Confidential to the novelist: Your main character is obviously you. I can tell because the character is not interesting though his or her every thought is described in detail. He or she fascinates you but no one else.

Writing magazine headlines is about the hardest thing there is to do. It is very emotional for everyone involved. Ideally there is a hed that fits perfectly, that ties together the photo, the story idea, and the mood of the magazine. The greatest headline ever written was in Wired: "Nobody Fucks With the DMV." Anyone who read that hed knew what the story was going to be about, and what the magazine felt about the story. (This was earlier in the 1990s, before people said the F word so much.) A bad hed for that story would have been, like:

The DMV Goes

HIGH TECH

This is the kind of hed that floats around, though. It's adequate but obviously careless. It's easy for people to agree on. It would be easy to design around, using the latest "digital" font. Someone would imagine writing the headline on the touchscreen of an electronic ticketing pad like cops use. What a fun idea, someone else would say.

The key thing with headline writing is that you're shooting for the a-ha hed that makes everyone *in the meeting* look up and say, "Yeah!" but that has never happened in the history of magazines. No three people in a hed meeting have ever agreed on a headline except in order to move on.

Just read a bunch of Theodore Sturgeon for some reason. I always think I'm going to like reading old science fiction and then I start reading it and it's all messagey. Probably in 1965 it was so shockingly new and still the realm of fantasy to talk about, to mention a few themes, impotence and homosexuality that the story didn't need to be very awesome. I remember a similar thing in a mystery I was reading that was written in 1990, let's say, and in which the big shockeroo had to do with AIDS. Or how emotional it was to see Wings of Desire while the Berlin Wall was still up, and how I haven't seen it since out of fear that I won't feel the same way, since the wall is down and the heartbreak at the center of the story has been more or less solved. I think these books and movies are genuine artistic responses to current conditions, but I don't know how well they will work in future conditions. Imagine what will happen to literature when we cure death. Probably the same thing that happened to the kidnap drama when we invented cell phones. Though maybe the problem is that these problems are in the recent past. Once they're fifty years old we'll be able to see them more clearly, rather than just be annoyed by people who still think they are problems, the way we're annoyed by someone who doesn't have a cell phone and starts freaking out when they can't get in touch with you. Get a damn cell phone, you say to Harrison Ford in Frantic; you don't say it to the cast of, let's say, Suddenly.



In a similar vein, I played My Bloody Valentine for an 18-year-old this week and she was not as blown away by it as I hoped. I think it must sound like just whatever's going on now to her, or like a paler version of now. On the other hand, I played her some Butthole Surfers and she about busted a gut. I remember one friend who was so highly strung during the teenage years that we worried about playing the Butthole Surfers around him. Turns out my cousin is the same way. I think I'll give her one month at college without this record, so she can meet some people, then send it to her.

In "Under the Net" there's a great idea, that there are places to live that are in the swing of things and there are places that are not. Philadelphia is not very much in the swing. You don't move here in order to plug in and be part of what's going on in the larger world, the way you would move to New York. You move to NY as much for the feeling of being switched on as you do for any actual job or opportunity. What's prompting these thoughts is a woman from the office who's moving to Boston, which just seems so much more alive and cogent as a city than Philadelphia does, though the two are similar in some ways. Boston is her fantasy city. I'm not sure if Philly is anybody's fantasy city, besides M. Night Shyamalan.

Just finished two novels in bound ms that I'm FedExing back to the publisher this afternoon. They're very good and had a million post-spell-check typos. "Suck" for "such" or "sec" for "sex," and a million times, "on" for "one." As usual I wonder where the edits -- and the books -- are going to go after I read them. I know that sometimes the work I do on these mss, when I work in pen on paper, is input by someone who may or may not be text-oriented, who may not know editing symbols. I have a few questions about the author's intent -- is this a typo or an unorthodox but correct word choice? These queries may not be made to the author, because time is tight; someone may just make a call, right or wrong, and let it fly. I also know that my corrections, when entered by someone else into the page layout, will cause other mistakes to appear, no matter how careful they are. It's just the law of editing and publishing. I can't think of another field in which so many people work solely to rid some product of errors, and never succeed. It's almost reassuring to me that this was a super-rush job, though it sucks for the author, whose works got such lickety-split treatment. One thing I learned early on is that second editions, as rarely as they're published, even more rarely get their typos corrected.



I really want these books to look good. I think they're very special. The tragedy of them is that they could be easily typecast as genre books, but the quality of the writing is so far above the kind of writing you usually see in genre books. I find them more human and thoughtful than James Ellroy, up to now my benchmark for modern, noirish mystery. They don't go for the cheap rush. But they're also not the inwardly chuckling self-reflexive kind of writing you see in upscale mysteries (often packaged around Italian themes). I think they're right for this publishing house, even though the house doesn't do genre books. The writing is so generous and beautifully paced. (Something else that will make them a tough sell; reviewers don't usually get a chance to sink into the pace of a book, or to try to quantify what makes a book alive as opposed to what makes a book "correct.") There are a few characters that I really see; others that I think are intentionally opaque and impossible to know. The mark of a good book, I guess, is the word "intentionally." I think this writer really worked on these books and made every choice consciously. I was psyched to read them and felt different afterwards, not tired but more alive.

I'm excited to read a new and quality book manuscript tonight because I spent my day marking up manuscripts that needed focusing on shed design, as opposed to general information about sheds, or on how the garage is the new front door of the home. The garage, it's said, is the entrance to the new "beehive home," which has taken over from the "cocoon." People go in and out all day. They also give their delivery guy the code to their garage door opener so he can leave them packages without going in the house. I wish I had a garage so I could get my damn package from UPS. Second delivery notice today. I really don't know how I'm going to get this package. No one is home all day in my building anymore.

I like giving books to people. Sometimes I just know it's the right book and sometimes I'm being imposing and a showoff or know-it-all. But every so often you hit the bullseye and this week I did. I had these two books on Scandinavian design that had come into the bookstore; they were 1960s era, both still in their book jackets, and they were going to be completely jacked to pieces if they sat on the shelves. I say this to justify my buying them at the discounted rate. I was saving those books. So I took them home and read them, and they were gorgeous and everything, and I stood them on the shelf in readiness for when my liking of Scandinavian design should blossom into an obsession. But it didn't, and I knew these books were important (I looked on Alibris and they were over $20, which is always a clue), so I thought, who do I know who wants these? And I thought of someone, and mailed them off, and got the best phone message back. Someone who really wanted these books now has them, without having asked for them. How about that? I think this is what librarians hope to do every day, and it accounts for why a lot of librarians you see are kind of angry, because what they really do every day is tell kids that their 30 minutes are up and it's time to let someone else use the computer. And ask for funding.