God, I can remember 1957, I feel so old.

You Belong in 1957

You're fun loving, romantic, and more than a little innocent. See you at the drive in!

Are you a netflix addict?  Want to see what kind of trash I watch?  If you want to be my netflix friend (I'm so lonely ;-}), plug this into your browser:
http://www.netflix.com/BeMyFriend/PX3oKK3NmunSzSh8vhQl

Now that I've finished the final draft of my novel, most of my effort goes into querying agents.  Not only did I have to write my query letter, but I had to come up with a consise synopsis of the book, which turned into a enormous pain in the keister.  Writing 270 pages is almost easier than boiling them down to a couple of pages.  That done, I've been researching agents, both on the internet and from a couple of books, notably Jeff Herman's Guide to Book Publishers and Agents and Joanna Masterson's Guide to Literary Agents.  I do think that it's more fruitful to search for specific agents on the internet and through other resources (MWA for example) rather that using the shotgun approach querying everyone in one of the books.  Those agents get tens of thousands queries in a year.  Odds of success are slim.

Another way of getting agents is through Writer's Conferences. I'm also going to attend the Surrey Writer's Conference in British Columbia this October.  They have a good lineup of agents that are available for pitch sessions.  One of the agents is Janet Reid, rumored to be the mysterious Ms. Snark.  I put her down on my list just because I enjoyed Ms. Snark's blog up until the time she closed it down last May.  Is she Ms. Snark?  Who knows?  But she rejected my query with a personal/humorous note, so I'm thinking she may be.  Another conference I'm considering is AWP in NYC in Jan. of 2008.  Pitch sessions aren't available, but the lineup of heavy-hitters in both prose and poetry is astounding:  John Irving, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Pinsky, Ha Jin, Charles Simic - maybe I'll pick something up just from basking in their gllow, though I'm not much of a schmoozer so I won't expect much.  The biggest problem there is money, we just dropped the enough money to buy a 2002 Buick on our trip to China, but the idea is still on the table.

Query count to date:  55 queries sent out, 28 replies, 20 form rejections, 6 rejections with personal notes from the agents (including Janet Reid), one request for a partial submission from an agent in Washington DC and one request for a full manuscript from a New York agent.  Those have been sent out and I'm waiting and wishing on a star.

I keep seeing "Who Gives Kudos" on some blog sidebars.  I've searched around for a way to activate it for my blog, but haven't found out how.  Anybody care to enlighten me?

Thanks.

Yizhou City is to central China as Lincoln Nebraska is to middle America.  No tourists, no rock'em sock'em sights, just a taste of the heartland.  We were the only Westerners there.  People were curious, that's all, not antagonistic, just curious.  Not many white folks around those parts.  The hotel wasn't any worse than some of the one stars I stayed in while doing the backpack thing in France a few years back; maybe better, the hotel in Yizhou had flush toilets, not a silly hole in the floor in la toilette down the hall.

The second day in YiZhou, we drove for an hour to reach the DeSheng Social Welfare Institute (SWI) which housed our daughter's orphanage.  Permission wasn't easy to come by.  Most families end up getting turned away.  We relied on a savvy travel agent, Louis Yi to help open the doors. 

We pretty much expected our visit to be short, maybe some mid-level functionary would give us a quickie tour, accept our bundle of schoolbooks for the kids and send us on our way.  Instead, we received the honored guest treatment, speeches, photo ops, exchange of gifts and of course the obligatory tour of the grounds.  After that, we had to play volleyball with some of the staff.  I haven't played volleyball since college (longer ago that I'd like to admit), and huffed and puffed around the court.  But it seemed the SWI administrators were as inept at the game as us and no one bothered to keep score.  It turned out to be quite a hoot, and an odd but effective bonding exercise.

After that, we all piled into our vans and cars and headed off to a local restaurant for a banquet in our honor.  I don't have a clue at half the things I ate, but it all tasted quite wonderful.  After we'd eatten, one of the men at our table held up his glass of wine, pointed to mine and said something which could be loosely translated as "Chug-a-lug".  I thought what the hell, and I tossed down my wine while he tossed down his.  They refilled my glass and the next guy at the table raised his glass, pointed to mine, and you get the idea. The game went on, the men rotating and me drinking, until we'd pretty much drank all the wine in the place and had gotten Mike (me) hammered.  Seeing a drunk, but happy American seemed to greatly delight everyone in the room, not that I really need to rationalize getting drunk.  Oh yes, the wine was Chinese: Great Wall by  name and as far as I can remember, tasted quite yummy.

Guilin is all that Bejing wants to be, but can never be: clean, beautiful scenery, tourist friendly.  Guilin attracts millions of tourists every year, but you won't see many Westerners in Guilin, most of the tourists are from China or other parts of Asia, maybe that's why the city lacks the hard edge of Bejing.  The western influence and the drive for western currency still hasn't arrived there.

The sights in Guilin are amazing-otherworldly rocky peaks and lush rivers.  We took a cruise down the Li River and our boat was filled with a raucous tour group from Taiwan.Mainland Chinese can be friendly or not, but in any case they are reserved.  The Taiwanese on the other hand seemed almost American with their assertive friendliness and conspicuous wealth, the two teenaged boys across from us took great pleasure in talking their father into buying food, photos and souvenirs. He protested it cost too much, but you could tell he enjoyed the game as much as they and enjoyed being able to buy his children what they wanted.   I found myself liking them; for a moment it felt like we were still at home. I have to wonder if the Mainland Chinese may not get more than they bargained for if they succeed in absorbing Taiwan.  They've had 50 odd years to absorb Western ideas and solidify their middle class.  Their influence along with that of the residents of Hong Kong may doom the communist leadership.  Not immediately, but in due course.

My advice: pass on Bejing and visit Guilin instead, take the Li River cruise and the evening cruise of the four lakes, visit the Cave of the Thousand Buddhas, wander into a local eatery and take a chance on something different.  You'll be glad you did.

Bejing reminds me of Florence, Italy: a big, bustling city that I had to visit, but one that I can never bring myself to love.  The sights are totally amazing.  You must visit the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace or the Great Wall. But Tiananmen Square is overrated and unfortunately, the Chinese government's blind drive toward modernization is rapidly demolishing what is left of old Bejing, and erasing the city's character.  What will be left will be the tourist spots and a bright, sprawling city without soul.

Bejing in July is hot, hot, hot, and polluted.  Capitalism has come to China in a big way; outside of any tourist spot, or just about on any large avenue, you'll be surrounded by street peddlers trying to sell you DVDs, CDs and Bejing 2008 Olympic hats, T-shirts and pins. Hucksters will approach you, pretending to be art students: "We're having an exhibition just a couple of blocks away, would you like to see?"   If you're visiting Bejing for the Olympics, be aware that traffic is the worst I've ever seen, worse than Paris or Rome.  Don't drive in the city, cabs are dirt cheap and the subway is modern and efficient.  However, once out of the city, the roads are great and almost empty.

My two biggest gripes about Bejing are more that mere tourist gripes.  First, for a classless society, there seems to be great emphasis placed on class distinction.  We asked our guides and drivers to eat their meals with us, but they declined.  Our Bejing guide used the excuse that she wasn't hungry.  Our Guilin guide was more honest:  he wasn't allowed to eat with us in the tourist hotels--house rules--guides and drivers apparently can't sit with their clients.  How odd. He did eat with us when we moved away from the tourist areas.  More disturbing was the obvious racism we encountered in Bejing.  Mostly it was confined to hard glares at our family (my wife and I are white, our daughter is Chinese), but on two occasions, groups of young men followed us, making rude gestures and comments directed at us that our guide refused to translate.  Racism obviously isn't just confined to the United States and I fear that the Olympics will not be without incident. 

To be fair, the service staff in restaurants and hotels in Bejing were unfailingly polite and attentive to our needs.  The racism issue seemed almost exclusively confined to Bejing.  The residents of Guilin and the surrounding countryside were gracious and welcoming. 

Greetings from Hong Kong,

It's been ages since I've been on Myspace.  Between finishing the final draft of my novel, Harkness and moving my mother into assisted living, time has been precious, dripping like water through my fingers.  Right now, we're in Hong Kong and just finishing up a two week trip through China:  Bejing, Guilin, DeSheng City and now Hong Kong. 

Bejing is a big noisy city with some great attractions, but the vibes pretty much such.  Guilin is awesome, great sights, great food and great people (well except for the lady that charged us $40 to do our laundry.  Rule 1: Negotiate price first).  Desheng City is a fairly small town about 3 hours drive from Guilin and is the location of my daughter's orphanage.  After a fair amount of red tape, we received permission to visit the orphange and the staff treated us like visiting dignitaries.  It turned out to be a much bigger deal than any of us anticipated. Funny how customs differ.  We ended playing volleyball against the orphange staff and I got in a drinking contest with several of the admisitrators.  Very intense experience that we'll never forget.

Hong Kong is another big city, not as in your face as Bejing, but not one to be treated lightly.  (Rule 2:  Don't leave your $2500 CPAP machine sitting around the lobby of the Regal Kowloon Hotel.  It won't be there when you look up.)  Yesterday, Roxanne and I went to Ocean Park, an essentially Hong Kong theme park:  massive place.  We only had four hours to visit which wasn't nearly enough.

We'll be back in the USA on Friday: back to hamburgers and newspapers in English and searching for an agent. 

Sometimes these quizzes are scary.


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Your Dominant Intelligence is Linguistic Intelligence

You are excellent with words and language. You explain yourself well. An elegant speaker, you can converse well with anyone on the fly. You are also good at remembering information and convicing someone of your point of view. A master of creative phrasing and unique words, you enjoy expanding your vocabulary. You would make a fantastic poet, journalist, writer, teacher, lawyer, politician, or translator.