A brooding sky this morning. When I arrived home late last night from Mexico the cold and damp lanced into me and I had to laugh at myself. For the whole time I was visiting down there everyone rhapsodized about the sublime weather and blue skies and I kept protesting how I loved four seasons and adored winter but now that I’m back I’m missing the blue, the warm, the lake, the hillsides and bougainvillea tumbling down beautiful old walls. I fell in love with the walls-(Now the so-called cobblestone streets were another things altogether since they are barely passable they are so uneven and treacherous). I had been teaching at the Lake Chapala Writer’s Conference in Ajijic, Mexico along with the talented freelance journalist Vince Beiser. Besides the fact that I had a hard time acclimating to the altitude, the whole experience was amazing, I met delightful people, was given a breathless tour around the lake that included passing an agave field, a colorful graveyard as festive as a children’s birthday party and people busy decorating graves on a Friday afternoon, and burros loaded with piles of firewood. I’d still be down there except I’ve got a book deadline. If you want to visit a part of Mexico that is magical and sweet and far from the glitz of Puerto Vallarta, this is the place to go…..I’m planning on returning.

While on the plane I read Ursula Le Guin’s intriguing essay in the February issue of Harpers, “Staying Awake: Notes on the Alleged Decline of Reading." A while ago the NEA issued their latest dire report about the decline of reading claiming that 43% of Americans hadn’t read a book in the previous year. Now, on first glance the report is troubling indeed. In this report one of these non-reading Americans was quoted as saying, "I just get sleepy when I read."

But if you look deeper into the report you’ll discover that creative nonfiction isn’t classified as literature, that on-line reading doesn’t count, nor do graphic novels. This has puzzled me enormously, because spring, summer, winter and fall when I step into a bookstore or library here in Portland, they’re throbbing with life and with, well, this apparently endangered species, readers. I meet readers everywhere I go. In her essay Le Guin simply insists that books are here to stay: "It's just that not all that many people ever did read them."

Le Guin's sharpest barbs are aimed at publishing executives who "think they can sell books as commodities" and are disappointed if their holdings don't increase "yearly, daily, hourly." She then goes on to compare selling books to selling corn.

Until the corporate takeover of independent publishing houses, she points out, publishers didn't expect expansion: "They were quite happy if their supply and demand ran parallel, if their books sold steadily, flatly."

It’s also a beautiful rhapsody to reading and Le Guin writes: “Besides, readers aren’t viewer; they recognize their pleasure as different from that of being entertained. Once you’ve pressed the ON button, TV goes on, and on, and on, and all you have to do is sit and stare. But reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed aloneness—not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from gathering. In its silence, a book is a challenge; it can’t lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won’t move your eyes for you images on a screen do. It won’t move your mind unless you give your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it…”

In the closing sentences she writes: “Since kids coming up through the schools are seldom taught to read for pleaser and anyhow are distracted by electrons, the relative number of book readers is unlikely to see any kind of increase and many well shrink further. What's in this dismal scene for you, Mr. Corporate Executive? Why don't you just get out of it, dump the ungrateful little pikers, and get on with the real business of business, ruling the world?"

A number of Le Guin's science fiction works, including her award-winning novels The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness, are set in a future. Over nearly 50 years she's published novels, children's books, more than 100 short stories, essays, poetry, two volumes of translation and screenplays of her works. She's received the National Book Award, five Hugos, five Nebulas, the Kafka Award, a Pushcart Prize and several "lifetime achievement" awards among dozens of other honors. She’s crosses genres and in her sci fi she examines contemporary problems by placing them in her imagined worlds--for example, an anarchic society in The Dispossessed, (1974) and life in an androgynous world, in The Left Hand of Darkness, (1969). LeGuin is also the author of a fantasy series for children, the Earthsea trilogy, and has received many awards, including the Boston Globe-Hornbook Award for juvenile fiction (1968) and the National Book Award (1973) for the children's book The Farthest Shore.

Le Guin once said, "The writer cannot do it alone. The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story."

Well the sky is sooty but no rain today. I’ve still been sick lately with various ailments, so am trying to get some work done, but not overdo. I’m working on the final chapter of my Bad Guys books so I’m trying to find books that fall into various children’s book categories. While browsing around the powells.com site I read a recent interview with Sue Grafton author of the Kinsey Milhone series about her body of work and her latest book, T is for Tresspass.

Last week while trying to get over the flu I read it and Greg Iles’ Third Degree. Isle’s latest book is a thriller and while it’s a page turner, I found myself wanting a bit more realism. As for Grafton, I found myself skipping or skimming over parts of the story—the whole just didn’t have enough tension for me. However, she’s a skilled and interesting writer and also I think any writer would be smart to pay attention to her writing process and how she works with her right brain. In the interview she mentions that she has posted the journals that she writes during her book writing process at the website http://www.suegrafton.com

The interview is at http://www.powells.com/interviews/suegrafton.html Here is an excerpt:

Dave: In the last twenty-five years, what is the longest you've gone without thinking of Kinsey?

Grafton: Seven minutes, maybe. I think about her a lot.

The way I look at the world is filtered through her. Every time I read the paper, I'm thinking about Kinsey, though I don't often draw from real cases because I don't want to get my butt sued. Everybody's suing everybody these days. Besides which, a lot of true crime, the stuff you read in the paper, is so absurd. There's no art, there's no intellect, there's no cleverness to it. People get drunk and they whack each other. Where is the joy in that? The beauty of detective fiction is that you come to believe somebody is thinking about crime, thinking and doing something devious. It isn't just alcohol-fueled, impulsive nonsense. If somebody gets killed in a mystery novel, there's a reason. It isn't for their tennis shoes.

Grafton: The mystery novels I love — Michael Connelly, Elmore Leonard — I love those guys who've been around forever, and they're just workhorses. Old school. I love watching writers of any gender do a beautiful job at anything. That's exciting. When you see someone who has a voice, a tone, a point of view, and they do their job well, that's fun.

You also might want to check out today’s Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media. It’s called "A Color of the Sky" by Tony Hoagland, from What Narcissism Means To Me. © Graywolf Press, 2003.
Here is the first stanza:
A Color of the Sky
Windy today and I feel less than brilliant,
driving over the hills from work.
There are the dark parts on the road
when you pass through clumps of wood
and the bright spots where you have a view of the ocean,
but that doesn't make the road an allegory.

A pewter-colored sky with constant rain and snow piling up in the mountains as avalanche dangers increase daily. Like most people I’ve been following the presidential primaries, wondering how New Hampshire is going to vote. I wanted to weigh in on something that happened yesterday when Hillary became emotional and teary-eyed while talking with her supporters in a diner.

Now, I’m not a big Hillary fan because I’ve been dismayed by many of her Senate votes and how she has seemed to be Bush’s enabler. For me, the Iraq occupation is the most important issue of our time and Hillary gets a big red F on that score. I also just don’t believe in political dynasties and believe the Clintons had their chance. I worry about good ol’Jeb B. waiting in the wings for his chance at plundering the national treasury because he apparently didn’t have enough chances to steal while governor of Florida. And it seems to me that if the Clintons had behaved better in office and if Hillary hadn’t sucked up so much oxygen with her senatorial race in 2000, Gore would be our president. Of course Gore game off as a prissy-pants and bore, he distanced himself too far from his own record, and the media treated him badly while giving Shrub a free ride, and then the Supreme Court stopped the vote….so lots of things have added up to the current horror we’re living in, but for me, I just cannot help it, the Clintons are tangled in this mess.

But while I’m not a Hillary fan, I don’t hate her because she is a woman, like the Neanderthals that were chanting “iron my shirt” at her rally yesterday. Which makes me think about women in power. Yesterday I turned in another chapter to my editor about dangerous women in fiction and drama. And throughout history women who step outside from traditional roles of hearth and home have been seen as a threat and if she stepped out of line, by say, heaven forbid, having sex with someone other than her husband, she needed to be punished. And if they weren’t punished, they usually had the good sense to off themselves, ala Lady Macbeth and Madame Bovary.

Hillary seems to be one of those dangerous women—hated by women because she’s powerful and by men because she’s controlling and tough. Or because she’s the wife of Bill. Or because she wears pants. Who knows? But it’s always been socially acceptable to hate women.

Hillary’s friends say she’s real and kind and funny. I hope all that is true. But what I know is that she’s allowed to get teary-eyed without the media glomming onto the story as if the sky has fallen. The story was the lead on all three network news cast last night. And of course the question was is she authentic, is she a fake, is she weak? Frankly I’d like to see her cry over all the dead and mutilated from the Iraq debacle and the mistakes she’s made in the Senate. Now, those tears would impress me. Last month Mitt Romney cried three times, but no comment was made, even when he practically sobbed on Meet the Press. And when asked about her tears, Giuliani the terror-warrior replied “9-11” because everything is about 9-11 according to that ass. So it seems to me that this campaign will be a great chance to watch the double standards of our society.

If you have not had a chance to see Bill Moyers Journal on PBS, you’re missing some of the best interviews and documentary-style reporting around. He especially focuses on the role of the media in politics {www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/archives} Lately, he’s been having Kathleen Hall Jamieson on the show commenting on the political race and in a previous show commented on the hate rhetoric aimed at Clinton based on sexism. She is the Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication and Walter and Leonore Annenberg Director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. I cannot recommend her analysis enough—she’s just so astute.

Salon.com has great political coverage these days. An opinion piece today by Gary Kamiya is called Obama's double magic. {http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2008/01/08/Obama} The story is about how “By allowing voters to both vent their anger and overcome it, while embodying the transcendence of America's racial wound, Barack Obama offers not just hope, but alchemy.” But I’m a sucker for a journalist who can really skewer Bush Co. as he does in this paragraph:

“In November 2004, American voters reelected the worst president in modern history. That election did more than blight the political hopes of half the people in this country, it raised serious questions about America's very identity. What kind of country could possibly reelect a president as manifestly unfit for office as George W. Bush? Why would millions of Americans again endorse an ignorant, incompetent leader who launched a disastrous and pointless war, presided over an administration based on secrets and lies, trampled the Constitution, ran up a ruinous debt, ignored the global environmental crisis, approved torture and secret prisons, and destroyed America's moral standing in the world?”

Happy Elvis’ birthday to all.

Dusk is falling and there is a slight drizzle here in the valley with snow in the mountains. A few weeks ago someone I know mentioned that if he could live the life he never dared he would have been a sports writer. He studied engineering and repairs copiers for a living now but is the kind of sports enthusiast who can quote statistics on just about any team, player, coach, or series. He imagines getting paid to follow teams around and put his sports knowledge to use. Since my brothers and father can quote stats going back 50 years, this doesn’t strike me as unnatural. But sometimes I wonder about what I would do if I wasn’t writing the books I write and teaching the writers I teach. Brain or psychological research—an endless fascination for me, or some other form of research would have required a much different course of study.

Last night I was listening to All Things Considered as I cooked a pot of chili and Matthew Sturm, a senior research scientist and snow expert with the Army's Cold Regions Research Laboratory (http://snow.usace.army.mi/l) came on and talked about snow. I never knew much about snow researchers and immediately starting wondering about this odd profession. Then after I went to their web site, I discovered that there is annual snow conference—who would have thunk? The site has beautiful photos of snow and magnified shots of snow flakes. It seems that the main purpose of their research is to track contaminants since in high altitude and polar regions where snow rarely melts, the continually depositing layers of snow serve as a historical record of contaminants.

Sturm explained that snow is a mineral and each flake has a dust mote at its center. While there are 30-40 general snowflake forms, that there are six basic forms such as prisms, plates, and dendrites most often seen on Christmas cards. You gotta wonder how someone gets involved in studying snow.

But if I didn’t go into research (and I shudder to imagine all the math courses and dry lectures involved), I’d love to be a film critic which seems one of the best jobs in the world, although there are so many dreadful movies made these days I can see the down side. Which brings me to the movie I saw most recently. It’s been years since I’ve read Cormac McCarthy although I was certainly aware of the buzz around No Country for Old Men. Then I started hearing about the buzz the movie and now understand it. If this film doesn’t win some Oscar nominations there is no justice.

In this film the Coen brothers are at the top of their game with a film that is so eerie, arresting, and fraught with tension that although my friend and I both needed to go to the bathroom half way through the movie, we were stapled to our seats until the final moment. However, if you cannot handle blood and gore, for god’s sake, stay away. It has some truly lurid scenes and there were several times when I looked away because my stomach could not handle, the uhm, medical details of the moment.

It’s also bleak, unfailingly bleak, and the themes are about mankind’s depravity and evil nature. As someone who has just rewritten my chapters on villains and sociopaths I was particularly interested in the antics of the character played by Javier Bardem as a cattle-gun-toting pitiless psycho. To say he’s an effective villain is to say the night sky holds lots of stars. He makes savagery look so easy that he’s pretty much convinced me never to set foot in Texas if I want to get out alive.

Although set in the barren plains of Texas the film is more crime thriller than Western since it involves a drug deal gone sour. But then sour is too wimpy a term. Since the fallout is horrific and everybody ends up dead, even the pit bulls. (You weren’t expecting Golden Retrievers were you?) A day or so later when the bodies have been baking and bloating in the Texas son the sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) and his deputy go out to check things out.

The dialogue in this scene and many others is terse and effective and spooky.

Deputy: “It’s a mess, ain’t it, sheriff?”

Sheriff: “If it ain’t, it’ll do ’til the mess gets here.”

The film has an astonishing amount of detail and each scene is brilliantly framed and even the most desolate landscapes are displayed with a strange beauty. The cast is well-chosen and Kelly Macdonald is great as Josh Brolin’s trailer-park wife and Brolin makes for a convincing Vietnam vet turned bad ass after stumbling onto the crime scene while hunting.

However, the wanna-be film critic in me needs to complain a bit. You see, there are two extremely crucial and climatic scenes that happen off-stage and for the life of me, I cannot imagine why. I won’t tell you what they are, but I will say that they’ve left a lingering disappointment in the midst of an amazing cinematic experience. Instead the film ends anti-climatically with Tommy Lee Jones describing a dream of his dead father. It’s an odd and tender moment with his wife played by Tess Harper with such concern for his happiness etched on her face that it almost broke my heart.

Perhaps in these days of such political corruption and a country falling apart, a story like this is apt—a terrible allegory for terrible times. I don’t know. I get up every morning hoping for some redemption, some glimmering humanity lightening my days. Apparently the Coen brothers don’t see things that way.

The sky is pale gray and fog is still hanging on. I’m working on my monthly column and listening to NPR’s Morning Edition and they’re reporting how “rock snot,” a type of algae, that is invading streams throughout the country. Apparently in recent years this aggressive strain is now on the loose and anglers who move from stream to stream are spreading the problem.

On Saturday I bent over to slip on my shoes and my back went out and since then moving, especially from sitting to standing, has been a big problem and the pain is like several knives in my low back. It’s given me pause to think about how I take my mobility for granted most of the time and how old age must feel for a lot of people. In the past few days if I drop something, it stays on the floor. And in a typical day I walk up and down my stairs dozens of times. Uh, I’m staying put, unless I need to press a bag of frozen peas on the pain. Now, I’ve had back problems for years so am never oblivious or take a pain-free day for granted. But it seems to me that it’s helpful to be limited for a while so you can appreciate when you feel better. So I’m going to limp into the new year and wanted to wish anyone who reads this a healthy new year and that peace prevails.

And I wanted to post a few quotes about writing, because I find so much inspiration from other writers and hope you do too.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. ~Ray Bradbury

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all. ~Richard Wright, American Hunger, 1977

I try to leave out the parts that people skip. ~Elmore Leonard

If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. ~Toni Morrison

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. ~Vita Sackville-West

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind. ~Catherine Drinker Bowen, Atlantic, December 1957

A writer and nothing else: a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to get human feelings right. ~John K. Hutchens, New York Herald Tribune, 10 September 1961

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. ~Hannah Arendt

The ablest writer is only a gardener first, and then a cook: his tasks are, carefully to select and cultivate his strongest and most nutritive thoughts; and when they are ripe, to dress them, wholesomely, and yet so that they may have a relish. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper. ~Isaac Bashevis Singer

The rain has stopped, the snows promised in the Willamette Valley yesterday mostly landed in the higher elevations, and the sky is a smorgasbord of clouds obscuring blue.

I’ve just turned another revised chapter into my editor and am trying to rethink the remaining chapters. As the year winds down, I’m thinking about what I’ve accomplished in the past months, what lies ahead, and the components of the writing life. Years ago I read novelist Oakley Hall’s How Fiction Works and in his introduction he included a list of writing tips. Since I agree with them all, and in fact, many are the basis for what I teach, I thought I’d pass them along.

1. Write every day.
2. Observe and listen.
3. Employ all the senses.
4. Use strong verbs.
5. Detail!
6. A specific always beats an abstraction.
7. Describe in motion.
8. Anglo-Saxon words are usually more effective than romance based.
9. Fiction is dramatization; dramatization is point of view, sense impressions, details, action and dialogue.
10. In dialogue, keep speeches sort.
11. Look for likenesses, parallels, contrasts, antitheses and reversals.
12. Beware the use of habitual case (would) the passive voice and the word there.
13. Plotting is compulsion versus obstacles.
14. In the second draft, start deleting adverbs.
15. Borrow widely, steal wisely.

Dusk is falling and the winter solstice is hours away. This time of year everything has a silver hue, the sky outlined against bare, silvery branches, stalks in the garden also cast like metal. I don’t know about you, but I always try to imagine the ancient astronomers and wise men and women who first figured out that this time of year in the Northern Hemisphere that the earth was tilted farthest away from the sun. And once they recognized this celestial event, how did the word of it spread? What is known is that a huge number of ancient civilizations built temples, cairns, observatories and such aligned with the solstices and equinox. It was celebrated from Scotland to Tibet, from Pakistan to North America. Solstice means standing still sun and I love the peacefulness of this day, the sense that something magnificent has shifted.

I was home wrapping presents a few nights ago and listening to various radio stations. John Henry Faulk’s Christmas story was broadcast on our local NPR station. If you’ve never heard it or read it the transcript for it is at: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5028755

It’s a story best enjoyed listened to in Faulk’s amazing voice. Here are the first two paragraphs: The day after Christmas a number of years ago, I was driving down a country road in Texas. And it was a bitter cold, cold morning. And walking ahead of me on the gravel road was a little bare-footed boy with non-descript ragged overalls and a makeshift sleeved sweater tied around his little ears. I stopped and picked him up. Looked like he was about 12 years old and his little feet were blue with the cold. He was carrying an orange.

And he got in and had the brightest blue eyes one ever saw. And he turned a bright smile on my face and says, "I'm-a going down the road about two miles to my cousins. I want to show him my orange old Santa Claus brought me." But I wasn't going to mention Christmas to him because I figured he came from a family -- the kind that don't have Christmas. But he brought it up himself. He said, "Did old Santa Claus come to see you, Mister?" And I said, "Yes. We had a real nice Christmas at our house and I hope you had the same."

I have a single candle burning in my window these days. Welcome Yule to all!

Scattered clouds with occasional patches of blue and more rain promised for today. I believe that this time of year it’s always fun to look back at the best movies, books, music, stories, that linger in the memory or have somehow made an impact.

Yesterday on NPR Fresh Air's book critic Maureen Corrigan’s reported that her favorite fiction of 2007 included Richard Russo's Bridge of Sighs, Min Jin Lee's Free Food for Millionaires, and Last Night at the Lobster, by Stewart O'Nan. Her nonfiction picks: The Mistress' Daughter, by A.M. Homes, Thomas Hardy, by Clare Tomalin and Ralph Ellison: A Biography, by Arnold Rampersad

The staff at Publisher’s Weekly have also published their best of 2007 list: “It's the end of the year—almost. A time for reflection, before the resolutions of 2008 send us all scrambling once again. So what did we read this year that kept us up at night, broke our hearts, opened our minds, made us fall in love? Three thousand books are published daily in the U.S., and PW reviewed more than 6,000 of them in 2007, in print and online. From that astounding number, we've culled a best books list covering our favorites in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, comics, religion, lifestyle and children's—150 in all. Some we've selected, such as Tree of Smoke, Fieldwork, Brother, I'm Dying and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, are up for National Book Awards; others have been blessed by Oprah (The Secret) or are a testament to DNA (Heart-Shaped Box). Some made us think about the music of the past (Can't Buy Me Love; Coltrane) or shiver in our boots (Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA); some, to paraphrase Kafka, just broke that frozen sea inside us.” For their picks go to: http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6496987.html

The New York Times Sunday Review has also weighed in with the 10 Best Books of 2007. Their choices are: Man Gone Down, by Michael Thomas, Out Stealing Horses, Per Patterson, The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño, Then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris, and Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson. In nonfiction they selected: Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone, Rajiv Changdrasekaran, Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression, Mildred Armstrong Kalish, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, Jeffrey Toobin, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History, Linda Colley, and The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross.

Here's the list, with links to previously published reviews and features by NPR’s film critic David Edelstein as well as by All Things Considered's Bob Mondello, Morning Edition contributor Kenneth Turan, and other NPR voices:

1. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
2. Away From Her
3. There Will Be Blood
4. Sweeney Todd
5. The Savages
6. No Country for Old Men
7. No End in Sight
8. Michael Clayton
9. Ratatouille*
9. Persepolis*
10. Grace is Gone

Other movies that turned David Edelstein's head:

Private Fears in Public Places
The Host
L'Iceberg
We Own the Night
Interview
Bug
Starting Out in the Evening
Sicko
Lady Chatterley
Gone Baby Gone
Charlie Wilson's War
Superbad

So what are your favorites from 2007?

Fog smothering the view this morning so the landscape is gradually taking shape through my office window.

When I give talks about writing and publishing I often mention that in the past 40 years or so that there have been a number of mega mergers that have taken place in the industry. Our most famous publishing houses such as Random House, Knopf, Putnam, Scribners, or Simon and Schuster, some which date back to the 1800s, have been transformed from private, family-owned companies to multinational media conglomerates. These mergers began in the 1960s and have come to mean that publishers are focusing on blockbuster sales and are no longer depending on their backlist for steady sales. We also know the Barnes and Noble, Costco, and big distributors have a giant influence in the book business and independent bookstores are fighting to survive.

But of course media mergers have infected every aspect of culture. There are only about a dozen or so major media companies that control what we read, view, and hear—Disney, AOL/Time Warner, Viacom, General Electric, Sony, Bertelsmann AG, Vivendi Universal, AT & T, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, and Liberty Media. In radio, Clear Channel owns over 1200 stations.

Now on December 18, the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) wants to give these large conglomerates permission to gobble up more media in a single market. This means that in town like Portland one company could own the newspaper and all the television and radio stations. And let’s not forget that this media cartel often has vast ownership in cable television, the Internet, movies and publishing. And if you think that the Internet is still a huge democracy you’d be wrong since its also being gobbled up by corporate media. Not only is FCC trying to change media ownership rules, but they have kept the public in the dark about their plans. In fact the Chairman of the FCC Kenneth Martin, a Republican, has been rushing through the process ignoring the will of the people. Apparently Chairman Martin has a history of working behind closed doors on behalf of media conglomerates.

But this is a bipartisan issue. If these changes go through you and I will be spoonfed a filtered, corporate version of reality and many voices will be silenced, particularly those of women and minorities. Trouble is, the public owns the air waves and the public doesn’t want this to happen. And we don’t want the news cancelled or a steady diet of Britney Spears and Lindsey Lohan scandals. Many of us want real news about real issues, and god help us, a big dose of truth. We know that diversity in the media is at the heart of our democracy.

Here is Ted Turner’s take on the situation from a Washington Monthly piece he wrote: “In the media, as in any industry, big corporations play a vital role, but so do small, emerging ones. When you lose small businesses, you lose big ideas. People who own their own businesses are their own bosses. They are independent thinkers. They know they can't compete by imitating the big guys--they have to innovate, so they're less obsessed with earnings than they are with ideas. They are quicker to seize on new technologies and new product ideas. They steal market share from the big companies, spurring them to adopt new approaches. This process promotes competition, which leads to higher product and service quality, more jobs, and greater wealth. It's called capitalism.

But without the proper rules, healthy capitalist markets turn into sluggish oligopolies, and that is what's happening in media today. Large corporations are more profit-focused and risk-averse. They often kill local programming because it's expensive, and they push national programming because it's cheap--even if their decisions run counter to local interests and community values. Their managers are more averse to innovation because they're afraid of being fired for an idea that fails. They prefer to sit on the sidelines, waiting to buy the businesses of the risk-takers who succeed.”

To voice your concern go to www.stopbigmedia.com and sign the petition or write to your congress person or senator.

Dawn is approaching with a bit of fog again washed over the neighborhood. Last night I was listening to National Public Radio and they were discussing the latest Bush administration scandal about the CIA destroying video tapes of suspects being tortured while being interrogated because the tapes posed “a security risk.” Now, I’m fascinated about why these tapes were destroyed, just as I’m fascinated by all the emails this administration has destroyed, and all the witnesses who refuse to appear before Congress. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to realize that these people have a lot to hide. But what bother me was that the NPR story began by describing the tapes depicting “harsh interrogation practices.” Torture is torture and let's call it torture especially since we’re supposed to adhere to the Geneva Convention like other civilized nations and we’re not supposed to use it. End of story, unless you’re a brain-washed Republican or the new Attorney General.

I don’t know about you but I’m an so weary of the right wing spinmeisters changing our language for the sake of political persuasion. When they add more troops in Iraq to replace our allies who have wisely bailed out, it’s called a “surge” not a buildup. Then there is this infernal “War on Terror.” Now, I know a lot of people besides me have realized that you cannot declare war on tactics used by fanatics, but still this term persists. Just as everyone talks about the Iraq War, when in reality it’s an occupation and we’re the occupying army along with mercenaries and a bunch of hand-picked corporations making billions in profits.

Now the right wing started subtly and not so subtly taking over our language a long time ago. Before Bush was billing himself with the help of Karl Rove as a “compassionate conservative” (boy, doesn’t that one make you choke these days?) there was Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America and the Reagan Revolution which used rhetoric that hid its inept and corrupt policies. And the real revolution of his administration was radical corporate deregulation and tax cuts for the rich, and let’s not forget his “trickle down” theory which meant that when the rich got richer we all did. Right. As he espoused “limited government” and borrowed more money than all the previous presidents before him combined and left the nation swimming in debt. As his administration and their “morning in America” in the name of “protecting democracy” meanwhile backed fascist governments and groups and were responsible for countless deaths from El Salvador to Guatemala to Chile and the list goes on. And let’s not forget how his boys created a private spy network and kickbacks from secret arms deals with Iran to keep the Nicaraguan insurgency alive…..

Which brings me to Barry Goldwater (who I suspect is spinning in his grave over what has happened to the G.O.P.) who began the current conservative movement with his anti-government, anti-communism philosophy and was also a politician of ideas and contradictions and a conscience. Goldwater was famous for his sharp tongue and shoot-from-the-hip analysis. While I certainly didn’t agree with everything he stood for, looking back on his manner of speech it seems refreshingly straightforward. Remember that when Nixon’s impeachment was about to go through in Congress they sent Goldwater to tell Nixon that the Republicans wouldn’t back him and the next day Nixon resigned. He was furious with Nixon about the Watergate scandal and said of Nixon he has shown "a tendency to dibble and dabble and argue on very nebulous grounds like executive privilege and confidentiality when all the American people wanted to know was the truth."

He also said in a 1994 Los Angeles Times interview: "A lot of so-called conservatives today don't know what the word means. They think I've turned liberal because I believe a woman has a right to an abortion. That's a decision that's up to the pregnant woman, not up to the pope or some do-gooders or the religious right. It's not a conservative issue at all."

It seems to me that these days our political discourse dibbles and dabbles and obscures the truth. My advice is that we refuse to use these buzz words and easy slogans, but form our own political content. And call a liar and crook a liar and a crook. And “harsh” interrogation torture.

I worry a lot about how our Constitution is being shredded by this administration and that the Congress isn’t moving fast enough to stop them. So sometimes I read it and the Declaration of Independence because the language is so precise and brimming with promise. The people that created these documents argued over the language, wanting it to be clear and true and so that it might last for generations. Many of these patriots suffered and died for adding their signatures to these remarkable documents that still ring with truth and hope: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” Anton Chekov

I woke in the middle of the night listening. For the first time in days I couldn’t hear the wind or rain pounding against the roof and windows. But although the wind has died down the rain is continuing. I know that much of the country has been hit with a wide-spread snowstorm; here it’s been a pineapple express. So while the temperatures have warmed, hurricane-force winds which reached up to 129 miles an hour and heavy rain have battered our region, killing at least four people and knocking out power as the storms blocked roads with trees, power lines, high water and mud slides. I-5 is closed between Portland and Seattle, some coastal towns are still without power, and the country’s largest Sitka spruce, over 700 years old was snapped in half by the winds. Seattle received more than 5 inches in a single day.

Yesterday I went out to visit Johnson Creek which is about a block away and discovered that it jumped its bank. In fact it’s about 15 feet above the bank with most of the surrounding park under water. Neighbors milled around snapping photos on cell phones while others filled sandbags and dogs acted nervous, sniffing around the altered landscape. The creek, which flows 26 miles through Clackamas and Multnomah counties before entering the Willamette River is prone to flooding. As I watched, the neighborhood’s great blue heron came in for a landing, but then with the creek seemingly unrecognizable, he flew back upstream.

On Saturday I spent the day amid snow and slush teaching in Olympia. The college is surrounded by huge evergreens, mostly cedars and the storm began around noon and snow nestled in the branches like a winter postcard setting. Traveling home by train the snow and sleet slapped against the car the whole trip and by the time I reached home somehow the weather had seemed to infiltrate me and I arrived home feeling unsettled but grateful.

I was teaching my “show, don’t tell” workshop which is a day spent advising writers how to make their writing more alive. Show, don’t tell is probably the first technique of writing. Simply put, show, don’t tell advises writers to show via action or dramatizing, including dialogue and the five senses whenever possible and to tell, or explain or report only when necessary. Yet, while it’s a helpful guideline, all writing requires both showing and telling. Too much telling and the work is distant, static, lifeless on the page. Too much showing and the story is relentless, a full-tilt boogie. And contrary to conventional beliefs, it can also be flat and dull.

If you show me it’s a story, if you tell me, it’s a report. However, let’s clear up this simple fact: telling is not intrinsically bad, nor can be considered a necessary evil, because all stories require background information and data in order to be truly developed. Effective writing is a blend of techniques with telling used to develop characters, explain and reveal. When you tell the reader information, you’re guiding him into the story, grounding the action with much needed evidence. Too much showing in a story and the reader is abandoned, adrift, forced to read meaning into every gesture.

It seems to me that chief difference between the two approaches is that with showing the reader is involved in the story as a sensory participant and draws his own conclusions; with telling the writer is instructing the reader how to think. But you know, since Saturday I’ve been thinking that most writing techniques are accomplished word by word. In this workshop we spend time focusing on using vivid verbs and limiting modifiers because modifiers tell and verbs show. We also spent a lot of time on how using precise and sensory details brings the reader into a story and evokes emotions.

Here are some suggestions for SDT, word by word:

• Limit your use of adjectives and adverbs, instead preferring specific nouns and vivid verbs.

• Use showing for the focal moments in the story.

• Avoid abstract language, judgment or announcement words like beautiful, frightening, wonderful, hatred, envy, ugly, evil, frustration. Nail down these terms with concrete proofs and interpretations told through a character’s or narrator’s point of view.
• Describe a person’s emotions; don’t state them.
• Don’t insert long descriptions in the middle of an action scene.
• Use telling when you need to deliver a lot of information in few words.
• Use telling for transitions and quick summaries.
• Dialogue shows and is especially helpful to reveal emotions and a person’s particular slant on the world. Dialogue can also reveal by what is NOT said.

• To show, use active verbs. An example is Telling: Alice looked at the men in anger. Showing: Alice’s eyes smoldered. Telling: The house was rundown and shabby. Showing: Weeds crowded the foundation and the paint curled around the sagging windows.

• Telling, when poorly applied, makes announcements: Alice was furious, Sam was sad, Bob was feeling lonely. This is telling at its most mundane; avoid this pitfall by stapling a solid example or evidence onto this sort of statement. Telling when used by a sloppy writer can be general and stereotypical.

We know that good writing simmers, brims, sweats on the page, slips into reader’s brain with a vivid vibrancy. Most compelling writing is a blend of action, physical description and information combined to create thrust and involve readers emotionally. Experiment with your own devices to breathe life into your words remembering that there is room for suggestive and indirect approaches.

And just a reminder from American Friends Service Committee: The $720 million a day price tag for the Iraq occupation could be used instead to fund healthcare for 423,529 children or equip 1,277,335 homes with renewable electricity for an entire year.

Dawn is bringing in a smoke grey sky and I’m working on my monthly column which is about keeping hope alive while you’re waiting for your next book deal. I’m heading up to Olympia by train later this morning to teach a workshop at Evergreen College and snow is in the forecast for tomorrow in the Valley and has been falling in the mountains and Columbia River Gorge.

We’ve all heard the old joke about parents telling their children “When I was a boy (girl) I had to walk five miles to school…..” or fill in the blank on some other hardship of life back in the day. When I was a girl we usually walked to school in northern Wisconsin, although we’d sometimes took the bus which stopped about three blocks away. Our school was about three miles away and as I imagine winter mornings back then and the piercing cold, every day was a battle or engagement with winter. Weather has changed in my hometown, but back then school was not closed until it was 40 below. Throughout the long months of winter it was almost always below zero, but we were out in the cold anyway.

The winter of my childhood was a white, white place with snow piled over my shoulders often. Snow was a constant, arriving early, often in late October or early November and staying late—sometimes still falling in April. As an adult I can still remember some memorable snow falls such as one New Year’s eve in the mid 1980swhen I catered a party and a blizzard dropped about five feet and we piled out of our van at regular intervals to dig out as we struggled to reach home.

For most of my life the sound of winter was snow plows lumbering past and shovels scraping away at the drifts and the songs that were played at the skating rink where I visited every night after dinner. Those songs still play in the recorder embedded in memory and at the oddest times one will replay, the melody traveling across the years. I lived in Milwaukee in the 1970s and 80s and the city operated an Armada of snow removal vehicles and would also attach plows to their garbage trucks. When a blizzard came into town, it was met with a kind of Normandy invasion tactical removal plan.

So imagine my surprise when I moved to the Northwest and snow happened. Few people here know how to drive in snow, and when the roads become white, people panic and the town looks like a giant bumper car game. The city doesn’t have the equipment they need to deal with it. And then they spread sand and gravel to combat snow and ice—which mostly makes a huge mess and doesn’t do much to combat the conditions.

So when it snows here I stay home, out of the fray. I cook soup and brew pots of tea and turn up the heat and go out walking in it, savoring the magic of a white world. Because it never lasts long when it lands here, in fact, is usually washed away by rain a day or two later. But I think all writers need to spend time in the places or weather or activities that made them feel alive as a kid. For me, it’s about snow and creeks, lakes, forests.

These days the sound of winter is rain and it’s soothing and sometimes when I awake in the night I just lie there and listen until it lulls me back to sleep. I have been trying to study some aspect of Buddhism every night before I fall asleep. In a book I’m currently reading the first lines are: The purpose of life is to be alive. I sort of hate to repeat such an obvious statement but it seems to me that many people think it’s to collect stuff or wield power. Writers get to live twice by writing about all they see and know and feel and imagining worlds they’ve created on the page.

So here’s what I think: look at the times and places you feel most alive and return there again and again. Show up at the page engaged and aware and crazy about living. Stay with the page tolerating the frustration, the uneasiness, the challenge. And feed your writing with the adventure of life in all its parts, including snow.

“A villain must be a thing of power, handled with delicacy and grace. He must be wicked enough to excite our aversion, strong enough to arouse our fear, human enough to awaken some transient gleam of sympathy. We must triumph in his downfall, yet not barbarously nor with contempt, and the close of his career must be in harmony with all its previous development.” Agnes Repplier

It’s been a day of working on my revision and short projects, then during a respite in the weather I tackled plants in the backyard, hacking and trimming, hauling out piles of dead and soggy branches. Then I whipped together batch of vegetable soup and visited the grocery store for more supplies for the Thanksgiving feast. I returned home and went out walking at dusk and the sky was a fright show of clouds dipped in gloom, all hanging low; the moon playing peek-a-boo amid the clouds; and damp seeping past my skin as my breath clouded the air. The recent rains have washed through here and the creek has spread wide and puddles are everywhere. I was walking past the creek when I happened to look into the water and spotted a great blue heron in the water just below me.

Now, it seems that every time that I’m thinking deep, worried thoughts that I spot the heron. Tonight he wasn’t moving much, merely gazing around, seeming unbothered by me as I played statue nearby. Part of me wanted to scream or make a sudden movement so that he’d soar aloft with all the grace that this world contains. But I kept still until he slipped downstream and I crept around in the park trying to spot him, but he became invisible in the gloom. And after chatting with a neighbor I continued on, touched by hope and something unnamable.

I returned home and flipped on NPR and heard that the National Endowment of the Arts has released a new study about the decline of reading in the country. The deciding factor in who reads and who doesn’t is not socio-economic factors, but rather how many books are found in a family’s home. Then Alice Brock who is now a painter of “Alice’s Restaurant” fame came on and talked about her philosophy of cooking and life and talked about how culinary mistakes lead to discovery and how she had no regrets walking away from her restaurant because now she paints and lives in a place she loves. Then a story about record numbers of deserters in our much-troubled military.

But I want to talk about villains because when I was out walking and all through this day, my mind has been percolating on the topic. I’m still in the thick of revising my Bad Guy book for my Writer’s Digest editor and I’m trying to restructure four chapters that cover villains so that the logic has a different progression. When a villain is in a story as with a monster, his presence capitalizes on our fear of death and being vulnerable prey. If you study ancient myths you’ll find a pantheon of them, in varied and hair-raising forms. They will showcase humankind’s basest desires and passions. You’ll find monsters that cause us to shiver and demons that haunt our nightmares, but you’ll also find ordinary folks who took a wrong turn somewhere and landed on the wrong side of morality.

The ancient Greeks were famous for their bad guys. There were the three Gorgons, three monstrous sisters whose glance could turn men into stone. The most famous of the Gorgons is Medusa who was once beautiful but Athena transformed into a hideous visage complete with a head of snakes instead of hair. In fact, she was so odious, that she was often depicted on Greek armor to frighten their enemies. The Greek culture also brought us sea nymphs like Calypso who imprisoned Odysseus, sea monsters and sirens who lured sailors to their deaths with song and wiles, Hydra, the many-headed snake killed by Hercules, fire-breathing oxen, the Enchantress Circe who changes Odysseus’ men into pigs.

From the Greeks we can learn to create imaginative foes that torment our heroes and simple people trying to get by in life. From the stories found in all cultures we can learn that fate dishes out harsh lessons and trials, that we humans sometimes need superhuman strength to navigate the perils of living and that as often as things can right, they can more often go wrong.

When you use a villain in a story it’s because the story needs evil deeds and intentions and no one else will do. As a storyteller you have many choices about your villain—do you make him or her sympathetic, or cold as an iceberg; sane or at least normal-seeming, or a raving lunatic. Is your villain young or old, attractive or ugly, benign to those who don’t know better, or beastly.

There are several traits that villains all share—they enjoy their villainy and are often motivated by power, revenge, or profit. They are anti-life or anti-social, and have some special form of intelligence. Stupid people make lousy villains just like in real life because they’ll get caught. A villain is not someone you can reason with or dismiss. They make conflict visible. And of course you want your villain rampaging, pillaging and swashbuckling through your pages. Or perhaps he’s the quiet, spooky type. With a cold blue stare that chills your blood. Wait a minute, that cold blue stare has been done before.

Since most of have been raised on Disney movies, Marvel comics, Grimm’s Brother fairytales and the like, it seems to me that most writers need to unlearn what a villain is. And travel toward a character that is much more nuanced, complex, vital, and exciting. I’m writing these chapters because it seems also that many writers need to think hard about the motivation and the why of villains. To think as the villain thinks, feel as the villain feels instead of imagining him or her as some monstrous Other. Or as Elmore Leonard once said, “All villains have mothers."

I awoke too early with rain spattering the roof and have spent a guilty hour reading articles on-line. Sky as gloomy as a graveyard at midnight. Last night I attended a brief workshop by Ken Kenyon who is a science fiction author. Her latest book is Bright of the Sky. The workshop was about dialogue and Kay made some great points about the emotional shadings of dialogue.

It seems to me that there are several aspects of storytelling that signal to readers that they’re in the hands of a competent author. One of the loudest signals [think-car-alarm-shrieking, geese-honking-in-a-huge, frantic-V-overhead, leaf-blower-loud] comes from how you handle dialogue. And too many beginning writers are too ham fisted. You know, I’ve never used ham fisted in a sentence before….but I think I’ll leave it in there anyway.

There are a few things to keep in mind about dialogue: it is conversation’s greatest hits, meaning it’s not the same as everyday speech—it is compressed, distilled and at the same time amped up and leaves out the boring or mundane parts of life. The other thing is that people rarely say what they mean in fiction. (You might argue in real life either) When they do it’s called “on the nose” dialogue and it’s generally to be avoided, although at times it can be appropriate. On the nose dialogue reveals a writer at work, trying to force information on the reader. It’s often obvious, clumsy and lacking in nuance. It’s a character laying out an obvious objective, emotion, or agenda. When my students read their on the nose dialogue out loud is always sounds flat and forced. Sometimes children will speak on the nose, or an arresting officer might use it, or a drill sergeant might use it. But most of the time dialogue is a tricky, slippery device. Repeat after me: fiction isn’t life, it is artifice.

For example, if a couple meets for a date and the male character wants to seduce the female character he might tell her she looks beautiful or lean in and stroke her arm. He might ask her about her hobbies and if she’s patched up things with her best friend. He’ll want to show interesting, caring. Unless he’s an idiot, he wouldn’t say, “Let’s have sex later.” No, he’d dance around this intention with seductive comments and flattery and banter. Anything but “let’s do it baby.”

Instead, when talking on the page or in a film, people should have agendas, especially hidden agendas, hidden emotions and vulnerabilities. They avoid, change the subject, struggle for words, struggle to control emotions. Dialogue is also often about a power exchange or power struggle. These machinations are all cloaked via dialogue and also expressed in subtext, the river of emotions that lies beneath ordinary speech and actions.

The results should be tension and possibly conflict. In fact, nearly every dialogue exchange should contain tension, which, of course, includes sexual tension. Good dialogue crackles and sparkles and lunges at the reader. It contains the breath of life, it conveys characters’ emotions and personalities; it pushes the story forward. It’s revealing, but often not too revealing. Good dialogue happens up close so that it’s immediate, intimate and sometimes awkward. So here are a few tips about writing dialogue:

In a scene ask yourself what the character is afraid to express or is hiding.

Collect witty comebacks and one-liners. You never know when they might fit into a story.

Avoid having characters state emotions—such as “I’m angry.” Or, “I’m sad.” Wiggle, slither around these obvious emotions. Or show characters acting out the emotion or struggling to hide the emotion in body language.

Avoid asking characters questions that they can answer with a yes or no.

If your characters are chit-chatting and the conversation doesn’t move the story forward, cut it.

Avoid characters talking to themselves out loud unless they’re mentally ill.

Avoid speeches, sermons, soliloquies, and other windbaggery. If for some reason a character must talk for more than a few sentences, try to break it up. Generally dialogue is used to speed up the pace.

Avoid having characters repeat what another character has just said.

Avoid having characters discuss things they both know or is too obvious—“As you know Bob, ever since Mattie dumped you, you’ve been a mess and your life has been going downhill.”

Remember that much of dialogue is unfinished—it gets interrupted, someone refuses to answer, someone blusters instead of giving a direct answer, someone trails off.

Be careful in revealing backstory through dialogue—it works best when the characters are strangers or new acquaintances. When old friends chat about the past it can sound false.

Read your work out loud so you can determine if your characters all sound alike.

Avoid attributions with adverbs tacked on—she said enthusiastically, Tom said crossly.

The more time you spend knowing and developing your character, the more the character’s dialogue will come forth instead of you forcing it onto the page.

Ask yourself what emotions you’re trying to generate in readers in specific scenes.

Don’t try to convey too much information in one dialogue exchange.

Break up dialogue with small action, mannerisms, gestures.

Use dialect with extreme caution.

Less is more.

The Sunday morning sky is brushed with clouds but mostly blue. The promised rain has never arrived and Veteran’s Day has come around again. There are now three men still alive who served in World War I. One will place a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier today while Bush hides from reality at his Texas "ranch." Does everyone know there are no cattle at Bush's ranch? But I digress...Veterans Day first began as Armistice Day on Nov. 11, 1919, to celebrate the first anniversary of the end of World War I. Congress passed a resolution in 1926 for an annual observance, and Nov. 11 became a national holiday beginning in 1938. Eisenhower signed legislation in 1954 to change the name to Veterans Day to honor all those who served in all American wars. Remembrances with parades and speeches and ceremonies will take place across the across the country today

But it seems that many will ignore this day besides noting that their mail will not be delivered tomorrow. I’m in the category that feels the constant sadness and unease of knowing that more people in uniform will die this week as did the six men who were ambushed in Afghanistan on Friday. They were returning from a meeting with village elders and eight U.S. soldiers were wounded in the ambush and three Afghan soldiers were killed also. In case you’re deluded and believe that things in Afghanistan or Iraq are getting better, their deaths made 2007 the deadliest for the U.S. military serving there since the 2001 invasion, mirroring the record U.S. toll in Iraq.

In 2006 we had 23.7 million veterans in the U.S. I wonder what would happen if they all would rise up to demand the end of the occupation in Iraq? Would anyone listen?

Meanwhile, last night I attended a LiveWire show with a friend. It’s a monthly radio show along the lines of Prairie Home Companion. The show had a literary theme last night and guests included Alexandra Fuller of Don’t Let’s go to the Dogs Tonight, Peter Segal of NPR’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me and Harry Shearer of Spinal Tap, Le Show, and The Simpsons. Shearer has a new song, Waterboardin U.S.A. that you might want to hear, a new novel Not Enough Indians about a town on the skids that forms a fake Indian tribe and builds a casino, and he’s on-line at www.mydamnchannel.com. You might want to check out their content because their business model sounds innovative ….. I bet after this writer’s strike more videos, shows will end up on-line.

Oh yes, and in yesterday's blog I forgot to mention that Mailer was always unapologetically progressive and anti-war.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing. Norman Mailer

Dawn is breaking revealing a sullen sky and what promises to be a weekend of rain. I woke up too early since I’m teaching today and heard the news that Norman Mailer is dead at 84 of renal failure. In recent years despite serious health problems and walking with two canes, he kept on writing.

His first novel The Naked and the Dead written when he was 25 after he was drafted into the army and served in the Philippines established him as a literary voice. He went on to write 40 novels and literary nonfiction, to cover politics and boxing, produce five films and win two Pulitzer prizes for The Armies of the Night in 1968 and The Executioner's Song in 1979.

Some of his work was great, some of it fairly dreadful, and at times his messy personal life including six marriages, drunken antics and brawling overshadowed his literary prowess. He had a public feud with Gore Vidal and other writers, hated the notion of women being liberated, smoked pot, made a bid to be the mayor of New York, was the co-founder of The Village Voice, and seemed to love his outspoken bad boy image.

But what I like to think about is how he loved the novel and how he possessed a distinct voice and style that was all his own and how Mailer kept on writing all these years. Even though he never used a computer—wrote everything longhand. In these days when so many writers are trying to crank out a 100-page screenplay or writing ad copy, he decried the current withering interest in the novel. When he was young, Mailer said, "fiction was everything. The novel, the big novel, the driving force. We all wanted to be Hemingway ... I don't think the same thing can be said anymore. I don't think my work has inspired any writer, not the way Hemingway inspired me."

He also said, “I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.”

The morning has brought fog to the region and the scene outside my window looks like the set of a horror movie. However, the sun will be back later and the fine weather continues. Despite the incredible weather, I’ve had politics on my mind lately and have been feeling particularly pessimistic and concerned about everything I see and hear. Mukasey’s confirmation seems a done deal and Musharraf’s antics in Pakistan are freaky.

Last night between a walk at dusk and getting ready to drive to my Qi Gong class I flipped on ABC Nightly News—something I probably do about twice a year. And the vision that was on the screen came from Pakistan and all the lawyers, dressed in their proper suits, being hauled away and arrested. Let’s think about this a minute. They’re not arresting thugs or terrorists. They’re arresting the people that understand the laws governing the country, who understand the fine points of their constitution.

So feeling grumpy I drove away listening to NPR on my car radio. They were relating a story about Johnny Cash being pardoned for a long-ago night in jail and then came a segment from their Vocal Impressions feature. And within moments my mood changed and I was pulled into the poetry of language and the beauty of the human imagination.

Vocal Impressions challenges NPR listeners to respond to a group of well-known voices and the emotions and sounds these evoke. Since January host Brian McConnachie has been asking listeners to describe in poetic language these impressions. The idea came to him after he asked his teen aged daughter what Ella Fitzgerald’s voice sounds like and she replied, “like diamonds dipped in caramel.”

When I talk to writers about editing and revising I remind them in their final drafts to add music—comparisons and metaphors and language that make the whole resonate. With that in mind, here is music from NPR listeners weighing in with these comparisons: On Morgan Freeman’s voice: "What rich river-bottom soil feels like" — Elizabeth Libby "A voice too tired to hurry and too powerful to slow down" — Andy Mullins

Marilyn Monroe’s voice: “A taffeta petticoat under a ball gown" — Nancy Julian

Truman Capote’s voice: "An exasperated raven with a tension headache" — Scott Lien

Patsy Cline’s voice: "The voice of the moon courting a shy earth" — Justin Balsley

Sean Connery’s voice: "The voice of God's more athletic brother who is home from college for the weekend." —- Kevin McGuire

Mick Jagger’s voice: "A box of chocolate with a spider in it" — Julianne Hurst Williams "Your annoying younger brother's annoying best friend the day after you had a surprisingly sexual dream about him" — Leslie Gurowitz

Eleanor Roosevelt’s voice: ""Julia Childs before she got into the cooking sherry" — Stephanie Miller "A swimming pool in late October" — Jessica Carlson
Barrty White’s voice:

Barry White's voice: "A waterfall of melted butter" — Brent Lamb, "Sun-warmed cat fur" — Victoria Lecuyer, "Deep need on a Saturday night" — Schubert Moore, "What you'd expect to hear when you put your ear up to an empty bottle of Viagra" — John Crotty

Pavarotti’s voice: "All the magnificent architecture that has yet to be built" — Olivia Linda, "The voice of every castrati crying out for heirs" — Charlene Rauch, "A newborn baby's first taste of air" — Jessica Carlson, "The upwelling of joy for no particular reason except that you're 17, it's spring and the universe is beautiful beyond bearing" — Judith Anderson