Writer's Notebook

Jock Stewart in Operation E-Book Drop

Today's Gainesville (GA) Times did a nice story in the local section about my participation in Operation E-Book Drop, a volunteer program offering free e-books to deployed coalition troops. I hope this story will help get the word out to service men and women about the availability of e-books from the 230 authors who have signed up. Sixteen of these are from my publisher Vanilla Heart.

This afternoon, I received another e-mail from program founder Ed Patterson about a mother who is signing up for her son who is soon to be deploying. I sent her an e-mail right away. I've sent out over 60 of these e-mails in the last several weeks for my comedy/thriller "Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire." When a new edition of my 2004 novel "The Sun Singer" comes out next spring, I hope it will also be available in the multiple formats distributed by smashwords.com for Operation E-Book Drop.

--Malcolm

How Much of Your Life is in Your Fiction?

The autobiographies of some novelists often read like a James Bond novel. No wonder they have things to write about.

What about the rest of us? We've done a lot of living: it just doesn't make dramatic front page news. Yet, that living--on a quieter scale, perhaps--often finds its way into our books in various forms, usually with the names changed to protect both the innocent and the guilty.

The worst stuff and the best stuff are obviously dynamic for page-turner books. But a lot of tears and joys are tangled up with everyday, garden variety lifestyles. It's just as well we don't feel larger than life: how vain would that be! But we can ramp up the little things, fine-tune the middle of the road things, and cautiously use the more exciting messes we've gotten ourselves into.

By fictionalizing bits and pieces of our life's stories, we not only bring passion to our work, we bring honesty. We're telling it true because we've been there and we've experienced it. This sincerity comes across to the reader.

I set my novel "The Sun Singer" in Glacier National Park. Why? I wanted a mountain environment, so I picked a place I knew. I knew Glacier because I worked there at one of the resort hotels and had fallen in love with the place. Consequently, I had a sense of the place and also knew where to go to find any facts I was missing.

My protagonist in "Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire" is a journalist. While I've done very little work as a journalist, my father was a journalist who taught reporting and editing at the college level; many of his friends were journalists and they were around the house a lot telling stories when I was growing up. I taught journalism for several years myself. So, it was natural to write about a reporter.

My yet-to-be-published novel "Garden of Heaven" is set, in part, aboard an aircraft carrier in the 1960s. You guessed it. I served on a carrier--as a Navy journalist, actually. Many of my experience aboard ship and in liberty ports have been fictionalized and placed in the novel.

I don't know whether everyone does this or not. Maybe their first kiss in in one of their books, and that's it. Maybe they had an argument with a math teacher, so they put that in. Or, perhaps their car ran off a snowy road during a long Wisconsin winter, so they put that in. Maybe it's one little thing here and another little thing there.

While my life will never read like a James Bond novel, I use myself as a source for a lot of stuff--and then I punch it up, so to speak, so it makes a good story. Maybe my novels represent the life it would have been fun to have lived.

--Malcolm

A place in the pun

"Pun, an expression that achieves emphasis or humor by contriving an ambiguity, two distinct meanings being either suggested by the same word or by two similar-sounding words." -- The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms.

While Shakespeare is said to have used some 3,000 puns in his plays, Oliver Wendel Holmes thinks puns are the ill conceived bastards of language, or words to that effect:  "People who make puns are like wanton boys who put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism."

Poe suggests that "The goodness of the true pun is in the direct ratio of its intolerability" and Fred Allen vows that "Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted."

Most of us groan when we read things like A princess gets her education one knight at a time and I'm on a seafood diet. Every time I see food, I eat it. 

In an article about the wordplay in Shakespeare, Jem Bloomfield writes that puns "rely on a sudden link being shown between two ideas which have previously been completely separate." That's the beauty of them: they're a shock to the system. As Bloomfield notes, the reaction is both visceral and intuitive.

If a comedienne winks at her audience and says, Hubby and I always make love on hump day, the resulting laugh will be accompanied by a jolt, a moment of dissonance while the audience bridges the ambiguous meanings of hump and laughs. Once you see it, you'll see it where it wasn't obvious before, as in when somebody says, Now that I'm pregnant, I'll never get over the hump.

When I write, I seldom plan a pun or a symbolic double meaning in the sentence I'm about to create. Yet puns and double meanings flow naturally as I type. It's as though my muse or my subconscious mind see dozens of connections between words that my conscious mind doesn't see as I think about what I'm going to write next. I grew up around people who made puns, so perhaps I was simply brainwashed.

Author Sunetra Gupta writes that "What words conceal is as important as what they reveal." This is a very important truth, one that it often takes writers years to discover because we are taught in school to find the best word, the most precise word. One almost has to flip a mental switch to see the humor and/or symbolism lurking within puns and passages that have multiple meanings. Gupta goes on to say "Although the essence of raw communication may be clarity, in literature it is the inexact and the imprecise that allow us to push forward the boundaries of human experience and cognition."

Pushing those boundaries occurs during the inevitable groan that follows a line like I couldn't quite remember how to throw a boomerang, but eventually it came back to me. We may laugh or smile, but we think about the matter as well, sometimes a little and sometimes a lot. Double meanings, whether silly or deep, can make both the reader and the writer step outside the box or even throw caution to the wind and destroy the envelope. Let the pun shine in.

Ice Water? Get some Onions - that'll make your eyes water. -- Groucho Marks

--Malcolm Campbell, author of "Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire," a comedy/thriller filled with more puns and groans per square smile than the law allows in some states.

Thursday's Thoughts - on being remembered

"You may forget but let me tell you this, someone in the future time will think of us." Sappho, as translated by Mary Bernard.

"Someone, I say to you, will think of us, in some future time." Sappho as translated by Margaret Reynolds

"Someone will remember us I say even in another time." Sappho as translated by Anne Carson

The precise words, as best rendered in English may be in doubt, for they come to us in fragments of an obscure Greek dialect 26 centuries in the past. It's more likely the words were sung or chanted, intended more for the ear than the page or the surface of a vase. Though the details of the poet's life are also unclear, it's clear that we remember her.

As a writer, I feel a connexion with a writer who said so long ago that those in the future would remember her, however tenuous, however inaccurate, however brief: the kind of connexion that occurs when one ponders another in the quiet of twilight until images dance in front of him in his mind's eye.

She was right, though she had no concept of the how of it, much less of a medium of expression light years away from papyrus and stone, her words would live. We still sing, though with instruments unknown in Sappho's day, yet we seldom sing Sappho's lines because they do not come to us as words we know how to sing.  Most of us, that is.

Was writers, our hope is this: we will be remembered. True, it sounds arrogant, vain, insane, perhaps, to say our words will be translated by scholars from our ultimately obscure dialect of English from fragments that survive on scraps on copy paper, old books, some sheet music perhaps. We may seldom speak of it, but in the quiet of twilight we hope our words will have attained the value that ensures they'll be kept. One dear reader may be enough, or an old lover long gone, to be sure, before the words are discovered and rendered anew onto the disk drive or travel drive or--let's speculate--electron cloud many centuries from now.

Maybe Anne Carson's distant family members yet to be conceived will one day create a book or holograph with a name like If not, Winter: Fragments of Malcolm where she writes, as Carson wrote of Sappho, "I like to think that, the more I stand out of the way, the more Malcom shows through."

And you as well, dear reader, someone--I say to you--will think of us in some future time.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Malcolm, author of The Sun Singer and Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire.

How do we keep from losing our local news?

Some years ago, metropolitan television stations went  head-to-head with the broadcast networks by focusing a fair amount of their "local news hours" national and international news. While the local newscasts were expanded, in some cases, to run for an hour and a half, we didn't end up with a lot more local news. The stations tended to focus on more dramatic stuff: murders, hot political issues, freeway backups and wrecks.

Viewers still relied on metropolitan and suburban newspapers for the bulk of their local news. With newspapers failing and trying to come up with re-invented online versions of themselves, I wonder how they will fare when they come up against the major news sites and the vast blogging world of the Internet. Will people have time to check Yahoo or CNN and then also look at the web site of the local tribune, journal or register?

In his piece on MediaShift, Roland Legrand suggests that newspapers are making a mistake when they view their web sites as places for dumping static versions of news stories that first appeared in print--or would have appeared in print if a hard copy version of the paper still existed. He suggests five kinds of out-of-the-box thinking for placing news into an online medium which is far different than the large sheets of newsprint most of us grew up with.

As newspapers re-evaluate their business plans, I hope they will also re-evaluate how to live long and prosper in a new media world. Otherwise, people will stop coming to their sites once those who used to subscribe to the former print version fade away. Some newspapers will charge for access to their sites, yet I don't think that's going to work long term since most readers are used to everything on the Internet being free. So the bottom line is local advertising for paying the bill of reporting, editing and writing the news.

Advertisers will expect to see a return from their online newspaper advertising dollar. And that means readers just as it does in the world of print. But these readers will approach the site much differently than they approached the hard copy version. Journalists and journalism schools must look at this seriously, or everything they hold near and dear--that is to say, local news--will be lost when everyone and their brother heads straight for CNN and the hot buzzed up stories over on Yahoo and considers themselves to be fully informed.

Today's Quote: Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent. --Gore Vidal

Today's Website: Bob Baker's Newsthinking - a handy place for writers interested in reporting the news.


Copyright (c) by Malcolm R. Campbell author of the upcoming novel "Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire" about an old-style investigative reporter in the middle of a murder investigation.

Vanilla Heart to Publish 'Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire'

from Vanilla Heart:

Vanilla Heart Publishing, an independent publishing company in Seattle, Washington, USA, is pleased to announce the signing of author Malcolm R. Campbell of Jefferson, Georgia, for his novel, Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire, scheduled for release later this summer.

Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire is mainstream humor with a dash of mystery. A throwback to Hollywood’s film noir reporters, Jock Stewart is out of touch with the looming world of digital journalism. A mix of Don Rickles and Don Quixote, Stewart is the man for the job when the skirts are up and the chips are down.

Hard-boiled reporter Jock Stewart wakes up on the morning after the Star-Gazer office party with a hangover and an old flame in his bed, and much later, he cuddles up with the mayor’s wife in the back seat of a 1953 Desoto. Between these defining moments, he investigates the theft of the mayor’s race horse Sea of Fire and the murder of his publisher’s girl friend, Bambi Hill.

Stewart discovers the truth for his news stories via an interview style based on lies, pretense, and audacious behavior.

Campbell was graduated from Florida State University with a B.A. in radio-television writing, with a minor in English, and from Syracuse University with an M.A. in journalism. He also attended the University of Colorado as a journalism student and was a weekend climbing participant at the school’s Mountain Recreation Department. He served in the U. S. Navy as a journalist between 1968 and 1970, writing news stories and features for the military and the civilian press while on board the aircraft carrier U. S. S. Ranger (CVA-61) and while stationed at the Great Lakes Naval Station.

Campbell lives in Jefferson, Georgia with his wife Lesa, of 22 years, a former newspaper reporter, systems analyst, and the consulting director of the Crawford W. Long Museum. In December, Campbell finished serving four years, three as chair, on the Jefferson Historic Preservation Commission. Both Campbells have been active in the town’s Main Street Program.

Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire will be available in print editions through several trade distributors and on Amazon, Kindle editions, and Ebook editions throughout the United Kingdom, Europe, and North America. A video teaser, pre-release reviews, contact information, and select excerpts are available on the Vanilla Heart Publishing Author website – http://www.vanillaheartbooksandauthors.com.

PUBLISHER CONTACT INFORMATION
For Media Requests or to schedule an appearance or interview with Malcolm Campbell, please contact MediaInfo@vanillaheartbooksandauthors.com.

I Sent My Muse a Telegram

WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING WHEN YOU KILLED MY FAVORITE CHARACTER? STOP.

I've been writing blind, channeling from wherever, typing at flank speed. I'm letting my "muse" and the characters control what happens.

The novel unfolds and as it does, I discover the plot, the dialogue, the action.

My protagonist Jock Stewart just left the Purple Platter restaurant, walked across the street, and there was a man signing the blues for donations. Suddenly, he sings an old Josh White song called "St James Infirmary." Jock throws a five dollar bill in the cigar box where tips are collecting in a large stack.

That's when he knows she's been murdered.

I did not expect this and I'm stunned. I stopped writing and thought about it. Perhaps I could put a lesser character in her shoes, so to speak. Like a god, I could create a new character out of Georgia clay, breathe life into her, and then say, "sorry babes, Col Mustard just killed you in the conservatory with a lead pipe."

"Don't even think about it," my muse said.

"I already thought about it."

"Let's have a come-to-the goddess meeting," she hissed. "If I'm going to supply the stories, your job is to polish them until they shine like jewels. Understand."

"But not her..."

"It has to be be her. When you get to the last line, you'll see why."

"I don't like you."

"So what?"

Leap-of-faith writing goes this way. I feel like I'm in a Porsche Boxster driving 150 mph with my eyes closed on a country road filled with pot holes.

If I open my eyes, I'm safe, but the dream vanishes.

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Today's Blog: Writers in the Sky - Interview with Book Marketing Expert Ella Curry

Copyright (c) 2009 by Malcolm R. Campbell