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.

Paper

Getting interviewed can be very educational, especially when it's an interview about a work in progress. As I got ready to read a piece of this book at the Monthly Rumpus (coming up in a few weeks), Sona Avakian of the San Francisco Examiner interviewed me by email and asked some questions that got my thoughts turning in new directions: thoughts about the book, somewhat, but mostly thoughts about my relationship to the book. The whole interview is here, complete with fun excursions into other topics (the internet, Joseph Pulitzer, superhero comics). But I like looking at what poured out of me about the book itself.

      I told Sona I was going to be reading a passage of the book "about how mass publishing swept over American culture like a flood—or a scourge—in the mid-19th century, and how we're still sort of playing out the culture wars that started in response...specifically about how sexual information was the most alarming part of the flood, and who rose up to fight back against the tide of intimate revelation." And she asked, "How did you get interested in publishing history?" Which I'd never quite asked myself. But I found myself saying this:

      "It's kind of a weird route. I spent my thirties as a comic book writer, writing superheroes for Marvel and DC and creating my own odd comics for small publishers, but also writing history and criticism about comics. I'd been a huge comics geek in my teens and into my twenties, and a lot of my work in comics was about seeking my creative roots in old pulp. Marvel Comics basically saved me from depression and despair when I was 13, and for decades I was still intoxicated by the smell of the pulp and the look and feel of that cheap, yellowing paper. Most of the founding fathers of comic books were still around then, and I could go into an almost out-of-body state sitting and listening to their stories of the old days.”

      Writing about old comics and pulps always seems to make my prose turn purple, because I followed that with: “I learned my dad had been nursed on the milk of wood pulp too—The Shadow gave him an island in a brutal '30s childhood. And then I ended up writing Shadow comic books, and I had this feeling of a river of four-color ink running down through the 20th century, pumping through the veins of generations of wounded kids.” (My friend Rachel said, "I can't work out whether this is poetical or pretentious." She was being polite.)

      “So when I got out of writing comics I wrote a book called Men of Tomorrow, about the roots of comics in geekdom and sad adolescence and the violence of American life in the immigrant waves and the economic churnings of the past century. But writing that I caught on that comics were just white caps on a bigger wave—cheap paper and ink were a primary carrier of new ideas, information, values, and driving personal fantasies from before the Civil War to the TV era, and still to a great extent up until the Internet took over. Especially for the poor, the young, immigrants, and the adventurously socially mobile, magazines and newspapers both expressed and shaped people's expectations and self-descriptions.

      "And there were wars fought over them: circulation wars where people got their heads bashed in and culture wars where people were driven to ruin and suicide or swept from obscurity to power."

      Sona asked what I meant by that last sentence, which is course is what I was hoping for. One thing you learn in comics is how to write hooks. “The first part's simple: In the early 20th Century, battles over newspaper distribution routes and control of corner newsstands were fought by local thugs who killed quite a few of their rivals. The newspapers played a huge role in the formation of organized crime in this country—Lucky Luciano and Dion O'Bannion got their start doing circulation for Hearst before Prohibition made them rich.

      “Second part, I'm thinking mainly of two of the big figures in my book: Anthony Comstock, an obscure dry-goods salesman who became one of the most powerful men in American culture—the chief censor of both the federal and New York state governments—through his unrelenting battle against indecent publications in the late 19th century; and Bernarr Macfadden, a professional wrestler and bodybuilder from the Ozarks who became the most successful magazine publisher of the 1920s, and one whose influence is still being felt in mass culture, by fighting back against Comstock with health publications, sex-education books, and finally the genre of confessional and 'true story' magazines, which he basically created."

      Then back to the main thread: “I started trying to get my head around that, to understand just how big this subterranean paper ocean had been, and then these past few years it's really been coming home to me that the age of paper is ending, or at least it's changing fundamentally. So I wanted to write a paean to it, and try to open up some partial revelation of what it had been—because, you know, you can't really see how your family's affecting you until you move out, and you can't really get what publishing meant until it's fading away—by looking hard at one part of it that hadn't been looked at very much. But one part that I discovered was really powerful, the way magazines drove this whole culture of talking about our private selves and talking about other people's private selves that we're still moving through."

      At that point Sona asked me something that made a light go on: "Do you think paper publishing has hit rock bottom yet? Can we expect a resurgence soon?" I said, "I don't think paper has hit bottom by any means, but I also don't think it will be a quick or simple fall. There will be bumps and twists and surprises on the road down. Print on paper will never go away, because some people will love it and be willing to go to the effort and expense of keeping it alive. I mean, horses aren't extinct, right? But I'm not holding my breath for them to retake their position at the forefront of transportation, either."

      She asked what I thought of the Panorama newspaper that McSweeney's published, and I said that I thought "it was really fun. It's exactly the kind of thing that subcultures produce when they're fading out of the mainstream—expensive, resplendent, nostalgic. Festive, not quotidian. Rodeos became show biz and an art form when the horse culture ended."

      It hit me then that that's a large part of why I've opened the book wider and have become so energized to write it now: it's the book under the book. It's the story of some of the people in the era of mass print and their impact on the world. But the writing of it is also kind of a private celebration of an era that's now fading enough that we can start to see and describe the whole thing.

My Dream Book

This has only happened to me a handful of times in my life: dreaming that I was explaining my book in progress to somebody and discovering upon waking that what I was saying actually makes sense. So much sense, in fact, that the dream conversation gives me some understanding that I'd never reached consciously but that actually helps me write the thing.

     The dream I had the other morning may have been the most useful yet. In it I was telling some poor, long-suffering (but mercifully unreal) acquaintance what The Undressing of America is really all about at its core. What I was saying wasn't, in fact, what it's "really all about," but it was an important piece that I hadn't really looked at yet: how some people, crossing social boundaries and existing in multiple worlds can befriend such a variety of other people that they become sort of living cultural crucibles—and how there are moments (like early 20th century America) when the culture is changing so quickly and the social lines are so blurred that those people can embody an entire historical moment.

     I've always been drawn to the combining of different worlds myself: in my public-speaking bio I used to say that I was the only person every published in Batman comics and The Atlantic Monthly in the same month, and sometimes I'd add that I got onto Fresh Air because I wrote Pokemon. And I know that's much of what drew me to the stories in this book: Bernarr Macfadden, the professional wrestler and carnival strongman who knew Upton Sinclair, Margaret Sanger and Benito Mussolini; Fulton Oursler, newspaper reporter, playwright, and stage magician who knew Conan Doyle in his weird dotage and the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous in their early years of sobriety. I know that's much of what draws me to stories about New York in the teens and '20s in general, where the highest tumbled and the lowest rose up and every connection was improbable. But I hadn't really understand that that was a vital part of the book—that those line-blurring, category-jumping relationships were essential to America's psychological and social undressing. Not until my unconscious got to work on it in my sleep.