Parents and GovernmentNow that the cat is out of the bag, privacy is a big issue for everyone. Someone may be listening to so many tiresome conversations that it’s amazing they would bother. With e-mails, snooping is much simpler, because you can feed all e-mail to a machine that analyses the contents and decides if it’s worth looking into (or keeping for later).What’s ridiculous with the current record-keeping and analysis, is that one could infer from looking at how many times you called a certain number that you are conducting business of interest, while, say, it could be an affair. They would arrest you, thinking it’s the latter, and since they can do that, they’ll keep you for a long time.They say it’s for your own good, and that otherwise they won’t catch the terrorists. Problem is, they’ve already shown that they could look the other way when they saw something suspicious. So now, even though they may not get anything from their domestic spying program, they could look the other way when someone serious …

Street SpiritAt Andronico’s in Berkeley tonight, I arrived on my bike, presented it to the door to see if the store was still open.  It was.  This man selling the “Street Spirit” shows me I could park it on one of the racks.  On my way out, I buy his sheet, and ask if he writes in it.  Puzzled by it, but made curious, he wonders if I would find out who would take his story, and I say he might want to ask whoever gave him the paper.Of course, I might have offered to write his story for him.  As I went home, I thought it would be a good idea to gather these people’s stories.  I also thought it could be another of those cool projects, to get the homeless a kind of occupation to write, to compose something…

Publishing as a HobbyI never expected that my book would get anyone’s attention in the publishing world.  I put it together for my own entertainment, and to give as party favors.  My friends like it, or at least they like the idea of the book.  It does look nice, something I owe to my younger years spent around typographers.The next step for me should be to show up at bookstores around here to ask if they would just put one copy on their shelves.  Again, I would not expect any sales, but if anyone came across it, opened it, read maybe one paragraph of it, I would be very happy.  How would I know?  Perhaps I could visit the bookstore once in a while to check if the book has been opened?Regardless, I find it very hard to go to the store and say, “I am the author of this book, I was wondering if you would put it on your shelves?  I’m not expecting it to sell; it would just be to say that it is on the shelves.”

I will have to resist applying self-censorship sooner or later.  I picked up a book at the Library called Telling Lies for Fun and Profit by Lawrence Block and after reading the bit about writing short stories versus a novel, I put myself in front of the computer and continued to write – or rather, revamped – a short story that was already, in my mind, part of a novel.  It is just that I get lazy when I think of the amount of pages still to be written, and the holes I leave to fill later.  The initial story draft, for example, was written in the first person, which to me was limiting (it seemed to help to give the character a more definite personality).  To some extent, I keep wanting to write the chronicles of a character in whose head I like to be.  Here’s the rub: the character engages in gay prostitution, and it raises red flags in my mind.  The funny thing is that I have no idea about the lives of actual sex workers, and this …

Self-publishing… There was a rumor that short story collections did not sell.  You could not find a publisher to put them together, much less convince a bookstore to place them on their shelves.  An author should keep submitting stories to literary journals in the hope that one would be accepted.  There is no money to be made: it is only a way to get one’s foot in the door, because one day there will be a novel, the big thing.  Having published short stories is a way to elongate one’s resume to propel one’s first novel up the slush pile.I have come to the realization that I just needed to get my writing out in print.  The perspective of receiving more rejection slips keeps my pen up.  After all, why should I write if I know my chances of having someone, anyone, to read the story?  I already have a number of reasons to block myself, why add this one?  It is even worse after finishing school, where at least one gets the teachers’ feedback.Enters the Internet.  I first thought I would build a …

Whoa…  Kepler’s (our local bookstore) closed yesterday, bankrupt after a four-year battle.  They had just celebrated their fiftieth anniversary.  It was the southern end of the literary triangle with Cody’s in Berkeley, and City Lights in San Francisco.  So, would you ask, where does someone get his books around here?  Online?  At Border’s?  How about the author events that Kepler’s used to hold?  All gone. It’s amazing how these “signs of the times” keep happening.  Recently we got upset at the perspective of a Starbucks establishing yet another of its standardizing stores on California Avenue, one of the streets until then forgotten by the corporations.  Printer’s Inc. Café across the street, is the only remnant of the Printer’s Inc. bookstore that went bankrupt (how should I say, coinciding with Border’s and Amazon’s flourishing?).  On University Avenue, now very much invaded by chain stores, there used to be a record store that soon disappeared after Border’s came up with its vast selection.  The really nice Torrefazzione Italia café is now closing, with the revelation that Starbucks had bought the small chain a few years ago.  It’s all about corporations …

Ants on my desktop.It happened a few days ago.  An ant was going up on my computer screen, ignoring the borders of windows.  I looked around and found more ants making their way through the randomly stacked papers and objects on my desk.  Where was the food, I wondered?  Perhaps they had found crumbs from cookies I had consumed while typing a story.  I should clean up.  I should really clean up, because I plan to change my office furniture.  It will be nice, I think, doubling the shelf space to fit the books that are currently on the floor or just stacked in front of other books.I realized that the ants had formed a path to the waste paper basket.  Of course, I thought, I should not have thrown foodstuff away in this one.  I emptied it and washed it after leaving it on the porch for a while so the ants would go away by themselves.