Saddest day of year?

The World Series ended last night. In years past, even those in which the Cardinals won, the day after the Series was the saddest of the year.

No more baseball this year.

Back in the early 1990s I was griping about the Cardinals’ poor season to a friend while it was little more than half over. “At least we have them with us,” she responded. She was right: bad baseball is still better than no baseball.

Enough nonsense masquerading as insight has been written about baseball during the explosion of writing about the game over the past 20 years or so. I don’t want to add to it here. However, baseball is like life in that the six-month regular season resembles the day-to-day grind we all go through. Had a great day today? Wait till tomorrow. Had a bad today? Wait till tomorrow. During the regular season, there’s always tomorrow. Games are important but not the end-all be-all.

The “postseason,” a term that really wasn’t used until the expansion era began in 1969, though, is like a wedding or funeral. A wedding if your team wins, a funeral if it loses. Sure, watching the Cardinals in the postseason is great, but there’s almost too much attention paid to every pitch, every swing, every everything. You don’t relax watching a postseason game. You can relax, though, watching a regular-season contest.

So, the wedding (Giants)/funeral (Tigers) concluded last night. Bring on late February-early March, when the spring training games begin.

What Joe DiMaggio and I share

For the past week or so I’ve had pain in my right heel. It hasn’t caused me to miss work or other activities, but sometimes I feel like Chester in the Gunsmoke series as I favor my foot when walking. I always try to speculate on what the source of an ongoing malady might be. This, I concluded, was either a bone spur or the beginnings of massive blood circulation problems that would lead to the amputation of my right leg by the end of the week (my philosophy: expect the worst to either be prepared for it or to happily relieved when it’s something much less).

Went to my doctor today (a fine physician) who suggested it might be a bone spur and recommended I get it X-rayed at Metro Imaging, down the street from his office. Within a half hour I learned that I do, indeed, have a heel spur.

I immediately thought of Joe DiMaggio, the great Yankee slugger (The Yankee Clipper, they called him). He missed the first half of the 1949 season (year of my birth) with a painful heel spur. In late June he got out of bed one morning and felt no pain, and no pain when he moved about. He rejoined the Yankees, who were ecstatic to have him back. His first three games with the Yankees were in Boston. The Yankees, behind DiMagg’s five hits in eleven at-bats, four homers and nine rbi, swept a three-game series from the rival Red Sox.

I was inspired. So I came home (I’ll call the doctor’s office tomorrow to see how he wants to treat it now that we know what it is), cut the grass, put on my aerating cleats (which I haven’t used in years), poked holes in the soil with them while slowly walking over every inch of my front and back lawns, then sowed grass seed. (I was going to sow winter wheat but decided to do that next fall.) While doing all that I was not aware of any pain. But as soon as I finished and put everything back in the shed, I had to hobble to the house.

So, why is the pain there sometimes and not there other times (like when I’m engrossed in something)? Maybe the doc will be able to tell me. In the meantime, I’m going to look at the rest of Joe DiMaggio’s 1949 season and hope to get inspired again.

Trying it again

I just “unpublished” Forget Us Not from smashwords, barnesandnoble, and other e-book outlets. To those of you who bought it, again I thank you and I hope you won’t feel cheated. You bought a book I’m proud of and which I feel is the finest thing I’ve written.

But I have to honestly say that I self-published as a kind of last resport, and I don’t think I was truly at the last resort stage when I published it in June. I tried a number of literary agents and a couple small publishers over the past few years, and sporadically at that. I probably didn’t try hard enough. The authors of many fine first novels got rejected at least two to three times as much as I did yet went on to see their books published by reputable publishers.

I always wanted Forget Us Not to be a book — a book on paper with pages that people would turn (I would hope continuously so that the readers would say I’d written a real page-turner). Sure, I’d also like my novel to be an e-book — but a conventional book on paper first.

That’s what I’ll now seek. I’m going to go back to the conventional route of inquiring. The manuscript I submit will be the one I just had for sale as an e-book, and I’m not changing one word (except for a few typos a friend found). I have one publisher in mind, and even spoke to the editor at a writers’ conference about my novel last year. She seemed interested. Silly me, because it was a small publisher and I had big dreams I didn’t submit. It doesn’t mean that that publisher would have accepted it then, or will now, but the recent experience has brought me back to reality.

I also pulled the e-book because I didn’t think it was right to submit a mansucript to a publisher or agent while still trying to sell it on the side.

Some writers make it real big with a first novel. Most writers don’t and keep writing to keep making money. That’s what I should be, though I never intended for Forget Us Not to be my only novel.

There’s also something else about self-publishing: While I had professional editors and writers look at it, and benefitted from their comments and error-catches — there’s something less than acceptable to me personally about self-publishing. I recall when I managed a B. Dalton Bookseller outlet in the mid-1970s. We had self-published writers come in trying to hawk their works but would always reject them. While working at the library downtown a few years ago I was approached by a young woman who wanted to donate her recently self-published book to the library; I didn’t have the heart to tell her she had a serious grammatical error in the title on the cover.

For most of the self-publishing world there are no standards. My 30 years as a newspaperman instilled in me a belief in standards — the paper stood for something and experienced editors and writers worked together to put out a good paper (well, we tried at least). The relationship between writer and editor is sometimes contentious, and I fought with a few copy editors as a reporter and with a few reporters when I was an editor. But they were healthy, invigorating skirmishes; we were both trying to find the best way to express something in print.

I hope to have that kind of relationship with an editor at a reputable publishing house soon.

One last thing: I’m glad I tried the e-book self-publishing route for awhile. Try something then go on, with an insight into what you did and what you should do. I got the idea after reading about some — few — successes by people who’d made some money at it. Most of them seemed to have offered their books at 99 cents. I thought about offering it that price then read somewhere that 2.99 was also good and that that price showed pride in what you’d done; 99 cents was almost a giveaway. Sales were very minimal, but I wasn’t going to reduce the price to .99, particularly not to insult those who’d bought it at 2.99.

In the meantime, while I submit the manuscript in the conventional route, I continue writing the next novel. Writers write, and that’s that.

Automation comes to the National Pastime

Last week while reading Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano, about a totally automated futuristic society, I reflected on how my favorite game, baseball, has come to be “automated.” “Automatic” or “regimented” might be better descriptions.

In that I mostly mean the use of pitchers. We rarely see what I would call the “heroic pitching performance.” Starters aren’t expected to go beyond six innings, with separate pitchers for the seventh, eighth, and ninth innings, and perhaps a left-handed “specialist” who comes in during the seventh or eighth to face a left-handed batter. That’s why Adam Wainwright’s complete-game 6-1 win over Milwaukee the other night, which I attended, was so different.

I’ve never felt that starting pitchers should go the distance. A manager has to be ready to pull one pitcher for another if he thinks the game is on the line. Broadcaster Joe Garagiola, a former catcher with the Cardinals who grew up a block away from where I currently live, used to say on air that a manager wasn’t pulling a pitcher because he’d run out of gas but was bringing in someone fresher. That I support.

But it’s the automatic use of pitchers today that drives me wild. Good pitching stops good hitting, so the adage goes, and the game is often determined by which team has the better pitching for that night. As long as a pitcher is retiring batters, why yank him except (in the National League) when his team is losing and it’s his turn to bat? Many a good pitching performance ended because of that (just look at Sandy Koufax’s stats during his great years with the Dodgers in 1963-66; he rarely got taken out because the opposition was hitting him but because of his batters’ weak support). And why is it that the “best” relief pitcher on a team comes in only when that team has a lead of three runs or less in the ninth? Many people have studied the situation since Tony LaRussa began using his “closer” (Dennis Eckersley) that way in the late 1980s, and all the studies show that the save stat guides a pitcher’s use rather than demonstrates his effectiveness.

Bruce Sutter, the former Cardinals’ closer from the 1980s, pretty much criticized in a Post-Dispatch article yesterday the way managers use their relievers today but said he doubted that any manager would change for fear of severe critcism the first time things didn’t work out. Sutter often pitched two or more innings in earning a save, often coming with the tying or winning runs on base, something the closer today doesn’t do unless he puts those runs on base himself. What is he saving, except his own ineptitude for that evening?

http://www.stltoday.com/sports/baseball/professional/sutter-makes-the-case-for-the-multi-inning-closer/article_dc806e57-20ce-592b-b954-9ad81bccce8e.html

I’m revising a baseball novel I wrote long ago. The manager in my novel, Howard Rourke, will have no such fears of using pitchers against the conventional wisdom.

Revisiting a great novel — Player Piano

This week I finished rereading Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano, which I highly recommend to anyone who likes a good story that includes commentary on the human condition. It’s amazing how far-sighted it was.

I still have the paperback copy I bought in 1970 from a wire rack in the tiny bookshop on the U.S. Army base in Vicenza, Italy, where I stationed in 1970 and 1971. A dour, thin, middle-aged Italian man ran the shop; I never saw him smile except when he conversed with one of the other Italians who worked at the base. I always got the impression that he despised us Americans and grudgingly worked there because it was better money than he could have earned off base. But perhaps he was uncomfortable since his English was merely passable. Vonnegut, had he seen this guy, probably would have worked a short story around him. My copy cost 95 cents, and the cover art is a yellowed piano keyboard with a man’s outstretched hands on the keys, his arms and body black and punctuated by white slots, like a reversal of a player-piano roll. His face is on a roller used to wind the piano music paper. That cover art was not reproduced on any subsequent reprinting.

The novel was published in 1952, when Vonnegut was 30. Reading it led me to gobble up everything Vonnegut had written till then, and at one point I considered myself an “authority” on his works. My humble estimation is that Player Piano was his best. I’m starting to conclude that writers, while they get better technically with age, write best when they’re hungriest. And, in looking through a recently published bio of Vonnegut, I learned that he and his wife were pretty hungry in the early 1950s. He’d quit a good-paying PR job with General Electric to write full-time. The encroaching automation that put people out of work, which he saw at GE, was part of his impetus for writing the novel.

Everyone in this futuristic society has a job, though it’s only the engineers and managers, all of whom hold Ph.D.s, that really have anything to do, any incentive to improve things, and who make big money. As a government official explains to a visiting sheik, “And any man who cannot support himself by doing a job better than a machine is employed by the government, either in the Army or the Reclammation and Reconstruction Corps.” (They fix potholes, 15 guys or so to a pothole.) Everyone except the engineers and managers is expected to be eternally thankful to them for improving their lives. Every house has the most up-to-date gadgets that give its occupants time to just enjoy life. But the sheik asks why people need to have that much time.

One part of the novel that caught my novelist’s eye was a passage in which a woman allows herself to get “picked up” by the visiting sheik, supposedly for sex in return for money, which the woman needs since her husband is out of work. He lost his job and his writer’s classification — W-440, fiction journeyman — because he wrote an unpublishable novel. Rather than extoll the “beauty” of the totally automated society, he wrote a novel about how dehumanizing it was. When she’s asked by the government official accompanying the sheik why he wrote something with an “antimachine theme,” she responds: “He didn’t care. He had to write it, so he wrote it.”

Vonnegut, in that and some of his early books (he lost it after Slaughterhouse Five), did what all good novelists are supposed to do: get both mad as hell about the injustices of this life and write about them both in hopes of changing things, as hopeless as that might seem, and to uphold the dignity of humanity.

I think Vonnegut finally gave up on seeing goodness prevail and wrote toward the end with savage sarcasm. But in Player Piano he still believed that people could offset the threats to their humanity. He writes of the brilliance of the human mind but also with compassion about the shortcomings and failures that go with just being human. I hope I always will. If you’re a writer, I hope you always will, too.

Player Piano is probably available in your local library or at a bookstore near you. Or you can consult

http://www.amazon.com/Player-Piano-Novel-Kurt-Vonnegut/dp/0385333781

Did I Dupe A Friend?

A friend who’s lived out of town for several years recently bought my e-novel Forget Us Not and wrote last week, tersely, that he was glad he’d read it. I sensed he hadn’t liked it and pressed him to give me a fuller reaction, assuring him I wouldn’t be angry if he ripped it.

He did. Big time.

I say that not to criticize him — no work of fiction is universally loved — and wrote back that I accepted his critique with one exception. He called it a Christian novel. I will always hold that it isn’t. While several characters are practicing Christians, the novel does not espouse any denomination. I mentioned this to my friend, repeating what I’ve written here before: that I wanted some of the characters to reflect what I perceive in the world, that faith in God is still very important to many people and that contemporary novelists need to realize that.

What I concluded was that my friend felt duped I hadn’t told him beforehand that some characters would turn to their Christian faith in making important decisions. He long ago left the Church.

I don’t think I need to put up such caveats as ”Reader beware: Belief in God found herein.”

As I watch movies made before the 1960s and read some novels published before then I’m struck at how they allow for a belief in God. (Today, unfortunately, the media portray religious belief as superstition.)

My friend and I, after a rather strenuous exchange of e-mails, have decided to cool it for awhile. I’m sure our friendship will resume.

Trusting in what the Lord wants for our efforts

The pastor of my church says we should pray for what we want. Scripture, in the direct words of Jesus, tells me that God knows what we want before we even ask. I’ve long believed that we can ask for what we want, and God will give us what we need plus the grace to accept both the disappointment of not getting what we ask for and the reality of what we actually receive (and how many times have I thanked God for not giving me something I wanted when I realized it wouldn’t have been good).

So, yes, lately I’ve prayed to be a successful novelist after a long career as a fairly successful journalist and co-author of baseball history books and articles. But I’ve always concluded the prayer with, “If it be Your Will.” Five times as many people in the first two weeks have downloaded the free portions of my novel than have bought it. Maybe they want to read it before deciding whether to buy it.

Yesterday, while walking home after Mass (yes, on a Saturday morning), I decided to accept whatever happens with the novel, and any future novels I write. If they become wildly successful and I fabulously rich, I pray for the grace to handle it. I don’t think I’ll have to worry about that, though. More likely a small number of people will buy it, I hope enjoy it, and I’ll make some pocket change. I don’t think God will make it a best seller (“Psst — buy Jim’s book.” “I will, Lord.”) I need to crank out some more publicity.  But a novel really makes it on its own merits.

We’ll eventually find out if Forget Us Not has any.