The Size of the Great American Novel isn't That Great Anymore (and I Think That's Great)

So, I've been out of the writing/publishing industry for a little while now, and a lot has changed in the last five years.  The fundamental rule - the one amateur writers the world over hate or refuse to acknowledge - is still true, and that is, if your novel doesn't fit into some very specific guidelines in terms of length, language, and topic, your manuscript goes in the trash can.  What has changed are some of those guidelines - most notably, the size of a novel.

The common wisdom used to be that unless your manuscript was big enough to consider it as a murder weapon, it wasn't big enough.   In On Writing Stephen King suggests that writing 2,000 words a day for three months will produce a "respectable" 180,000 word novel.   I've always felt this was a little ironic since I've always enjoyed his shorter work, such as Carrie and The Running Man, a lot more than his longer works like The Stand (I said it, come at me fanboys).  In fact I attribute a reasonable amount of his success to being able to get in, tell a story in as few words as possible, and get out.   180,000 words is a lot of words.

Well, the times they are a changin'.  Printing books is expensive and giving them shelf space is even more expensive.  People are also spending less time reading than they used to, and that means that now, it looks like most publishers rarely consider a manuscript over 100,000-120,000 words.  That's a full third shorter than the recommended length just a few years ago and personally, I love it.

High fantasy is the biggest offender, but I often read a book and think "this was a good book, it would have been a great book if they had shaved another off 20% of it."  I find that it's much, much easier to tell a 200,000 word story in 150,000 words than it is to tell a 100,000 word story in 150,000, assuming the writer has any interest in the quality of the finished product.

So this change excites me.  I have at least two half-novels written that died or stalled because I couldn't find a way to bloat them up to 180,000 words or more and still tell the story I wanted.  I can't say for sure that I'll be able to revive those projects (and I won't be looking at them at least until I finish my current novel, which isn't sci-fi or fantasy) but they'll certainly be worth a look.  It excites me.

Self Help - The Four Hour Work Week

So recently I started listening to The Four Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferris on audiobook, mostly because I got it for free and it was recommended by Youtube vlogger PhillyD.

I'm only half way through but so far it follows the same line that most self help/live better/achieve your dreams/become wealthy type books follow - take a few genuinely strong pieces of advice, sprinkle in a little bit of bullshit to make sure you actually have enough content to get it published, and flesh it out with a ton of self promotion.

Alternate Title:  

"Success through four hours a week of actual work, and 90 of self promotion."

These books always make my blood boil because they almost always tell me valuable things that I need to hear (like Ferris's advice to stop trying to fix your weaknesses and spend your time capitalizing on your strengths) but it's surrounded by so much chaff it's unbelievable.  The Four Hour Work Week in particular is about how to save time and make your life more efficient; while it contains some good tips, I wish I had saved myself several hours by paying someone $10 to read  the book and writing down all the genuinely useful stuff in a two page synopsis.  In fact, the book itself recommends treating most things in life like that.   Maybe the book is just trying to be an effective object lesson?

I remember being a fan of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and if nothing else, books like this are good for helping you understand the way wealth in the world works (that being that hard work does generate wealth, but only if you're working hard doing the right things, and most people aren't), even if some are better than others at demonstrating how to come by any.

Where Ferriss succeeds is making a very strong point - why spend your life being miserable with the hope of being content in retirement, when you can set up your life to be content now?  Where he falters is where many similar authors do:  practical steps to take someone from a crappy office job or blue collar work into the life he recommends.  He makes a lot of helpful suggestions and offers some good tips, but it doesn't come together into any sort of cohesive working plan.

I'm torn.  Part of me wants to say "don't get this book" and part of me wants to say "get this book and a highlighter, highlight the useful stuff, and ignore the rest."

Maybe something will happen in the second half to really surprise me, but with the sheer volume of self praise and self-referential promotion so far, I'm not expecting much different for the rest of it.

Honesty In Writing

I'm considering taking some time off from poker (not long, maybe a month or so) and picking up writing again, which really is my first love.

I'm really struggling with the concept of honesty in narrative.  I find the work of guys like Chuck Palahniuk  or Chad Kutlgen really engaging because so much of the writing space is devoted to what's *really* on the mind of the main characters.  For a guy like me who comes from a fairly sterile upbringing in a fairly sterile city, this is a pretty tough decision.

I come from a background where everyone pretty much filters out the most personal part of themselves - children won't tell their teachers when they disagree, husbands won't share their true sexual thoughts with their wives, longtime friends won't admit their insecurities.  There's a very high level of perceiving what is appropriate and then filtering your thoughts so that no one is shocked or offended.

Even my wife - who by any definition is quite liberal with her thoughts and emotions - was disgusted and offended while reading The Average American Male, which, while a crass novel to be certain, isn't really an unfair picture of the thoughts of many guys in their early 20s.

I'm paraphrasing here because I don't have the book handy but the dedication in The Average American Male reads something like "To my mom and dad.  I am sorry I've written a book you will not want to read."

I'd say that sums it up - I'm fairly certain that writing with any degree of genuine honesty about the thoughts of my characters that they will either end up as shallow robots (as I will have filtered out their darker thoughts) or I will end up alienating people with my writing - people I genuinely respect and admire.

I'm not really sure where to proceed from here. Is it even possible to tread some delicate middle ground?  I don't know.  Even if it is possible... would I really want to?

Pot Control Tip of the Day finds its way to the Switch Poker Blog, Also, Onion Soup is Delicious

So today is the big roll out for my blog entry/tip of the day over at Switch Poker.  I'm pretty pumped about it, although I'm not really sure how many people are reading that particular blog.  The intro:

You can't win every hand of poker you play. In fact, in the long run, you'll win roughly the same number of hands as your opponents. So what separates a winning poker player from a losing one?  One way to make sure we're winning at the table is with superior pot control .

The rest of it is here.  For an attempt at dealing with a pretty complex topic in a very short number of words, I'm pretty pleased with it. 

Incidentally, if anyone out there wants me to set them up at Switch Poker, leave a comment and let me know. It's a small room, but it's really convenient and easy to pick up and play, on a desktop or on an iphone/ipod/android/etc. 

As an update on the cooking front, making onion soup was actually quite simple, tastes great, and has basically no calories as well

The only real ingredients you need:

- A bunch of onions

- A tablespoon or so of butter

- beef broth

- patience

I really thought I was going to have to add a lot of stuff to the recipe to make it palatable, but it's actually quite good as-is.  

Chop up as many onions as you'll be able to fit into a frying pan (medium sized pieces are fine, no need to burn your eyeballs off mincing the onion).

Put all the onions in a large pot with the butter and let them simmer for about 30-40 minutes, stirring  every few minutes, so the onions get nice and translucent but don't start cooking to the bottom of the pot.

The patience is key here.  Don't try to rush it, just let the onions cook down, adding more butter to keep them from sticking if needed. 

Once that's finished, add enough beef broth to the pot to make your onion soup the consistency of, well, soup, then add a bit more.  You're going to let this simmer for a few hours, so add a bit more water or broth as it cooks down.

That's it.  Tasty, easy, low in calories. 

More in a few days. 

New New Content

Well... here it is.  Over a year since the last time I tried to open this blog.  Yikes.  Well, here I am trying again, and this time, I'm expecting it to work.

It's not that I've been lazy.  On the contrary, I've just been so busy with the poker that even the poker blog has taken a back seat.  It seems like every time I sat down to write a blog entry, some interesting poker action would come up and I would chase it down.

February was one of my best months of poker ever, and I enjoyed the victory by taking a trip to my home town in Michigan to clean my stuff out of my parents basement.  While I was there I positively pillaged the local charity poker room (including joining and winning a massively over-raked tournament).  The rake structure might be terrible, but Woody's Poker Room does put on a good tournament. State law mandates a whopping 20% of the prize pool go to charity, but at least the tournament organizer did all he could to take care of the players.

Then on top of that, I lucked into a pretty good score when bitcoins shot up in value and I was holding on to a small pile of them... luckily I dumped about 90% or so before the crash.

So.... yeah.  Feeling like the year is off to a good start so far. I've been off the caffeine for about a week now  and it's starting to feel like a good thing instead of slow torment.

Tomorrow, I'll be cracking open Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking to try my hand at some onion soup (on the quest for a low calorie lunch option that isn't salad). If it's not terrible, I'll post the results here.

On the blogging front, I have a strategy article coming out soon for Switch Poker, which I'll re-post here as well if I can.

Hijinks to follow.

Did you know "hijinks" is a slang variant of the actual "high jinks?"  My vocabulary is pretty good, and I had no idea.  Huh. It seems wrong as two words.  Can you have low jinks?  medium jinks?  eye level jinks?

Blog Reopening With New Content Updates!

Well, this has been a long time coming. I've been meaning to get this blog in order for quite some time, and I'm now settled in Canada with no excuse not to start writing again. I'm sure there will be more aesthetic updates to come as I'm still playing around with Blogger, but as far as content you can expect:

Tuesday Poker Content!

Tuesdays, I'll share my thoughts on a poker related topic, from game theory to poker news, from hand histories to book reviews. I hope to talk strategy and math here as well as anything else that could be considered interesting and poker-centric.

Thursday Life in Review!

Working at home means I end up consuming a ton of books, movies, TV shows, and games (some related to poker, some not). Find out what's worth picking up here. It's going to be most of the year before Doctor Who starts up again, so we need something to do in the meantime, right?

I actually just finished "The Mentalist" and started on "Freaks and Geeks,"

but neither of those gives me an excuse to post pictures of Amy Pond/Karen Gillan.

The Sunday Cookbook!

Sundays, end the weekend right with a recipe for something you might actually want to eat and might actually be able to cook - follow along at home as I attempt to stave off how long it will be before the next time my wife mentions that we order too much takeout.

U.S. Department of Justice indicts major poker sites

Friday April 15 is certain to become a legendary date in online poker history, as the United States Department of Justice issued a scathing indictment against three major poker sites: Pokerstars, Full Tilt Poker, and Absolute/Ultimate Bet.

With the apparent removal of 20bb tables from Party Poker, Pokerstars and Full Tilt are rapidly becoming not only the best places to play, but the o

nly places, if you're a short stack player. If you're an American, then it's no choice at all.

I wish there was more that could be said on the topic, but for now it's all questions and no answers. It's unclear as to when (if) American players will be able to access their bankrolls on these sites, and these poker giants are currently blasted with epic volumes of customer e-mail, and hesitant to change customer addresses (I suspect their suspicions may be aroused by the thousands who allegedly managed to relocate outside the U.S. mere days after the announcement.)

For the record, my next blog post wasn't going to be about this at all. It was going to be about the importance of taking time off from your regular poker play. I guess I jinxed us all, because we're all getting a bit of time off. Even if you're not an American player, game quantity is shrinking and shifting considerably.

For those of you that don't know, I currently live in South Korea. My wife and I went on vacation to the port city of Busan, famed for its beautiful beaches. Yep, that means Asian swimsuit girl post-savers.

Thanks a lot, Department of Justice.

So for now, we wait.

I'm one of the "lucky" few, planning on moving to Canada in the next few months anyway to rebuild. How to rebuild is still a big question. It's a question that will likely remain unanswered in the coming weeks, as the dust on this won't settle anytime soon.

Good luck everyone, no matter how your poker is (or isn't) going. If the poker community can use their collective "one time" to find a strong way through this, I'd submit now is the time to bust it out.