MIA Piece Accounted For

It wasn’t good news, but at least it was closure. I just got a rejection note about a piece I sent out so long ago that I had forgotten that this particular paper had even received it. I sent the paper an article on Japan at the end of 2007, and I got the rejection last week, 197 days after I first emailed the article.

That may not be a record, but it’s close.

(If you’re wondering how I know how many days had passed, I figured it out with this new time wasting tool.)

Mission Accomplished

I did my reading last night, and I think it went pretty well. I wish I’d had more time to prepare, because I know my delivery wasn’t as seamless as it could have been, and I wasn’t as able to look up at the audience as much as I would have liked. But someone later told me she was surprised to hear that I’d been nervous. So I guess I faked it well enough.

The pieces I read seemed to go over well. People were surprised to find out that neither one had ever been published, so I resolved to try again harder to send them out.

For those of you who missed the reading—and that’s just about everyone, because I didn’t have time to rally the troops—you get another chance next month. I’ll remind you again later, but it’s at the Ferry Building Book Passage location, at 5:30 on August 11. I promise to practice more next time.

I’m Reading! 5:30 PM

I made the cut and I am reading today at Book Passage at the Ferry Building in San Francisco. Unfortunately, I don’t know exactly what time I go on—we won’t decide the set list until just before the event starts. But it’s a great bookstore, with some good places to get a drink afterwards, and I encourage everyone to come down, if you get the chance.

Getting on My Soapbox

The theme of Monday’s reading is “On the Soapbox.” We will all be reading opinion pieces. I have two that I am trying to choose between, both about gay marriage. The one I like best is a little outdated now, so what I have to decide is which is more feasible: updating the old one, or improving the new one. I think I’m going to go with editing the newer one. That will give me something to work on this afternoon.

Another Reading?

It never rains but it pours on my public appearance calendar.

The woman who organizes the Ferry Building events invited me to do a reading next Monday, forgetting that she’d already signed me up for the August reading. We both agreed that two months of Nicole might be a lot, so right now I’m penciled in as an alternate. If she can’t get a full schedule of readers, I get to go on.

If this does happen, I’ll be reading at 5:30 on July 14 at the Book Passage Ferry Building store. I will let you know as soon as I do!

Book Passage Reading

I decided which story I’m going to read at the Book Passage event. It’s the one about Taiwan. Of all the travel stories I have that would be appropriate for the event, that’s the one that’s gotten the least exposure so far, so that’s the one I’m going to go with.

Mark Your Calendars

I believe I’ve said before in this space that I’m not an enthusiastic speaker. I’m okay once I’m at the podium; I’m just terrified of the idea. As a consequence, my public appearances as an adult have been very limited.

But, rock stars have to support their new material, and so do writers. (See, there’s something else I have in common with Mick Jagger.) So I decided it was time to take advantage of an opportunity offered by a writers’ group that I’m part of. Every month, this group (Left Coast Writers) hosts a bookstore reading. Any member can volunteer to present, but I’ve never had the courage.

Yesterday, however, the group met and I allowed myself to be talked into signing up for August by one of the other members. August’s theme is travel writing, so if I don’t do it then, I may never.

The event is August 11 from 5:30 to 7:30 at Book Passage bookstore in the Ferry Building in San Francisco. There will be several other readers, but I don’t know yet how many or which number I am.

If anyone’s worried about this, I think the two-hour time frame includes drinks at the Wine Merchant afterward—I’ve never known one of these readings to take anywhere close to two hours. Book Passage is an excellent bookstore and I encourage everyone to stop by if only to patronize a clean, well-lighted, and independent place for books. (The San Francisco branch is small, but they can order anything for you.)

When to Buy?

It used to be that buying airplane tickets was a little bit of a gamble. You never knew if you were buying at the right time. You might commit to buying a ticket and the next day the price might drop significantly. Or it might go up. It all seemed very random and it was hard to decide when to make the purchase.

Lately all the advice I’ve been getting says to buy now, because prices will only go up. And over the weekend, I had an experience that suggested very dramatically that this is true.

My family is planning a getaway to a lake near Oshkosh, Wisconsin at the end of July. On Saturday, my sister and I had a pow-wow on the phone, each of us in front of our own computer, in order to book plane tickets to Milwaukee. We looked at airfares for various dates and times on several different web sites. Finally, we decided on a particular American Airlines itinerary, which Hilary found on Orbitz and I saw on Travelocity for exactly the same price. We went through the booking process together, picking seats that were next to each other.

When we got to the end of the process, we double-checked with each other and then we both clicked our purchase buttons at what must have been almost exactly the same time.

I instantly got a confirmation that my purchase had gone through. Hilary, though, got a message saying that one or more of her flights was no longer available. When we tried to start the booking over again, neither site offered that exact itinerary as an option. After a few minutes, the flights reappeared—for several hundred dollars more than I had just paid. We hoped this was a fluke, and that prices would come back down after a few hours, but so far, no luck.

I am aware that two people sitting next to each other on a plane can pay wildly different prices for those two seats, but I never realized this could happen when they’re booked seconds apart. In retrospect, I see now that we should have been using one computer to purchase both the tickets at once. But if we’d taken the extra time for one of us to drive to the other’s house, who knows what would have happened to prices during that hour?

Like I said, it’s a gamble.

Happy Fourth of July

Pipi and I like to be ahead of things, so we already saw fireworks, last night at the Marin County Fair.

This frees us from the annual Bay Area ritual of packing into a crowded public place and standing in the damp chill while watching muted color flashes going off in the fog. I’m relieved that I won’t feel obligated to do that this year in order to say I saw fireworks on the fourth. It feels, well, freeing.

The weather was good in Marin. Joan Jett played a set right before the fireworks show, and what’s more American than rock ’n’ roll? Pretty much only hot dogs and corn on the cob, which is what’s on the menu for at least two meals tomorrow.

Happy Fourth, everybody!

Marketing Pays Off?

A few days ago, I had a rare nibble of interest from the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. He wrote back to me in response to an article I’d sent him about the Great Wall of China. He said he already had an article lined up, but that he would see if he could incorporate any of my work into the China issue. I haven’t heard anything since then, and I’m not holding my breath, but it’s more encouraging than anything I’ve ever heard from him before, so I’m cautiously optimistic.

Introducing Glenview

The original idea behind my walking project was to get to know parts of Oakland that I knew very little about. I’m definitely still interested in that, but right now, I’m taking a little bit of a break by exploring the Glenview neighborhood. This area is not far from where I live, so I do know it a little already.

Glenview has the distinction of being the last neighborhood I will be able to walk to. Any other unexplored neighborhoods are far enough away that by the time I walk to them, that will be my exercise for the day. So soon I will be in the odd position of always having to drive to take a walk.

Not too soon, I hope. I’m afraid that driving to exercise will make me irreformably Californian.

I’ll Come Back Later

Another thing the guard told me is that the whole eastern side of the base is going to be bulldozed, and that a car dealership plaza will be constructed in the area that is already torn up and covered in gravel. So one day I probably will be able to walk around the old Army base again. It just won’t look anything like it does now.

Not-So-Warm Welcome

Here’s the funny thing, though: Actually, you’re not particularly welcome. In fact, I got kicked off recently.

The guard was nice enough. I think he was just surprised to see a walker meandering between the warehouses. He wanted to know if I’d “come off a truck.” I wondered for a second if he thought I was part of a human smuggling operation, but I think he just wondered if I were a truck driver, because those are about the only people around the base during the day.

The guard politely informed me that the base is private property, and I politely offered to leave, since I was done for the day anyway.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t entirely done with the base. There are still a few streets I haven’t been on yet. One doesn’t seem to exist anymore—it’s under a parking lot now. A couple more may not exist—if they do, they’re buried under a mountain of construction-site debris, and in any case are in the private area. Two more short streets are outside the area marked “private,” but they seem to lead to a truck loading zone and you have to go past a guard post to get to them. I don’t think I’ll be walking on them, either. I did say I wouldn’t trespass, so I appear to be done with the Oakland Army Base, and with it, West Oakland in general. I’ll miss the area, even the base, which was a little desolate, but full of history.

Phase III

So far no results yet from my marketing blitz, but I didn’t really expect anything to happen so quickly.

My next step is to try to pitch some story ideas to magazines I’ve worked with in the past. This might be where some previously unpublished pieces finally find a home, although it will take a little work to get them into magazine shape. That should keep me busy for a while.

Not Taking No for an Answer

Phase II will involve trying anew to get articles published. I keep lists of every publication I’ve offered every piece to, and periodically I go back over those lists and try to think of papers that might be a better fit. Today I tried sending some China articles to various newspapers. I can’t believe no one’s taken my Great Wall of China article. If they don’t want it this summer, they never will, so I was pretty aggressive about sending it around. Some editors may not be seeing the Great Wall piece for the first time, but my feeling is that if you don’t ask me to cut it out, I can keep offering it. (And I will keep this up as long as editors persist in ignoring submissions completely.) As always, we’ll see how my campaign goes.

Getting Resourceful

Part of writing is marketing, and on Friday I went on a big marketing push. I’m trying to find homes for pieces I’ve already written and that either never got published or still seem to have some life in them.

Phase I of this push involved me unloading a number of stories on the Travelers’ Tales web site. They offer a number of avenues for allowing travel pieces to see the light of day. They publish anthologies, which is the real goal, and they also post stories on the Travelers’ Tales web site, which would be nice, too. In addition, they run a contest every year called the Solas awards. Awards are given in a lot of different categories, including Women’s Travel, Bad Trip, Travel and Food, and the intriguing Animal Encounter category. I’m not holding my breath, mostly because the awards aren’t announced until spring, but I remain hopeful.

The Rest of the Story

There was a whole scene that got cut out of my Taiwan story. Karen said she edited it this way specifically so that I could publish that part elsewhere, which was a nice consideration. I do intend to try to get an audience for it somehow. I’ll start with you.

This section starts at the end of our hike along the train tracks, and describes dinner at a sort of bed & breakfast (well, bed & dinner) establishment Sarah and I stumbled into. I remember that I was a little apprehensive going into the situation—what if I couldn’t talk to anyone? What if the food was weird? What if I committed a faux pas? Pretty quickly, though, we relaxed and stopped worrying so much, and that’s when the fun began. I didn’t get all the conversation, and in fact, the food was a little weird. But it was, as they say, all good. Well, not the maple gelatin, but everything else, once I’d let go of my need to understand and anticipate every little thing, was great. It’s one of my favorite memories from that summer.

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We finally decided to turn around when we got to a dark and forbidding tunnel full of imaginary snakes and spiders. The hike back to town was uneventful, with no train wrecks and no further epiphanies.

We’d heard through the backpacking grapevine that the town’s railway workers were eager to supplement their income by renting out rooms to tourists, and this turned out to be true. For the equivalent of $12, we were invited to have dinner and spend the night at the home of a boyishly jovial conductor named Mr. Gao. He was no taller than either of us, and was still wearing his uniform, with a hat that fell over his eyes and sleeves that hung down to his knuckles. If he had been on the train that had almost run down (or at least bumped) a couple of Americans earlier that afternoon, he kept it to himself.

We just had time to wash up before dinner. As I was taking off my muddy shoes, I overheard Mr. Gao in the bathroom explaining a quirk of the plumbing to Sarah. “Thanks,” I heard her say in Chinese, “I’ll tell my peng you.” Peng you. Friend. She’d called me her friend. A jolt of happiness made me smile, and for the second time that day, I had the feeling something important had changed in my life.

There were about 10 people at the dinner table. We spoke a pidgin of Mandarin sprinkled liberally with English. I picked up that the others were railway employees who came and went with the waxing and waning of tourist crowds. I wasn’t sure I understood who lived in the house and who didn’t, but it didn’t matter. The sunny Mr. Gao made us all feel like we belonged, heaping our rice bowls with more and more food. He brought dish after dish out of the kitchen, bok choi with garlic following shrimp and mayonnaise chased by chicken, stir-fried squash, and bamboo made with local shoots so stupefyingly tender and nutty that Mr. Gao said that he forgot his name whenever he ate them. A few of the offerings did challenge my teenaged palate, like the brown jelly that looked like consommé but tasted like Aunt Jemima pancake syrup. (I slid my portion into Sarah’s bowl when Mr. Gao made one of his many trips into the kitchen.)

I wondered aloud what some of the more exotic items were, and each time I asked, Mr. Gao jumped up from the table, bounded downstairs, and returned a few minutes later with a dot-matrix printout describing the dish in English. When one slip came back with the single word “tripe,” I decided to stop asking. I never found out what the next item was, a fibrous, tasteless, branched thing that looked like a diagram of human bronchial tubes. (Years later, when someone happened to ask me what the weirdest food was I’d ever eaten, this was the first thing that popped into my head.)

I can’t say that everything in my life became clear that day. I couldn’t identify half the things in my stuffed belly, for one thing. I never learned the names of all my dining companions. I hardly understood the obsession with China that had made me want to study in Beijing, and nobody really had a clear picture of the massacre in Tiananmen Square that had re-routed me to the island formerly known as Formosa.

So it’s true that I was still, in many ways, the same baffled teenager who had gotten on a bus with a near stranger that morning. I still barely knew where I was or how I got there. But for the first time in my life, I had some idea of where I was going.

Read All About it at Readerville

My story is live now on the Readerville front page. You can click here to see it.

I can tell that this was an interesting editing exercise for Karen Templer, the wonderful woman who runs the site. It was an interesting exercise in editing for me when I wrote it. I could tell it was going long before I was very far into the story, and I had to stop and ask myself how I was going to deal with that. Usually the answer to a piece meandering into the 2500+ word territory is to cut mercilessly. Occasionally, though, the thing to do is to let it happen, making sure you take the time to treat each element of the story before moving on to another part of the narrative.

I chose the latter approach for this essay. I’m not saying it was the right decision; I’m just saying it was what I chose. As a consequence, the story did turn out longer than Karen wanted (i.e. longer than normal people will give an online story). So she cut some parts out. I don’t blame her. Something had to go, and you probably won’t even notice. (I once left all the sugar out of a dessert recipe by mistake and nobody noticed. It’s amazing what you can do without when you have to.) I’m just saying, if you are left wondering how I got full from a dinner I never mentioned eating, or what exactly I overheard Sarah say, the answers were once there.

Of course, you probably you never would have asked. It can be hard when you write something to tell what’s important and what isn’t. That’s what editors are for.

Readerville to the Rescue

Several months ago I went to an event where I saw a speaker who runs a web site called Readerville. It’s a site by and for literary people, dedicated to the idea that people still read for pleasure. I hadn’t heard of the site before, but I loved the idea and tried to think what I could send them.

I did think of something, and today I’ve been working with the editor to prepare a piece for publication. It’s a long story about a summer I spent in Taiwan when I was in college. It’s too long—and took place too long ago—to be published in most conventional venues. I still have hope that the full-length piece will appear in an anthology someday. But soon—maybe as soon as tomorrow—a mercifully abridged version will appear online. I’ll post a link when it’s live.

Taking the Scenic Route

Several years ago, Pipi and I flew Southwest Airlines from Oakland to New Orleans. It was cheap, but it also took all day, the itinerary involved three stops, and a drunk lady in party seating spoiled a big part of the book I was reading. After the second stop in the state of Texas alone, I vowed never to fly Southwest cross-country again.

That vow held for almost 10 years, but recently, temped by a low fare on the ultra convenient Oakland-Harford route, I broke down and decided to give it another try. The web site promised just one stop each way, which I find acceptable on that route, so I thought it might not be so bad.

And it wasn’t too bad heading east, where I really did have just one stop, in Nashville.

On the way home, I was expecting a stop in Baltimore. The leg between Baltimore and Oakland, however, turned into a frustrating lesson on the difference between a non-stop and a direct flight

Instead of proceeding non-stop from Baltimore to Oakland, the plane traveled directly—we touched down in Chicago, where I didn’t have to get off the plane, but I did have to sit in my seat for an entire deplaning/cleaning/boarding cycle before we were airborne again. I know that’s not so bad, but I found it annoying because I hadn’t been aware of the Chicago stop until I got to the airport in Hartford.

The moral is study your itinerary carefully. When Southwest tells you that you only have to change planes once, that doesn’t mean you’re only stopping once. They don’t actually use the words “non-stop” or “direct,” so you can get tripped up even if you do know the difference between the two terms.