This is the final cover for my latest novel.

(Featuring original artwork by the incomparable Mari Kurisato!)

Well, it’s not the latest to be written, but it’s the next one to be published. Blood Bonds will be out in paper and ebook formats in approximately two weeks. Here’s the cover text, for those whose displays don’t show the image in all its glory:

“I vow never to take my blood brother’s woman…”
“…and I vow never to leave him in trouble…”
“…and I vow never to take anything of his…”
“…and I vow never to lie to him…”
“…so help me God.”

Immortality is the birthright of youth.

     The young are going to live forever, and they know it. When you’re young, you can cut your hand with a dirty piece of bottle glass from the town dump, and it’s okay, because you’re going to live forever. There will be no pain and no blood. There will be no regrets. You can lie to your best friend, you can steal the very substance of his dreams, and pay no price, because you’re immortal.
     When the shadow finally sweeps you up in its slow omnipotent crawl, it is not life that you are leaving behind. It is youth. It is the immortality of belief, of knowing that you can cut your hand, you can kiss a girl, you can steal from your blood brother and never pay a price.

How many of us go our entire lives and never see the evil that waits for us under our skins, behind the thin veneer of neckties and fingernail polish?

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Want a free review copy? Email me!

It was originally written some years ago, and was posted to the forum of a writer’s group I belonged to at the time.

I wrote my first poem in 1966. I still have it. No, you cannot read it. Let me just point out a few salient facts about this lovely piece: it is thirteen iambic pentameter quatrains, ABAB after ABAB after ABAB, without so much as a trochee or an ABBA to break the deadly monotony. After each ghastly stanza, like the row of identical telephone poles whipping past to let you see that you are most assuredly moving, and may, in fact, be going somewhere, comes the refrain: "I am America! I am beautiful!" Give me a break; I was eleven.

But wait, gentle reader! The story goes on, and it gets worse.

Picture this: myself and some half-dozen college youth, lying about in various poses of ennui in a dorm room somewhere. Wine bottles sporting candle wax mantles adorn the smoky lair. Friend A (still my best friend thirty years later)[now thirty-five years] says to me "So, Levi, have you written any poetry lately?" I could gleefully have strangled him. There was, among those present, Friend B (no, let’s call him Acquaintance B), well known for his pedantic ignorance, the opinions of whom I was most eager not to gather. But Friend C (still my best friend thirty years later)[now thirty-five years] was all for it, and between A and C, they talked me into it.

I handed around my most recent piece, which made extensive use of tetrameter because I find it sets a melancholy mood, and which had so much rhyme in it I was almost embarrassed (but it was ok, because at least it was all internal). B reads it, a little bemused. A and C talk me into showing him some more. He reads them all, getting more and more confused. Finally, he says to me “This is very good writing, but I just have one question: why do you call it poetry? It doesn’t rhyme, and it doesn’t have rhythm.”

Needless to say, I was a little put out, since I had worked so hard at using enough meter to help set the tone, while still using it, not letting it use me. Ditto the rhyme issue, so I commence trying to show him these things. He wants a definition of meter, a definition of rhyme.

Ho ho, my fine fellow! I have you, now! I am well equipped for giving definitions, and I haul out Poetry Handbooks and Poetry Encyclopedias and Dictionaries of Poetry Terms till he is fairly buried in the drift, but he denies them the right to define the terms of their own craft. He wants a Webster’s (which I do not have; I despise Webster’s).

Finally, believe it or not, I drag out “I Am America.” He reads it. He sits stunned. He has (I swear to you I am not making this up) tears in his eyes.

“Now, that’s poetry!” he says reverently.

But now the names have been released, and now I can write this.

On Monday, 12 December 2011, a helicopter crash near Joint Base Lewis-McChord, near Olympia, Washington, claimed the lives of four United States Army aviators:

• Captain Anne M. Montgomery, a native of North Dakota
• Chief Warrant Officer Frank A. Buoniconti, a native of Colorado
• Chief Warrant Officer Joseph S. Satterfield, a native of Alaska
• Chief Warrant Officer Lucas Daniel Sigfrid, a native of Alabama.

Captain Anne Maureen Rockeman “Rocky” Montgomery was my daughter-in-law, married to my second son, Chief Warrant Officer Aaron “Monty” Montgomery. There is much I do not know about Rocky, as they had only been married since May of 2010, and they had spent that time in many, many places, serving the needs of the country. What I know about her is that she was the perfect other half of my son. She was what made him whole, in a way that so few people can truly enrich and be enriched by others. She lit his face in a way that I had never seen before.

Rocky leaves a family whose size and extent I still do not know in whole. I know her parents are missionaries in Kenya, and that she has at least one sister and one brother, and I will pray for them in this time of need.

Aaron, of course, personally knew all four of the people who were snatched away by this tragedy, knew their wives and families, and spent time with them as members of a close-knit and loving second family. I can only imagine what he’s going through now, and I pray that he will find the strength he needs.

PLEASE NOTE (added 12 Jan 2012):

Comments on this blog are turned off automatically when a post is 21 days old, and there seems to be no way to turn them on for one post, without turning them on for all old posts. (I tried that, actually — the spam began to bury me in hours.)

If you wish to add a note to Rocky’s “Memorial Wall,” email me, and I will make it happen.

This article was on the front page of the Seattle Times website, so it was pretty easy to find.

It was impossible to read.

There were so many things happening on the website all at the same time that the text would scroll up or down a line every few seconds, presumably to make room for some fancy-pants “feature” that was going off somewhere around the edge of the screen. If I had the audacity to allow my mouse cursor to touch anything on screen, something popped up, or flew out, or splashed, or upchucked, or something. When all of that settled down, a pop-up opened, in spite of the fact that I have pop-ups blocked in both my browser and my anti-virus software. To be fair to the blockers, it was probably not something they’ve been told qualifies as a pop-up. It was probably Flash or something similar.

It had an X in the top right, so I hovered on that long enough to see that it was not a “Close this obnoxious window and let me get on with what I came here for!” button – it was a “Why certainly! Yes, of course I would love to go off to this advertising site and let them install a spying cookie—oops, sorry, I mean tracking cookie on my computer so that they can track my every move!” button. Not that it would have done them much good, even if it wasn’t my habit to check and see what mysterious little X-boxes do – I have tracking cookies deleted every time I close the browser, and most of them never get placed in the first place, so it was more the annoyance factor than anything else.

But that annoyance factor is pretty high. I hate walking into the few stores in my area that have policies in place (looking at you, Blockbuster) where everyone has to be “greeted” when they walk in the door. I think it’s an insult for them to assume that I am so sensitive that not being “greeted” by a total stranger is more offensive to me than to have that person simply go on doing what they are doing (usually waiting on another customer, who is put out by the interruption in an amount at least equal to what I might putatively feel were I not “greeted”). If these stores had policies telling their employees to come and hold signs in front of my face, advertising their latest specials or trying to get me to give them my name and address and home phone number and social security number and who knows what else, then my reaction to that bricks-and-mortar store would be the same as my reaction to the Seattle Times website:

Which is, I will never darken their virtual doorstep again.

I go to a website with a purpose in mind. That purpose, in this case, was to read a news article. And the Seattle Times runs a website with a purpose in mind. That purpose is to say to their advertisers “Look at us! Look at all the eyeballs we get to our site! Come and buy some eyeballs on our site.” I am under no illusions that the Seattle Times (or Blockbuster, or Mom-n-Pop’s Good Greengrocers) owes me anything. The bricks-and-mortar places are there to sell me things. I know that. The Seattle Times, whose site I can peruse for free, is there to sell advertising. I know that, too. Everybody needs to be paid for something, or we all have to go back to hunting and gathering. That’s Econ 101.

But when the invasive, intrusive, obstructive advertising comes between me and what I am there to accomplish, then you have gone too far. I can no longer obtain my end of the deal, which is the information in the article I wanted to read. When this happens, I have only one option. If I walk into your store, and your employees wave signs in my face, pluck at my sleeve, get between me and what I am there to get, then I will no longer reward you for being there. I will not buy the things I came to get. I will walk out.

And when I can no longer use the website of a newspaper to read the news, then I will walk out. I will not be eyeballs for your ads anymore. I will not be a tick-mark in your metrics anymore. I will be gone. I will probably be reading your news articles via Google News, in fact.

I have long said, and I will say it until the day I day, that big box stores do not “Put Mom and Pop out of business.” Mom and Pop (and Borders, and independent fast-food places, and everybody else) put themselves out of business by no longer providing what their customers need. They lose out to those who do meet the expectations.

Google and Amazon and all those other big names are succeeding, not because they are evil, not because they are bad guys, but because they meet the expectations of their customers. I expect to be able to actually read the news. Somewhere. Anywhere. I don’t care where. I do take sources into account, and I do try to read a lot of sources on any given thing before I decide what I believe, but those sources will be named in any good search engine.

Want my eyeballs in your metrics, Seattle Times? Then let me read the articles on your website.

Unconsciously, semiconsciously, subconsciously, stealing the lines and words and phrases of other writers. To a certain extent, of course, I am. There are a finite number of words in English, and therefore a finite number of phrases. Someone, sometime, somewhere, has already written “There are a finite number of words in English.” To a deeper, truer, more meaningful extent, of course, every single thing that is ever written that is not a deliberate plagiarism is whole and fresh and unique, and that’s what keeps us all going.

But when I read a line like this, I really, really wish I had thought of it first:

Laurel had cried all her bones out and was too floppy to worry that she was red-nosed and puffy-eyed in front of a boy.

–Joshilyn Jackson, the girl who stopped swimming, 2008

Seriously? She had cried all her bones out, and was too floppy to care? There’s so much packed into that line that I just want to write a scene where I can steal that line and pretend it was mine. But it wasn’t. And that’s the important part, right there. The moral, ethical, philosophical issue that separates the writer from the plagiarist. I want to pretend it was mine, but it wasn’t is a far cry from I want to pretend it was mine, and no one will notice.

Yes, this is about Quentin Rowan.

The same Quentin Rowan, who, under the pen name of “Q. R. Markham,” wrote “wrote” a spy novel that was published by Mulholland. (You can search and find a billion references, but that link is to what I think is the best place to start, at the blog of spy-novelist Jeremy Duns, who is standing rather honorably through the whole thing, and whose efforts need to be read.) When the book was pulled from shelves by its publisher because of the revelation of plagiarism (and that should be Plagiarism With a Capital P), I watched rather angrily as too many people in the press tried to put it off as some sort of post-post-modernist comment on the state of publishing in general, or of spy-fiction in particular, or on the very concept of intellectual property. Not because I thought that any of these arguments would actually change anybody’s mind on any of these issues, but because I felt that Mr Rowan would surely seize on them in an attempt to explain himself, and that his effort would largely succeed. We, as a society, love a bad boy best when he is unashamedly bad, after all.

But there’s another post, also from Mr Duns, that should also be read.

In the comments section on Highway Robbery: The Mask of Knowing in Assassin of Secrets, Mr Duns details a fairly extensive email Q and A between himself and Mr Rowan that reads like the confession of an addict. In fact, Mr Rowan himself uses the comparison of plagiary to addiction:

“I can only compare it to other kinds of obsession or addictive behavior like gambling or smoking: in that there was no need to do it initially, but once I’d started I couldn’t stop and my mind kept finding ways to rationalize the behavior. Even though, somewhere deep in the chasms of my thick brain, I knew it would destroy me: it did something for me in the moment.”

–Quentin Rowan, as quoted by Jeremy Duns

I should be clear that I would find the wholesale plagiarism from which this book apparently is stitched together to be immoral and unethical, even if it were done to make some obscure “comment.” I should be clear that I find it immoral and unethical, even if it stems from some subconscious compulsion.

But I have to admit, this is a frightening glimpse into the depths of the human mind.

Dear Mr. Montgomery;

I purchased your novel “Cursing the Cougar” for my Kindle from amazon.com last week. I began reading it today, and I stopped reading it today. I stopped when I got to the line “He’s pretty sure they’re the type who go years without reading, while Morgan [Morgan is the protagonist – LM] can’t go into the bathroom without a book.” Reading in the bathroom is so disgusting that I would never be able to finish a book about such a character.

I won’t be reading any more of your books. Please grow up. This is an excellent example of why a man should never try to write female characters.

I offered her a refund on the book, and I have begged her to post this as a review on the book’s Amazon page. I doubt that she will, but it would be rather hilarious.

*scurries back into the cave to work on “growing up”*

A breed of business based on a whole new model, which is actually an old business model, in which the writer (or perhaps a rich patron) purchases various publishing services from the publishers. You know, like the old days, when you took your manuscript down the street to the guy who did the weekly paper, and had this printing press sitting idle for six days. You said “Yo, Bob! How much to print this thing a zillion times?” “I say there, good Robert, prithee inform me, in what amount would you expect to be compensated for the goodly toil of printing this fine manuscript some number of times, say perchance one zillion thereof?” (Ye olde times, and all that, right?) That, of course, was before the “real” publishers said “No, no, no! We’re gatekeepers, not businesses. We don’t exist to do things for writers, they exist to do things for us. We are consumers of manuscripts and manufacturers of stories, which we then sell to readers. Things you can’t be expected to understand. Simply continue to provide us with the raw material, since we all know you can’t create the actual product.” Before the old model got relabeled as “vanity publishing.” Before some guy named Yog got a silly rule named after him.

Well, we’re not there yet, but there’s a log across the river, and we’re in the middle of it. We will reach that promised land soon. In the meantime, there are a number of businesses popping up to handle some of the interim steps needed to take advantage of the ebook/POD revolution. Formatting and posting ebooks, or preparing PDF/x-compliant files for POD, is not rocket science, and I believe that any writer who can write a good book can learn these new skills, but then, there are those who believe that if I can write a good book, then I can market it, and that is patently untrue (I maintain that marketing is a form of magic to which you must be born, much like writing, and that you can’t really be taught the inner workings of its arcane systems, but I digress). When these new businesses will do that for us, then we can step off the log on the far side.

Here, though, is one of the new startups specializing in formatting your ebooks for you.

I received an email a few days ago from Michel Semienchuk, telling me of his new business. I responded with a few questions, and he was kind enough to answer them promptly. Here, then, is an interview with the founder of Appealize.com:

MS: My name is Michel.  I’m a self-published writer, and I’ve recently launched a small start-up to turn books into ebook apps.  The concept is simple: people send me their books in word format, and I do the conversion for them.  In the end they get an app file, which they can submit to an app store.  The great thing about it is that there aren’t any monthly fees or profit sharing, so my customers truly own their app and any and all profits that come from it.

LM: Tell me about cost. If there is a flat fee, what is it, and if there is not, then what is the fee structure?

MS: There’s a flat fee of $95.95.

LM: What is the typical turnaround time expected to be?

MS: 5 business days.

LM: Since turnaround time is directly related to "programming bandwidth," so to speak, how many people do you have doing this work?

MS: 3 people.

LM: If it turns out that you do not have enough people on tap to handle unexpected surges in demand, will you A) put more people to work, in order to meet the demand, or B) turn work away, in order to remain small and responsive?

MS: We have a base of freelancers who can help us when we’re very busy.

LM: What do you expect from the author? Suppose an author has a "sloppy" manuscript, where tabs and/or spaces have been used to indent paragraphs, or local styling has been used instead of paragraph styling to set the typeface, etc. Who does the needed clean-up work?

MS: Clean-up work is normally done by the author, although we can do it for a charge.

LM: What about books that would have extensive formatting requirements, such as figures, charts, diagrams, etc?

MS: Typically our service is used for books which are more text based.

And there you have it.

Just in passing, I’d like to note a few more things.

• I would argue that a small core team, with free-lancers standing by, would be the best way to stay fast and agile and responsive, while not having to turn away work because of a sudden surge in demand.
• Those writers who are creating “sloppy” manuscripts should have to do their own clean-up work. Maybe they’ll learn the lesson. I don’t think there’s any reason for modern writers to continue to write as if we are constrained by the capabilities of a typewriter.
• If you have a book with a lot of charts, diagrams, etc, an extensive index, or other formatting issues, I don’t think you can expect it to be formatted for a flat fee at all, and certainly not for one as low as this.

These are from a blog post called “My Lousy Stigma” by Pete Morin. Go there and read the whole thing.

A few more examples are warranted.

There is a stigma surrounding the game of golf, you know. So many players can’t break 100 and swing like broken windmills. Ruin it for the rest of us, so I don’t play golf any more.

Big stigma surrounding indie rock music. So many crappy bands out there. So I don’t listen to rock music anymore unless it’s put out on a major record label.

I don’t eat steak any more either, because the quality of hamburger at McDonald’s is so inferior.

And don’t talk to me about those Japanese cars! I drove a Civic once and had a sore neck for a week.

And finally, how about this one:

I’ve been told that as soon as my short stories appeared on Amazon, they went from excellent to lousy, just by being so close to all that dreck. Like catching a cold in kindergarten. You just can’t avoid it!

You see the absurdity of it?

(emphasis added)

On a not-unrelated note:

One of my sons is writing a novel. No big deal, you say – we all did that at nineteen. Yes, we did. I’d started a dozen novels by then, but here’s the difference: The unanimous assumption of both my son and his peers is that if and when he finishes it to his satisfaction, he will publish it. Not “submit for publication,” not “seek publication,” not “grovel on hands and knees for a scrap of attention from the gods of gatekeeping.”

If and when he finishes it to his satisfaction, he will publish it.

How can that option possibly not be a good thing?

Stigma? What stigma?

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Here, have an ad for a wonderful, stigma-free book:

Trust your instinct as least as much as you trust your editor.

I’m not going to link to the blog post where I found this, because it’s not my goal here to embarrass or shame anyone, or to set myself up as a better source than another blog. I only want to point out that a lot of the so-called “corrections” you will get for the so-called “errors” you make are nothing more than stylistic choices, where either option you pick will have its supporters and detractors. I trust that those who search hard enough to actually find the source of today’s frustration will recognize this.

A blog that I read every time it is updated had a guest post today from someone has decided she is a “hack” writer, based on the edited manuscript she got back from her editor. Many of the changes were in the form of disagreements over open or closed compounds. There was no discussion in the guest post of whether or not the editor had noted that these are often matters of choice, based on personal preference, house style, etc, although I suspect from the implied tone of mortification that there was no such notation.

“Street light” was corrected to “streetlight,” apparently throughout and apparently without comment. While Google’s Ngram Viewer does show that “streetlight” is more common, “street light” is used roughly half as often, indicating that the matter is far from settled.

“Red brick” suffered a similar fate, with far less support. In fact, “red brick” seems to be about four times as common.

Similar results exist for “rib cage,” which was changed to “ribcage.”

“Gill net” became “gillnet,” although the former seems to be more common. Living in the heart of gill net/gillnet land, I have to say that “gill net” looks wrong to me, too, but that’s not the point. The point is that whatever I (or you, or an editor) might think is neither right nor wrong in this case. It’s just a choice. Pick one and live with it.

Here, though, is the best of the bunch – “Leftovers” was changed to “left overs.” And here’s the picture of how the compound actually exists in the wild:

Not even close.

Again, my goal isn’t to demonize anyone. Not this time around. Claim that it is wrong, wrong, wrong! of me to boldly split infinitives, and I will demonize you. Tell me “The passive voice should never be used,” and I’ll point out that you just did. Tell me never to use adverbs, I’ll point out that “never” is an adverb. And if you say that I can’t start a sentence with a preposition, I will flounce the zombiehood of that non-rule in your face. In your face!

But whether to open or close a compound is largely a matter of choice, and the propensity of writers to choose one or the other in any given case can easily be checked.

Google Ngram Viewer – your new BFF

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Now go and enter my giveaway for J. E. Seanachai’s latest novel, Nonessential: The Expansion Paradox.

This is from a blog post at Language Log, where Mark Liberman quotes the abstract for a course that his colleague, Geoff Pullum, was (in 2004, unfortunately) about to teach:

Try to imagine biological education being in a state where students are taught that whales are fish because that is judged easier for them to grasp; where teachers disapprove of tomatoes and teach that they are poisonous (and evidence about their nutritional value is dismissed as irrelevant); where educated people accuse biologists of "lowering standards" if they don’t go along with popular beliefs. This is a rough analog of where English grammar finds itself today. The state of relations between the subject as taught by the public and the subject as understood by specialists is nothing short of disastrous. The fact is that almost everything most educated Americans believe about English grammar is wrong. In part this is because of misconceptions concerning the facts. In part it is because hopeless descriptive classifications and antiquated theoretical assumptions doom all discussion to failure. Amazingly, almost nothing has changed in over a hundred years. The 20th century came and went without affecting the presentation of grammar in popular books or the teaching (what little there is of it) that goes on in schools. Today’s grammar books differ in content only trivially from early 19th-century books. In this lecture I name and shame some of those on the long dishonor roll of myth-creators and fear-mongers (John Dryden, Henry Fowler, Ambrose Bierce, William Strunk, E. B. White, George Orwell, Louis Menand, Stanley Fish), and I sketch a view of what could and should be taught in a course on the grammar of Standard English in the 21st century.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000750.html (emphasis added)

(Note that both Professor Pullum and Professor Liberman would seem to be in position to know what they’re talking about, with regard to grammar and linguistics.)

I suppose, given this sad state of affairs, that it should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone that so many writers and would-be writers continue to defend such zombie rules as “Never end a sentence with a preposition,” “Never begin a sentence with a conjunction,” and “Never split an infinitive verb.”

I should be able to simply ignore the fact that these same people rail against the passive voice while not even being able to name it correctly, much less identify it. Here’s a hint: it has nothing to do with any putative “passive verbs.” Dr Pullum again: “Nor does ‘passive construction’ [make any sense as a term] if you define it, as Webster’s does, as a type of expression ‘containing a passive verb form’. That would be far too vague even if English had passive verb forms; but in fact it doesn’t have any such thing.” (emphasis added)

I should be able to simply ignore their war on adverbs (be sure to read the comments – quite amusing).

Instead, I find myself amassing research to mount an assault in the form of a) the longest blog post you’ll ever teal deer, b) a series of blog posts, most of which will be read only by the choir, or c) my first-and-probably-last nonfiction book (although I’ve made a good start on a book on character voice, points of view, etc).