I challenge you to a computer solitaire match.

My record winning time is somewhere around 1:30 with a
conventional mouse. Even with a trackpad (much harder) I’ve
clocked winning times under 1:50. Guinness Book, look out.

I’ve grokked the inner nature of the game in a way that’s
only possible when you’ve played for hours on end and
experienced that mystical moment when the hidden patterns
reveal themselves. (If the card you need is available both
in the deck and on the board, it’s almost always wisest to
play the card on the board. Playing the first card off the
deck often is essential to winning. But exhausting the deck
early probably means you’ll lose.)

When we were publishing the Federal Personnel Guide, I went
through a period of solitaire obsession wherein I
monopolized our main company computer for hours so my wife
Carol and our customer service manager Sandra had no access.
I only realized in retrospect that I’d made it impossible
for them to work. Carol and Sandra never said anything. I
wonder what they were thinking.

Oh sure, you say, big deal. Frank wastes time playing
computer solitaire, you waste time following the Redskins,
she wastes time watching Extraordinary Pregnancies, we all
waste time doing something. Point taken, but wonder why 45
minutes of computer solitaire makes me feel so icky?

It’s an addiction, is why. Stedman’s Medical Dictionary
defines addiction as: “Habitual psychological and
physiological dependence on a substance or practice beyond
one’s voluntary control.”

Add to that addiction’s utter uselessness and
self-destructiveness. Unless you take my bet and let me win
a few bucks, that’s about right. Computer solitaire has cost
me months, maybe years, of time I could have spent making
love, making money, or (here it comes) making fiction.

See, writing a novel is the biggest invitation to
procrastination there ever was. Sitting in front of a blank
screen making stuff up takes its toll. Unless you’re cookin’
(doesn’t happen too often), it’s almost always easier to
check e-mail or your stocks, get a snack or … play
solitaire. Back in the Day, novelists sharpened pencils. Now
we’re in the computer age though, so God or the Devil has
brought us something to do at the keyboard that, like pencil-
sharpening, appears to be useful work but, like pencil-
sharpening, isn’t.

I am discovering that the only remedy for this (not
surprisingly) is to write. It usually takes at least a few
minutes, and sometimes a lot more, to write your way back
into your story. Once you’re there, though, the juices often
resume their flow. You get ideas, you get excited, you try
stuff, maybe your characters even pull a fast one on you,
doing or saying something you didn’t expect. That’s the
coolest thing.

Carol has suggested another remedy, that I simply unload the
solitaire program off my computer. When pigs fly.

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. My November Chicago trip so far includes appearances at
Barnes & Noble-Village Crossing, Skokie, and public
libraries in Homewood, Skokie, Schaumburg and Arlington
Heights. More appearances are being added. Check them out at
http://tolovemercy.com/frank_joseph_appearances.html

Thanks to the miracles of technology, I paid a visit last night to Jason Bourne a/k/a Matt Damon.

You’ll never see a more technologically advanced motion picture (well, you probably will, and probably in a few months’ time at that), but I walked out feeling nothing. It was like watching a chess game — interesting to observe the feints and thrusts, but no emotional connection to the characters.

Also, I didn’t know what the stakes were until the end (they turned out to be the well-being of the free world). The stakes undoubtedly had been conveyed early on but I’d missed them somehow amid the jump-cuts and flash-frames and jittery camera shots. As the credits were rolling, I asked my daughter Shawn about some of what I’d missed (yes, there comes a day when your adult children choose to be with you just because they like you). ‘Didn’t you see the first two?’ she responded.

Well. No, I didn’t, and I certainly agree it would have been better if I had. But I take the position that a sequel should stand on its own without depending on reference to the prior work. That, as it happens, is my biggest challenge in the novel I’m currently writing, working title “To Walk Humbly.”

To Walk Humbly (referred to hereinafter as TWH) is a sequel to my first novel To Love Mercy (TLM). TLM was about a white Jewish boy named Steve who encounters a black Evangelical boy nicknamed Sass in Chicago in 1948. Its plot turns on a MacGuffin*, a precious silver talisman fashioned by Steve’s great-great-grandfather. Steve and Sass were 10 and 11 years old in TLM. TWH picks up their lives four years later and entering high school and, again, the plot turns on the silver thing.

So I’ve got a lot of explaining to do. The challenge is to do the explaining in such a way that you, Dear Reader, learn the minutes of the last meeting without getting irritated with me, the Dear Author, for burdening you with them.

I’ve been dealing with this problem by having various characters reveal little bits of the past here and there. Steve and Sass will meet again in Part II and try to resume their aborted friendship. When they meet, I plan to fill in the remaining blanks about their shared history.

I’ve written about 110 pages of TWH — Section I plus two chapters of Section II. I was so concerned about whether it stands alone that I signed up for a Writer’s Center workshop for critique by people who had no prior exposure to TLM. This group gave me very positive feedback, I’m delighted to report, while spotting certain issues and shortcomings.

The best thing I got from them, though, was what they didn’t give me — flak about whether TWH stands alone. The subject didn’t even arise until a half-hour into the discussion, and then it wasn’t a serious concern.

So my advice to Jason Bourne is: If you’re planning to show up on screen a fourth time (and surely you are), work a little harder on having the movie make sense in its own terms. And see if you can fashion a character or two I can care about.

*MacGuffin: An otherwise meaningless thing or notion on which the plot turns — Alfred Hitchcock.

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. Read the first chapter of To Walk Humbly at http://frankjoseph.com.

P.P.S. And read the first chapter-and-a-half of To Love Mercy at http://tolovemercy.com/to_love_mercy_excerpt.html
P.P.P.S. Chicago in November! I’ll be at Barnes & Nobles in Skokie and Vernon Hills, public libraries in Homewood, Skokie, Arlington Heights and Schaumburg, at least two high schools and one middle school, and the annual meeting of the Illinois School Library & Media Assn. More appearances are being added right along. They’ll be posted on our website in a few days. I’ll keep y’all posted.

I think of the political arc of Jesse Jackson as a small American tragedy.

When I was 27 and a reporter for The Associated Press, I interviewed Jackson in the kitchen of his apartment on the South Side of Chicago. Jackson, then a graduate student in divinity at the University of Chicago and only 25 or 26 himself, swept me away with his vision, moral grounding and articulate passion. I have never been in the presence of a more charismatic individual. I went back to the office and wrote more than 2,000 words. The piece had been assigned as a feature for Sunday-morning papers, a special distinction; but my editors, seeing I’d totally lost my vaunted reporter’s objectivity, slashed it to 750 words and sent it out for Wednesday-afternoon papers, very few of which ever published it.

Over the years, though, Jackson seemed to lose his lustre. When the arc of his career culminated in seeking the presidency, he didn’t have a chance. There was his dreadful “Hymie-Town” slur, of course. And in 1984 and 1988, America surely was less “ready” to elect a black than it may (or may not) prove to be in 2008. But I think the core reason Jackson didn’t become a contender was where he came from. He started out as one of Doctor Martin Luther King’s inner circle, and had devoted his career to civil rights and agitating for the well-being of African-Americans — who are roughly 12% of the American population. It’s not a big enough base from which to be elected president of all the people.

After Jackson we had Al Sharpton and he wasn’t electable for similar reasons, I think. (Let alone the shameful Tawana Brawley episode that made him famous or notorious, as you please.) Sharpton has charisma to burn and possibly the slyest sense of humor since JFK. But to be elected president in the U S of A, you need more than that. You need to be able to reach beyond your base.

Now comes Barack Obama, who, as far as I can tell, doesn’t have a base. Indeed, the base you’d expect — the Jackson-Sharpton base — has been giving him are-you-black-enough flak. Grin and bear it, Barack. If you’re the candidate on Election Day, where else can these voters turn?

Allow me to digress. My daughter Shawn has a lot of girlfriends, both black and white. We were talking about the presidential race and Shawn said her white girlfriends think Hillary Clinton is electable. But her black girlfriends think Barack Obama is not.

Hmm.

The black girlfriends are expressing a deep though realistic pessimism about American society, Shawn thinks (so do I). But, I asked, why aren’t Shawn’s white girlfriends equally pessimistic about a woman’s chances?

I put this question the wrong way. I ought to have asked: ‘In America today, could this black man or this white woman be elected?’

I’m going to get a raft of you-know-what for saying this but … because Obama enters the race not identified with “black” interests the way Jackson and Sharpton were, I think he could be.

He’s a very credible candidate of course, with an unusual resumé (community organizer!) and a Senate seat. In the Obama-vs.-Hillary matchup, Obama wins the charm-and-good-looks award. Where Hillary seems up-tight and scripted, he seems confident and relaxed. But Hillary wins on experience, gender and, yes, possibly toughness. On Iraq, hard to tell. On money, a wash (so far). On brains … probably a wash too.

Only 4% of Americans say they would be “less likely” to vote for a candidate who was black, according to a February Pew survey reported in today’s New York Times. The survey says 11% would be “less likely” to vote for a woman candidate. People tend not to be truthful when asked such questions and I suggest taking both numbers with a big grain of salt … but still. If Pew asked the same questions two decades ago when Jesse Jackson was running, I bet the negatives were a lot larger.

Are we ready for a woman or an African-American in the White House? For this woman, this African-American? Time will tell. At least this African-American isn’t lugging the baggage that burdened, and finally may have broken, a guy who could’ve been a contender … Jesse Jackson.

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. Read the first chapter of To Walk Humbly, the sequel to To Love Mercy. Visit http://frankjoseph.com/to_walk_humbly.html.

When I was in college, I was a creative writing major; at age 21, my ambition was to be a novelist. But I also had an ambition not to starve, so when I graduated I took the practical course. I became a journalist instead.

Over the years I’ve worked as a journalist, a publisher, a marketer, a copywriter, a consultant — a wonderful career, a career I was lucky to have — but I didn’t write fiction. I thought about it though. Looking back, there wasn’t a single day in those 40+ years when I didn’t have at least a fleeting thought about the fiction I was not writing.

In my mid 50s, I read an article in the Washington Post with the headline “50 Things I Want to Do Before I Die.” This article changed my life. It said, basically: You don’t want to go to your grave with regrets; so make a list of the 50 things; and when you’re in the neighborhood, do them and check them off the list.

I made the list and couldn’t come up with 50 things, couldn’t even come up with 30. I came to view that as the sign of a life at least fairly well lived. One big thing on the list was to travel to Europe, which Carol and I had not done and both wanted to do. Over the next few years, we went to Italy and France — great trips.

But the more I thought about the list, the more I realized there was really only one important thing on it: my dream to write a novel.

So I did it. Over the next three years, while working a day job (running our home-based publishing company), I wrote the draft of To Love Mercy.

For me, the big moment was when I wrote The End. Sure, I wanted to be published, and when the day arrived that To Love Mercy was accepted for publication, I was ecstatic. But the biggest deal — the achievement of my youthful ambition — was completing a real novel, or anyway a novel I felt was real.

I didn’t think about publishability much while I was writing it, because I thought it would be unpublishable. Its concerns seemed so obscure — blacks and whites, Christians and Jews, how children view the world, Chicago in 1948. Why would readers care? I couldn’t imagine. So I just wrote the story that seemed to want release from my heart.

Many who read To Love Mercy in draft asked whether it was a young-adult novel, since it has kids as protagonists. I answered no. In my mind, it was, if anything, an old-adult novel. Turns out I was mistaken. To Love Mercy starts with the White Sox and ends with the White Sox; the year it was published the White Sox led the league. Schools are dying to find books with boys as protagonists, to get boys interested in reading. Schools are interested in books that raise issues of race in a serious way. To Love Mercy has gone onto reading lists at several high schools and middle schools already, and more have shown interest. So much for my commercial instincts.

I think I wrote a better novel because I wasn’t thinking about the market, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t hope for commercial success. Now To Love Mercy has won six awards, collected 23 five-star reviews on Amazon, and gone into a second printing. More importantly, it has attracted the attention of a fine literary agent, Michele Rubin of Writers House, who now represents me. I haven’t made a nickel from my fiction yet, but for the first time it seems possible.

Michele has encouraged me to write two sequels — the “Chicago Trilogy” — and I’m hard at work. What situation could be more commercial? Now I’m struggling to avoid thinking about the market, and just try to keep things as real as when I was writing To Love Mercy from the heart.

The sad reality for most fiction authors these days is that most of us will never be published, at least not by the Simon & Schusters of the world. Chances are we won’t even be published by a small independent press, as I was. Sure, because of advancements in technology, we now can be published by companies like iUniverse, but that amounts to glorified self-publishing. You get a physical book to show friends and family, but little more. In most cases, iUniverse can’t get your books into bookstores, and bookstores are still where most people buy fiction.

I am encouraging you to face these facts, but with a smile. If you feel a story inside you, why not just write it for the sake of writing it — for yourself? Lightning still may strike. If you write from the heart, it might even be likelier to strike. Even if it doesn’t, you’ll still have something good for your tombstone — ‘He (she) wrote a novel.’

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. The first (of four) sections of “To Walk Humbly,” second novel in the “Chicago Trilogy,” is all but finished. In case you’d like to read a bit of it, visit www.frankjoseph.com in a day or so.

Guys have this annoying little thing called a prostate. Far as I can
tell, it’s about as useful as an appendix, and as troublesome. I’ve
never developed much appreciation for mine. Now I downright resent it.

It was bad enough when my prostate started waking me up at night five or
ten years ago. I tried swatting it with saw palmetto and other herbs and
that seemed to work for a few years. But the sucker just kept getting
bolder and bolder. Lately it thinks it can run my life.

Enter Dr. G., the kindly urologist. Girls, you can tune out now. You’ve
got your OB-GYNs and that should satisfy you. Guys don’t visit OB-GYNs
and, far as I can tell, girls don’t see urologists. Kindly Dr. G.
festoons his office with copies of Car and Driver, Sports Illustrated,
Success, Fortune, etc. I’ve never seen a copy of O The Oprah Magazine
there, nor do I expect to.

Dr. G. first put me on a prescription drug with a package warning I’d
never previously encountered. It says: Not to be taken by women.
Ever. Don’t even think about it, girls.

But the prostate waxed and battened. Probably liked the drug’s taste.

Sterner measures are called for, said Dr. G. as he removed his greasy
rubber glove from you-know-where. We’ve got lasers to incinerate it.
We’ve got microwaves to cook it. But my personal favorite, the gold
standard, is the rusty-trusty old scalpel.

(At this point I could get really gross and tell you what he planned to
do with that scalpel and where and how he planned to do it, but I won’t.
The procedure is called TURP, short for Transurethral Prostatectomy, and
my pals at Johns Hopkins will be glad to fill you in. Read about TURP at
www.johnshopkinshealthalerts.com/ppc/prostate/turp_reg_landing.html?st=ppc&s=GLP_005011_004&gclid=CP7qstyz-owCFRI7ZQodPT_eDg)

Enter Carol. You do not want that dirty old man messing with you
Down There, quoth she. Go to Dr. S.

Enter Dr. S., the acupuncturist. Dr. S. is a cackly old witch who speaks
an incomprehensible Taiwanese dialect of English and delights in poking
you where it hurts most. She also enjoys feeding you brackish liquids
and poisonous powders, while giving you baffling dietary instructions
and discoursing about Heat On Your Liver. She warms you. She ices you.
She sees mysterious energy flows where you see only bare skin. But what
Dr. S. enjoys most is sticking you all over with pins.

I hadn’t been to Dr. S. in years. When I’d gone, she’d actually helped
me with certain things. But her explanations made so little sense that
I wasn’t quite desperate enough to go back until … now.

This time, I was facing a 4- to 6-week recovery. Pain to be expected.
Hemorrhaging possible. Impotence and incontinency extremely unlikely but
… possible. No heavy lifting. No tennis. No exercise except walking.
No sex. And in the background is Dr. S., screeching: I can helrp you!
Twelrve treatments! Give it a try!

I visited Dr. G. and told him to schedule the surgery for a few weeks
hence, but that I was going to try twelve acupuncture visits in the interim.
To his credit, Dr. G. showed an open mind. I don’t know anything about
acupuncture, he said, but it can’t hurt. We’ll retest you after the twelve
treatments and do the surgery if it doesn’t help.

You know how this story is going to end. I started feeling better around
Treatment #4 but thought I must be imagining things. Around Treatment
#7, though, I was pretty sure it wasn’t my imagination. The retesting
proved it wasn’t. While not cured, I’ve gotten a lot of relief — enough that
I see no need for surgery.

Dr. G. thinks this relief will be temporary and the day will come that
I’ll need the surgery. I suspect he’s right.

But whatever. Acupuncture is working for now, and it got pretty much rid
of my morning backache in the bargain. Needle me again, doc!

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. Getting boys to read is a big concern for educators and school
librarians. They often push “boy topics” — sports, cars, etc. — but I
think there’s a better approach. I think boys (like girls, like everyone)
respond to a good story, well told. On Saturday, Nov. 3, I have to
prove my theory. I’m speaking on the topic at the Illinois School Library
Media Assn. annual meeting in Springfield IL, my first stop on yet another
Chicago tour. This is a call to anyone out there who can adduce evidence
to support my position. Help! Please!!!

There are more adoptive parents reading these postings than I realized. After I wrote about our adoption experiences, I heard from some.

At least one of these correspondents did a so-called “open” adoption. When Carol and I adopted our son Sam in 1984, there barely was such a thing. The prevailing ethic was that the birth mother should give up the baby and get on with her life. Us adoption agencies will take over now, dearie. You just run along and forget you ever had this child.

Most people today will find this attitude ludicrous, but back then it was accepted — at least overtly — by all, including birth mothers. We now know the pain these mothers suffer at giving up their own offspring, with little hope they’ll ever see the child again. We know the pain adoptees feel at not being able to pry their biological information out of obdurate public agencies, and the obsessive birth-parent searches this pain may engender. But we didn’t then.

Frankly, Carol and I were feeling a little pain of our own at the time.

We’d tarried long while the old Bio Clock ticked away. When we finally got serious, we lost a baby to a tubal pregnancy. There followed months — years — of invasive, costly, humiliating fertility fun, none of which got us pregnant again.

Finally one day I had a flash. I said to Carol: We are not going to have a baby the natural way. Let’s adopt. OK, she said. You do it.

In the year it took to adopt Sam, the pain we experienced was of a different sort but real just the same. When an agency offers you a baby, you wouldn’t think anything could go wrong; but I am here to tell you it can, and did. Agency people change their minds. Mothers change their minds. We changed our minds. Long and short, a process that was supposed to take mere months took about a year, and Sam was the third or fourth baby offered us. When we finally got this treasured child, we were feeling pretty beat up.

Then I start reading stories about open adoptions. The stories were, as I remember, pretty gaga. I thought: No way, baby. Ain’t room in this household for but one set of parents. And that’s us.

But our situation with our daughter Shawn was, in a sense, an open adoption. We became her principal-caregivers-without-portfolio while her dad remained her dad. This situation went on from her teens into her 20s, when he died. (Then we adopted her. Talk about locking the barn after the horse is stolen.)

Now Shawn is the mother of her own adopted son, in an agency adoption that was, legally, quasi-open. Shawn has never met his biological parents but communicates with them by mail via the agency.

I still prefer closed to open. When Shawn’s dad was alive, Carol and I walked on eggs. If we’d felt more confident of our authority, I think we’d have been better parents to her. And Shawn’s dad was our friend — not likely the case in an open agency adoption. The idea of a birth mother taking active part in the rearing of my child gives me the willies. It’s hard enough staying on the same page with your spouse without some stranger sitting in the peanut gallery giving you the razzberry.

(For people of my turn of mind, international adoptions are great. There’s a snowball’s chance in hell that you or your kid will ever encouter the birth parents or they you.)

But the world turns. Some open adoptions clearly work. Some adoptive and birth parents work out the lines of authority that seem so daunting to me. I don’t know whether this is good or bad on balance for the kids, and I wish I did. But I’m pretty sure of one thing: Growing up with a biological parent in the picture would dispel that hollow craving that plagues some kids, not knowing who gave them birth.

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. Acupuncture works! Tell ya about it next time.

Any guy can be a dad. All it takes is opportunity and lively sperm. But just try to adopt a kid and see how easy that is.

First you have to find a kid to adopt. If you go the agency route, you can expect to be paperworked and home-studied to a fare-thee-well. You rarely wind up with a newborn. And you pay big bucks for the privilege — tens of thousands of dollars by the time you’re done. Adopting a baby  via an agency isn’t like having a baby; it’s like filing a lawsuit.

If you go the private adoption route, you’re in a gray (or black) market where you don’t know who to trust — and you’re still out big, possibly even bigger, bucks.

If you adopt domestically, you may have to wait a long time.

If you adopt internationally, the wait may be shorter but the uncertainty far greater. Your baby may arrive sick, or worse, due to abuse or neglect in a country with few or no controls on its orphanages. Your adoption may be derailed in mid-process because your country changes its laws, and countries change laws all the time — often in response to domestic scandals involving allegations of rich Americans “stealing” babies. The language and communications barriers add to your confusion, suspicion and mistrust as you bite your nails.

I’m speaking here from personal experience. Both our kids are adopted. We were involved in Shawn’s life since she was a little girl; taking over as her parents was a long but mostly private process. But we adopted Sam internationally via an agency and had to jump through hoops.

We had to ask friends and associates to write personal references attesting what great parents we’d make. We had to disclose facts about our private lives we’d have much preferred to keep private. We’ll never forget the home-study, where a social worker basically came into our house and white-gloved us. We had to travel to Chile, carrying cash — thousands of U.S. dollars — in a money-belt strapped around my waist.

Biological parents just go out and have kids; but adoptive parents must in effect get a license. And licensure, I am about to argue, leads to better parenting.

Biological parents tend to have kids early, adoptive parents late. We all know stories about young kids who weren’t ready for kids of their own, but adoptive parents are ready. They’ve been through failed pregnancies, miscarriages, repeated doctor visits featuring invasive medical procedures and violent drugs, IVF (which, by the way, costs a fortune and often doesn’t work), etc. etc. They are better established in life. They have a few bucks (or else they couldn’t afford adoption, let me tell you). Most important, they really want to have kids — and they’re willing to put up with tons of B.S. to do it.

They’ve given lots of thought to the mistakes their own parents made (and what they did right), and resolved to learn from those lessons. They’ve had plenty of time to consider what sort of parents they want to be, and what sort they don’t want to be. One small personal example: When Carol and I adopted Sam, I wanted to be an active dad. I figured I’d need strength — physical strength — to be that sort of parent, but I was 43 years old, overweight and out of shape. I joined a gym and set about changing myself. Regular exercise is a hard habit to gain, as anyone who’s tried knows, but I did it. I not only enjoyed Sam’s growing-up far more than I might otherwise have, but I changed my own life for the better. I still go to that gym.

I believe that, because I am not related by blood to my kids, I am actually a better parent. My ego is ever-so-slightly less at stake. I don’t fall into parenting traps quite so easily. At least, that’s what I’ve come to believe.

These thoughts were triggered by a conversation the other night with Shawn. She doesn’t like the term “adoptive parent” and neither do I. Of course it is factually correct to distinguish “adoptive” from “biological” parents, but she and I both resent the implication that “adoptive” parents are second class. Did I mention that Shawn adopted her son Kai as a single mom at age 38? That her desire to devote all her love, care and attention to a kid for some 20 years (and after that, forever, as all parents know) trumped not having a significant male other in her life; trumped workload; trumped career jeopardy; trumped cost; trumped everything? Now Kai is almost 7, loves the Nationals, and is his baseball team’s home-run hitter. And my only grandson (so far).

No family could be closer than ours. Shawn lives not 10 minutes away. We see her and Kai all the time, several times a week. She invited her closest friends to the beach house she rented last week, and we made the cut. Sam, who’s finishing up at NYU, talks to us all the time on the phone, often several times a day. They may not be perfect kids — nobody’s perfect — but there are no better kids in the world.

Happy Father’s Day.

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. To Love Mercy wins another award! Honorable mention, teen fiction, New York Book Festival! Visit http://www.newyorkbookfestival.com/event/details.asp?event_id=9. TO LOVE MERCY has now won six awards, garnered 22 five-star reviews on Amazon, and is in its second printing. To Love Mercy [ISBN 0-9744785-3-9] is available in bookstores everywhere, on Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/Love-Mercy-Frank-S-Joseph/dp/0974478539/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-3906176-5275626?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1182086750&sr=8-1 or at our website where you can get autographed copies. Visit http://www.tolovemercy.com/to_love_mercy_online_sales.html.

I don’t have one, is what I now think.

I write on computer. I write in longhand. I write in the morning. I
write in the afternoon. I write every day. I miss a week. I plot and
plan. I stumble about in the dark. I follow advice. I ignore advice. I
write in “flow.” I quit for lunch. I concentrate. I procrastinate. I
follow rituals. I flaunt them. I go into my writing grotto and hide out.
Or I venture forth into anonymous writing spaces — coffee shops,
libraries, trains, the beach.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. It really makes you start
believing in this muse stuff.

She’s been visiting lately, thank God, though you never know when she’ll
take a powder. I am 71 pages into (working title) “To Walk Humbly,” the
sequel to my novel To Love Mercy, and I’m cooking.

I was feeling decidedly diffident (look it up) about this novel at
first. I’d never written a sequel so I felt compelled to put tons of
background into the first chapter. But when I read that stuff, it
sucked. It’s still sitting there, but it’s targeted for death.

Then I wrote a chapter that brought the tears to my eyes. Now I’ve
written a second such chapter and I’m feeling pretty plickin’ good about
the project. When you stare at a blank screen for two hours, you feel
like taking the gas pipe. But when you write something you feel good
about, the elation is indescribable.

I figured it would take me six months or so to write this novel but here
it is closing in on six months and I’ve only written 71 pages. Is this
good or bad? Discuss:

• It’s bad and you’re a procrastinating slacker. OK, I plead guilty.
When you don’t know what you’re going to write, procrastination is the
easiest thing in the world to do. I can sharpen pencils down to the
erasers and never get bored. But when La Musa comes to call, things
change. I find myself eager to write. I want to tell the story. I want
to find out what happens next.

• It’s bad but excusable. I didn’t write a word the first three months.
Unlike To Love Mercy, where I just tapped into my early childhood, this
novel is set in my adolescence and I don’t have the bone-in memory for
this period that I had for childhood. I spent the first three months
doing research to ground myself. I went to the Library of Congress and
read tons of microfilm of the Chicago Tribune, Sun-Times and Defender.
Now that I’m writing, I view most of that research as a waste of time,
in that I’m not likely to “use” much of it; but at the time I was doing
it, I felt it was absolutely necessary. So I guess it was.

• It’s bad, but hey. Most days that’s where I am right now. I am
realizing that, in a sense, story tells itself. At the start, anything
and everything is possible. But the more you write, the clearer and more
alive the characters become, and the more inexorable the story becomes.
As this happens, you write faster. So maybe it’s OK that it took 2 1/2
months to squeeze out these first 71 pages; maybe the rest will “write
itself” in just a few months more. (I can dream, can’t I?)

It took approximately three years to write the draft of To Love Mercy.
That’s always embarrassed me. True, I was working a day job, but still.
Some people — lots of people — write 50,000 words in a month and have
day jobs. There’s this wonderful contest called NaNoWriMo, short for
National Novel Writing Month, that takes place every November. It costs
nothing to enter and you don’t win any prizes except a 50,000-word novel
draft on Nov. 30. Thousands of people participate and hundreds finish. I
signed up last year for the first time but didn’t participate. Maria
Thompson, my nephew’s wife, entered and knocked out 50,000+ words of a
romance novel and held down a day job and raised a teen-ager. Visit
www.nanowrimo.com.

I wrote To Love Mercy figuratively (and literally, see below) in the
dark. I had the belief that plotting amounts to painting by number, and
doing so would rob me of my spontaneity. I now believe this was a
misconception that was the direct reason TLM took three years, not six
months, to write. This time I’m doing it differently. While not in the
strict sense plotting, I have a yellow pad full of plot and story points
written in longhand. This narrative bounces from topic to topic and is
fragmentary, but every time I’m not sure what happens next I re-read it
for inspiration. When what I’m looking for isn’t there, I get out the
fountain pen my son Sam gave me for Father’s Day when he was about 12 –
also known as Dumbo’s Magic Feather — and write more story points.

All this said, I now dimly realize a few principles and tricks that help
me become more creative and consistent. Having established my bona fides
as an unreliable source, I don’t expect you to pay any attention
whatsoever to the advice that follows:

1. Put the writing first. Many sages say to write every day. Others say
to write X number of words per day. I can’t do either thing, but for me
resolving to put the writing ahead of all else seems to have the same
effect.

2. Just start writing. If you’re stuck, write blah blah blah if you
must. Write what you ate for breakfast or what you plan to eat. Write
what you dreamed last night. Write about your wife, your children, your
boss, your mama, but just write something until whatever you sat down to
write about starts to flow. This is pump-priming and, believe it or not,
it works.

3. Do whatever you have to do. I’ve heard of writers doing truly
outlandish things. I like to write in the dark, for example, but Kent
Haruf, author of a plangent (look it up) novel called Plainsong, says he
locks himself in a dark closet and pulls a knit cap down over his face.

Finally, get a prescription for Ritalin. Ritalin helps, I think. Then
again, that’s what Dumbo thought about his feather.

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. Apologies for the blog-o-lag of the past week. Life got busy, then
we went to the beach for four days. The good news is, we had a great
time. Best of all, I wrote some lambent (look it up) prose at the beach.
Thanks to daughter Shawn for getting the great beach place yet again,
and for counting her Old Mom and Dad among the friends she invites.

P.P.S. I’ll be in Chicago next November for sure. Plans are shaping up.
Watch this space.

Carol and I saw a movie the other night called “Waitress.” It’s a charming fairy-tale for adults about a Cinderella with a heaven-sent talent for making pies, who is trapped in a terrible marriage to a lout. The pretty waitress falls for her handsome OB-GYN, they have an affair, the baby gets born, the lout gets his comeuppance, and all (except the lout) live happily ever after.

But this isn’t a movie review. It’s about the lout.

The lout, whose name is Earl, appears unshaven and grubby-looking in every scene. He is said to work in a bank but I found it hard to imagine him in any bank job beside janitor. He mistreats the waitress heroine at every opportunity. He tells her again and again that she is his property. He won’t let her compete in a pie-making contest which — at the end of the movie, after she has de-louted herself — she of course wins. His sexual advances are cringingly clumsy, and indeed he only impregnates her because one night she gets drunk and careless. When he learns he is to be a father, he tells her how he hears some women get to loving their babies more than their husbands. He forces her to promise not to do that to him.

Earl never is redeemed, but there is a touching scene near the end where he falls to his knees in tears and clutches her pregnant belly, telling her how much he loves her. He looks helpless, pathetic and vulnerable. You believe him.

Now, I don’t treat my wife as property. Heavens. I’ve never raised a hand to her either. But I’ve certainly yelled at her from time to time. I noodge her sometimes just for the fun of it. I can be mean; at my worst I can be a bully.

Whenever Earl was on the screen, I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. I kept putting myself in his place. I kept thinking of all the bad things I’ve said and done to my long-suffering wife in the many years we’ve been together.

After the movie, I said some of this to her. I think she was a little surprised at the degree to which Earl had gotten under my skin. Carol, I said, thinking as much of his neediness as his abusiveness, there’s a little Earl in all us guys.

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Last week’s posting on immigration stirred up the expected fuss. Many said right on, some said wrong on. I expected people who live near the Mexican border to be the most negative, and some were:

– Rick Abeles in Santa Fe NM: “Illegal immigrants (let’s not make it sound nicer by saying undocumented workers) are a major problem here. Much of our crime is directly attributable to these folks. Granted, there are many hard working illegals and they are very important to our economy. Interestingly the strongest objectors to the illegals are the local Hispanics who have been here for generations. They feel, with some justification. that the Anglos came and took over their land and jobs and they have been oppressed from above, and now the illegals are taking their remaining jobs and oppressing them from below. This is not a perspective you would get in Chicago, New York or Washington DC.”

– Jack Foster in Santa Barbara CA: “You say: Around here at least immigrants work. Around here, they do too. But we’re not talking about [all] immigrants. We’re talking about illegal immigrants. And around here, illegal immigrants not only work hard and care for their families, but many also beg on the streets, send 58% of the money they make back to Mexico, overwhelm and exacerbate our educational system, and crowd emergency rooms to such a degree that two years ago I had to wait on a gurney for seven hours before a doctor could check my exploding gall bladder. And, around here, at least, I encounter homeless people almost every day with Spanish accents. … You disparage those who equate risking one’s life ‘to sneak across the Rio Grande,’ … with a crime like burglary, murder, or rape. I don’t equate it thus, but I do think it is a crime and should not be condoned … The illegal immigrants broke the law. To reward them for doing so is opening the door to anarchy.”

– Suzi Brozman in a similar vein (although in Atlanta, not along a border): “When my great grandparents trudged off their leaky boat, there was not government holding out wads of cash and promises of entitlements. They expected to work for everything they got. They didn’t go to hospitals expecting someone else’s tax money to pay their bills while many of those born here couldn’t afford to buy health insurance (a separate discussion). They didn’t expect food stamps or aid for dependent children or subsidized housing. They made their own way. And yes, they came legally, and the expected to obey the laws of their chosen country. Today’s illegal immigrants are breaking a law by their very presence. You can debate the wisdom or justice of that law, but the fact is that it does exist and what are we if not a nation of laws?”

Some focused on post-9/11 national security:

– Joel Whitaker in Rockville MD: “I’m opposed to open borders. In today’s world we need to know who’s here. I’m opposed to “guest workers.” I think we should assume that anyone who comes to work here will stay here. I agree with union leaders who say guest workers are simply a way to provide a pool of exploitable people who will work in substandard conditions for substandard wages. Give ‘em green cards. … I’m in favor of some sort of national ID card system, probably based on driver’s licenses. (You get your green card, go to MVA and get a license — which expires when your green card expires.) I’m in favor of local police detaining for ICE illegal immigrants, who are detected in the course of ordinary police activity, such as for-cause traffic stops. And I think the Feds should encourage this … by tieing Federal funding to passage of a statute requiring local police to hold and detain illegals for ICE.”

But Dan Alemar, speaking from personal experience, countered: “Most immigrants come to a new country with the idea they will return to where they came from. They will come and earn enough money to last a lifetime. What usually happens though is that life intervenes. They meet a person who becomes husband or wife. They have children. The children may speak the language of the home country, but they are not socialized in the customs. They become Americans with a very different take on life. If their parents try to return to the home country the kids don’t want to go. It was never their experience and they are truly foreigners in the land their parents call home.

“In studies of immigrants, it was found that the person living away from their country returns a portion of their salary to the home country. It ends with the death of the recipient or the death of the individual. I remember my father (Puerto Rican) going home and buying a home for my grandmother. He also paid the mortgage for my grandmother for many years. He sent her money each week to make sure that she had enough to eat. Even though Puerto Ricans are American citizens, their behavior is the same as any other [immigrant] group. My father always dreamed of building a shack on the beach and living out his days there. He just got too comfortable and had a wife who said no way.”

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. My old high school buddy Bill Roth asked me to record a version of “Give me your tired your poor” for his radio program. It was to have been broadcast this afternoon on KRML-AM but, when I tuned in, Bill was reading something by Anne Morrow Lindbergh instead. I’ve attached the MP3 file for your listening pleasure, or you can go to www.krmlradio.com or tune in 1410 AM in the Monterey-Carmel CA area and hope to catch it. Even if you miss it, you’ll still hear some great jazz.

P.P.S. “To Love Mercy” just hit 107,966 on Amazon, the lowest (i.e. best) ranking in months. I don’t know what’s cooking but who cares? Help a starving author lower his Amazon ranking! Buy a book now at http://www.amazon.com/Love-Mercy-Frank-S-Joseph/dp/0974478539/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-8044709-7112717?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1180475415&sr=8-1

On the base of the Statue of Liberty is inscribed “The New Colossus,” by Emma Lazarus. I had to Google for the title of the poem, but I can still recite (and even sing) the words by heart:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

My grandfather Nathan Joseph and my grandmother Martha Salkin Joseph were among the tempest-tost who landed beside the golden door; as were my great-grandparents Sam Baum and Amalia Neuberger Baum, and Adolph Weber and Fannie Kahn Weber. I daresay, Gentle Reader, that most of you are similarly descended from immigrants, and so are most of the solons in Congress now debating the niceties of 900-mile fences along the Mexican border. (But not the Canadian border. Hmm.)

Before these guys take a chisel to Miss Liberty, shut down Ellis Island and run Lou Dobbs for President, they ought to consider a thing or two.

• Around here at least, immigrants work. I was in a Chipotle a few weeks ago and at 11:30 a.m. a flood of men streamed in wearing dirty work clothes and hard hats, every single one speaking Spanish. It seems like every guy (or gal) I see working construction, pulling weeds, running power mowers, caring for babies, etc. etc., speaks Spanish. But when’s the last time you encountered a homeless person with a Spanish accent?

• Around here at least, immigrants display family values. Sandra Perez — who came to this country illegally from Guatemala at age 20, and rose from taking care of the infants Alex Baldinger and Sam Joseph to becoming customer service manager of Key Communications Group Inc. and, now, administrator of a 1,500-soul Catholic church in Silver Spring (and an American citizen) — always sent Mom and Dad a handsome portion of a not excessively handsome salary. Gogi Sethi, who shared a house with us for several years while he was driving a D.C. cab, brought his Mom and Dad over from India to stay with us for three months. When you drive past those churches with the signs in English and Korean — and it’s not your friends who are attending regularly — don’t you wonder who is?

• Around here at least, it mostly isn’t immigrants who are committing the crimes. Think hard now: When was the last time someone with an accent stuck you up?

When Nate, Martha, Sam, Malchen, Adolph and Fannie stepped off the boat, there was no such thing in America as an “illegal” immigrant. Illegality was introduced in 1921 with the first immigrant quotas, and toughened in 1924 in response to a wave of post-WWI immigration from southern and eastern Europe. That deck was stacked; the quotas were based on the U.S. population makeup in the 1890 census, which had the effect of keeping out certain “undesirables” such as Italians. Some 200,000 Italians a year immigrated to the U.S. after 1890; but the 1924 quota for Italians was set at less than 4,000. (My forebears would have been screwed, blued and tattooed: Russia 2,248, Hungary 473, Lithuania 344, Latvia 144.)

But now, listen to those howls against “amnesty” — as if risking your life to sneak across the Rio Grande, or sail here on a leaky boat, just to escape poverty and hopelessness and persecution at home, and hope for a job planting petunias, were a “crime” like burglary, murder, rape or, er, using your public corporation for a personal piggy-bank.

Immigration built this country; our earlier open-immigration policies made us who we are today, and all of us benefit from immigration that occurred generations ago. But while those immigrants of yore were streaming in, they did indeed trigger the same kinds of social strains that immigrants are triggering today — different looks, dress, worship and languages (and, let it be noted, politics; some of those immigrants of my forebears’ generations were political agitators, trade unionists, Socialists and Reds, not our kind of people dontcha know).

And yes, today’s economy doesn’t offer the wealth of low-paid factory jobs and needle-trade piecework that greeted our forebears. (But we do have a lot of buildings that need building and petunias that need planting, not to mention babies that need taking care of.)

So OK, immigration is a hard pill to swallow. But I know I’m personally better off because Nate, Martha, Sam, Malchen, Adolph and Fannie got in; and I also know the country is better off because of the accomplishments of these particular individuals and their descendants. I’ll bet most of you could tell a similar story. I’ll bet our Representatives and Senators could too. Maybe even Lou Dobbs could.

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. Gore-Obama? Edwards-Obama? Giuliani-Obama for God’s sake? Should I even be asking these questions? Well, should I?