David Thayer

Literary agent Donald Maass ran his breakout novel seminar in San Jose Costa Rica, no San Jose California this weekend. My sister attended, telephoning this reporter before the Saturday night mixer.

San Jose is in the heart of Silicon Valley and I wondered what genre dominated among the attendees. So close to Google HQ in Mountain View, so close to the Roman garrison at Monterey, yet distant from Hollywoodland, what are forty writers in the Valley likely to work on? When I attended Don’s class in Seattle it broke down this way: 21 fantasy, 12 traditional romance, 8 traditional sci-fi, 3 romantic sci-fi, 3 historical fantasy, and one noir thriller.

Terri has written a mystery that centers around a quilt show. She’s a quilter, so that makes sense. Her classmates are probably venture capital specialists or software engineers so I’d speculate the manuscripts breakdown like this: 1 quilter mystery, 4 venture capital thrillers, 11 vc romantic suspense, 7 fantasy Google Rules the World, 9 paranormal venture capital thrillers, 2 books about traffic, and 1 burning Angles, ruddy cheeks adventure about the sacking of York.

Donald Maass is an excellent teacher and the class is worthwhile if you fit one of the following categories: a working novelist, close to publication, or have two or three training novels under your belt. His focus is on writing novels that will perform well in the marketplace; if you’re at the beginner level, try reading The Career Novelist or the Breakout Novel Workbook before investing in the class.

They are greedy, these books that are not books, manuscripts, publishing’s dirty little secret, the incubation of the finished product, the handheld novel bound between two covers because as long as humans have thumbs they might as well use them. Novels in manuscript form are unruly, wilfull, hard to wrangle; individuals who shall remain nameless enjoy making notes on manuscripts, or putting blue ink through harmless paragraphs. Strangled by rubber bands they are sent on long journeys in shoe boxes.

Now we have the e-manuscript. With the press of a button hundreds of pages slip through the ozone. That’s not progress, not really. There are rubber bands lying around with little or nothing to do; they talk among themselves, rejoicing when emails go astray. They know their days are numbered. As for shoe boxes, well, those so inclined can always put their shoes in shoe boxes, although I don’t know why anyone would. Shoes are passive. They just sit and wait.

No more trips to the “lucky” post office, the one where manuscripts are flung into large sacks organized by zip code. Sure the rubber band might break or the buff colored envelope might get scrunched. These are acceptable risks. Sending your novel via email is more fraught with peril, especially when Mrs. Enid Braithewaite of the Outer Hebrides deletes you as spam. Don’t trust this new technology. Enid doesn’t. The American Rubber Band Society doesn’t either.

If you’re a fan of Richard Price you’re probably excited to the see the trailers for Freedomland on the tube. The novel is one of my favorite books even though the narrative has more stops than the number seven train from the Bronx, Price manages to whip the reader through long after the ending was a foregone conclusion. He’s written the screenplay which bodes well for the movie. Or does it?
Two of the more difficult topics a writer can tackle are race and child abuse. Freedomland has elements that make your hair stand on end as Lorenzo Council, a black detective, sets out to locate a missing child, taken by force during a car jacking. Because the action is set in the projects of North Jersey the assumption is the doers are bangers from the hood. The set up becomes a story about the world Lorenzo inhabits, a state within a state, the world of the Armstrong projects, black, violent and dismal.

My reaction to Freedomland was complicated by remembering ads for the old theme park, ads as cheezy and weird in memory as Murray the K claiming to be the Fifth Beatle, as disjointed as an afternoon in the Shea Stadium parking lot with a friend who sold hot dogs. The wind never stops off Jamaica Bay and we dodged flying objects dealing out the franks, which is how I felt reading the book. If that make any sense to you  go to the head of the line.

Amazing blogger tricks: they read, they write, they may be on the same subway car or freeway that you’re on right now. Who are they? Bloggers, my friends. They confound everyone with their ability to assimilate into society at large. “They look like us,” Professor Dagesham Moriarity of Think Tanks Ltd. “Bloggers may one day learn to reproduce.”

Blogger offspring will know how to add links to their sites before they develop other skills such as speech. “They may never speak as their tongues will become vestigial. These future children will never taste a lollipop.” Others are not so sure. “Professor Moriarity is a crackpot,” ventured Stanford Professor Emeritus Evita Dontcryforme. “Although bloggers are wired differently they are not a separate species.”

Tests performed on volunteer subjects revealed that bloggers can succeed at other endeavors although it is not clear how this is accomplished. Professor Moriarity believes that one day in the not very distant future a blogger will go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. “Humans did it in the 1930s and 1940s. Going over Niagara Falls in a barrel may be a rite of passage for all upright creatures.”

In a controlled experiment a blogger and a human were placed next to a water feature in the professor’s back yard. The human slid down the side of the four foot cataract while the blogger dozed. “Curiosity is the key,” Professor Moriarity said. “Large mammals often doze near waterfalls.”

“This is huge for Madison Avenue,” he said. “What if bloggers start buying things?” His work is being funded by private donations; going over Niagara Falls in a barrel violates several city, county, and provincial ordnances. Oliver Castinstone reporting.