The Novel Resurrected, Maybe

Two posts down I was doing “Streets of Laredo” over my novel: one last bouquet and I let the clods fall. Here two weeks later that’s all changed, thanks to some new-found friends in a new-found writers’ group. Happens to be hosted in the UK, but most of the stuff translates pretty well. (Will it work in the other direction? That first sentence up there may tell us.)

With encouragement from the group I’ve decided to self-publish. What that means is that I now have to eat some of my words about self-publishing. If you have, or if you do, read or read what I wrote about that you’ll see why it’s going to be hard to swallow. Publicly reversing your position on something you’ve been sarcastic about isn't easy to carry off. I'll find a way to rationalize it, though.

There does remain one last consideration before publishing; I have to make sure I haven’t libeled someone. There’s the off-chance, if a lot of people were to read the story (!) that someone might say, “That character sounds like my Uncle Herbie, and you’ve insulted him.”

Back when -- and it does seem like a long time ago -- when I had the idea I would be working with a real publisher, I assumed an editor there would note the potential problem and it would be referred to a huge legal department. That’s not the case any more; I’m on my own now. I have sought advice, and what I’ve heard so far is that you can’t libel a dead person, and given the time setting of the novel, “Uncle Herbie” should be dead by now. A good thing, too, because he comes off looking pretty bad in my story. 

And there’s another startling development that’s come with membership in the new group. I’ve been invited to send the link to this blog. Readership could go from zero to a positive number. I’m not sure I could handle that.

LinkedIn, Again

      

This business about not having a picture on  my LinkedIn profile had become a problem. I’d almost been turned down for membership in a writers’ group because of a “blank avatar.” (If you don’t post a picture, the default is a gray unisex head-and-shoulders silhouette that looks like an FBI firearms training target. Linkers like to call it an avatar.)

The thinking is confusing for me on several levels.

First -- If there were ever a case where a picture is not worth a thousand words it’s in a profile you consult to see if that person is experienced in the work you want done. Why do you need to see what someone (ostensibly) looks like when you can read all his/her qualifications for whatever business you want to conduct? 

If you think you’re going to get an insight into someone’s character from their picture, forget it. No one is going to put up an unflattering picture. Do you suppose some people might post something less than current? From a school yearbook, maybe?

 Or - is not having a picture cause for  suspicion? Do we need to  eliminate the threat that there might be a space alien or a multinational corporation lurking behind the individual’s name?

And absence of a mug shot is only one offense on Li. A shortage of “connections” can mark you as suspect, too.

Li is all about connections. You can “connect” with others and they can “connect” with you. There are 300 million people on the rolls, so you can see the potential. But for practical purposes, how many connections is enough?

There are people with 500+ connections. (Bragging rights are cut off at that point.) Really? How do you keep up with that many friends or even acquaintances?            I suppose you could email a “hello” to 50 a week for a couple of months, but it would be time to start over by then.

I used to find, before I learned more about controlling things, that some of my paltry 40 or 50 connections had accreted without my knowing who they were -- possibly chance pressings of a button in the course of a surfing session. I wonder how much of that might be part of it for those 500+ guys.

On the other side of the equation, occasionally someone will ask to connect with me, and it's a flattering thing to be chosen from 300 million people. 

The avatar situation has a solution, too. It’s permissible to use the photo space to put up some other kind of illustration besides your face.  Some people have company logos or other designs there. Since I don’t think my mug shot will win me any business, I’ve taken advantage of the loophole and posted an avatar of my own. It’s a picture of  a diamond, about a hundred-carat job. Wotthehell.

Death of a Novel, Maybe

  

Not only has the novel nibble reported in July become null -- I’m on notice that I don’t have a novel at all. I have a novella. Forty-six-thousand words does not a novel make, I’m told, and I may have been sealing my own fate by specifying that number in the pitches I’ve been sending to agents.

This leaves me in a quandary. The work is too long to try to pass off as a short story but too short for a comic strip. (I had actually considered that format for it at one time, but comic strips go on for years or, in some cases, decades, while this story has an end.) 

Trying to force something into a new format is unpleasant work. It would mean creating new adventures for the characters to satisfy the comic strip form or adding thousands more words to make it a conventional novel. Either would be like patching together a Frankensteinian monster; it might walk, but you wouldn’t want to spend time with it. Might individual chapters, excerpted, make coherent stories? Maybe, but it would be by lucky coincidence at best.   

There is a last resort: self-publishing. It used to be called “vanity” publishing, but like many other things it’s been renamed and made respectable, the literary equivalent of “erectile dysfunction.” I've always held out against it as being an admission of defeat: your work couldn’t make it in the competitive arena.

 I believe there have been instances of self-published books going on to become wonderfully successful, but it’s so rare as to be comparable to winning the lottery. There must be countless books in print, sort of, with readership in the single digits, slightly more for authors with large families. I prefer not to put myself in that category, especially since my circle of relatives has greatly diminished over the years.

The saving of the situation is that not being published, while it’s a disappointment, isn’t a crushing defeat, because I’m not a novelist. I’m a business/technical writer who felt a story coming on one time and put it down on paper. Maybe it’s time to put it down altogether. Appropriate; it’s about animals.           

Profiles and Dumb Questions

Occasionally I write profiles of people and companies. Haven’t made it into The New Yorker yet, but I have been featured in Air Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration News and Paint and Coatings Industry  -- so there.

There are (or used to be)  publications like those for every industry. Usually there’d be two or three in each, because someone in the business is the CEO, someone else is the technical expert behind the product or service, and there’s a purchasing agent and the marketing department, even if it's a one-man company and they’re all the same guy. You could slant the writing to the interests of each in the publication that catered to each. Enterprising business writers traditionally made their living emphasizing different aspects of a basic story for different audiences. I guess they’d call it “repurposing” now.   

For reasons I have to think back about to explain, I’ve always preferred writing for trade publications like those rather than consumer publications. Pay is less and exposure is nil, but it just seems there’s something more …solid…about it. Those business book editors gave you specific assignments and expected pertinent information back. You weren’t going to slip a wad of “content” past them.

The profile assignment would usually be someone selected for his or her reputation in the industry or maybe for something newsworthy they’d done. It’s where one of my specialties, the dumb question, comes into play. 

Dumb questions are the secret behind being able to go, with nothing but scribbling ability, into an interview in a business or a technical operation you may know nothing or very little about and come out with a story. I’m good at asking dumb questions. The skill part of course is asking the right dumb questions. At the end, you organize what you’ve learned, consider your audience, decide on the “voice,” et voila -- your article.  

Those assignments are the easy ones. It’s trickier developing a profile about someone undistinguished or an “average” business. You have to believe -- I do -- there’s a story in every business. Maybe you can see what it is going in but, then, maybe it only emerges at the end, and when it’s finished and it’s good you feel like you’re reading it for the first time yourself. 

It’s a good feeling all around. Your editor is happy (you’ve met the deadline); the interviewee is delighted (he sees himself and his business reviewed, to the envy of his peers); and for a writer, it’s knowing you were skilled enough to find the story where maybe not everyone could. Very satisfying.

Young Tree, Old Gardeners

    

Just discovered a newly-planted tree in the greenbelt near my writing bench. It’s a skinny little thing, still with its training wheels: poles on each side wired to it, holding it erect. You can count the number of leaves on it -- I did, there are 12 -- although I don’t know what kind. They’re not three-pointed maples, so it’s pushing the limits of what I know about trees. They’re vaguely oak-looking, and I’m not even sure of that.

All the other trees in the neighborhood are fully leafed out; it’s first days of autumn but the weather is still summer around here. So this newbie really sticks out. You want to say encouraging things to it, like you might to an awkward teenager: “You’ll be beautiful in a little while. Hang in there.”

And it will flourish. I’m not the one who put it in the ground, a sure death sentence for anything green. We have really professional gardeners. Mostly they’re Chicano, 50s- and 60s-looking. Many look too old to be doing this kind of work in the heat -- we’re having some near-hundred-degree days as I write this -- but I’m sure  it’s not by choice. I think they get even with the world by running their hundred-decibel leafblowers.

They work all around us residents but manage to not be “of” us. Most don’t speak English or pretend not to, and I and the people   I know don’t speak Spanish. So if there is any contact it’s fleeting: pidgin Spanish-English and some gestures to indicate you’d like the flowerbed in front of your apartment weeded. If it’s heavier than that the English may be a little louder and a little slower, and maybe a ten-dollar-bill will change hands.

The gardening goes on  constantly; no blade of grass escapes to grow more than half an inch when our gardeners mow the lawns. At tree-trimming time you see them perched in the upper branches, running small chainsaws. The trees look denuded when they’re through, but I’ve learned they know what they’re doing because the trees come back better than before.

I can't help but think there must be a metaphor in the situation somewhere: the aging gardeners, some of whom look like they should be in retirement themselves, planting young trees in an old folks’ community. The trees will outlive all of us, residents and gardeners both. Young Tree, Old Gardeners

Emotion and Business-To-Business Marketing

There’s an  ongoing argument about emotion in business-to-business marketing, and it’s a fundamental one: Should emotion be used, yes or no. I’ve seen diametrically opposed arguments from people who are represented (or represent themselves) as gurus in the field.

This is an argument against.

Traditionally, business marketing has taken a pragmatic approach, focusing usually on helping prospects attain practical objectives by practical means. “Increase Your Profits With This Product.”

The people who advocate using emotion point out that businesses are run by people and people have emotions, so you should appeal to that when selling business products or services. “Here’s a Way To Become Rich.”

Basically the approach recasts “objectives” as “emotions.” You translate the business owner’s objective, “making money,” into an emotion, “greed”; the employee’s drive to advance on the job becomes pride.  But have you really changed anything?

Not if you’re in business for the conventional reasons. Your prospects have objectives or emotional needs, call them what you want, and you’re selling something that will help achieve or fulfill them.

How do you do that?

Not with emotion; you do it with hard information.

The entrepreneur makes additional profit (satisfies his greed) by increasing sales or lowering costs or getting to market ahead of the competition or offering higher quality for the price. Your task is to show how your product helps achieve those things. Demonstration, specifications, test results, case histories, ROI.

The manager advances to a better position (satisfies his pride) by demonstrating improved results for his department. Your product has to show him increased productivity. More efficient processes, new-technology equipment, better-trained employees.     

Sure, you can hook `em with emotion, but question-answering and problem-solving and customer benefits are what you’re going to need after that. Why not just get down to it?

And it’s no different even in the new-era work environment we hear about where profit may not be the driving motive; where success may be measured by other criteria. But the business going under won’t help save the environment or improve the human condition; it has to be viable to achieve the larger goals. The ends may have emotional roots, but the means remain stubbornly practical.

That’s not to say there can’t be any emotion at all in business marketing.

Say you’ve just solved a tough problem for an important customer. Your reward is practical -- a big sale and a lot of money  -- but there’s an emotional component in it, too. Depending on which camp you're in, it's the pleasure of knowing you have a profitable business, or the satisfaction of your greed.

The Compound

I’ve  discovered that some of my fellow residents in our little world refer to it as “The Compound.” It’s great shorthand and I think I’ll adopt it. Saves the trouble of trying to decide whether you want to say you live in a senior community or a retirement community (or an old folks’ community).

A century ago it wouldn’t have been a problem, because most people weren’t living to be old. Any that did probably ran out their string in a bedroom of the family domicile, now handed down to a son or daughter. That usually meant a son- or daughter-in-law as well, with all the potential friction that brought on as the oldster expropriated a grandchild’s bedroom and got a turn in the family bathroom. “Don’t be silly, Dad. It’s not an imposition.     You be quiet, Susie.”

The Compound has some 9000 residents in 17 "mutuals," groups of cooperative apartments. Apartments are 12 to a building, which is fine with me. Having grown up in rented apartments in New York tenements, I’d be uncomfortable without people on three sides of my walls making living noises.

You see some people sunk under blankets in wheelchairs, but the great majority are quite independent, and many are talented, as the annual arts and crafts fair demonstrated. There are more clubs  and activities than anyone can recite from memory, and new ones spring up when four or five enthusiasts in anything discover each other.

Income range is a reflection of the greater society: some got it, others don’t. The thing of it is, if you can afford to buy in in the first place, the living is easy. I think most people do it by selling a  single-family home and applying the proceeds. Monthly payments then are low, maintenance is taken care of, et voila! you’re retired.

A lot of us still work inconspicuously at computers or in the wood shop or at the ceramics kiln. Some of us of more authoritarian bent become security officers and get to drive around in white cars with lights that flash red on occasion. Many if not most of those occasions will be when assisting the paramedics, who are regular visitors. The county thoughtfully located a fire station literally just down the road  from us, so help is here within minutes. Sometimes even that’s too late, but the thought is comforting.

All in all, if it’s security you want -- and you find you do want help with that as your aim and gun hand become shakier -- this is the place.

Jean and I used to say “That’s for old people.We’ll never live in a place like that.” Right on the first part, wrong on the last.