reduced even further, and the nouveau riche children of the upper-middle classes were able to join in the fun, including young women. Today, it’s even more accessible: new college graduates often scrape together some money to do the broke backpacking thing in Europe for a couple months before moving on with their professional lives.

Unlike those young travelers from centuries ago, I’m definitely not in my twenties, I’m definitely not an aristocrat, and I definitely don’t need to prove my status to anybody. Plus, I already studied the Renaissance liberal arts during a year at Oxford University, I’m paid regularly for my writing and editing in the field of European history, and I have watched a hell of a lot of Anthony Bourdain. So I didn’t want to undertake a European tour for the normal reasons.

But I do enjoy exploring places I’ve never been, usually the more exotic the better, with an eye to writing fiction. Plus, as a digital nomad who works remotely, I’m free to go where I want, when I want. That’s why I decided to undertake my own Grand Tour, sticking closely to the itinerary described above: France, Switzerland, northern Italy, then finally reversing up to England and Scotland. Most of the places were new to me.

I’d meant to do this last year, but planning travel in pandemic-stricken Europe during 2021 was no easy task. It felt like navigating a hallway of buzzsaws. Things were so fluid, borders rolling open, then snapping shut, entry requirements changing monthly, that it was easier just to wait.

Here are a few observations and highlights.

Paris, France

As a metropolis, it’s possibly the biggest cliché in the world. Maybe that was why this superstar primate city honestly didn’t fire me up too much. I stayed in both Montmartre and Le Marais, and the problem wasn’t the food (obviously terrific), or the people (surprisingly friendly), or the attractions (world-class). No, the problem was the scale of the city—bedrooms, doorways, chairs, tables, everything was three-quarters size. I’m not claustrophobic, but there was almost no relief for this 6’2” male with broad shoulders and long legs. I take up room and Paris doesn’t like to grant that.

Also, after traipsing through the Louvre and Versailles and other sites, I started to feel tired. Historical tourism burnout is real. Constant daily visits to crumbling structures make children whine, lower backs ache, interest wane. Unless you have the passion of an archaeologist or professional historian, the sites soon blur together. Personally, I don’t spend more than ninety minutes in any museum, if I can help it.

But don’t misinterpret me. The vin chaud in the streets was delicious and climbing the steps up to the Basilique du Sacré-Couer felt truly iconic. From a literary perspective, even though the city is well-trodden ground, next year I’ll be cowriting a romantic mystery set in 18th-century Enlightenment Paris.

Lyon, France

I elected to spend many weeks here, in a beautiful modern rented condo overlooking the River Saône. It was a good decision. There is much more room in Lyon than in Paris, and it is France’s premier gastronomical city, the home of Paul Bocuse and many other chefs. In the first two weeks, I visited a few classic boucherie lyonnaise to sample the old menu items such as quenelles (fishcakes) and saucisson de Lyon (sausage) and salade de lyonnaise (with bacon, eggs, and croutons). Soon, however, I realized these classic restaurants were all more or less the same, so I switched to modern eateries, such as Breizh Café for the savory galettes.

But my biggest takeaway was that the French really excel at breakfast foods. It’s the pastries such as the Paris-Brest or apricot tartlettes, the many quiches, the terrific breads. Just don’t expect great coffee; the French don’t care to do it very well. There’s better coffee in the United States, no joke.

The city has an ancient quarter with a gorgeous Roman amphitheater, a strong history of silk and weaving, breathtaking plazas with hundreds of people sipping beers in the cold spring nights, and a great network of trams and subways. I even went to my first professional European soccer match, Lyon v Angiers, which was sedate.

One afternoon, I climbed up to the Croix Rousse and accidentally stumbled into a massive political rally featuring Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the left-wing candidate for president of France. I couldn’t understand his speech because my listening comprehension is basement level, but he came in third to Macron and Le Pen a few weeks later.

My recommendation: Go to Lyon and stay for at least a week, if not longer. It’s better than Paris for living.

Vieux (“Old”) Lyon.

Geneva, Switzerland

I spent Easter Sunday weekend here and didn’t see too much because half the city was closed. Yes, it’s mind-bogglingly expensive, and the home of high-end wristwatches, with Patek Philippe advertisements on nearly every corner. But the Red Cross Museum was unexpectedly touching, with its exhibits on humanitarianism and refugee crises. Still, the north wind off the lake was brutal and I can only imagine how rough the winter gets there. The Swiss people felt much livelier than the French people in the previous stop, but that’s probably the difference between a quieter regional city like Lyon and a glamorous international city like Geneva.

Milan, Italy

It’d been 15 years since my feet last touched The Boot. Italians are still Italians – fun, maddening, loud, obsessed with food and drink. I stayed in the Porta Romana neighborhood, near Bocconi University, and the old man at the café on the corner could make the world’s best macchiato in about half a minute. I drank three every morning.

The Duomo is undoubtedly the centerpiece of the city, but the tapestries and art in the Castello Sforzesco gave me a quick thrill of discovery. Strolling the canals in the Navigli district was beautiful. But overall the city isn’t as romantic as Rome, which is like saying an apple isn’t as sweet as high fructose corn syrup. There’s no reason to even pit them against one another. It’s not a fair fight.

At five o’clock every day, I enjoyed an aperitivo, which is the Italian, and Milanese, tradition of happy hour. For seven euros, you get one cocktail and a wide array of carby snacks like pizza, ham and cheese sandwich, etc. If you’re a light eater, it can even serve as dinner.

Recommendation: Head to the Navigli canal district, pick a bar, order an aperitivo, and enjoy top-shelf people watching as the sun goes down.

Negroni + Piazza del Duomo.

Oxford, England

A quick visit to the city of dreaming spires taught me three things.

One, memory decays with time, because I had completely misplaced the location of the Turf Tavern, an old favorite.

Two, young Brits are obnoxious drunks. The drinking scene wasn’t pretty when I was a college kid there, and nothing seems to have changed despite the new alcohol policy enacted by the UK government. They’re loud and sloppy and their bad reputation on the continent is well-deserved.

Three, punting on the River Cherwell is still stressful and overrated. A paddle is a thousand times better than a pole. I will die on that hill.

Recommendation: The leather sofas in the back room of the King’s Arms, which dates from 1607.

The dining hall at Keble College, Oxford University.

Bristol, England

I hadn’t expected to like this city in the southwest of England as much as I did. My coworking space was closely situated to my historic apartment in the old city centre, and the beautiful Temple Meads train station was a quick half mile walk. I went out dancing at nightclubs for the first time in three years. That felt good, so the next night I went out to an energetic rock gig by a young Welsh band in the hull of the Thekla, a cargo ship anchored in the harbor.

Nearby, the city of Bath was a bit of an overpriced tourist trap, which I gather it’s been for centuries, but the Royal Crescent was worth the visit, especially for architecture nuts.

It was only a week, but I’d return here for a longer stay.

The River Avon passing through Bristol City Centre.

Edinburgh, Scotland

I was partly holed up with a bad head cold here, but it wasn’t my first visit anyways. Little needs to be said except that this remains the most atmospheric city in the UK. (Bonus: Stumbling onto Adam Smith’s tomb in a cemetery.) Someday, when I plunge into historical or fantasy writing, I’ll come back here. It’s inspirational.

Fort William, Scotland

This small town in the Highlands serves as a hub for those who are climbing Ben Nevis (the U.K.’s highest mountain, just outside of town), visiting whiskey distilleries, or fantasy fans who dream of traveling to Hogwarts. Let me explain that last one. In the Harry Potter movies, the century-old historic Jacobite steam train stood in for the famous Hogwarts Express. The real train continues to depart every morning at 10 am sharp, burning coal on its way across the famous Glenfinnan Viaduct (also seen in the movies). The seats are packed to the gills with members of Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Gryffindor houses. I was told that Slytherin tends to keep to themselves. I took said train and it was really a special experience. Another experience was a classic high tea at the Inverlochy Castle Hotel, which is about the only thing a normal person can afford there.  

Filmmakers swapped out the sign for Hogwarts Express. It runs April through October; reservations required far in advance.
A classic high tea.

Glasgow, Scotland

All I knew about Glasgow came from stereotypes: impossible accents and druggy poverty. Happy surprise to find out that it’s nothing like that. What I saw was a normal functioning city with beautiful green lush Victorian parks and a strong central business district. There were a lot of clouds and some sun. The highlight was my impeccably stocked Airbnb, with fantasy books, board games, and no less than fifty bottles of liquor.   

Overall, I found several new things to like about the UK.

  • Clotted cream. It’s not available in the US because we haven’t legalized unpasteurized milk. This delicacy sits somewhere between heavy cream and butter, fat-wise. I never really understood scones until slathering them with this stuff.
  • Doner kebabs. Lamb (my favorite), chicken, or veggie—they’re healthy, affordable, and portable. I wish we had more of those options in the US.
  • Parks. The Victorians knew how to make you linger in a way that others don’t.

I also found quite a few things not to like about the UK:

  • The cost of living in London. Even if I’d wanted to spend more than one night there, I couldn’t have.
  • Bad clothing. I’m no expert, but Brits really don’t know how much about patterns or colors. Once I spotted a girl wearing a shirt that was divided in two parts and clashed with itself.
  • Marmite. Holy Christ, one tiny taste had me gagging in horror. It was like eating a rancid bouillon cube.  Be better than that, England.

And that was the end. I didn’t do any writing during this time, as I was busy with other work and tourism. But I did plan in detail a new, large body of fiction – two ambitious new mystery series plus a historical thriller trilogy. Working from outlines is essential for me; as a ghost, I tried “pantsing” (writing without an outline) and it doesn’t really yield the best results, at least not for mysteries. When my travel ends in the next few months, the publishing will return. I’ve learned that it’s one or the other, in my brain.

Anyways, it’s a big world. Let’s go see it all.

Nine Months of Traveling During Covid

/ J.A. Jernay

My international life during a global pandemic…

I left the US in September of 2020, back when very few were traveling and the second wave of the pandemic was a vague fear looming on the horizon. Getting out of the country was an ordeal. I’d compare it to threading a needle on a bouncing bus while wearing mittens. Let me explain.

Trying to arrive in Barbados, my first stop, was a comedy of errors. First came a month of cancelled flights by American Airlines, then a cancelled connecting flight in Dallas, then an involuntary 10-day stay in Miami Beach (expensive but not unwelcome), followed by a rebooking on LIAT airlines. (LIAT, I found out later, colloquially stands for Late, If At All.) That flight, however, required a forced 5-day stay in Jamaica, in quarantine, while waiting for a new connecting flight to Barbados.

It was my only option, and once I arrived in Jamaica, I was greeted with the task of finding a new PCR test (as my last one had expired) in a developing Caribbean country, on a specific day (Wednesday), at a specific time (3 pm), to qualify for the 72-hr PCR rule that Barbados had in place for arrivals. Achieving this was a feat that required the help of the PR guy at my hotel, who placed a personal call to the actual Jamaican Minister of Health (a childhood friend, he explained), whose office obtained me a single spot at one of two private clinics on the island. The private clinic only took cash, which had to be paid on the morning of the exam, and I was tagged onto the butt end of a large group of people. By the way, Jamaican authorities also placed a mandatory app on my phone to monitor my whereabouts, though it’s not clear that anyone ever followed up on that. I left the phone in my hotel to go out for dinner twice. Color me rebellious, but I hadn’t been to that island since age five and wanted to see what I was missing in Kingston.

Finally arriving in Barbados, I sat in another mandatory 8-day quarantine during which time carb-heavy foods (pasta, club sandwiches, fries) were brought to my hotel room door three times a day. I felt like the Christmas goose being fattened before the kill. Leaving the room wasn’t allowed, either, even though I could hear the ocean crashing just twenty tantalizing meters away. Later, after being released, I discovered that while Barbados had zero cases of covid, they still enforced all the new global protocols. So I spent the next three months wearing masks everywhere, getting temperature checks in the forehead, and accepting squirts of gel — you know, the same old drill, but on an island with no virus whatsoever. They’re not particularly good at independent thinking, those Bajans. (This observation was echoed to me by a couple Bajans themselves.) If I sound frustrated, it’s because I’d gone there precisely to escape the virus, not to pretend it still existed.

Still, Barbados is a tropical paradise, albeit one with excellent wifi and a Michael Kors outlet. They tell me that Grenada is the most unspoiled island in the Caribbean, and I hope to check that out too, along with Dominica and the Grenadines. I’m going back soon.

  • Happy hour at Zaccios, west coast of Barbados.

Next stop was Colombia. Landing there in January was fairly easy. That country requires a simple 96-hour PCR test, which was easily gained in Miami, and the movement around that terrific country was mostly unrestricted, though there were occasional surprise weekend lockdowns in Medellín that were barely enforced. I’d been to Colombia before, for several months in 2014 and again in 2019, and the people are the most friendly of any place I’ve ever been, next to Puerto Rico.

I avoided Bogotá until the end of my two-month stay there, since the covid-19 situation was so precarious through January and part of February. In fact, if the world ever suffers a pandemic like this again, my advice is to head to warm cities such as Medellin in the months following the winter holidays (January and February). The post-holiday viral bulge there was less pronounced, thanks to the “eternal spring” climate that allows so much outdoor dining, outdoor activities, and outdoor socializing. Bogotá suffered a much larger increase in post-holiday cases simply because of the colder climate there, and the subsequently greater numbers of indoor parties and socializing during the holidays.

  • Valle de Cocora, Colombia. It’s the setting of upcoming Pixar movie Encanto, with music by Lin-Manuel Miranda.

In rural areas such as El Eje Cafetero, the open-air coffee region where I stayed for two weeks, locals told me that there was absolutely no virus there until November 2020, months after it’d gripped most of the world, and very little transmission of the virus once it arrived. My hired driver said there’d been a total of two covid deaths, both over age 70. There really is something to be said for fresh air and ventilation in avoiding viruses (see the end of this article). I would guess that better overall health, owing to a life of agricultural labor, probably played a role too.

In March, it was onto Peru, for which I gained another PCR exam in Bogotá, this one administered by a sadistic nurse who jammed her swab into my nose with enough strength to crack a rock. I also discovered that Peru now requires face shields on all transportation — plane, train, bus, and auto. That was my biggest problem there, for reasons of 1) claustrophobia and 2) language comprehension.

It drove me a little batty to wear both a N95 and a face shield, because together they create a sonic bubble around your skull in which you can hear both your own breathing and your own words bouncing back at you. Regarding language, imagine going to an airport check-in desk and trying understand a female with a tiny, high-pitched voice speaking to you rapidly in a foreign language—while she wears two layers of facial protection and stands behind a plexiglass shield. I’m fluent in Spanish, but I don’t have superhuman hearing. Instead of asking people to repeat themselves, or inflict another excruciating hand-cupped-to-ear Torquemada-style interrogation, I would sometimes just say yes, and then hope that I’d hadn’t just agreed to a five-year term of indentured servitude. This was sometimes true in restaurants too, even excellent ones such as Maido. (If you go, make a reservation for the tasting menu, which was probably the best meal of my life.)

Overall, Peru was quite strict about covid-19, which I’ve learned is true in general, even before the pandemic. At Machu Picchu, for example, there were spotters standing throughout the historic mountaintop site—despite it being as open air as a place can possibly be—who were ready to reprimand anybody who took off the mask for even a second.

Still, that famous wonder of the world, as astounding as it is, was overshadowed by a day tour of the Sacred Valley I’d done a few days prior. My overall favorite site in Peru was definitely La Reserva Nacional Salinas y Aguada Blanca, outside of Arequipa. Check out the slideshow here (text in Spanish) and put it on your next trip itinerary. I have to say that bathing in natural hot springs at 5000 m elevation in a hailstorm next to a mini-volcano while watching llamas wander by was a high point of the year.

  • La Reserva Nacional Salinas y Aguada Blanca, Peru. Volcanos in the background.

Mexico, my current stop, has been more relaxed. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. There is no PCR exam required for entry, and I’d estimate that only about 75% of the people on the street in Mexico City are wearing masks (compared with almost 100% everywhere else). Sometimes I’m not sure the older people understand that they’re in the midst of a pandemic. I’ve seen older folks gathering in large groups in plazas for salsa or ranchero dancing, mostly without masks. So keep that in mind next time you want to curse out Americans . We haven’t cornered the market on intransigent jackassery, but we’re definitely the loudest.

I’m planning to get the J & J vaccine in another couple of weeks upon my return to Miami, and so will end a very unusual chapter of not only world history but also personal history.

Was traveling during a pandemic dangerous?

No more than staying at home in the US. After all, you can socially distance anywhere, in any country. In fact, I’d argue that a warm climate, good ventilation, outdoor activities, personal fitness, social distancing, and of course the almighty N95 mask are all you need to avoid any serious viral illness. Where you do these things matters very little. The only exceptions are those who are immunocompromised, elderly, or afflicted with metabolic syndrome (obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, etc), in which case it’s best to keep oneself in the most developed country possible in case of hospitalization. For those of us in great health, I have yet to see any dangers in traveling during this pandemic.

Did people think I was crazy?

Yes—fear is much stronger than hope. Friends and even my own family told me to stay in the US during the pandemic. This would’ve meant an entire Great Lakes winter sealed alone behind closed doors, which seemed like a silly thing to do when I saw a second, even bigger wave of infections coming.

Plus, when the world says zig, I like to zag. I see this flexibility as a positive attribute during times of crisis—it’s the old principle of throwing yourself into the punch instead of waiting to be greeted by it. I cast aside fear and made judicious decisions regarding risk, starting with the miniscule IFR (infection fatality rate) for people my age (1 in 400, which includes the obese). And there was my own suspicion that I had already had a mild five-day case of covid-19 in January 2020, long before it became A Thing.

As a result, I safely explored four new countries, visited bucket-list sites for half price (Machu Picchu), gained tons of new Gemstone Travel Mystery ideas (just wait!), made a lot of money working online, met a ton of new people, and even fell in love.

Would I do it again?

Yes, absolutely. Choosing to travel internationally during a global pandemic was one of the best choices of my life. “Crisis” is the Greek word for something like “turning point” or “decision” — something all good storytellers should know — and I’ve benefitted personally, financially, literarily, and emotionally from this one.

It’s a big world. Let’s go see it all.

The End of Ghostwriting, For Me

/ J.A. Jernay

Confession: I’ve spent the last four years working as a ghostwriter.

It started sometime in 2015, when I moved to a new city and applied for a job at a ghostwriting firm. This particular company wanted to see both fiction and nonfiction samples, as they were busy in both departments. I put the samples together and sent the package over.

Typrewriter

My vintage 1949 Smith & Corona.

They liked my samples and decided to take a flier on me. I was thrilled. The first project they sent me was a lecture about plotting and movies. It was a small assignment, but I worked fast. Evidently it impressed them, because they quickly upped my rate, instituted an incentive program, and then sent me a completed manuscript to edit/rewrite. It was a memoir, written by an international student from Africa, about dealing with her descent into mental illness while living at a boarding school in the U.S.*

[*All project descriptions have been slightly changed to protect the clients’ identities.]

I worked hard on that one. Soon I had earned the firm’s trust, and the projects began arriving fast and furious upon my doorstep. During the next four years, I wrote or edited 40 to 50 different projects.

They were all different.

I wrote international espionage thrillers. I wrote a wacky novel about a boy discovering a not-so-imaginary world of wild spirits living inside an old factory. I wrote a trilogy of time-travel sci-fi novels. I wrote a tear-stained family drama that ended in a triple suicide. A lesbian BDSM murder mystery set in Eastern Europe. A salty humor book about toxic bosses.

I never would’ve thought to write about any of these topics if I hadn’t been assigned the projects. That’s what made them so much fun.

The clients varied. There were a few doctors, an unemployed political consultant, some egocentric business types, even a flight attendant. None of the clients were famous, but many were respected in their professions. Some needed a book for their careers but didn’t have time to write one. Some lacked confidence and needed help finishing their stories. For some, English was their second language.

Anyways, during this time, my hands were a blur on the keyboard. In 2017 alone, I wrote over half a million words, which tripled my previous yearly record.

That may sound like a lot, but that’s small beans compared to pulp writers of the early 20th century. Those writers, whom you’ve never heard of, typically wrote a million words a year for the slick genre magazines, some as fast as a novel per week. (A novel was defined as about 25,000 words back then; today, it’s about 60,000 to 70,000 words.)

Not me. When I’m writing, I usually max out at 2000 words a day. That means my absolute yearly maximum, with no weekends or vacations, would be about 730,000 words. That would amount to 12 normal-length novels, if I could swing it.

The point: I have done a lot of writing recently. But you, the public, unfortunately won’t see those books under this name—at least not for 35 years, when intellectual property law allows me to claim them for my own. By that time, those new book sales will keep me well stocked in cardigans, Metamucil, and split tennis balls for the bottom of my walker.

Anyways, it’s all over now. The ghostwriting firm closed several months ago, without warning.

 

Work-For-Hire Is Nothing New

People find ghostwriting fascinating. I get asked a lot of questions from strangers about it.

Here’s what I know about the field.

First, there’s no reason to think that ghosting is a new phenomenon. Pen names can be seen as a form of ghosting, and many famous writers in history, such as Soren Kierkegaard, used multiple ones. Some pen names are so well known that we don’t even realize they’re pseudonyms, such as Stan Lee, Anne Rice, Barbara Vine, and Lee Child. Even Benjamin Franklin wrote under the pen name Alice Addertongue!

What we call ghostwriting today has been a big part of publishing for at least a century. Early in the twentieth century, a man named Edward Stratemeyer sold nearly half a billion books. (That’s billion, with a b.) He controlled the youth publishing market for decades, and was almost a hundred percent dependent upon ghosts. For example, he conceived of “Franklin W. Dixon”, who wrote all the Hardy Boys novels, and “Carolyn Keene”, who wrote all the Nancy Drew novels. Those two writers never existed. Stratemeyer used those names as a screen for a rotating group of contributing ghostwriters. Today, famous ghosts such as Andrew Crofts have sold millions and millions of books—and the only people who know exactly which ones are high-level editors.

Some readers are appalled that books are not written by the author on the back cover. That’s a bit naïve. Do those people also get upset that Aunt Jemima never existed? Or that the Geico lizard isn’t real?

It’s better to think of an author name as a brand, not a person.

Ghosts have very practical uses. Sometimes, if bestselling novelists freak out or get sick, their traditional publishers may decide it’s easier to call for backup in order to make an autumn release date. I’ve heard rumors that, back in 1998, J.K. Rowling very nearly got replaced on her own sequel to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone because she was so late with the manuscript.

Some of these practices seem to be dying out in the twenty-first century. People like James Patterson and the late Clive Cussler are openly crediting their ghosts now, as are many celebrity memoirs. But ghostwriting is like a weed. It always grows back, in different forms.

 

The Benefits of Being A Hired Gun

Ghostwriting was rewarding. It tickled my brain and heart in ways that writing on my own hasn’t, just because of the sheer variety of assignments.

For example, on my own I never would’ve written a highly self-conscious Jane Eyre set in the rural American West, overlaid with supernatural elements—never—but man, write that sucker I did. It’s funny what a fat wire transfer deposited directly into your checking account can do to stimulate creativity. I’m not joking. Money really is a powerful motivator for art.

Also, in ghosting an assignment, there’s a lot less open space. The client has usually set limits. So instead of wandering aimlessly across a featureless field of pure artistic inspiration, you’re navigating through a tight rocky canyon. The walls are high, and you can’t climb out. You’ve got to pick your way along the bottom of the canyon, all the way to the end—and they need you to find it by Friday EOD.

A black notebook , a pen and dollar cash banknotes on wooden background - concept of financial management or planning, make money from freelance writingAlso, ghostwriting can be lucrative, especially if you can wrangle a percentage of the profits of a breakout book. (The businessman Donald Trump, for example, stupidly paid his ghost, Tony Schwartz, 50% of the profits of The Art of the Deal — without a single negotiation.) That type of windfall never happened to me, though the firm paid pretty well. I was thrilled to be making a lot of money doing something really fun and challenging.

Overall, the experience taught me that being an artist-for-hire is a little easier than being an artist-for-oneself. I don’t think I’m going to provoke much pearl-clutching by saying that either. In fact, the god of highfalutin modernist poetry, T.S. Eliot, used to talk about how much he liked strict poetic form because it removed choice, forcing him to be creative within tighter constraints. The fewer decisions, the easier. It’s why many people, such as Steve Jobs, prefer to wear the same clothing every day.

But in the back of my head simmered the advice of a writing guru named Dean Wesley Smith. A few years ago, he taught me a lot about how to build a modern writing career. He’s also done a ton of ghostwriting projects in his life. Dean cautioned me not to do too much of that type of work, because it can blunt a person’s own original artistic impulse. He himself complained that he never found a really strong original voice on the page because he was too busy being paid to sound like other people.

He was right. It was fun while it lasted — but now it’s back to my voice.

 

Ainsley Rising

While ghostwriting, I put the Ainsley Walker Gemstone Travel Mysteries partly on hold.

No longer. Here’s what’s coming up:

The Mongolian Moonstone was completed a few months ago. Its release has been interrupted by a short-notice two-week trip to the Middle East, by the arrival of covid-19, and by a monthlong move to a new address. The book is releasing soon, and if you liked previous titles, you’re going to love this one.

The next title, The Easter Island Coral, is halfway finished and was inspired by a three-day trip I made to that remote pebble of an island at the end of 2017. I outlined the entire story on a legal pad during the flight back to Santiago. In three words: obsession, madness, and moais. You’re going to love this one too.

The following title, The Chile Copper, will see Ainsley seeking a copper sextant, a collection of which I discovered at the Museo Maritimo Nacional in Valparaíso. It felt appropriate to use a nautical instrument as the McGuffin here, since that string bean of a nation has over four thousand kilometers of coastline. Anyways, in this one you’ll see Ainsley chasing a suspect across a ventisquero (glacier), joining a group of distance cyclers across Patagonia, and cracking more than a few jokes about the linguistic mess that calls itself Chilean Spanish. If you liked The Argentina Rhodochrosite, you might love this one most of all—it feels like it wants to be pretty long and intricately plotted.

Other confirmed future story locations include Bolivia, Colombia, Panamá, México (specifically the Yucatán), Iceland, Cyprus, Saudi Arabia, and Dubai.

Generally, I’m choosing wild, farflung places. The more unfamiliar, the better. Nobody needs another story about another traveler discovering baguettes in Paris or cappuccinos in Rome. That has been beaten like a gong.

Me, I’ve done a lot of travelling the last few years, but I don’t actually visit all the places I write about. I didn’t go to North Korea, thank God—but don’t hold it against me. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote the bestselling slavery novel of the 19th century, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, without having set foot in the American South. Stephen Crane wrote the definitive novel of the Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage, even though he hadn’t even been born until six years after the war ended.

On the other hand, I also travel to many foreign locations without writing about them. A week in the Netherlands last winter left me kind of flat. Good beer, meh food, gray skies, but nothing really seemed interesting enough to write about. (Sorry, Nederlanders!) Same with Siberia, which totally defeated my powers of imagination. Even after doing a lot of research, I just couldn’t find a compelling story about that God-forsaken empty taiga.

One thing is for sure—while ghostwriting was challenging and fun, I’m going to heed the advice above and steer myself back towards my original voice.

Thanks for staying with me.

Meanwhile, it’s a big world. Let’s go see it all.

The Mechanics of Strong Modern Sentences

/ J.A. Jernay

Sentences are the writer’s stock-in-trade. Manipulating them should be as essential to us as manipulating algebraic equations is to a mathematician, or matching color swatches is to an interior designer.

Here are a few bits of knowledge that I’ve gleaned, or accidentally discovered, about how to write better sentences for fiction in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

By the way, I usually write anywhere between 300,000 and 500,000 words per year, and this is what seems to work.

 

A phrase is better than a clause

Whenever possible, avoid using extra clauses. Try to replace them with participle, gerund, prepositional, or appositive phrases.

There’s no law stating that you can’t open a sentence with a dependent clause, but it’s becoming more modern not to do so.

Here’s an example:

When she was a child, Ariella discovered her superhuman powers.

As a child, Ariella discovered her superhuman powers.

Which one is better? Arguably the second. The first sentence begins with a dependent clause. Again, this is not wrong, but it is less efficient. To make matters worse, however, this particular dependent clause uses a ‘be’ verb, which is inexcusable. Stick with action verbs.

The primary reason to limit dependent clauses is that a subject-verb combination is very powerful and should be reserved for true action. In modern fiction, we generally restrict clauses to one, maybe two, in each sentence, so that the action is clear, direct, and simple. Any more than that, and you run the risk of writing like Nathaniel Hawthorne. Check out this sentence from The Scarlet Letter:

“It (Hester’s face) was like a mask; or, rather, like the frozen calmness of a dead woman’s features; owing this dreary resemblance to the fact that Hester was actually dead, in respect to any claim of sympathy, and had departed out of the world with which she still seemed to mingle.”

Ugh. Four verbs in that sentence. Plus two confused similes. Hawthorne is notorious for his ADD regarding similes. Just read that sentence again, and you can see him changing his mind about which comparison he wanted to use. Red rover, red rover, send an editor on over.

Still, his storytelling was tight. I’ve always said that The Scarlet Letter would be a massive hit today if someone would just rewrite it in a modern American style.

 

Metaphorical language has to fit the theme

Let’s say you’re writing a horror story about a herd of vampire kittens who descend upon and terrorize a small town.

(You like that idea? It’s all yours. My gift to you. Run with it.)

Here are two variations on the same sentence:

Its fangs bared, the vicious little feline leapt on the old woman’s horrified face like a spurt of blood out of a vein.

Its fangs bared, the vicious little feline leapt on the old woman’s horrified face like an Olympic track-and-field gold medalist.

Which one reads better? The first one, obviously. But why? Because spurt of blood is more closely aligned with horror than Olympic track-and-field gold medalist is.

There you go—I just saved you the cost of an MFA. You’re welcome. Seriously, that’s a huge part of writing traditional storytelling fiction. Choosing every word carefully, particularly in metaphorical language. It’s important in creating an overall effect.

In some of my books, I’ve gone so far as to write down a single “deep image” that I want every book to reflect. They’re one-word themes, such as competition or meat. Then, when I drop bits of metaphorical color into the book, I make sure that each figure of speech is oriented to that deep image. It’s a technique borrowed from poetry.

I’m not going to lie, though: doing so does slow down the words-per-hour rate. Thinking of a thematically-aligned metaphor can be hard. Sometimes I just skip it altogether.

 

Put the subject and verb next to one another

Which sentence is better?

Karina, who found herself paralyzed with fear beneath the furry blood-soaked predator, the way her dead mother had undoubtedly felt a few minutes earlier, screamed.  

Paralyzed with fear beneath the furry blood-soaked predator, the way her dead mother had undoubtedly felt a few minutes earlier, Karina screamed.

The second one is better. Why? The subject and verb, Karina and screamed, are next to one another, with zero words separating them.

In the first sentence, however, Karina and screamed are literally at opposite ends of the sentence, with 20 words separating them.

The second sentence is waaay more modern.

The first sentence is a nineteenth-century structure known as a periodic sentence, which is defined as any sentence that saves its independent clause until the end. In other words, the verb arrives dead last in the sentence. This was Hawthorne’s favorite tool, the go-to structure for Henry James, and the preferred syntax for a lot of other Victorian-era writers whom nobody reads anymore… mostly because there’s too much freaking space between the subjects and the verbs.

Compare sentences with music. Minimalist songs tend to last longer because they don’t have a lot of instrumental parts to sound dated. Take the song Rock On, by David Essex, or even Ben E. King’s Stand By Me. Both sound modern as a result, especially “Rock On”, even though it’s almost half a century old.

Sentences are like that too. Subjects and verbs are like the rhythm section.

Fun fact: In German, this old syntactic model is still common. Germans typically hold their verbs back until the very last moment. This denies people the meaning of the sentence until the very end, forcing them to read or listen closely to the entire phrasing. It’s possible that this explains why Germans are famously meticulous—because their language demands it.

Maybe you prefer to read this longer, ornate style. Maybe you like to lose yourself in a long labyrinth of clauses. That’s fine. You can find boatloads of old books in any library or at digital repositories of history such as Hathitrust. Just be sure to leave a trail of bread crumbs behind you, and let your loved ones know how long you’ll be gone. It can get dangerous in that dark forest of clauses.

Me, I live in 2019, and I like to sell books. So I’ll continue working in the modern style.

 

Use Interior Monologue and Information

This is not specifically about sentence structure, but I can’t resist mentioning this.

Why those two things? Because they’re the only two things that books do better than filmed entertainment.

Written words help us get inside characters’ heads much more easily than any other medium. For interior monologue, filmed content has to rely on voiceover, or direct address to the camera. Those are inferior methods of accomplishing what books do quite efficiently.

Here’s an example:

Samuel stared at the trembling, furry little animal in his hands. It had killed his grandmother, that much he knew. The smart thing would be to swing it around by its tail like a sock full of rocks and then dash its evil brains against the wall. But it was hard to reconcile this little tabby face with the same blood-drinking creature that had sucked the life out of his dear Mawmaw. In the end, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Not since that afternoon at the farm. To this day, he still woke up in night sweats, dreaming of the bag of kittens he’d drowned in the pond under the stern tutelage of his grandfather. It didn’t matter how many humans it had killed—he couldn’t kill this animal. He’d never be able to sleep again.

Onscreen, you could accomplish this, in a limited way, with flashbacks. But during my time in Hollywood, every development exec I knew rolled eyeballs at flashback scenes in a script, and most writers avoided them as a result. Maybe you could have the character speaking his or her true thoughts under his breath. That works, briefly—like in Die Hard, when John McClane mutters ruefully to himself as he crawls through the ventilation shaft: Come out to the coast, we’ll get together, have a few laughs. Or a really gifted actor can even express some of that in his or her face.

But none of it works as well as a paragraph in a book.

The other thing that words do better than video is relay information. That’s why, in the Ainsley Walker Gemstone Travel Mystery series (link: Amazon US), I occasionally will toss in paragraphs of historical or geographical or cultural background about the place where Ainsley finds herself. For people reading on tablets, I also provide links to stable, respected websites that provide even more background and context. Judging from the reviews, some readers really appreciate those links. Those who consider them a distraction can easily skip over them, so I see no downside to the practice.

Overall, written words convey information a thousand times better than filmed content. Using this advantage will make the best experience possible for the reader, hopefully compelling the person to put aside the newest episode of her favorite sitcom in favor of one more chapter. This is important, given that all of us can now read books and watch video on the same damn device. It’s a battle for attention.

 

Read Stephen King

I’m only half joking. He’s a terrific prose writer, and I marvel at the way his sentences manage to be propulsive and modern and stylish all at the same time. No doubt, we’ll still be reading him in a hundred years. If you want more specific language tips from King, check out On Writing, which is a bit of a Bible for a lot of us novelist types.

In the meantime, it’s a big world. Let’s go see it all.

Recommended Reading: February 2019

/ J.A. Jernay

The quest continues. For the last several months, I’ve been reading only unfamiliar authors, or authors that I haven’t read in a decade or more.

Here are some of the best books I’ve enjoyed lately. (All links Amazon US)

Rec Read image-Hayley Finn

Killers of the Flower Moon, by David Grann

Book-length narrative non-fiction, when done well, is top-of-the-line reading. I picked this up at Collected Works Bookstore & Coffeehouse in Santa Fe, NM and had a feeling that it would be an astounding story. It did not disappoint.

The Osage tribe of Oklahoma was the richest group of people in America for a few years in the 1920s. Why? They were sitting on some very profitable oil leases, and many had expensive cars and chaffeurs and mansions. This alone would’ve been interesting – but then, horrifically, they began turning up dead. Two, then four, then eight, then twenty-two. Then the nascent FBI got wind of the murders and dispatched a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to investigate. What he found was a county-wide conspiracy among the white power structure to murder natives for the headrights, and no method was too terrible–bomb, strangulation, poisoned needles, hammer, auto accident.

It’s a peculiarly American story, focusing on sudden wealth, racism, and murder. There’s an investigator trying to make sense of all of it. And it’s all true. Nearly every sentence integrates something from the historical record—a quote, a statistic, a testimony. It’s unputdownable and should be required reading in schools. Rumor has it that Martin Scorsese will be filming the movie version with Leo DiCaprio later this summer. Don’t wait—find a copy of the book now. It won a 2018 Edgar Award.

 

This Is How You Lose Her, Junot Díaz

Last time my path crossed with Mr. Díaz, it was ten years ago, and I was travelling across part of South America. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao had just been released, and I carried it in my hand onto buses, into restaurants, in hotel rooms, etc. That book was great. No—it wasn’t just great, but obnoxiously, incredibly, awesomely, choose-your-adverbly kind of great. His voice on the page was nothing like anybody had ever seen, and in my own reading life, voice is everything. I’ll follow a great authorial voice anywhere, even to subjects I don’t care much about. Salman Rushdie, Tom Wolfe, Kaye Gibbons, Frederick Exley—their fiction voices are/were amazing.

Díaz is right up there with those stars. He released this collection of short stories in 2012, and it’s got the same look-ma-no-hands kind of passion, the same structural artistry, as Wao did. In fact, I don’t think enough people give him credit for taking unusual story structures and making them emotionally compelling. It’s not easy.

The stories here are all based on the same point of view: a young poor Latino guy in New Jersey pursuing misadventures in sex. It’s clear that Díaz is obsessed with women—finding them, luring them, charming them, using them, getting used by them, analyzing them, dumping them, getting dumped by them, remembering them.

I’m aware that Díaz got nailed by the #MeToo movement, and has some sins to atone for. And reading this book, I can see some reason for that, because this book is drenched in the hormones of a young man’s sex-addled brain. Still, I do separate the artist from the art, and this collection is definitely worth the read. None of the stories here is heads and shoulders above any other. They’re all terrific. Whenever Díaz is ready to publish something new, I’ll be here waiting.

 

Sonata Mulattica, by Rita Dove

I’d been meaning to read modern narrative poetry for a while, because it seems like a genre that’s ripe for a comeback. I’d also been meaning to read Rita Dove for a while, because she was our Poet Laureate for three years back in the nineties.

Then, while I was wandering the streets of the Printers’ Row Literary Festival in Chicago last summer, this title leapt off the shelf into my hands. It’s Rita Dove’s book-length narrative poem about the real-life story of George Bridgetower, a biracial violinist of the 19th century who was friends with Ludwig von Beethoven.

Man oh man, it’s a tour de force. This series of poems is told from various different viewpoints, in various different poetic styles, even including a brief stageplay. Dove takes her sweet time telling the details of Bridgetower’s life, and uses some pretty highflown language to relate those details. But that’s the nature of a poet, choosing opacity over clarity. It reminds me of the famous saying that a scientist takes something that nobody knows and says it in a way that everybody can understand, while a poet takes something that everybody knows and says it in a way that nobody can understand. That’s not a criticism. Today, poetry is meant to obfuscate. That’s kind of the point, at least in our modern conception of it.

This book got me juiced for the possibilities of the genre. After all, narrative poetry, if written in a conversational tone, could have a potentially huge audience. To my way of thinking, a lot of readers who don’t have the patience or time or attention span to finish a novel might be surprised how much easier it can be to get through a story in poetic form. Robert Frost wrote like this. James Dickey wrote in this form back in the sixties and seventies.

Me, I’m going to explore this genre further. Ms. Dove has inspired me. Isn’t that what books are supposed to do?

 

“There’s No Place Like Home” by Edan Lepucki

This is new: Amazon has commissioned a series of novelettes by famous and less-famous writers. It’s called the Warmer collection, and all of them are connected by the same theme: each is set in a dystopian future in which society is suffering severe climate change. The ‘Zon swoons over the series as “a collection of seven visions of a conceivable tomorrow by today’s most thought-provoking authors. Alarming, inventive, intimate, and frightening, each story can be read, or listened to, in a single breathtaking sitting.”

That’s really purple marketing copy. A single breathtaking sitting. Someone fetch the smelling salts.

Seriously, those folks over in Seattle seem to have read my mind, because I’d thought of doing a series exactly like this. In fact, I did write a similar series of shorts for a ghostwriting assignment a couple years ago. I’d love to release them to the public, but, ya know, contracts, and, ya know, lawsuits. The pain of being a ghost. So you’ll just have to take my word for it.

Back to Lepucki’s story. It’s sharp and well-observed. The young girl who discovers her father’s suicide in an overheated Los Angeles of the distant future felt very, very real. The descriptions were accurate but understated. You could feel the slow way that oppressive heat and malnutrition wears down a family. And the small details, like Manitoba’s new role as a northern destination, a societal escape valve, were sharp.

Mostly I enjoyed the author’s world-building. It spoke to me. As someone who used to live in Los Angeles, I’ve glimpsed the future described here. In fact, the prospect of a dystopic waterless future of the haves v have-nots grappling under the broiling desert sun was one big reason I fled Southern California a few years ago. Returning to the upper Midwest, the land of great lakes and mild summers, has sent my happiness meter skyrocketing. There will be many more following this same path in future years as the desert Southwest slowly transforms into a kiln in coming years.

Anyways, read the story; it’s free in Amazon Prime as one of their Amazon Original Stories. I’ll be gobbling up the rest of the series shortly.

 

In Sunlight or in Shadow: Stories Inspired by the Paintings of Edward Hopper, edited by Lawrence Block

Another terrific anthology idea: Persuade America’s grandest mystery novelist, Lawrence Block, to put out the bat signal. He then persuades 17 respected writers to contribute one short story to his project–each inspired by a different Edward Hopper painting. Each story is prefaced by the canvas that inspired it.

Hopper was best known for Nighthawks, but all of his uniquely alienated American scenes are crying out for some noir-inspired moodiness and madness. This delivers. It’s a sharp collection, and a lot of these stories hit the mark. They include pieces by Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Olen Butler, Kris Nelscott, Stephen King, and many others. I didn’t care for King’s story very much—heresy!—but Craig Ferguson, the talk show host and comedian, contributed an expectedly wacky tale. My favorite was written by Joe R. Lansdale, who I’d never heard of. Michael Connolly and Lee Child round out the cast.

Fact is, we’re living in a golden era of short story writing at the moment, thanks to a digital world of publishing that has lifted almost all restrictions on story length. Oddly, I’ve been reading all these shorties on my phone, a Moto Droid. When I bought it a couple years ago, I swore I wouldn’t read on such a small screen, but that wall crumbled pretty quick, and I’ve found that it’s comfortable to use for short bursts. Also, this is probably the way more people around the world will be reading in the future, since a delivery platform for paper is downright impractical in many developing parts of the globe, such as Indonesia, which has ten thousand scattered islands. This is the best time in history to be a reader.

 

 

The Artist Doesn’t Matter

/ J.A. Jernay

There is the art … and there is the artist. Is it possible to separate the two?

Let’s look at three case studies.

Case #1: The Superstar

Once upon a time, I was friends with the vice-president of a major electric guitar company, one whose name you’d recognize if you enjoy heavy metal. Let’s call him Joe. Whenever I was at Joe’s house, our conversation invariably turned to Prince. Joe loved talking about Prince. Everybody in the music industry, he said, had weird Prince stories.

I was all ears. After all, I’ve been a huge Prince fan for much of my adult life. In concert, he was the best performer I’ve ever seen—an eccentric, bizarre, charismatic, five-foot-two genius.

Well, let’s hear one, I said.

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Photo credit: MobyRichard via Flickr

Joe began to tell me a story that had been related to him by his friend, let’s call him Dave, who was working as Prince’s guitar tech at the time. I gulped, because this was firsthand music industry stuff.

According to Joe, Dave received a salary of nearly $400,000 per year from the Purple One for his service as principal guitar tech. In return, he had given up all pretense of a life. That was understandable. Working for a boss at that level of talent and fame, and given his immense salary, Dave must’ve known full and hell well what the job would entail when he accepted it.

Total submission to His Royal Purple Ego.

Here’s where the story starts: One day, Dave asked Prince if he could have a few days off to visit his family in Pennsylvania during Thanksgiving. Prince gave him permission.

However, the moment he stepped off the plane in Pennsylvania for the weekend, his cell phone rang.

It was Prince. “I can’t find that setting on the new amp,” the superstar said.

“The vintage tube amp that just arrived?”

“No, the solid-state.”

“Which setting?”

“The fuzzy one we talked about.”

“It’s on the back, in the upper left corner, just to the right of the yellow cable.”

He waited while Prince looked for it. The star came back to the phone and said in his low, velvety voice: “I need to you do it, Dave.”

Dave didn’t miss a beat. “No problem. Give me a few hours to get back to LA.”

And that’s what Dave did. Still at the airport, he turned around, marched to the ticket desk, bought another round-trip ticket from Pennsylvania to Los Angeles, and boarded the next flight back to California. Once he’d returned, he drove to 3121, Prince’s rented house up in the Hollywood Hills, walked inside, found the amp, and flipped on the setting.

Prince was nowhere to be found.

Then he drove back to LAX, boarded another cross-country flight, and returned to Pennsylvania.

All of that, just to press a button for Prince.

Callous? Yeah. Exploitative? Of course. Selfish, arrogant, insensitive? Check, check, and check.

That was Prince. And yet I still love his music.

Can you separate the art from the artist?

 

Case #2: The Nebbish

I loved Annie Hall the first time I saw it. I remember that Bullets Over Broadway was an inspired and silly movie. I watched Vicki Cristina Barcelona twice in the theater. And Midnight in Paris was an irresistible little confection for any writer who loves the Golden Era of the 1920s.

The one thing that those movies all have in common? They were all written and directed by Woody Allen.

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Credit: David Shankbone via Flickr

I bring this up because he’s been rumored to have molested his adoptive daughter, Dylan Farrow, an accusation corroborated by his son Ronan Farrow. These allegations haven’t gone away either—these are the types of credible charges, from his own children, that make you think twice. Adding fuel to the rumors about his pedophilic ways is the fact that Allen seduced and married another one of his adopted stepdaughters, Soon-Yi Previn.

I’m inclined to believe that he’s a pervert who should be in prison. At the same time, we all know that he’s an artistic powerhouse.

Can you separate the art from the artist?

 

Case #3: The Fop

At the end of the nineteenth century, England’s most famous playwright and essayist, Oscar Wilde, was convicted of and jailed for “gross indecency with men”.

oscar_wilde,_1882

Oscar Wilde

He was gay. That was his only crime. He had an affair with a young man in his twenties, Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas.

Can you separate the art from the artist? In 2019, this one is a no-brainer. Of course we can.

But the goalposts are always shifting. Once you commit to judging the art by the artist, you’re committing to a lot of uncomfortable potential contradictions.

 

We Can’t Know Who They Are Anyways

Boycotting good art produced by bad people instantly makes hypocrites of all of us. This is for two reasons.

The first reason is that social norms and customs change by culture and by era. The condemnation of Wilde’s art in 1895 looks silly a century later.

The second reason is even stronger. We cannot know the people behind all the art that we consume.

Be honest: Do you research the lives of the creators of all the art that you consume? Do you read the biography of pop auteur Zedd before you consent to listen to his newest song? Did you analyze the personal life of the Harlequin author who was responsible for your favorite romance series? Do you demand a full background check on the writing staff of a Netflix series before you watch it?

Most of us don’t even know the names of those creators, much less their backgrounds. And even if you think you do, you don’t—because a lot of creative industries employ ghostwriters and ghost producers. I speak from experience, having worked on many, many different ghostwriting projects in the last few years.

Also, the people at the top of our media companies are often horrific human beings. Have you seen the movie The Jazz Singer? My Fair Lady? To Have and Have Not? Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Any Jimmy Cagney movie? Looney Tunes cartoons? All were made under the reign of Jack Warner at his studio, Warner Bros—and Jack was a famously toxic piece of shit who enjoyed humiliating and hurting people. He deserted his first wife, fired his own son without cause, and was estranged from his own brother until death. Most of those titans of the old Hollywood studio system were like that. As director Gottfried Reinhardy put it, “Harry Cohn was a sonofabitch but he did it for business; he was not a sadist. Louis B. Mayer could be a monster, but he was not mean for the sake of meanness. Jack was.”

Will you now boycott all entertainment produced during Hollywood’s golden era? Is your moral backbone that strong? Probably not.

More recently, a man named Scott Rudin has produced just about every intelligent film adaptation of the last twenty-five years—The Social Network, The Truman Show, No Country For Old Men, Julie & Julia, Revolutionary Road, There Will Be Blood, Notes On A Scandal, etc. He’s accomplished this all despite being an abusive prick. By some accounts, he churns through nearly 50 assistants per year. He routinely throws objects at people’s heads. His assistants literally used to measure the length of his phone cord so that they would know how far to stand back in case they tripped his wire. Another former assistant has framed the pieces of five different early-2000s flip phones that Rudin snapped in his frequent fits of rage.

Did you know any of that? Probably not. Will you continue to see Rudin’s future work? Most likely. He makes damn good art.

This begs the question: Why do we sometimes care about the artist—and sometimes not?

The short answer is this: Media attention. The news media decide, for whatever reason, to zero in on the bad behavior of one individual artist. Then there’s a stampede to condemn. Everybody’s hide gets ruffled, books get burned, movies get deleted, bad reviews get written.

You may approve of this tsk-tsking, but to me this is herd behavior. It serves as a tool for some people to make themselves feel morally superior to others. In some cases, condemning the Bad Guy is nothing more than a status marker. It separates the ones at the center of the herd from the ones at the margins.

Granted, a bad person should be punished by the legal system. But you won’t hear me crowing about it–the same way you won’t hear me crowing about non-artists getting their comeuppance.

My simple response, if I hear about the immoral acts of some artist, is to make sure they don’t get my money ever again. I may still enjoy their art in other ways, but I won’t let them know it.

 

Why You Shouldn’t Care About Me

Other than travel, my life is not particularly interesting. That’s why I choose not to write about it, other than posting occasional photos on social media about my international journeys.

This isn’t a smoke screen either. There’s no skeletons in this closet, no secrets at all. I’m from a healthy ordinary middle-class family and am just not built for wild or bad behavior. In fact, my future memoir would be the most boring book in the world. Eleven pm Friday night, and I got back to my dorm room and changed into my shorts and picked up my guitar. Boy, it’d been a hard week of reading. My God, I’d have to write it as stream-of-consciousness poetry just to get anybody interested enough to finish the first chapter.

Oh, believe me, I’ve fantasized about acting differently. I’ve imagined someday descending into a lost weekend worthy of William S. Burroughs. Picture it: The seedy motel. The needle plunging the heroin in the space between my toes. The empty cartons of Chinese food strewn about the room. The cigarette butts in the carpet. The strung-out hooker with smeared mascara and an off-the-shoulder t-shirt passed out across the filthy mattress.

Has any of this ever happened? Hell no. The most self-destructive thing I’ve ever done is steal Oreos from a hotel minibar.

From what I’ve seen, most other writers are pretty much the same. We lead really ordinary lives. There are a few exceptions, like Hunter S. Thompson, who forget that it’s their writing, not their personal lives, that are supposed to be fascinating. In his career, Thompson lost sight of this distinction and got swallowed up by his own media-enhanced rock-star self. His writing until 1971 was terrific—Hell’s Angels was great, and of course Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is an American classic. But his writing after 1971 was a snooze. He used all his energy building his persona, giving outrageous speeches, gobbling mountains of drugs, running quixotic campaigns for local sheriff, being generally outrageous. There was nothing left in the tank for the words.

Another issue is that those writers who exclusively use the confessional mode don’t have much to say after a while. They eventually run out of material. It’s not exactly news that Mary Karr, for instance, is a brilliant memoirist—but she’s written three memoirs now. One, two, three. I have to believe that she’s spinning her wheels in the confessional mode. Her poetry is marvelous, but in terms of prose, what else ya got for us, Mary? I say that as a fan.

To me, it’s best if we writers look outside ourselves, because the best stories can’t all happen to us individually. The best stories happen to millions of people all over the world, every hour of every day. Which is why I say…

It’s a big world. Let’s go see it all.

Recommended Reading: October 2018

/ J.A. Jernay

Earlier this year, I realized that I had been reading fewer books by unfamiliar authors. This hasn’t happened because of a newly shortened attention span. My mental state hasn’t yet deteriorated into a series of electrocuted-frog twitches. True, Twitter is a huge time sink, but it hasn’t changed my neural wiring or anything.

No, here are the real reasons:

  1. As a writer and editor, I stare at words for hours and hours every day. At night I often need a break.
  2. During the last few years, I’ve grown into the mentality of a professional. This means that I’m tougher on other people’s books now than I used to be. I’m not necessarily proud of this.
  3. We’ve living in a golden era of television. Between Netflix and Amazon alone, we have hundreds of thousands of hours of high-quality filmed entertainment. For example, most fiction I’ve read recently can’t hold a candle to The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, whose scenes are brilliantly written, and which won enough Emmy trophies to build an army.

Anyways, it hit me earlier in the summer that I missed that habit of adventurous reading. You know, the one that I’ve enjoyed most of my life.

Rec Read image-Hayley Finn

(photo: Hayley Finn via Flickr)

So I assembled a list of books to read. Many websites such as Goodreads will help you curate a list like this, but I did it the old-fashioned way—on a Microsoft Word document. (Side note: Twenty-five years of market dominance, and Word still shows no signs of wearing out.)

I decided that the list would consist of either

  • writers whom I’ve always known about but had never read
  • writers whom I hadn’t read in the last ten years and had forgotten about.

Unfortunately, I discovered that my patience for other people’s fiction is still pretty thin. Again, I’m not proud of this. Several fiction titles I abandoned without finishing and won’t mention them here, with one exception.

Here are the six titles I enjoyed the most. All links Amazon US:

 

Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee

In so-called “literary fiction”, voice is everything. (Because plot usually doesn’t exist.) In Disgrace, the author’s voice is strong on the page—solid, serious, and with something always swimming just below the surface. Maybe that’s Coetzee’s Dutch Afrikaaner background, maybe that’s just his reported cantankerousness. Anyways, this book was appealing and weird and yet kind of off-kilter at the same time. This despite the fact that the first half of the story itself—a college professor who has an affair with a student and loses his job—felt incredibly tired. It made me think of Tom Wolfe’s admonition to writers to get the hell out of the ivory tower and see how people actually live for a change.

Halfway through, however, the story took a strange twist, and suddenly I found myself in a racially provocative sequence of scenes in rural South Africa involving the protagonist’s grown lesbian daughter. I was motivated to finish this one, and I think I can see why he won the Nobel Prize a few years back. It was unpredictable and fairly masterful, even if Coetzee doesn’t seem like the kind of guy I’d want to share a coffee with. Still, I’d definitely read another book by him. I remember Mark Sarvas enthusiastically recommending his title Summertime on his now-defunct blog The Elegant Variation.

 

My Misspent Youth, by Meghan Daum

For my money, Daum is the best essayist in America. I haven’t read another book of essays that were so nimble and supple. Her insights are as sharp as a diamond cutter’s tool, and each essay still feels contemporary. I say still, because it’s to my eternal shame that it took me nearly twenty goddamned years to finally get around to reading this book, her first.

My Misspent Youth is a collection of essays about Daum’s partly successful, partly agonizing time as a young person struggling in New York City, which ended when she fled to the hinterlands of Nebraska before the age of thirty. If you’re smart and educated and thoughtful and ambitious, and if you’ve ever moved to a new city as a twentysomething (and suffered financially for it), you’ll recognize yourself in these pages. I particularly loved “Variations on Grief”, her bitter essay about a friend who died young without having accomplished anything in his life. That was uniquely honest.

These days Daum apparently runs an occasional essay-writing class in New York. If her talent can rub off, I’d say don’t walk, but run to her doorstep, and beg for a sprinkling of that magic fairy dust.

 

Sabrina, by Nick Drnaso

A graphic novel about the murder of a young woman, and her boyfriend’s sense of grief as he goes to a friend’s house in Colorado to recover. I’m no expert on graphic novels, but I always enjoy them as long as nobody’s wearing colored tights, flying through the air, or shooting webs out of their palms.

Drnaso’s last book Beverly got a lot of attention, and though I don’t know that one, I can report that Sabrina is worth your time. The illustrations are pretty small and basic—honestly, there are better visual artists out there—but the story nonetheless had me turning the page. He’s not afraid to draw characters in mundane situations, which heightens suspense. He’s also not afraid to move to the next scene without resolving that tension. This may lead some people to derisively label the book “arty”, and make snide comparisons to David Lynch, but to me this unpredictability is a draw. It’s a story that takes its time and is not easily summarized.

 

Waiting, by Ha Jin

I need two things from fiction. First, if it’s a story about a radically non-Western culture, I need someone from my own culture to serve as an interpreter. You know, a Virgil to be my guide. Second, I also prefer writers with strong authorial voices, who aren’t afraid to make statements of opinion in the book.

Neither of these preferences should come as any surprise, since both of these qualities define Ainsley Walker, the protagonist in my own Ainsley Walker Gemstone Travel Mystery series. Let’s be honest. In the end, much of fiction really just boils down to a matter of taste. This pisses off critics to no end, but it’s really true. That zombie apocalypse novel with the ugly cover may seem awful to you and me—but to a twelve-year-old boy who can count the total number of books he’s ever read on his left hand, that bloody zombie tale is going to be a great book. He’ll remember it for the rest of his life.

Unfortunately, this book didn’t have either of my two preferred qualities, so it wasn’t for me. Waiting is a story about a man in China who waited eighteen years to divorce so he could marry his nurse. Why did I include it on this list? Because Jin, who wrote the book in English, was born and raised in China. Holy Christ in a Happy Meal, is that all kinds of crazy talent. I mean, though I speak Spanish well, I can’t begin to imagine writing a professional-quality book in that language, much less winning the National Book Award for it. If he wrote Waiting by himself, Jin is otherworldly.

 

The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories, by Ernest Hemingway

There’s nothing new I can say about Hemingway that hasn’t already been stated a thousand times by a thousand critics over the last century. What I can say is that I hadn’t read a word by him in a decade. I didn’t care much for his writing when I was younger, though that changed at age twenty-five, when I picked up A Moveable Feast, which stands to me as a supremely artistic way of telling a memoir, even if he didn’t finish it. (Or maybe because he didn’t finish it.)

Anyways, this particular title is a collection of various short stories, a couple of which were frankly boring, but most of which were vintage Hemingway, like the famous title story. Yes, he displays some sexism, and he chooses to draw women in a consistently negative light, but you should know that about him by now. Complaining about Hemingway’s machismo is like going to the hardware store and complaining that you can’t find any milk. You went to the wrong store.

As I was reading, however, I was fixated mostly on his style, trying to imagine how radical it must’ve looked to an America that was still in the throes of the Nathaniel Hawthorne type of hundred-word sentences, a chain of dependent clauses parading across the page nose-to-tail like a procession of pigs. Hemingway’s grandest achievement was to hack away a lot of that linguistic overgrowth, and as a result he became probably the most consequential writer in our history. Today, asking a writer to define Hemingway’s influence is like asking a fish to describe water.

 

No is Not Enough, by Naomi Klein

Ten years ago, at the end of a trip to Europe, I found a copy of Klein’s then-new title The Shock Doctrine in the English-language section of a bookstore in Madrid. I didn’t have anything else to read on the long flight home, so I bought it.

I read the book for eight straight hours. It was a brilliant, profound look at how governments and organizations exploit natural crises for their own ends. I was aghast at the Chicago School of Economics’ influence upon Latin American politics, especially in Chile. The stuff about the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina also put into context a lot of stuff happening during the W era.

This title, published last year, isn’t quite as good, but it’s not because of her lack of analysis, style, or passion—those are all still there. It’s just that this title is less shocking (ba-dum!) and less original. It’s a fairly predictable attack on the horrible actions of the current U.S. administration. Watching her take shots at the lizards in power felt too easy, maybe because they’ve already being well and deservedly ambushed by many other lesser intellects.

Klein is an unabashed leftist—she sits on the board of The Nation—which is too far out to la izquierda for my own tastes. Still, I found myself nodding in vigorous agreement as she identifies and discusses the two biggest threats to global civilization: income inequality and climate change. I’m still a fan, but I’d beg Klein to turn her enormous brain towards issues that are less obvious than the treasonous rat-bastards currently running the federal government. That crime family are going to be short-timers anyways; it’s Klein’s big-picture analysis of long-term trends that makes her so great.

 

 

 

 

Tom Wolfe: An Appreciation

/ J.A. Jernay

Millions of people were inspired by the writings of Tom Wolfe, and I was one of them. When he died last spring at the age of 88, I lost my one and only role model.

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Tom Wolfe: 1930-2018

A little background: My college career wasn’t the four-year-long bacchanal that popular culture has painted college to be. Instead, it was four-and-a-half very difficult years of studying Cicero, medieval and Renaissance texts, neoclassical books of commonplaces, and other bits of fluff.

However, my profs routinely complained that my writing was too entertaining, too polemical, and sometimes too original. They were right. I couldn’t speak or write that weird hypersensitive academic dialect, which is why I usually saw comments such as very insightful but style is inappropriate scribbled on the margins of my papers. As a result, I knew that there was no way on God’s blue marble that I’d ever work in a university.

Then I discovered Tom Wolfe. He was already almost seventy years old, but in his writing I thought I glimpsed a reflection of myself fifty years in the future.

So Tom Wolfe became my guiding light. An arrow pointing the way. My one and only role model.

“The problem with fiction is that it has to be plausible. That’s not true with nonfiction.” – Tom Wolfe

I gobbled up everything I could find about him. In his twenties, Wolfe too had been a stylish and talented and nonacademic writer while pursuing his Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale. He too had gotten the same tsk-tsking comments from his professors. He too bristled at the restrictions, leaving academia as soon as he could.

This was candy to my eyes. I saw that what Wolfe had done, I could do too, in my own way, somehow, sometime in the future.

Like him, I went into journalism. I chose the field partly because it’s what writers often do, and partly because that was how Wolfe had started his career. In fact, he’d spent a few years at The Washington Post, working on the Metro and Foreign desks. I too got a job at the Post, coincidentally also working on the same Metro and Foreign desks.

However, Wolfe left the paper in his early thirties and moved to New York, where his writing career immediately exploded (along with his propensity for outlandish suits). Mine did not. Here’s why.

  1. At twenty-two years old, I was way too young to succeed as a writer. To write good nonfiction or realistic fiction, you flat-out need to be older. That’s not true for other genres. Fantasy writers, for example, do often succeed when quite young.
  2. My skills still needed work. I’d placed in a short story contest sponsored by Scott Fitzgerald’s estate, but that was a matter of beginners’ luck. I really didn’t get the hang of fiction until age thirty. (And my skills will always need work.)
  3. Three, the media market had totally changed in the forty years since Wolfe had burst out in a fireball of success.

That third point is so very crucial. In the nineteen sixties, there were about ten radio stations and three television channels in every major media market. That was it, nothing else. On the print side, the newspaper business was thriving—there were thousands across the nation, and they were mostly solvent, supported by classified ads and retail advertising. The magazine industry was more or less the same. The book industry relied totally on the “produce” model in which a book was seen as basically a head of lettuce, existing for only a few weeks before going bad and being remaindered.

Whoo boy, have things changed.

On the good side, the average American citizen is now inundated by buckets of news and entertainment every waking second.

On the bad side, the average American citizen is now inundated by buckets of news and entertainment every waking second.

Wolfe enjoyed a couple more advantages as well. One was that he was born in 1930, and thereby escaped service in World War II. Think of this—if he’d been born even seven years earlier, he would’ve been drafted into the service, and the experience would have turned him into a Greatest War author like so many others, and he would’ve written about slogging through calf-deep mud with bullets whizzing past his ears and nights spent gnawing on hard cheese rinds and sleeping on the dirty floors of churches in miserable French villages.

Nope—not in his books! Instead, Wolfe hit his mid-thirties, a time when so many writers finally begin doing good work, in the mid-nineteen sixties—the exact moment when our national social fabric started to unravel. And so that time period became his material, with its many peculiarities.

His other advantage was the fact that he made his name in the Sunday newspaper supplements, thin magazines that were disposable and whose editors gave Wolfe room to experiment. They existed for only a few decades and are almost totally extinct today.

HE WASN’T PERFECT

Before going further, I do have small criticisms of Wolfe.

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One, his output was slow, at least to my eyes. He only published a large book every few years or so. For instance, A Man in Full took him eleven years and clocked in at 370,000 words. Do the division, and you see that he only wrote about 35,000 words per year during that time. For comparison’s sake, I usually write about 500,000 words per year on various novels, ghostwriting projects, editing projects, academic exams, emails, blog posts, and other errata. So in that sense, the pupil has exceeded the master.

Of course, it’s true that quantity does not equal quality—but it’s also true that lack of quantity doesn’t equal quality either. To my eyes, there is a basement level of word production below which we start to wonder—is this person still a writer? Or has he become that ickiest of terms, an author?

What’s the difference, you ask? It’s a question of verb tense: a writer writes, while an author has written.

Some of my favorite writers have gotten sucked into teaching jobs and become authors, never or only rarely returning to their careers. For example, I loved the book Paint It Black by Janet Fitch, but she took her sweet time—eleven full years, same as Wolfe did above—before publishing her next book, The Revolution of Marina M., in 2017. Assuming the new one is a normal length of 70,000 words, the math tells us that she was writing at the breakneck pace of 530 words per month, or 18 words per day. I haven’t read the new book yet, and part of me isn’t really inclined to do so.

Another strange thing about Wolfe is that he never wrote in a series, which is a bit of an anomaly for a bestselling fiction author. Going all the way back to James Fenimore Cooper, you can see that series have always been a popular vehicle for writers. Hell, more so-called “literary” names than Wolfe, such as the highbrow John Updike, wrote in a series. Even the Nobel Prize-winning Southern Gothic whiskey-swilling mad genius William Faulkner wrote in a kind of series, knitting all of his work together in the imaginary setting of Yoknapatawpha County. But Wolfe never did anything like that. That’s partly because he came out of nonfiction journalism, which doesn’t do series. It’s also because his work was so strongly based on different locations.

Different locations, you say?

WHAT I STOLE FROM HIM

Full confession: The Ainsley Walker Gemstone Travel Mystery series would one hundred percent never have existed without Tom Wolfe’s work.

He was my biggest inspiration as a writer, by far, nobody else was even close—and this series has been my attempt to carry his intelligent, funny, entertaining style into new places. I mean places quite literally. Wolfe is still living rent-free in my mind as I visit and research locations such as Uruguay and Argentina and Puerto Rico and Portugal and many, many more yet to come. In fact, he drilled the importance of research in every interview he ever gave. “Nothing fuels the imagination more than real facts do,” Wolfe told the AP in 1999. “As the saying goes, ‘You can’t make this stuff up.'”

“I do novels a bit backward. I look for a situation, a milieu first, and then I wait to see who walks into it.” – Tom Wolfe

But I did consciously decide to do a few things differently. Here’s a quick list:

  • Ainsley Walker would be my recurring main character, an advantage Wolfe never had.
  • The series would feature the same external goal in every story—find the gemstone—another advantage he never had.
  • The sentences would be less complex and show-offy than Wolfe’s.
  • The chapters would be shorter than Wolfe’s.

So much else, however, I stole shamelessly from the man in the white suit.

  • Remember his colorful, larger-than-life characters, such as Reverend Bacon in Bonfire of the Vanities? I’ve been copying the vibrancy of that character, over and over, in different ways.
  • Remember how he used huge vocabulary words such as sternocleidomastoid muscle? I use them too, once in a while, particularly foreign words and phrases. He taught me to lift the reader up. It’s not insulting to occasionally use a big word, especially if you explain it with context.
  • Remember how the settings of his books played as large a role as the characters? New York, Atlanta, Duke University? I stole that convention too—but I didn’t limit myself to the U.S., the way Wolfe did. I’ve stupidly decided to write about every nation in the entire world.

All of this leads to a single question that has been circling my head for the last two decades: What would Tom Wolfe do if he were trying to make it as a writer right now?

From a business perspective, I guessed that he would’ve begun as a totally independent entity and written whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, held to nothing except his own high standards. This route would mean less money early in life (no advances from traditional publishers), but more money later in life, since books sell eternally now that the produce model has disappeared.

So, thinking of him, I chose that route. It seems to be working.

LOWER THE CURTAIN

Unfortunately, I cannot even name one other writer who inspired me as much as Wolfe did.

The only writer who might come close was Robert Penn Warren—but only for one book, his brilliant All the King’s Men. Michael Crichton’s scientific adventures featured great pacing and good research, but his work was lacking in character and dialogue. James Michener displayed huge ambition and obvious work ethic, but I always found his fiction to be honestly boring. (Warning: I’m a tough critic! Take my opinions with a grain of salt.) Still other classic fiction writers I’ve admired a lot, such as Flannery O’Connor or Agatha Christie or Raymond Chandler or Ernest Hemingway, never inspired me to emulate them.

But Tom Wolfe was a complete writer. Reading his passages over and over (particularly those in Bonfire) taught me how to write fiction—not from a methodical standpoint, but just through sheer osmosis. At risk of sounding like a vegan yoga teacher, I caught his vibes, man. Then I made them my own.

“What I try to do is re-create a scene from a triple point of view: the subject’s point of view, my own, and that of the other people watching—often within a single paragraph.” –Tom Wolfe

If you’re looking for a good title to start with, well, my favorites are everybody’s favorites, the biggest hits—The Right Stuff, Bonfire of the Vanities, and A Man in Full. People older than myself swear by The Electric Koolaid Acid Test, which was linguistically revolutionary but too druggy for me. In college, after I discovered the brilliant The Painted Word, I tracked down From Bauhaus to Our House in the stacks of my library by pulling up dusty old bound copies of Harper’s magazine from the late seventies, when the book first appeared serially in those pages. (I still don’t own a copy of that book, only the printed photocopies of the magazine.) In fact, I blame that book for kickstarting my small obsession with modern architecture. And while studying abroad at Oxford University, I remember finding The Kandy-Colored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby in a bookstore in London and reading it for hours until my back hurt. I only bought it after I’d finished.

As time went on, of course, I slowly grew apart from his work. You could say it was because Wolfe’s last few books, from 2004 onwards, were not quite as brilliant as before. You could say it was because I was changing. You could say many different things.

But that doesn’t take away the very, very important role he played at a very, very important juncture in my life.

This is the only author appreciation I’m going to write. You won’t see me memorializing any other writers, not like this. That’s partly because the ones I’ve liked the most have already died. But it’s also because none of the others mattered quite as much to my life and career as Tom Wolfe. And I’m doing my best to hopefully, possibly, maybe, someday, fingers crossed, if the good Lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise—match the master. That’s the goal, anyways. And even if that doesn’t ever quite happen, his example will push me to places I wouldn’t ever get to otherwise.

He was my one and only role model. Requiescat in pace, Tom.

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The Two Anthony Bourdains: Six Years Later

/ J.A. Jernay

We lost a big one today. Anthony Bourdain (1956 – 2018) was a hero of mine. I never wanted to be him — a former heroin addict and fairly unhappy chef — but I wanted to be like him, if that makes any sense. I think millions of people probably felt the same way.

He was a phenomenally good nonfiction writer, with the type of authorial voice that you can’t teach somebody. As a television host, he and his team wrestled Parts Unknown to the ground and made it the best program on all of television. I really mean that. It was one of the only television programs that successfully dismantled the myth of the Ugly American — and tried to teach Americans not to be scared of other people.

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You can read thousands of gorgeous remembrances of him all over the interwebz, but nonetheless let me share one more piece. My own.

In 2012, I wrote a blog post here, on this site, about Bourdain’s tortured soul. It was a short piece, and only the second time I’d ever posted anything here. Here it is again:

The Two Anthony Bourdains

He’s an astounding writer.  He used to be a good cook.  And he’s been making good television for almost a decade now.

But Anthony Bourdain has an inner struggle.  A cleavage in his soul.

One half of him, the part born and raised in New York City, the place where people’s emotional shields are as high, hard, and glossy as the glass curtain-walls of their skyscrapers, hasn’t changed.

That’s the wisecracking part.  You saw this exhibited best in the Sardinia episode, years ago, the skinny dude in the black Ramones t-shirt, crouched on a rock, unleashing his sarcasm-plated tongue on the local caper farmers — until they reamed him for using utensils.  The former junkie putting his own needs above others.

Dostoevsky called this a state of “laceration”.  It doesn’t translate so well into English, but I think he meant people who have been pierced, and are aching with pain.  In Bourdain’s case, of course, he “pierced” himself, over and over again, with a heroin needle.  And he’s still aching.

But the other half of his soul has been blooming.  You may remember the Brazilian episode, in Sao Paulo, in which — confronted with a really nice woman and her stew — he finally let down his guard, shed the New York tough-guy shell.  It can be seen in other episodes too, when his empathy quietly emerges, especially during segments with troubled people.  Those are my favorite moments.

As a fiction writer, I’ve been advised to plate my characters with armor, and then throw them into a pool.  It’s a fascinating metaphor.  The main character is forced to strip herself of her psychic armor—because if she doesn’t, she’ll drown, and the mission won’t get achieved.

Bourdain has been “stripping” in public for years—not of clothing, but of his own psychic armor.  And he’s still got years of television (and lots of psychic armor) to go.  It’ll be exciting to see if him continuing to change, and to explore the world, at CNN.

In the meantime, it’s a big world.  Go see it all.

Well, it’s still a big world. And you should still see it all. Without Bourdain, however, that task has just become a little bit harder.

RIP.

The Friend Zone

/ J.A. Jernay

Have you ever read a novel that, when it ended, you could remember more about the best friend than you could the main character?

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There’s a reason for that.

To explain, let me pull back the curtain. Most stories are about ordinary people going through extraordinary situations. In the end, though, they’re still ordinary people. In fact, that’s their appeal. Protagonists tend to be simple vessels for our empathy, and not very much more. This is especially true on the big screen. Matt Damon once said that main characters in movies should be “ciphers”, or zeroes. If you’ve seen or read the Jason Bourne series, then you know it doesn’t get more cipher-y than that. The guy literally has amnesia.

The friends, on the other hand … well, that’s where the spiky human spirit leaps up and shines. A sharp sidekick stands out in a sea of ciphers like a bright fork in a tray of pudding. Because of this, fictional friends often live longer and more intensely in our collective imagination than heroes do.

You can find hundreds of examples of this dynamic in every branch of storytelling. Prince Hal is just a prince, but Falstaff is so vivid that his name has become an adjective. Forget Frodo, he’s a snooze—we remember Samwise’s stolid and servile dedication to his friend. Tom Sawyer is remembered as a generally nice kid, but it’s his friend Huck Finn, that mischievous homeless trashy scamp, who stands out more brightly in our psyche.

All of this means that, very often, friends are more important than the protagonist.

Therefore, if you’re a writer, you’ve got to spend some time in the friend zone.

Some of these friends come prepackaged as archetypes. Say what you want about them, but archetypes exist for many reasons. One, they’re universally recognized. Two, they pop off the page in a way that protagonists don’t, because friends can be their own crazy selves when they’re at the margins of the story. Three, they don’t have to undergo change. A protagonist’s allies often end the journey the same way they began—maybe crude, maybe honest, or funny, or repressed. In fact, you can usually describe their personalities in adjective-noun pairs, such as the narcissistic salesperson.

Here’s an example from television. I dislike Sex and the City for a lot of different reasons, but the series does perfectly illustrate this principle. Carrie Bradshaw, the series’ protagonist, is a cipher. All we really know is that she loves spending money on shoes. Around her is an orbit of three stalwart friends: the intelligent libertine (Samantha), the traditional naif (Charlotte), and the cynical careerist (Miranda). (Note the adjective-noun for each.) Those characters are more memorable than Carrie because they’re defined. Carrie spends every episode trying to find her own identity, but her friends have already discovered theirs.

(As a side note, did you ever notice that the exact same four characters are found in The Golden Girls? The two casts parallel each other almost perfectly. Carrie is Dorothy, Samantha is Blanche, Charlotte is Rose, and Miranda is Sophia. This probably wasn’t an accident.)

One of the bibles of storytelling is  The Writer’s Journey, by Christopher Vogler. It’s one of those books that humbles you. When you read it, you realize that other people, smarter people, walked the path of storytelling long before you ever did. In fact, I’d say this guy Vogler figured out the craft of story better than anybody else I’ve ever read, including the famous Joseph Campbell. His book is a reference point for all writers, in every genre, in every format.

Here’s what Vogler has to say about friends: “Allies do many mundane tasks but also serve the important function of humanizing the heroes, adding extra dimensions to their personalities, or challenging them to be more open and balanced. Allies in fiction suggest alternate paths for problem-solving and help round out the personalities of heroes, allowing expression of fear, humor, or ignorance that might not be appropriate for the hero.”

Perfectly said.

 

Ainsley, the Half-Cipher

Books, however, have different strengths than films do.

It’s harder for a main character in a book to be a total cipher, thanks to interior monologue. The nature of the medium—words, on a page or in pixels—brings us easily into a person’s innermost world. We can hear the protagonist narrating all of her thoughts. Movies and television can’t do that, at least not easily. They have to use awkward devices, such as voiceover. Or the producer hopes and prays that a brilliant actor will sign on to the project.

In the Ainsley Walker Gemstone Travel Mystery series, the protagonist is more than a cipher. If you’ve read any of the titles, you know where Ainsley stands on just about everything that is going on around her–because she tells us! The woman has opinions. This is the benefit of using the third-person limited perspective.

(It’s true that a writer can achieve the same with a first-person perspective, but first-person tends to work best with protagonists who are either a bit whack-a-doodle or outright liars, and with stories that are less plotted. For example, I love Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, but good luck describing that plot to a stranger. There isn’t one.)

So here’s the contradiction: Though we know all of Ainsley’s thoughts, we don’t know much about Ainsley’s background. Even I don’t know much! We only know what she wants to tell us. She’s like the cool French girl you met in the hostel in Amsterdam during your semester abroad back in college and you ended up hanging out with her for almost a week but never learned anything about her personally except the fact that she liked OG Kush better than Super Silver Haze. Ainsley keeps you, me, and the world, at arm’s length.

Think back to the series. Here’s what we know: Ainsley’s father passed away from cancer when she was a girl, her ex-husband disappeared after law school, and she used to be a state track-and-field champion. She’s also had a checkered work history. And that’s it. That’s literally all we’re told. She never reveals anything about her early life—not her birthplace, not her mother, not her siblings, not her extended family, not her education. We don’t even know her real hair color.

And that’s the way it should be. You, the readers, can project what you’d like onto Ainsley Walker. Maybe in the future we’ll all find out, in extremely granular detail, her complicated relationship with her mother, or her deep insecurities, or her turbulent adolescence. But that would remove some of the mystery.

With Ainsley Walker, you are free to fill in some of the blanks.

 

International Relation(ship)s

More than anything, it’s her many friends and allies who help define Ainsley Walker. Let’s revisit a few of them.

Spoiler alert! You may want to skip this part if you haven’t yet read all the Gemstone Travel Mystery titles.

In The Uruguay Amethyst (link: Amazon US), Ainsley befriends an extroverted hair stylist, Sofia, who becomes her travelling companion through the second half of the book. She is assisted by Bernabé, an elderly lecherous jeweler. Both friends serve different purposes. Sofia helps Ainsley accept her new identity as an international traveler, while Bernabé helps her physically achieve the mission.

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Both are static characters. Sofia finds out that, despite her dreams of travel, she is meant to be in the Montevideo hair salon, and no reader can imagine Bernabé being anything other than himself. Their personalities are set in stone. Meanwhile, Ainsley plays the dynamic character as she tries to achieve two goals: one external (find the gemstone) and one internal (find her identity).

But sometimes the peripheral characters are the dynamic ones, and the main character remains static. The Puerto Rico Pearl is a good example. In this book, Ainsley befriends Luis, an unemployed poet and handyman who drives her around the island searching for the brooch. She also meets Orlando, an obese scholar of Caribbean pirate lore who is trying to free himself from his enormous private stash of historical documents.

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This story wouldn’t be the same without either of them—but Orlando is the one who undergoes a significant change. Ainsley remains the same, beginning to end.

In The Spain Tourmaline, however, Ainsley returns to claim the role of the dynamic character, as she slowly must confront her hostility to the killing of animals. First, despite her newfound vegetarianism, she is forced to eat jamón ibérico. Second, she’s forced to watch a bullfight. Third, she’s finally forced to kill an animal.

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I actually wrote this three-step ladder of escalating internal conflict before I knew anything else about the story. Ainsley’s friend, Gabriel, the bullfighter’s assistant, is static. He exists to carry her along this path of self-discovery.

It’s been exciting to discover that my protagonist and her allies can switch between the two types of roles. It keeps things unpredictable. Sometimes Ainsley’s a deep human being, going through wrenching internal changes—see, for example, The Camino Crystal.

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At other times, she’s like Leo DiCaprio in The Revenant, simply battling for survival—see, for example, The North Korea Onyx.

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Whether static or dynamic, her allies are just as important to the series as Ainsley herself.

 

A New Idea For Short Stories

Some writers set their series in the same location (say, a small town), and are therefore able to revisit the same cast of characters in book after book after book. Many readers love this, as they get to visit old friends with every new title.

This isn’t possible for my protagonist, since she travels to a different farflung international location in every title. Still, it seems a shame to dream up and portray a compelling friend–and then abandon that character forever after one book.

So I’ve been kicking around an idea.

Maybe it would be attractive to write and publish a series of short stories or novelettes about Ainsley’s many friends and allies? I’m thinking one title for each. It could be a great way for you readers to revisit some of your favorite characters from the series, and it could be a great way for me to revisit them too. Plus it would extend the number of titles in the series.

Keep in mind, I wouldn’t write an entire novel about a side character, because authors sometimes confuse their readers when they start publishing seven different series, all semi-interwoven with non-chronological timelines and characters running in and out of each. At one conference, I’ve actually seen an author put up a Powerpoint of an incredibly complex flow chart in an attempt to explain how his body of work was arranged. (It kind of looked like this.)

This series, however, wants to stay simple. For you, the reader.

Still, I don’t think a smattering of seven or eight short stories would clutter things up too much, especially if the titles are clear and brief, such as “The Basque Chef”. If that’s something you’d like to see more of, or if you have any other ideas, feel free to let me know via the comments below, via email (j dot a dot jernay@gmail.com), or via other social media such as Twitter. I love hearing from readers.

In the meantime, it’s a big world. Let’s go see it all.

[photo credit: Mick C via Flickr]