It’s been at least ten years since I first started thinking seriously about eBooks and getting excited about the idea.  I had a Palm Pilot for work, and the display was poor and the Internet connection was horrible. But I loved the idea of carrying an entire library in my pocket. Still, I never even purchased the first book. The Palm Pilot is probably in some museum right now. Maybe the Gutenberg Museum we recently visited in Mainz, Germany.

Far Beyond the Pale is the new novel from Daren Dean.

Well, it’s taken me ten years to finally give it a try. What I needed was the right device and a strong reason to jump in. I bought an iPhone a couple years ago. But still, I didn’t download the Kindle app and a book until  my friend Daren Dean released his amazing novel, Far Beyond the Pale, on Amazon. I downloaded the app and fired up the book, and now I’m thoroughly enjoying both Daren’s excellent writing and the experience of reading a novel electronically.

Readwriteweb recently gave five reasons why eBooks are better than their paper ancestors.Though they highlight some amazing features of eBooks that aren’t available in the dead tree format, I wouldn’t go so far as saying this makes them superior. There’s still nothing quite like the smell of a fresh (or old and dusty) book, or the feel of pulp in your hands. There’s a sensory pleasure in reading a paper book that can’t be replicated digitally.

But the actual act reading, of experiencing words, even on the iPhone’s small screen, is just as engaging as reading on paper. You can make notes, highlight, save your spot. The iPhone allows you to flip pages with your thumb, adding a new level of touch to the experience that pressing a button can’t give you. The digital annotation tools are more efficient than the analog system of sticky notes, highlighters, bent corners and margin scrawls (albeit aesthetically less pleasing). The price is also fantastic. Daren is self-published, but I was able to buy his novel at a price on Kindle that allowed him a better profit margin (per copy) than if he’d connected with a traditional publisher.

Some writers and book lovers may think that the advent of eBooks is a sad day for novels, words and books in general. I think that’s pessimistic horse shit.

There’s also something nice about the short page length on an iPhone…it gives you the feeling of headlong progress (through the 4,000+ pages that Daren’s novel reaches in this format). I thought I’d need time to adjust to thousands of micropages compared to the traditional200-400 page length of a novel, but it’s been no problem at all. In fact, I appreciate being able to flip a page or two between giving my kid a bath or waiting for her to brush her teeth. It seems easier to dip in and out of a novel than reading a fraction of a longer, standard-length page.

Some writers and book lovers may think that the advent of viable eBook platforms is a sad day for novels, words and books in general. I think that’s pessimistic horse shit. eBooks may just be what saves the novel form in this digital age. The new platform introduces the novel experience to people who are used to consuming all of their information on a mobile device and wouldn’t otherwise think to read something of that length. It saves trees. It allows self-published authors to reach a global audience in minutes. It enhances the opportunity to deepen the novel experience with, say, video of the author reading or social highlighting and notes that give you an instant book discussion group. The future of the book-length manuscript would be far more precarious if they didn’t translate so smoothly to the Kindle, iPhone and iPad.

And it’s silly to think that paper books will die as a result of the growing popularity of eBooks. We all now have keyboards and mobile devices that shoot video and record audio. People write blogs and online diaries and send volumes of digitally composed email. But personal journals are as popular as ever. Moleskine notebooks are on sale everywhere. I see them in every coffee shop in Oregon, but I also recently returned from Germany and Italy, and they’re all over Europe as well. Every corner in Florence seemed to have a fine stationary shop, where Moleskines were the cheap option, and antique leather notebooks fetched ridiculous prices. There’s still a place for the handwritten word five hundred years after Gutenberg. People will always read paper books as well.

Hands-on printing at the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz - they'll still be doing this 500 years from now.

While we were in Germany, we stopped at  the Gutenberg Museum. My daughter joined her cousins in making prints in the museum’s hands-on print shop. She was thrilled by the tactile, mechanical experience of creating art in a method not unlike Gutenberg used when he printed his first Bible page a half millennium ago. This experience could never be replicated digitally. The art hanging on the walls of the print shop was innovative, and had a warm, comfortable feeling. Prints will be decorating walls for as long as I’m alive. Gutenberg’s invention brought the Bible and a host of other materials to the hands of people who didn’t have access to them before. He created a world of readers, expanding the simple practice of reading to the great unwashed. eBooks have the potential of bringing novels and book-length manuscripts forward, not only reaching people who already read them, but even introducing them to folks who never would have thought to pick up a manuscript on their own before.

Just like Gutenberg's invention brought the new experience of reading a book to people never reached before, the digital novel will bring novels to new readers.

So for writers and serious readers, there’s nothing to fear from eBooks. Bookstores will still exist. Some will flourish, and some will close. But books and novel manuscripts will persist. Writers like Daren Dean will be able to share their stories with friends on the other side of the country, and hopefully even reach a wider audience. Far Beyond the Pale is a compelling novel with an engaging voice. It’s a little raw, but it’s better than a lot of the pap that I’ve bought from traditional publishers in the past year. It also has a feeling of personal authenticity that other novels I’ve read recently. Maybe it’s because I know Daren, or maybe it’s because the digital age is allowing novelists to engage readers without the filter of big corporate publishers.

Daren is an amazing writer who surrounds his readers with voice-driven prose and rich, tactile imagery that comes through just as well on screen as it does on paper. And even traditional publishers and agents have been telling him for years that he’s an amazing writer, though, “the market is just too tough right now.” But today he’s now able to reach the audience he deserves.

Gutenberg would be pleased.

In the end she died, and I took her out and buried her in the flower bed. We’ll plant a fern over her and find a concrete statue that resembles her in her prime, and we’ll remember an awesome goddamned cat.

Even people who hate cats loved Sammy. Partially it was that she acted like a dog: greeting you at the door, climbing all over you, desperate for affection, desperate to win your approval. She was cussed out not a few times when we tried to work and she’d be there calling for attention. She weathered the abuse of a growing child who treated her like a doll and carried her around the house once she grew too old to outrun her. When Bailey was an infant and we closed her in her room at night to cry herself to sleep because that’s what some stupid book told us to do, Sammy, who knew better, would sit outside the door with a look of pity concern until the crying stopped.

Within minutes of meeting her, even the most hardened cat hater and most macho dog lover would be absently petting Sammy as she snuggled into his lap. You couldn’t help yourself. She worked harder at melting hearts than any creature I’ve known. You open yourself up to ridicule, I suppose, writing a eulogy for a cat. Even a cat lover like Hemingway wouldn’t stoop to this. But I gave up being a serious writer a long time ago. Screw it, I’m going to eulogize.

Sammy sat on my lap while I wrote three thousand pages of drivel…two finished and unpublished novels, and two stillborn epics never completed despite amassing an ungodly number of pages. She outlived my desire to be a Great American Novelist. She spent many late hours purring patiently as I wrote a few screenplays that fared a little better than my novels, and as I burned oil until well past midnight launching armadas of marginally useful emails for what is colloquially referred to as a “real job.”

In the end, she never judged. She just wanted a warm hand to slick back her fine gray fur. She wanted to wedge her chin against your cheek and make a burbling noise not unlike a coffee percolator that would slowly unravel your frayed nerves and remind you that you aren’t alone in the world with your toils, and how the simple things, like the humble acknowledgment of the fact that other creatures exist and breathe and want nothing more than a scratch under the chin, can change your attitude. Sometimes it takes another species to remind us that we’re human.

Sammy had a good life. Nancy picked her out at a shelter fifteen years ago. She was scrawny, wearing her rib cage like a corset, blowing snot and twisting her bony, patchy body around our legs. For some reason, this little mongrel won Nancy’s heart even though she didn’t look like much to me. We spent a couple thousand bucks, which was a lot when you’re making $6.50 per hour on the night shift at Kinko’s, getting her healthy, and she spent the rest of her life showing us her gratitude.

Thanks, little gray buddy, for the gift of your friendship. I’m reaching out my hand now, and for the first time in fifteen years a grumbling, mewing, sleek little creature isn’t leaping out of the shadows to arch her back under my fingers. That’ll take some getting used to.

I just returned from a trip to LA to meet on a project in development. I came back with a head full of notes and a deadline for the next draft. And somewhere along the way back to the job I saw my kid and realized that she had grown in the few days I was away.

Jim Harrison's latest book of poetry is called In Search of Small Gods

This can all be overwhelming and serves to dampen creativity. Add to that the fact that the vet told me my cat was probably dying, and you’ve got a recipe for creative impotence.

But then I found a package from Amazon buried under a stack of bills and I ripped open the box to find Jim Harrison’s latest book of poems. For those who don’t know, Jim Harrison is the greatest living American poet. He’s a true American writer who makes love to the landscape and lives for the small details like the shapes he finds in the undersides of bird wings or the damp smell of a thicket after a rainstorm. He’s also a fine novelist and a retired screenwriter.

His latest book of verse, In Search of Small Gods, is absolutely amazing. If you’re a screenwriter and you don’t read any poetry, you should think about that. Poetry exists for the richness of language and imagery. In many ways it’s like writing for film, though for a theater of one that exists within the soft, mushy side of the skull.

I pick a poet depending on the script I’m working on. For my first optioned script, it was Pablo Neruda. For my current project, it’s Whitman’s, Leaves of Grass. But Jim Harrison’s poetry works for just about anything. I tore open the box and read the first poem and was quite choked up. Rescue your creativity. Read good poets.

I believe in steep drop-offs, the thunderstorm across the lake in 1949, cold winds, empty swimming pools, the overgrown path to the creek, raw garlic, used tires, taverns, saloons…

That’s about all I need. I’m ready to get started. Thanks Jim.

It's hard to gain the solitude necessary for writerly artistic meditation when you have a five-year-old in tow, but if you follow these steps, you'll never less have a pleasant hike in the woods

I fully believe that any writer has to master the skill of capturing a sense of place in his or her work. I was earnest when I recently wrote that one way to develop this sense of place was to sit on a stump for four hours in the remote forest of your choice. That’s, of course, more easily done in rural Missouri or Oregon, the locales I’ve most recently called home.

Stumps are easy for me to come by, especially in Oregon where there’s a vista of stumps around just about any bend. This state has a reputation for being green and sustainable, but there are also a whole hell of a lot of clearcuts with nary a huggable tree in sight.  So I’ve got plenty of stumps nearby. It’s the isolation and the four hours that are hard to find these days.

Like many people, I’ve got a kid. And despite being a big-time-famous writer (sic!) on nights and weekends, I’ve also got a full-time, mortgage-paying job. And a wife whom I hope stays sane. So, unlike that diminutive and celibate little bachelor Henry David Thoreau, I rarely have four hours to sit on a stump and develop my sense of place. I try to sneak away for a weekend backpack, or sometimes I send my wife and kid to the in-laws in Phoenix so I can wallow in solitude and hiking blisters, but still, I need little woody quick-fixes.

I had one such forest jaunt this morning. But I had to bring my daughter along because it my turn. We hiked 3 miles through an Oregon Coast Range forest. I found a nice stump and we sat there for twenty minutes drinking coffee (me) and eating animal crackers (kiddo). I think that writers as a type need to hike in wild (or mostly wild) places for a variety of reasons. It’s best if you can do it alone, but if you can’t, here are a few tips if you must bring a small child along. I’ve developed these tactics over the past few years with my own kid (currently 5-ish), but I assume they work with a range of ages and even multiple children.

1. Bring a day pack with a smallish blanket, a nature guide, water, coffee, healthy and not-so-healthy snacks, a magnifying glass, layers of clothes for all parties concerned and a camera.
2. Start your hike by going uphill. If you live in a mountainous area, look for a loop hike with a gradual uphill gradient, with the second half of the hike all downhill to your car. If you live in washboard topography (like Missouri), stick to the flats.
3. When they start complaining, take a snack break. Even if you’re less than an hour into your hike, stop anyway. Spread out the blanket and have a picnic. It’s okay to have multiple picnics.
4. Make your second picnic stop before they start complaining for the second time. This will surprise them and they will inexplicably begin to trust you and believe that you are not going to march them to death.
5. Engage on several collection games during the hike. It can be wildflowers (to be pressed in the nature guide) in season, heart-shaped rocks, slugs, photos, animal tracks, leaves, whatever you can think of. You’ll wind up with a pocket full of stuff that you will have to bring home, but it’s far better than incessant whining.
6. The magnifying glass makes collection games more interesting. Binoculars can also work. Allowing your kid to take photos can also get them engaged in the hike. Sometimes they can look for limbs or clouds of an interesting shape.
7. Set ground rules for piggyback rides before you start. I give my daughter 1 free piggyback ride to use when she chooses.  She usually blows this one early in the hike and then soon starts whining that she wished she would have saved it for a steeper stretch of the hike. I’ll usually give her another free shoulder ride later on in the hike. If you’re following the other steps, she’ll forget and probably won’t use it for the rest of the hike.
8. Don’t read the warning signs about bears and mountain lions out loud to your kid. You’re the one who has to be wary, not her. No need to make her more scared of the woods than she needs to be. You, of course, should be vigilant.

If you follow these techniques, you’ll soon learn that your little anti-hiker who whines and cries when you tell her it’s time for a forest walk might even begin to ask you when you’re planning to go again.

Of course, these techniques aren’t limited to writer-types.

You’ve got two options. Give it away for free, or follow the traditional market models. The power of the Web allows the former to happen rather easily. But the latter is still the best way to turn your efforts into cash money.

I’ve now earned a modest amount of remuneration for making stuff up. Certainly not enough to keep the mortgage paid. And as a Web professional, I’m all for the concept barrier-free communication. Everything I do at my day job is designed to make it easier to access information. And this is at odds with the whole notion of publishing. It’s hard to access novels…you have to walk to the store and fork over twenty bucks, or sit at home and wait for the box from Amazon. So the notion of paying for text is ridiculous. Every word I’ve ever written, which is by now numbering in the millions, would fit on a thumb drive and could be sent around the world in seconds from my iPhone.

But as a writer, I also want to get paid for the years I’ve invested in creating that text.

A part of me believes it’s inevitable that writers, novelists in particular, will be giving the goods away for free online, using sites like Scribd. Even publishers are starting to offer free content on Scribd and elsewhere, trying to figure out what the business model will be.

But my friend Mort Castle, with his razor wit and boundless optimism, doesn’t seem to think that is such a good idea.  He’ll proceed as before on his 40-year quest to be an overnight success. Few writers work at it harder than Mort does.

But is the role of the publisher changing in a world of open communication? As these fireworks at SXSW demonstrate, publishers are being forced to face this question directly. I think the guy from Penguin makes a solid point when he proclaims the importance of the filter. That’s always been the role of the publisher and agent: find the gem in the slush, make it easily accessible to the masses. In essence, readers pay publishers to find the best stuff. Won’t a publisher’s role become even more vital in a world where choice is expanding?

Still, the sticky question is how to capture a profit when shelf space and distribution is now free. Some projects would never have existed if it weren’t for the Web, these the sorts of blog-to-book scenarios that writers dream about manufacturing.

Do you wait for a business model, or do you make one? Or do you just experiment? Or do you just stick to the traditional models like Mort? For now, I’m still sending manuscripts to New York in manila envelopes. Though I’ve noticed that agents in the traditional book biz are even changing, with requests for PDFs or Word versions to load onto Kindles increasing. As for LA, I’ve never printed and sent an actual screenplay manuscript…it’s all been PDF (and a scanned release form) since I’ve gotten involved.

But I’m also giving it away. Next week I’m launching a Web comic, an online graphic novel called ‘Los Refugiados,’ with artist Santiago Uceda. We’ve kicked around adding a donate button. We hope someone will recognize our brilliance in monetary form. But we have no real business model.

In the end, telling stories is something that humans do. If the market didn’t exist, it would still happen. If the Web weren’t around, we’d sit around the fire and spin yarns or scratch it into the walls of our caves.

But it sure would be nice to get paid for it.

Both were brilliant films for different reasons, and too much has been written about La Dolce Vita for me to bother with adding much more. I will say, though, that, given fifty million dollars to burn, I would love to take a stab of remaking this film with a coherent plot. Is that sacrilege? Is that blasphemy? I’m not saying the original is flawed by any stretch, just that I tend to tell stories differently. I can’t watch anything without thinking what I would do different. I sat through the whole film thinking impure thoughts like: what if each scene had a stronger transition that threaded one to the next; what if there were just a pair of overarching narrative elements, a touch more obvious, layered on top of everything else; what if we gave the audience just a hint more to grasp onto? Would that be pandering? Dumbing it down? Destroying the whole point of the film and its chaotic, jubilant, circus-like anti-narrative? I’m just saying.

Into the Wild resonated with me for another reason. About five minutes into the film, my wife looked at me and said, “My God, this is about you.” There were some strong critical reactions against this film (and also much praise), but there is also a specific subset of individuals who have lived this story, albeit likely with less tragic outcomes. It’s the American road story, it’s Thoreau, it’s the pursuit of ideals, the hubris and naivete that is the basic pulse of our culture. That’s what led that scraggly  piece of parchment under glass in Philadelphia. It’s what led, dare I say, to the audacity and idealism that brought our current White House occupant to the capital steps on Inauguration Day.

In the case of Alexander Supertramp in Penn’s film (and Krakauer’s book), his personal demons and hubris carry him too far. But plenty of us have read Thoreau or Nick Adams and taken it to heart, striking out for some purity of purpose. Wildness, Ralph Waldo said, is the salvation of humankind. That wildness could be nature. Or it could be the audacity and recklessness that leads us to pursue whatever it is that we’re after.

It takes a certain amount of hubris and naivete to sit through a film like La Dolce Vita, or The Godfather, or Double Indemnity, or There Will Be Blood and to think to yourself, “I could do that.”

Without naive idealism, you’d never sit down and start scribbling a script, dropping it in the mail on a lark with the notion that someone might want to read it and then plan on investing a lot of money in making a film out of it, as happened to me. Without naivete and a touch of ego, you might not spend years working on a novel, piling up a hundred rejections, finally sitting down and reading through it again and thinking, “hey, this is pretty friggin’ good,” and then settling in and bracing for your next hundred rejections. Which has also happened to me.

Penn nails this particularly American blend of blindness and idealism. This is a tragic story, but also very American. And in many cases, it turns out differently.

And then of course it all went to hell shortly thereafter. I hope Mr. Obama’s quiet revolution fares better than Yeltsin’s.

In any case, within minutes I saw an entire script unfolding before me. Ideas are cheap. Any writer probably gets a dozen every day. But a few really have that spark, that sense that they could become a real story. But once you get an idea with the appropriate fire, the question becomes, “when do I start?”

There are no formulas, rules or truths, and any self-proclaimed guru who tries to sell you one is full of shit. Only the formatting guidelines of a script are set in stone, and beyond 12-point Courier and the appropriate margins, anything goes. Sure the three act structure can work, though it doesn’t have to. If there is a gun in the first act, you’d better use it by the third…unless you can make it work otherwise.

And then there’s the question of research. A lot of writers immerse themselves in the world they’re about to be writing in for a long period of time before they get started. It’s probably a good practice, but I can’t work that way. For me, too much research tends to shape the story and take it off course into the weeds of detail, especially in a period piece. So when I get an idea for a script and I don’t have an ongoing project, I’ll wait as long as I can, which usually means a week or two. And then it will either fade or I just have to jump in and race through the first draft in a few weeks.

I don’t slow down for research on that first draft. What I can’t find out in short magazine articles and Wikipedia will have to wait. I’ll save the heavy research, that involving travel or books over 500 pages, for somewhere between the first and second drafts. Often I’ll find that some of the assumptions I made in the first draft hold true. Other instances will have me rewriting to correct some factual errors.

I’m not a big fan of advance research, but that’s just me. Maybe you’re the sort who needs an idea to gestate for a period of time before getting to work. I know some writers who wait years. There are no rules, though. Beware of people who try to tell you that there are.