The New Scourge

Another excerpt from the book in progress, The Undressing of America. Young Tony Comstock has just arrived in New York from small-town Connecticut in 1868.

Nothing in Comstock’s life had prepared him for New York City.

      The city was exploding in size, from half a million in 1850 to nearly nine hundred thousand by the late 1860s. And nearly a quarter of those nine hundred thousand people had been born in Ireland, most of them to the rural poor. Other foreigners were pouring in too, especially Germans, tens of thousands a year, most of them as Catholic as the Irish.

      The city grew rapidly, ruthless northward, but no amount of construction could keep up with the population. Vast shantytowns sprang up at the edges of the new neighborhoods and old neighborhoods were overbuilt by denser new dwellings, or old buildings were carved up into tenements. Wide swaths of the city fell prey to such overcrowding, neglect, and poverty that living conditions in them approached the unendurable: open sewers, backyard livestock pens and open-air slaughterhouses, hundreds of people living in windowless basements, defecating in the corners, falling prey to the waves of cholera, malaria, and tuberculosis that swept through the city. Descriptions of the city speak of filth in the streets—human feces, animal feces, sometimes the offal of slaughtered pigs—filth sometimes so thick that a man couldn’t walk through it without it slopping over his shoes. And they speak of a brutal, inescapable stench.

       Crime ran rampant. A growing army of abandoned and orphaned children survived largely by theft, and violent gangs grew up to run graft and extortion rings in the rougher neighborhoods. From those neighborhoods came political power, too. Just three years before Comstock arrived, immigrant workers had rioted violently against the draft, paralyzing the city for weeks. Fear of another insurrection haunted the established classes. Tammany Hall and its Democratic machine had been amassing more and more power through the decades of immigration, and the year after the draft riots it had cemented its power over the city’s politics by getting one of its own elected mayor. Boss Tweed became a hero to some and the embodiment of ruin to others. Political corruption became business as usual. Laws were increasingly enforced on a pay-as-you-go basis.

      Prostitutes lined some streets and bordellos others. Female poverty, official corruption, and a great number of unmarried workingmen guaranteed that prostitution would be a big business. Sophisticates considered prostitutes part of the local color, writers and artists—Walt Whitman among them—were fascinating by the figure of the whore, and guides to sporting houses were sold openly throughout the city. Other industries sold sex too: a great vogue in those years were the “pretty waiter girl saloons,” restaurants and watering holes that replaced the traditional male waiter with women hired for their looks whose job it was to bring men in and keep them buying. Theaters were popping up everywhere, and more and more entertainments advertised their beautiful actresses and dancers. Local gossip was filled with tales of rich men trolling the restaurants and theaters for women who were willing to be kept.

      Tony Comstock found all of it alarming, but at first he seemed most troubled by the ubiquitous saloons. New York had always been a hard-drinking city, but now whatever attempts the more upright city elders made to control the number of drinking establishments were swept aside by the rising political and cultural power of the Catholics. Young Comstock had known drinkers all his life, but in Connecticut he had been able to draw a clear line in his mind between the rude farmers and workers who thrived on cheap liquor and the teetotalers who dominated the social, religious, and political community. The mongrel world of the city, where Catholics and sophisticates of all classes and vocations imbibed without shame, made him worry for the fate of the city and the nation.

      He heard those fears echoed often among the people he knew. The idea that New York was in a catastrophic moral decline grew as the city grew; for not only were more Catholic foreigners arriving to change its mores, but more small-town Protestants were arriving to be horrified.

       Countervailing currents, though, surged through the city’s consciousness too. Talk of reformation, of cleansing and uplift and reconstruction, was everywhere. The tremendous growth of the city had brought tremendous challenges, including sanitation issues at a scale America had never before had to deal with. Sewer systems were overtaxed almost as soon as they were built. No aqueduct had been built capable of bringing adequate water to the burgeoning population, and so the island was dotted with pools and reservoirs that became breeding grounds for cholera and malaria.

      Now, with the war over and vast reserves of public money and manpower freed up for other ends, monumental public works were launched, most prominently a new, interrelated system of aqueducts and sewers. New York’s civic conversations were dominated by talk of bringing in clean, pure water and sweeping out filth. And as the resources dedicated to war were now turned to the physical improvement of urban life, so were the moral energies that had been devoted for years to abolition and the preservation of the republic now brought to bear on uplifting the city’s moral life. With slavery removed as the principle evil for ministers, reformers, and evangelical organizations to battle, new attention was brought to the evils of alcohol, sexual license, the exploitation of women, and the neglect of children.

      A movement to take care of children and young men who were left without resources by poverty, or by parental death or neglect, had spread from England to America in the 1840s and ‘50s, most notably in the form of the Children’s Aid Society. Tony Comstock approved of their work. The thrill of reform coursed through him as intensely as did his revulsion at vice.

      It was another English transplant, however, that spoke most to him: the Young Men’s Christian Association, dedicated to “Improving the spiritual, mental, social and physical condition of young men.” Its principal concerns were men like Tony and like the men he saw around him at work and in his boardinghouse, men who’d come alone to the big city and were especially vulnerable to its seductions. It was the New York branch of the YMCA that would give Tony Comstock his next mad dog to kill, and so doing give him his purpose in life.

      It was the YMCA that drew his attention to a new scourge threatening the young, a scourge that he found more alarming than alcohol, prostitution, crime, poverty, cholera, syphilis, Catholics, and rabies: publishing.

To be continued...

The Undressing of America: Opening

After months of diligently avoiding the blogosphere, having finally, actually finished a fairly polished draft of the first chapter of The Undressing of America, I've decided to start posting excerpts to see what people think. This is how it will begin, not counting whatever I write as an introduction... until either I or my editor decides that it has to change.

Although the great forces of history are most likely immune to the acts of any individual will, and most of what we like to see as turning points are probably, really, the first manifestations of movements already bound to happen, still it’s interesting to speculate on how the cultural history of America may have turned on the shooting of that rabid dog in Winnipauk, Connecticut in the late summer of 1862. There were other events to the south that had a more obvious impact on the nation’s course and no doubt deserve the much greater attention historians have given them—the Battle of Antietam and President Lincoln’s first Emancipation Proclamation to name a couple—but even so, what happened inside the soul of one young man when he leveled his gun, not at a Confederate soldier but at a drooling mastiff, would echo through the next five decades and beyond.

          

       Tony Comstock was eighteen years old. Just six months before he had left New Canaan, one of those Congregationalist communities scratched by sheer puritan zeal out of the thin New England soil over a hundred years before, now withering slowly as the wealth of America moved to more temperate, more southerly, and more secular climes, to seek better fortunes in the mill town of Winnipauk, burgeoning with the recent arrival of a railroad link to the coast and the rest of the world. Tony was less interested in worldly fortune than in serving the austere God whose spirit had informed every joy and sorrow of his childhood, every lowering winter sky and hard row of sod and tender spring shoot of barley on his now lost family farm; but he had obligations. His mother had died when he was ten, his father had vanished while chasing another of his financial pipe dreams, and his older brother had gone to war to end the evil of slavery; his younger sisters were living with relatives, and Tony’s income provided their keep.

          In those six months, Tony had already impressed his Winnipauk neighbors with his energy, industry, and earnestness. Tony was, above all things, earnest. His round face, nascent jowls, full chest, and thick legs made him look several years older than he was. His air of complete devotion to every task he undertook, the gravity he brought to discussions of morals and politics, his obvious love of little children, and his unquestioning willingness to lend his energies to anyone who needed help made him seem older still. So it was that when rumors shot through the town of a mad dog on the loose, Tony was among the first men asked to hunt it down.

          This was not a request made lightly. Rabies was one of the great terrors of nineteenth century American life. There was no cure, or any treatment known other than washing the wound (which many people dismissed as superstitious nonsense anyway), and the contracting of it was a sentence to agonizing death, inevitable from the appearance of the first symptom. Reported cases had been rising since early in the century; although to what extent that reflected the genuine spread of an epidemic as opposed to the rise of a terror within the national imagination is hard to ascertain. America’s canine population surged exponentially along with its human population, and the ever-quicker flow from farms to towns and towns to cities brought dogs, like their owners, into closer contact. So epidemics are spread.

          But times of change stir their own special nightmares, too. In communities like those of New England, where once-homogeneous societies found themselves increasingly disrupted by rapid economic and population shifts, where the moral and philosophical control of the founding churches was being steadily eroded by spreading secularism and free thinking, the idea of the loyal family dog turning suddenly into an agent of death was a compelling one. Common belief held that the first symptom of rabies was a sudden mania, a feverish energy, a frantic and directionless roaming: canine echoes of the unbridled human ecstasies that earlier generations of New Englanders had read as products of witchcraft. Many a cry of “mad dog” went up before the creature in question had a chance to show the insatiable thirst and foaming chops that would have proved it to be rabid; and many a dog surely died for no more than a bout of uncharacteristic energy or anxious restlessness.

      This dog, this Winnipauk mastiff, was doubly damned, because it belonged to a saloonkeeper. Tony Comstock was well aware of this particular saloonkeeper. He not only sold the Devil’s drink to mill workers and railroad men, preying like all saloonkeepers on the loneliness of men who had left behind their families, their home towns, and their native churches; he sold it also to women and children. Tony had heard stories of the man exchanging gin and cider for groceries, even with women, even with mothers of young children. Already the man spread dissolution and destruction through liquor, indifferent to the lives of the innocent. That he would do the same in an even viler manner by leaving his dog untethered and unwatched was only to be expected.

      Tony was one of two young men working at the general store when a neighbor burst through the door and cried for help. Both boys took guns from the store’s stock, poured powder into the muzzles, and rammed home bullets. One bullet per gun, and poor guns at that; every decent weapon in New England had gone south to the war. Facing a mad dog, a man could hope to kill it with his first shot or hope the beast didn’t charge him if he missed, because no man could reload faster than a dog could close a gunshot’s distance between them. Tony fell to his knees and prayed for courage. Then he stood and strode to the door. When he held the door open for his fellow worker, he saw the boy still standing at the counter. He’d lost his nerve. Tony stepped into the street alone.

      Finding the dog was not a complicated task: wherever other people ran from, Tony walked to. Soon enough he marched alone through the streets (or so he would always tell the story), watched from doorways and windows by terrified men, women, and children. He saw the dog at the end of a street. It turned toward him as he brought the gun to his shoulder. He fired his single shot, and the cur dropped. His fellow citizens began streaming toward him, thanking and praising him. He admitted later that he enjoyed their adulation. But his greatest pride, he said, was that “I killed it before a single child could be bitten.”

      Tony went straight back to work at the store, knowing that his Lord wanted a man to attend to his work as earnestly as to the protection of innocents, but not many hours had passed before he found his day interrupted again. Another dog had been seen racing through the schoolyard at the other end of town, and it too appeared to be rabid. Evidently the saloonkeeper’s dog had already begun to spread its illness before it could be killed. This time the townspeople turned to no one but young Comstock to deliver them.

      Again Tony loaded the gun. Again he tracked down the dog by forging upstream against the terror of his neighbors. Again he fired his single shot. But this time he missed. The dog wheeled and charged at him. Tony had no time even to hope to reload, but he did not run. He asked guidance of God as the beast bounded closer. Then God answered, in the sound of a gunshot. This time, one of the men watching from a window had his own rifle ready. The dog crumpled and fell at Tony’s feet.

      That evening, Tony hiked back to his small, bare room as a local hero. He had proved himself to be not just a young man who could track and kill a mad dog, but one who would stand steadfast, unarmed, as a mad dog charged him. But his was not the unfurrowed brow of the hero who knows his battle is won. He knelt and thanked his Lord for this opportunity to protect the women and children of Winnipauk from unimaginable horror. And yet, that mission seemed scarcely completed. For the first cause of the horror was not the saloonkeeper’s dog but the saloonkeeper himself. Even as the dog ran wild, spreading its madness and physical corruption, its master sat in his den spreading his own madness and corruption. His poison worked more slowly, but it would spread death among women and children even more widely and for far longer.

      Tony sought guidance from his own Master, and the truth came instantly clear: the dogs had been only his calls to arms. His true battle was against the man.

       The next morning, Tony went to the sheriff and told him everything he had heard about the saloon, including the rumor that the owner had no legal license. The sheriff didn’t deny the charge, but he also didn’t seem inclined to do anything about it. The saloon was a popular local service, and clearly there was no political gain to be had in shutting it down at the insistence of an outraged stockboy still years shy of voting age.

      Tony left him in a rage. He knew the damage wrought by men who would not do their duties: his own father had repeatedly abandoned his family to chase financial phantasms, leaving little Tony to be his mother’s support, until that neglected woman had died and left Tony with no one to look after him but God and the church. This man who would not use his authority against vice was as guilty as the purveyor himself. And if civil authority could not be trusted to do good, then a higher authority must be invoked.

      “I wish to buy some apples,” Tony boomed as he stepped through the saloon door. The owner told him that he didn’t sell fruit. But Tony paid no attention to his answer, because he was casing the saloon. He took note of the big, wooden, fauceted kegs that held nearly the man’s entire stock, and he took note of the windows nearest them.

      He stole back under the darkness of night. He waited to be sure that he was alone on the street and that no lamps burned in nearby windows. Then he grabbed one of the saloon’s window shutters and, with all the power of his solid torso and unblinking faith, he tore it free. He climbed through into an even deeper darkness. His memory led him to the kegs, where he felt along until he found a faucet. He opened it full, then groped his way to another. The air filled with the hiss and stench of cider, gin, and whiskey gushing to a dirt floor. When that sound subsided, and Tony could only hear the splash of his boots in the man’s foul stock, he wrenched the kegs off their struts and sent them rolling across the floor. He felt the walls until he found bottles and mugs, and he smashed those against the shelves. At last he found the counter and laid on it a note he had written earlier that day: if the man did not abandon this evil business, it warned, then next time the Lord may bring down the entire building.

      Such attacks were not yet established tactics of the religious battle with alcohol: Carry Nation was then just a sickly fifteen year old wheezing in bed in rural Missouri, still twenty years from her saloon-smashing days. This was simply what Tony Comstock knew God wanted. He went to bed that night with the “same consciousness of having done a good job completely that was felt when the first dog lay dead and harmless.”

      He had found the one thing that, for the rest of his life, would give him true pleasure and satisfaction: stopping mad beasts and moral disease before they could destroy the innocent.

        When his brother died at Gettysburg, Tony’s extended family  expected him to enlist to take his place—that’s what good New Englanders did—but for seven months Tony ignored the call. His brother’s death seems not to have affected him terribly; lifelong Tony would bond strongly with women, especially women like his mother and sisters, whom he could protect or depended on him, but he built no strong ties with other men. He also showed little interest in the war itself, or in any political or moral issues beyond his local battles. He finally went off to war in the spring of 1864, with the Confederacy already in retreat.

      Like any Congregationalist, the young Comstock saw slavery as an evil, but the battle for abolition seems to have been too abstract for him to care much about it. In the diary he kept during his year of service, he never mentioned the larger issues of the war and tripped lightly over the tiny bit of action he saw, instead writing mainly of his relentless efforts to organize prayer meetings and urge his fellow soldiers to attend. He was frequently “twitted” for lecturing his fellows on the evils of alcohol and nicotine, and once rather violently hazed, but he never stopped. Usually he enjoyed arguing and took a special satisfaction in calmly standing his ground when vastly outnumbered. He railed against his own weakness when he fell into wrath or self pity over the twits and insults of these men who knew not what they did.

      When the war ended, Tony returned to Connecticut, but there was little there now to hold him. His sisters were growing up, he was not close to his extended family, and he had no real friendships. His closest bond had always been with his mother Polly, the one person he believed had loved him truly and completely. When the judgment of New Canaan had descended on the family for his father’s inconstancy, it was Polly who had protected him. He often said that her memory was his most constant companion, and that when he fought to defend the innocent he wanted to give them the protection his mother had given him. But having let other relatives take over the family farm during the war, his last physical connection to her had been severed. A year after the war, jobless and nearly penniless, he asked a family friend for help.

      No young man with Tony’s energy should stay in Connecticut, the man said. In the wake of the war, too many men were competing for too few jobs. But a great boom was coming. Huge industries had been springing up before the war, and now they would be making up for lost time. The West about to be opened: the two ends of the transcontinental railroad had stretched to within a few hundred miles of one another. Any young with ambition should be heading for the center of the nation’s business and finance: New York City. The man even offered to give Tony money to stake him. He could only afford five dollars, but that was more than Tony had. And so, in the summer of 1866, the twenty-two year old Tony Comstock arrived in America’s biggest city with three dollars and forty cents in his pocket.

      Very quickly, he discovered that other young men had left Connecticut for New York, and countless others had left every other state in the union. There were jobs, but there were men lined up for every one. After days of dogged searching he secured a place as a shipping clerk at a dry goods company. Unable to afford to live in New York itself, he had to take a cheap room in the neighboring city of Brooklyn and commute by ferry.

      Nothing in Comstock’s life had prepared him for New York City.

To be continued...

 

This is not a blog post

Well, it worked. I finished that very rough draft of my book by my deadline, and I see three main ways I got it done:

1. I just got really, really sick of not getting it done.

2. I enlisted the encouragement and nagging of friends, including a set of high-stakes incentives with one of them.

3. I stayed off my blog, my Facebook page, Twitter, and every other "internet presence" I have.

      The last of those tools was so helpful than now that I'm technically free to come back to my blog and strut, I'm not going to. I want to keep my focus going into the rewrite, which will be a longer and no less demanding job.

      Hardly a week goes by that I don't hear or read someone telling me that a writer these days needs to be running a regular blog and keeping a lively presence on all the social media. Maybe that'll make sense when I have a book about to come out and not a book doing everything it can think of not to get written. But when I look around, most of the writers I admire for their productivity and quality don't keep up much of an "internet presence." I just looked at Michael Chabon's website: a caricature of his latest book's cover, a skeletal appearances calendar, a few goofy pictures, and three uncollected essays, complete with typos. Why does he have no blog, no news, no discussion? Why does he have no Facebook page or Twitter account? Because the little fucker's getting his work done, that's why.

      That's why I'm not posting today. And why I'll be back soon to tell you more about why I'm not posting then either.

Interview

Just making an exception to my no-blog policy to plug an interview with me about the new graphic novel and related social issues on Examiner.com by Sona Avakian. It was fun to do, and I like how she pulled it together. It's here.

What It Really Takes

Although it is undeniably true that in this competitive, interactive, media-driven era every writer who hopes to succeed must maintain a presence in the blogosphere, it is also undeniably true that in this competitive, interactive, media-driven era every writer who hopes to succeed has to get his goddamn work done. Which is an easy fact to ignore as the rationalizations to blog and tweet and facebook come thick and fast, and so we find ourselves in that rue-inducing cycle of never finishing our books because we're so busy promoting the books that we hope to sell once we finish them.

      Sometimes it takes an ultimatum to get us to open that internet-blocking application (MacFreedom for me) and withdraw from the constant fix of networking and stay buried deep in that Word file until the writing is done. Bringing with it relief and excitement and fear, such an ultimatum has come to me. Terms were offered and I've accepted: by the end of October I have to finish the first full draft of this book. It can be a brutally rough draft, but a draft of the whole thing it has to be.

      That's a lot of writing. It's not a sure thing. But if I succeed I'll rewarded by far more than a sense of accomplishment, and if I fail I'll miss an opportunity to pursue something that I very much want to pursue. It's what I needed, this combination of carrot and stick; they say rewards are more effective than punishment for creative motivation, but I know from experience that it's too easy to be philosophical about not getting something extra, and that what I also need to keep pushing me is the fear of losing something I truly value.

      I won't be blogging until it's done. Wish me luck.

The Romance of Junk

I was sitting at a bar and grill on Michigan Avenue, eating a blue-cheese loaded iceberg wedge and drinking a basil-infused gimlet, taking notes in my eating a blue-cheese loaded iceberg wedge and drinking a basil-infused gimlet, taking notes in my little Moleskine notebook while the guide to the Chicago Art Institute that I'd been using as a bookmark lay on the table next to it. In small-talking the waiter I said I was from San Francisco and I'd come to Chicago because my son was attending G-Fest, a convention for Godzilla fans. We shared a smile: oh, those crazy kids, ha ha ha. Overall, I was doing a very good impersonation of an adult.

      But ten days later I was at the San Diego Comic Con, and I wasn't with my son. True, I had a graphic novel to promote, one that sprang from a web comic commissioned by a nonprofit advocacy group. I could try to pretend that that's the only reason I was at Comic Con, but that wouldn't explain the twenty-six straight years I'd been there before this one.

      I get why my son loves Godzilla and all his fellow kaiju. And it's not just that he's huge and destructive and free of the constrictions of society and all those other virtues I wrote about in Killing Monsters. It's that he's junk. He's chuckled at by the rest of the world, and Nicky is part of a select group who understand that there's something valuable in that junk, who can tell you why the guy who directed Mothra is better than the guy who directed Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster and why YMSF makes more accurate vinyl monster toys (or "figures," if you will) than Bandai and how the composer of the best Godzilla soundtracks consciously combined Western symphonic music with Japanese folk ballads and why the American Godzilla movie really sucks.

      I was that way with comics before they had a cachet, when comic cons drew only a few thousand obsessive guys and a few dozen embarrassed girlfriends. I liked discovering artistry in a medium completely dismissed by the world at large. I liked being able to take one look at a comic book page and recognize the artist, and somehow it meant more that hardly anyone beyond the confines of that convention center would even know his name. It wasn't just about finding a community and setting myself apart, either, although those were both part of it. It was also about coming to rescue of the junk. It was about saving great junk from the garbage and telling those obscure artists and writers that someone noticed. And it was about discovering gems that lay right under the noses of the mavens of culture but that they could never recognize.

      That's part of what's drawn me to The Undressing of America. Because while comics have gone cool and even Godzilla has his conventions and fanzines, no one is championing the confessional magazines. No one is arguing for the importance of true crime magazines. No one tells the stories of the men who created the tabloids. It isn't even that I like the things as works. Far more even than in superhero comics and monster movies, the glimmers of artistry there are lost in a sea of hack work. Read ten True Story articles in a row and my brain goes numb.

      But as cultural forces they mattered. As historical capsules they're rich. As threads in the American story they deserve far more attention than they get. When cultural historians write about the history of magazines in the Twenties they wax about the New Yorker and Mencken and Time, with perhaps an obligatory nod to the Readers Digest and the Saturday Evening Post. But naive, tatty, neglected True Story reached more people than any of them and did at least as much to change the cultural and social landscape. I like digging them out from under the piles of better-respected magazines that have been stacked on top of them for decades. In comic-fan terms, I like discovering them at the back of the quarter box.

Hot Wind

Where am I? The Central Valley of California has a real geography, of farm roads and rivers and cities, but the the long, thin twilight zone of Interstate 5 has only its own reference points: about an hour downwind from the doomed, stinking cattle of Harris Ranch, between the two closed state rest areas, past the towering diesel sign, still a long way from Starbucks.

      I love driving through the valley for itself, but I may love this weird road more. I love the light and I love the wind. Coming out from under the cool, foggy July of San Francisco, I especially love the wind. Hot and solid, pushing on me and stirring me to push back. It makes me want to write, too. Notes on the book, a blog post typed in a parking lot and uploaded through a truck stop wi-fi.

      I know a lot of people who find that the gray calm of San Francisco makes them want to draw inside—inside their offices and their heads—to write. I have a hard time keeping my focus and energy in gray calm. It's in the noisiest and most public places and the most aggressive weather that I find myself wanting to work. Maybe it's because, when I was young and felt myself trapped in a chilly fog of a life, writing was the way I found to push my way out and engage with the world. As private an act as it is, in my gut it excites me most when it pulls me out of myself. When it knocks me around and agitates me like the valley wind.

Whirlwinds and Work

It's been a crazy stretch: London and Chicago, friends in from out of town, a film festival and more travel coming, a book coming out, multiple projects to juggle. In times like these, especially when I'm traveling, my mind seems to jump to a new level of nimbleness. I've had a series of insights into this book that I'm sure will make it better, that make me impatient to finish this thing so the world can see how brilliant it is.

      But hardly any writing gets done. And in the calmer stretches where the writing does get done, my emotions settle and my brain narrows its focus. The book becomes once again a series of truculent sentences that refuse to work quite the way I want and long narrative stretches that I already have well enough in mind that bright insights and new directions would be only distractions. In those times I'll settle for a paragraph that makes sense and don't ask any more of the book than that it be coherent and reasonably interesting.

      This is the constant paradox of this work, and I think much of the reason that books can take so much longer to write than I expected and so often seem in danger of not being finished at all. When I'm most in love with the book I don't actually move it forward. And the act of moving it forward is automatically a let down. It's so much easier to stay in the whirlwind, reveling in my epiphanies and looking forward to this book that will be so good when it's written someday.

      There are those times, of course, when the laying down of sentences is in itself exciting, when the discovery of solutions to small narrative problems is nearly as much fun as those flashes of inspiration and quickly scribbled notes on the London tube. Those are nice times, but they don't show up on command. Mostly I just have to keep a bit of that fire of inspiration burning like a little pilot light as I push forward, remember that there will come a point, after enough hard work, when the words on the page will actually live up to the excitement of those insights snatched from the whirlwind.

How Did I Get Into This?

My friend Meghan Ward wrote a post on her blog Writerland (one of my favorite blogs on writing and publishing) called "My Writing Journey," in which she describes how, starting at the age of six and proceeding through a series of adventures, misadventures, wrong turns and right turns, she ended up deciding to be a writer. Then she asked readers to share their own writing journeys, which got me thinking: how did I end up here?

      As a narrative, my story seemed pretty lacking compared to Meghan's. Hers is full of twists and turns, stabs at other careers, the recurrent siren call of writing, all the things you want in a good life journey. Mine had some build up, then one sharp moment and there I was. But it's a story I've never heard exactly from anyone else, and maybe that alone makes it worth telling.

      I was one of those kids who is compelled to tell stories from his earliest years. On family hikes I'd pour out inchoate adventures endlessly to anyone who would listen (which was always my dad; it must have been his military training that enabled him to endure what drove everyone else insane). I drew pictures on my Playskool blocks in narrative sequence, like comic strips, and then lined them up on the floor to see how long—physically long—I could make a story. And when I figured out how to use the alphabet, the first thing I did with it was add dialogue to my picture stories.

      I didn't read much, at least not as much as most writers say they did as kids. It was the pouring out, not the taking in, that drove me. Sometimes I'd love a book but read only until I got an idea for a story of my own, then drop it and start writing.

      Here the nature-nurture loop gets complicated, as it always does, because I was also enthusiastically supported in my writing by my mom. Her heroes were writers: poets and playwrights, mostly, but novelists too, even the better genre writers. Shakespeare was as close to a god as we had in our household, but Ray Bradbury got his share of veneration too. So I grew up with the idea that a writer was quite a noble thing to be.

      It was only later that I learned my mother had wanted to be a writer before I was born, and had even gotten a short story published, before she lost her drive and became an English teacher instead. We do pass on our unfulfilled dreams.

      By fifth grade I was already identifying myself partly by my ability to write longer and more elaborate short stories than any other kid in the class. But when adults asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I still had a wide range of answers. I carried the fantasy of illustrating nature books into my teens. I think, really, I saw writers as some other class of being, like kings and astronauts, who we admired from afar but could never become.

      Then, at fourteen, I read a book called A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. For the next year I experienced my first real literary infatuation, checking out and buying everything by him I could find. In the course of that I made a fateful mistake: I bought a book that said Edgar Rice Burroughs, Master of Adventure on the cover, thinking it was another novel. Instead, it was a biography of Burroughs written by Richard Lupoff.

      It was the first time I'd read a biography, and the first time I'd had a sense that these marvelous creatures called writers actually had lives, apart from the few dramatic events my mother had passed on (Christopher Marlowe being stabbed to death, Keats hiking all over Britain and then getting sick and dying). Realizing that this writer I loved had parents and a childhood, could have been other things but decided to write a book, had to send his book out to publishers and worked other jobs to pay the bills before he could write full time, made me think that maybe "being a writer" was an attainable human goal.

      Still, though, I didn't think of making a living as a writer, I think mostly because I didn't want to think about making a living. Really, I didn't want to think about being an adult at all. I was quite happy walking around lost in my own head and touching ground only long enough to eat the food that my parents put in front of me. That was an easy state to maintain for my fifteenth year, because I spent the whole year hanging around the house. I'd been unhappy in school and my mom, being a bit too averse to facing reality herself, just pulled me out.

      But reality does come calling. The summer I turned sixteen we were going to be moving to a new town and I'd be entering a new high school. Since the only school I'd been in since seventh grade was a tiny "free school" in the Santa Cruz Mountains with no classes or even classrooms, plunging into a public high school as a junior was a terrifying prospect. It got me thinking about the fact that there was, inevitably, an adulthood ahead of me. Which included, someday, having to earn my own living.

      One day in late spring, with my house being readied for sale and the onset of summer weather announcing that the great change was imminent, I was walking my dog along the creek behind our house—I could still find the exact spot—when I decided that I was going to write fiction for a living. I wouldn't have said this at the time, but that was the best way I could see to avoid reality forever.

      It helped that my role model had had a charmed career: Burroughs's first book sold extremely well, the sequels sold better, books flowed out of him like water from a spring and money fell on him like rain. It seemed to me that all I had to do was sit down and start writing fantasy stories with the intention of getting them published and everything would fall perfectly into place. I would never really have to leave my own head again.

      A few months later I entered Gilroy High School, nearly as out of place among normal American adolescents as if I'd just immigrated from another country. I was scared, but also eager to be liked or at least noticed somehow, so for my defense I used the fact that I was a writer. I was the only kid in school who announced that he wanted to write for a living, the only one who used his spare time to write stories. It didn't take long for my whole identity to solidify around Being a Writer. By the end of high school the idea of Not Being a Writer looked more perilous than anything the writer's life could hold.

      I'd already finished the journey to writing and started the journey I'm still on. And even now when I wonder if I picked the right journey and toy with the idea of ending it to try something new, I know deep down that I never will.

Fathers' Day

My dad lives in a series of old moments, endlessly looping. At the nursing home we talk about sneaking into the Foothill Theater in Oakland, Sea School at the San Diego Marine Base, shenanigans at Waikiki before the war, driving the length of old Highway 61 with an injured dog in the back seat, memories pretty much all recorded by 1950.

      My dad also exists in my own mind a series of old moments. Responding with a genial "Oh yeah?" as I retold funny Bullwinkle lines through the bathroom door, hiking silently up the endless slope to Swiftcurrent Pass as I babbled out some inchoate tale of high adventure I'd just thought of, driving me to see King Kong at a revival house in the depressed heart of San Jose and telling me how he first started noticing that directors had personal styles watching Warner Brothers movies in the '30s (probably at the Foothill Theater he'd just snuck into).

      He was emotionally pretty remote but physically present when I needed him and mentally present when I'd talk about something he cared about. He taught me a lot of little things and two big ones. A certain toughness, an ability to guard yourself just enough so you could keep taking punches until the other guy wore down (there was a Marine Corps story about about that too, the day he earned the nicknamed "Rugged Jones"). And how to see things critically but with affection: why good stories work, how characters come to life, when passions turn phony, how to love what you love no matter what it is. Bullwinkle, King Kong, Gunga Din, Benny Goodman, Ernie Kovacs, Mel Brooks, Moby Dick.

      The first one has gotten me through a lot, although I learned it only half way; because I also picked up my mom's tendency toward self pity and drama, and, really, because I usually learn more by getting hurt than by not. The second, though, that's still central to me. It's what makes me write and how I look at my own writing.

      My dad and I can't share any thoughts about that anymore. We still have Gunga Din, though. That brilliant scene where Cary Grant struts alone into a temple full of murderous Thuggees and calls, "You're all under arrest!" Watching that together, and him making me notice it, is still in his loop of moments and mine.

No Exit

Although The Undressing of America plugs along, it's lately getting less attention in my life than this graphic novel that's just coming out, Networked: Carabella on the Run. Which I still find disorienting, because it wasn't so long ago that I thought I was out of the graphic novel and comic book business entirely. But people warned me: once you get comics in your blood, they said, you can never get them out.

      I wrote a lot of comics from the late ‘80s well into the ‘90s, then started shifting toward nonfiction books and screenplays. After the Pokémon newspaper strip in 2000 I stopped writing comics entirely. But ten years later, here I am again. In my case, what pulled me back was a bit more substantial than just something in my blood. The mistake I made when I left comics was not severing all my social ties with them. I kept talking to Mark Badger, one of my favorite collaborators from my DC Comics days, thinking it was safe to talk about innocuous subjects like kids and politics and our respective careers.

      Mark was mostly teaching and coding then, but he fiddled with comics occasionally, some for small publishers and some for political groups. For a couple of years I was writing a book about comics called Men of Tomorrow, so of course we talked about the old medium. We’d even say occasionally it would be fun to play with some of our old ideas, like that Haunted Man thing we did for Dark Horse Comics, although that usually felt like just one of those nostalgic things old friends say.

      Then Mark started doing work for a nonprofit group called Privacy Activism. First they hired him to do the art on an interactive game on their website, and after he impressed them with that they started talking about a web comic to encourage high school kids to start thinking about issues like online privacy in their own lives. But Mark didn’t feel like writing it himself, so he asked me if I’d like to play. The work would be light, he said. Just an ongoing comic strip, nothing ambitious.

      But as soon as I started thinking in panels and balloons, the old fever kicked in. The story got longer, the characters got more interesting. “Hey, we could turn this into a graphic novel,” we said. And suddenly there’s no staying out anymore.

Titular

I mentioned a couple of posts ago how the title of this book inspired the new direction the book itself has taken, and that's got me thinking about my experiences with book titles. I'd been writing books for over twenty years before I finally came up with a title on my own that actually stayed all the way to publication. Gradually I've realized how much of the soul of a book is held in its title, and how coming up with a title not only requires understanding a book at an even deeper level than just writing it allows (odd as that sounds), but can actually reveal what it's really about.

      In 1981, when I was but a young thing, Will Jacobs and I wrote a book to amuse each other, about the supposed efforts of the world's great writers and filmmakers to save Leave It to Beaver from cancellation in the summer of 1963. Mostly it was made up of twenty-five literary parodies, story treatments about the Cleaver family by Tennessee Williams, John Steinbeck, and people like that, but we also described, in a mock elegiac sort of tone, how despite all their passionate efforts, their beloved sitcom was sacrificed to Mammon by soulless executives. I say "sort of" mock elegiac because, honestly, there was a bit of real elegy going on under our smart-mouthed surface. We really did love Leave It to Beaver, and we were both going through bouts of nostalgia for our suburban childhoods (I was 24, he was 26, and the charm of San Francisco fog and buses was wearing thin). So, in that crypto-elegiac mood, we called the book The Summer of the Beaver.

      When Peter Cannon at Crown Publishers wanted to bring the book out, he didn't want elegiac, not even mock. He saw our selling point as being the parodies themselves and our ludicrous claim that these lost literary works had just come to light. Both the Pentagon and the Vallachi papers were still alive in the cultural memory then, so he suggested The Beaver Papers. He also strongly urged cutting our wistful (and long) concluding chapter down to a dry-eyed half page. We grumbled as we agreed, wanting to convince ourselves that we were making a tough compromise, but in our hearts I think we knew he was right. There was a little too much of us in The Summer of the Beaver, the parts of us that weren't very funny. And ever since then I've thought of The Beaver Papers as a book I wrote, even though, technically speaking, I never wrote anything called The Beaver Papers.

      Next Will and I wrote a history of superhero comic books (which we were both obsessed with at the time) and wanted to call it The Superheroes. Simple, like. Peter Cannon approved of that one, as did the Crown marketing department. But then we ran into a most unexpected snag: Marvel Comics claimed to have a trademark on the word "superhero," and no one but Marvel could use it in a title, not even for a book about superheroes. We suggested using the common alternate form: The Super Heroes. But DC Comics claimed to have a trademark on the term "super hero," and no one but DC could use it. Apparently a few years before, Marvel and DC, the only large publishers of superhero comics at that time, had decided to follow the example of 15th Century Portugal and Spain and evenly divide, not the world, but the word. Marvel wouldn't complain about DC's use of "super heroes" if DC wouldn't complain about Marvel's use of "superheroes," but they would complain loudly if anyone else tried to use either of them.

      Obviously that would never stand up in court. Both versions of the word were in use for decades by all kinds of people before anyone thought of trademarking them, and anyway, can you stop someone from using your trademark when they're writing nonfiction about your product? But the lawyers at DC and Marvel told us we'd be sorry, and no one at Crown wanted to get in an argument with lawyers over the title of a book that everyone knew wasn't going to sell very well. So we agreed, with more sincere grumbling this time, on The Comic Book Heroes.

      For eleven years I disliked that title (a quiet sort of dislike—it's too boring to work up any real passion around), but there came a day when I was working on the updated and heavily rewritten edition of the book, writing a passage about the generation of artists and writers who'd struggled through bad working conditions and mediocre pay and a total lack of glory to give the world their creations, and it struck me: the real comic book heroes aren't the guys in the silly suits, they're the guys at the art tables and typewriters. Duh. So I slipped in a sentence to clue the reader in that, of course, that's what we'd always meant by "comic book heroes," and suddenly I was very grateful for the petty legal departments of Marvel and DC Comics.

      (I should note that by the time I started writing for DC a few years later, the legal staff seemed to be made up of much more reasonable people. One of them, Maura Healy, is still a good friend. I never asked around, but I assume whatever pursed-lipped, narrow-eyed curmudgeon was in charge in 1984 had moved on. And neither company tries to enforce that trademark anymore. Instead, I understand, they now co-own the form "super-heroes," which no one else would want to use anyway.)

      Then I wrote a book that I simply could not title. It was the story of TV situation comedies and how they'd been shaped by and influenced the currents of American life. For a while I tried to come up with something catchy, but I can't even remember what I tried. In the end I sent it out as The Sitcom Story. I would have ended up hating that one as much as The Comic Book Heroes, but this time I wouldn't be able to blame it on anyone else. Fortunately, my editor, Bryan Oettel, liked it even less than I did and suggested we both go off and brainstorm. I don't remember what I came up with, but I know none of them were any good. He plucked a cliché out of sitcom land and suggested Honey I'm Home. I agreed that it was catchy, but I wanted the title to say somehow what the book was about. No, he said: the title is just supposed to be catchy and unique—it's the subtitle where you tell them what it's about. As many books as I'd read, I'd somehow never noticed that. I've been grateful to Bryan ever since.

      That did, however, bring me to what has turned out to be one of the great hells of writing for me: subtitles. A hell that I know I'll be facing with my current book, because as much I like The Undressing of America I have no idea what words should appear under it to explain what it's actually about. But it's a very educational hell, and some other time I'll post about what it's taught me. Or tried to teach me.

The English When They're Chirping

I was supposed to be in England today, but I’m not because of a volcano. As much as I like saying that, that my plans changed because of a volcano, the fact remains that I’m not where I was looking forward to being. A friend I’d planned to meet there just dropped me a note saying, “What a shame that you’re not here—the sun is shining and everyone is very chirpy.”

      My first thought was, “Good for the English. I’m not chirping.” But then I remembered that I’m actually pretty content. I get to be here when my son came back from his school trip to Joshua Tree National Park instead of hearing an abridged version of it days later. I get to catch up on my work. And my sleep. And I get to feel the San Francisco weather finally turn warm, and hear a fair amount of chirping around here.

      Those words “I get to” can save my sanity, when I remember to use them. For a long time I approached most of my responsibilities, especially my writing, with “I have to”: have to meet this deadline, have to write this book. But I “have to” only because I picked this line of work and either created or went looking for these projects. And compared to all the duller ways I could be making my living, being in a position to “have to” write a book is a blessing.

      I spent a long time paying lip service to “I get to” without ever really changing my thoughts or my mood. Then, a couple of years ago, life hit me with an opportunity to road test those words under truly demanding conditions. A producer hired me to write a screenplay based on my own book, Men of Tomorrow. The screenplay came out extremely well, everyone was thrilled, and we seemed to be at the brink of putting together a production and distribution deal with one of the bigger companies in the business. Then the producer went bankrupt. He filed Chapter 11, listing my script as an asset, and my script vanished into the slowly grinding wheels of bankruptcy court.

      At first I felt like I’d been punched in the face. Went through the usual stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression. Then I started telling myself: I get to go through this. I get to see how bankruptcy works in the intellectual property business, get to see what to do when I adjust my career expectations, and eventually get to see what I cad do with my script in a new market. After a while it started to sink in. In the past two-and-a-half years I’ve learned a lot and written things I wouldn’t have otherwise. And now that it looks I’m finally about to get my script back, I really am looking forward to finding out what comes next.

      One of the main things that freezes me when I’m writing is the pinball game of fears and fantasies. One minute I’m telling myself I can produce a book that blows open new doors for me and transforms my career—which means I have to make every page brilliant. The next I bounce to believing it’ll sink without a trace and I’ll be left wondering why the hell I ever decided to make this my book—which means I have to drag myself through this thing just because I signed a contract. So I keep reminding myself: I get to to do this. I get to see what it’s like to keep wrestling with this evolving book, and I get to see what happens when it’s done.

      It’s been working this week. I’m grateful to have an unexpected week at home to write my book, and I’m happy to leave the English to their chirping.

Rebirths

Part of me thinks it's cheesy to be applying Easter metaphors to my life just because it's Easter. Especially since this is the most un-Eastery Easter in my experience. It's the first year my kid's been totally uninterested in egg-dying and chocolate rabbits (he's just eager to get the comic book convention in town), so his mom and I decided just to do our separate things. She's at a bead and gem show, and I'm contemplating the dandelion plants shooting up out of the lawn and wondering if I really have the strength to fight with them today. And it's gray. And drizzly. In my bones it just doesn't feel like Easter. Not California Easter, anyway.

      But maybe that's why the metaphor keeps coming to mind, in a muted way. And since I'm thinking about writing in order to avoid thinking about the lawn (which is a nice reversal of my usual avoidance, I have to say), I'm looking at how this book died twice and both times came back. Not that it ever truly died, not to the extent that I'd decided I couldn't write it and was planning how to pay back my advance, although both times I seriously considered that. But twice the original idea proved to be untenable, and I found myself unable to work on it or figure out what to do about it.

      The first rebirth was a narrowing-down: within the broad story of Bernarr Macfadden's life and magazine empire, what I found I really cared about telling was the specific story of True Story magazine and the creation of confessional media. That's when I changed the title from whatever it used to be to The Undressing of America, got my first massive contract extension (thank you, Eric), and launched the draft that I was wrestling with when I started this blog. That version didn't die as dramatically as the first one, but it was dragging and limping and refusing to tell me what was wrong, and then during the summer, early in the period I stopped updating this blog, it just ceased to move. I walked away from it for a few weeks, talked to some friends at the Writers Grotto about it, and then turned around to look at it from a distance.

      The second rebirth was an opening up: because the thing I suddenly noticed was the title, which I liked, but it occurred to me that I wasn't really writing to that title. I was writing about a tiny piece of this national undressing, but there was a lot more I wanted to say about the battles between censors and publishers in those years, about the emergence of this whole "culture of undressing" that we've been exploring for the last century. I wanted to talk about how America got itself so overdressed in the first place and what happened in the early 20th Century to change it. Bernarr Macfadden, I found, was still in the center of the story I wanted to tell, but there were other people who had to be in there, especially the nemesis of his early years, the grand high censor of American culture, Anthony Comstock. Then the book started to roll. And so far it's still rolling, faster and further than it did either time before.

      I'm very well aware, sitting here alone on a holiday with a terribly gloomy sky staring back at me through the windows, that this version may die too. I don't think so, but I have to allow it to be. But it dawns on me that I've gotten a lot out of these deaths and rebirths. A better book, better skills, a couple of personal anecdotes I can use in the class I teach on "Finding the Story." And it's actually been kind of fun, when it wasn't horrific. So that's my cheesy metaphor for today: don't fear death, because things come back, usually better. Books can, anyway.

      Happy Easter. My kid just called and I've got to go pick him up at the convention center.

What It Sounds Like

I had the chance to read a chunk of this book in front of a live and, thank God, largely inebriated audience in San Francisco a few weeks ago. I could feel myself being a bit nervous and uncertain, because this whole approach to the book really hadn't been released from the confines of my own head yet. But I liked what I heard, mostly. This felt like a story I want to tell about and can do a good job telling. And I liked the fact that the story I'm telling is largely about the age of mass print, but I'm telling it out loud to a web-generation crowd in a city at the vanguard of the post-print era, bobbing on the whitecaps of history.