Christopher Moore's Blog

Today’s blog comes from question in our, So You Wanna Be A Writer section.

I spent so much time on the answer, that I thought I’d put it in here, where more people would see it.

Adeamus askes:

i have recently been exploring the values of buddhism. i have in the past read a lot about it, i am just now taking it more seriously.

at the same time, i am taking my writing more seriously. i am working on 2 different novels right now.

now here comes the contradiction…while i am a complete failure at this, i realize that one of the most important things in buddhism is to “stay in the moment” to have an enlightened awareness to your everyday activities.

as i continue to work on the plots of my stories, i often find myself thinking about different scenes or directions they may go. nearly every free moment, my mind seems to find its way towards those topics. some good material and ideas come from those sessions. however, a lot of it is useless mental chatter.

The Author Guy Responds:

Dude!

I have been waiting 20 years for someone to ask this question. I don’t have an answer, but I’m glad you asked.

Here’s the thing. The place to be in Buddhism, is in the moment, without ‘dualistic” thought. (That is, good, evil, big, small, here, there, past, future, etc.) But writing is the most singularly dualistic art form I can think of, with the exception of perhaps film making. A painter can sling paint, a musician can jam, but a writer does everything with deliberation. It is simply the nature of the craft. You have to look ahead, you have to think of the effect you are trying to achieve.

Consider the “Zen” arts, and how one goes about them. Sumi-e ink painting, archery, flower arranging, fencing. (Yes, swordsmanship and painting can be manifestations of the same philosophies.) In each of those things, you practice repetition, the same stroke of the brush, placement of the object, cut of the sword. You do it again and again until your body knows what to do without thinking about it. As the swordsman, you stand ready and open, no mind, to react to whatever happens. You don’t plan what you are going to do, because when your opponent attacks, then you’ll have to “unthink” your plan, and then react. You have to be pure in thought, ready to move. In painting, you will see bamboo, a plum blossom, an orchid, and you will have done the orchid stroke, the bamboo stroke, the plum blossom stroke so many times that your composition will appear on the page in minutes, if not seconds. The “spontaneity” of the art comes from repetition, of learning your chops, so the art (or craft) becomes automatic. (For instance, you would want to learn to use the “shift” key, then move on to more complex tasks) 🙂

That said, you have to be satisfied with moments that only approach “no mind” in writing. As you get better, you have to think less about how to achieve an effect, and you simply imagine what you want and you do it. At many points in writing my first book, I remember thinking, “Okay, now some people should talk.” Then, “Okay, that’s enough talking, now I should describe something.” I don’t do that anymore. That stuff is on autopilot. I feel it. I simply write narrative or dialogue as it is needed, as it serves the material. I don’t have a perfect “Zen” moment. I am thinking about where the book is going, who will say what next, what the scene is setting up, where it has come from, the agendas of each of the characters, but part of the craft has become spontaneous. You get, at best, pieces of Zen.

Haiku is the Zen literary form. And it is, I suppose, as close as one gets to Zen expression in language. But I find that the rhythm of the 17 syllables has never become automatic for me. I have to always count on my fingers. I’m sure if I wrote a thousand haiku, I’d just write 5-7-5 without thinking, but I’m not there yet. The Zen aesthetic that applies in Haiku is that it “invokes” the moment. A single thought, sensation, second in time. Practicing the art form itself, not so much. Much is the same in Zen rock gardening, or flower arranging. It’s not spontaneous and instant, it expresses the composition of the Buddhist mind, the yin and yang, the space and object, the dark and light. The actual making of a Zen rock garden — well, it requires planning, thought, and repetition. Perhaps in raking the stones, one achieves a Zen of movement, which is also a precept of Buddhism. That is, moving meditation. (Wax on, wax off, for those of you playing the home game.)

So, really, even in the most pure Buddhist art form, we only achieve the “present”, for a moment at a time. Despite the dualistic nature of any goal, because, as the Zen monk would say, we are trying to get to somewhere that isn’t there, we keep in mind that a Zen moment may happen to us at any time. And when it does, well, that was nice, now what? As soon as you spot it, it is gone.

As a writer you have to recognize that you may achieve these moments of spontaneity very, very rarely, and look upon them as gifts. But, the better mastery you have of your craft, the more you write, the better chance that you will achieve a Zen of “just writing” rather than having to think of every aspect of the craft. The craft becomes automatic, and the creation can just happen on the page.

But you have to remember, that the reason you kill the Buddha on the road if you meet him, is because he represents a barrier between you and your own Buddha nature, he removes you by one degree from the moment that is enlightenment. I have never met anyone who can claim enlightenment as an ongoing state, But I have met a few, who have glimpsed it, had a single moment where everything slid into place, and then evaporated, and perhaps, that is all you get.

So to reconcile this inherently dualistic art form with the goal of being integrated into the moment, what do we do? One writes, one frets, one learns words, structures, timing, transition. We practice. And in the midst of that practice, we experience moments of pure expression, of an unconscious link between the image in our brain and the keyboard or pen, and that is the Zen of writing. It’s as good as it gets.

I’ve been learning Sumi-e ink painting, because I needed a way to make art that didn’t weigh so much. In my studies I ran across an interview with Wynton Marsalis, wherein he compares Jazz to Sumi-e. What he said so impressed me that I used it as the lynch pin in a scene in A Dirty Job. It was like this:

“In Jazz, there is a crisis in every moment, and you bring all your skill to bear on that crisis.”

Brilliant, and true. A jazz musician does not have time to unthink his improvisation. He has to has his chops down in order to keep time. That involves the practice of scales, forever. As artists, writers, musicians, photographers, whatever, there is still a crisis in every moment, and we must bring the full measure of our skill to bear on that crisis. That is the Zen of the art. The practice and learning, not so much.

I’m not even sure that putting the words on paper doesn’t negate the moment. I know that in each of my books there has been a passage that suddenly occured to me, fully formed, without any editing. Almost always this came to me when I was doing something else, and I had to stop and put pen to paper before I forgot. It was the flash of inspiration, the spontaneous creation that encompassed the Zen moment. Writing it down took it away. But that’s okay, there was no there, there.

And that’s what you have to remember. That trying to grasp a moment of enlightenment is like “trying to bite the teeth”. At best we just keep buggering on, learning our craft, preparing without preparing, being prepared without acknowedging for what, so that when that elusive moment appears, we are fully in it, we bring all of our skill and knowledge to bear on the crisis.

So, yesterday morning, I had a call to my cell phone from a producer at NPR, who wanted me to appear on Talk of the Nation and talk about what I was really glad to be rid of now that Christmas was over. Because of the time zone differences and so forth, I wasn’t able to respond in time, but I did start thinking of those things. So here’s what I’m glad I don’t have to put up with now that Christmas is over….

1. Funky-ass Christmas tree water. For some reason, the water in our Christmastree stand went south really early. Consequently, after about a week, instead of a pleasant pine scent, our tree smelled like it had been run halfway up the Angel’s poop chute, then pulled out and left to stand. So I’m glad I don’t have to put up with a Christmas tree that smells like ass anymore. (I took that nasty fella to the dump about an hour ago.)

2. Spam telling me that I only have one more week, two more days, three more hours, or six pico-seconds before I lose the chance at free shipping. It’s not as if I fell off the internet turnip truck yesterday. For instance, I ordered all of my “business” Christmas gifts on December 6th. I constantly got updated notices of when they would arrive, with the “whoops, this one won’t make it by December 24th” notices starting last Monday. As of now, they just may get there by January 9th. I know they are lying. I know that unless I spend $36.00 for shipping, my shit aint going to get there on time. Let it go.

3. The War on Christmas – Enough! This is clearly the brainchild of someone who had too much time on his hands. Conservative pundits who pursued this subject to fill time should have instead reassessed the practical applications of an agenda that states it is fundamentally against government while trying to govern, that is against government spending, while spending record amounts of money, is pro-life, while prosecuting wars and executions, and that circumvents laws and the Constitution at every turn, yet wants judges who interpret both strictly and literally.

4. Victoria’s Secret TV ads. Because TV generally blows during the Christmas season, there was nothing on TIVO and we were forced to watch ads. Don’t get me wrong, those are some very attractive young ladies running around telling everyone that their wife/girlfriend/whatever wants sexy underwear for Christmas, BUT, the truth is, that most real woman weigh more than 86 lbs, and although they might look great in Victoria’s Secret, they won’t look like those girls, therefore, there’s an uncomfortable moment while the guy acts like he’s not really watching the Victoria Secret models because suddenly he really needs to see if that is an old pepperoni slice under the coffee table, and the woman says, “Someone needs to give that girl a sandwich.” Bottom line, the only vaguely whorish gift your girlfriend won’t interpret as a comment of dissatisfaction with her is cash. (And don’t get me started on the Girls Gone Wild ads, which were put on TV exclusively to make me feel uncomfortable.) I’m just glad that the Christmas TV season is over and I can get back to fast-forwarding through the commercials so I can watch attractive women poke dead things in peace.

5. Egg Nog – Even when I was a screaming alcoholic I could find a better vehicle for alcohol. Like, for instance, alcohol. As if your poor body isn’t assaulted enough during the holidays by food that’s actually good , suddenly someone is handing you a glass of what is essentially Hollandaise Sauce with a cup of sugar stirred into it. (Or a glass of cholesterol with alcohol AND sugar stirred into it. Mmmmmm.) Yeah, I know a bunch of you are going to write, “Hey, I like to put on slutty underwear and drink whipped salmonella with Karo Syrup every Christmas, that’s just the way I roll.” And that’s great. I happen to like fruitcake, when everyone else sort of views it as the musical chairs of re-gifting. But understand, that when you are drinking Egg Nog you are essentially quaffing a custard that failed. That’s all I’m saying.

6. Santa. Yeah, fuck Santa. His shit is weak.

7. Extreme Christmas lights. Okay, it gets worse every year. This guy spent a million bucks, that guy synchronized his lights to The Nutcracker Suite, these two guys decorated forty-acres and let people drive through for free. Okay, we get it, you really, really like spending days and days on a ladder stringing lights. What I want to know, is what makes you go there? Millions of people don’t have lives either, and they are content with playing marathon sessions of Evercrack or writing in their blogs. What sort of twisted exhibitionist decides that conspicuous consumption of electricity is how he wants to manifest his ego? The FBI should have profilers to figure this shit out, that’s all I’m saying.

8. Reports on how retailers are doing. Don’t care. Really, really don’t care.

But lest you think that I’m all Scroodged out here. Here’s what I’ll miss about the Christmas Season: red and green stuff, turkey, wreaths on the front of trucks, more talking animals on TV, people in the East complaining about the miserable weather, giving presents, cheesy snacks everywhere you go, walking around in nothing but a Santa hat, getting a rat head left outside my office from the kitties on Christmas morning, and all the swell good wishes from the good people who read my books.

Chapter one of a Dirty Job.

Chapter 1- Because I could not stop for Death– He kindly stopped for me– Charlie Asher walked the earth like an ant walks on the surface of water, as if the slightest misstep might send him plummeting though the surface to be sucked to the depths below. Blessed with the Beta Male imagination, he spent much of his life squinting into the future so he might spot ways in which the world was conspiring to kill him – him, his wife Rachel, and now, newborn Sophie. But despite his attention, his paranoia, his ceaseless fretting from the moment Rachel peed a blue stripe on the pregnancy stick to the time they wheeled her into recovery at St. Francis Memorial, Death slipped in.

“She’s not breathing,” Charlie said.

“She’s breathing fine,” Rachel said, patting the baby’s back. “Do you want to hold her?”

Charlie had held baby Sophie for a few seconds earlier in the day, and had handed her quickly to a nurse insisting that someone more qualified than he do some finger and toe counting. He’d done it twice and kept coming up with twenty-one.

“They act like that’s all there is to it. Like if the kid has the minimum ten fingers and ten toes it’s all going to be fine. What if there are extras? Huh? Extra credit fingers? What if the kid has a tail?” (Charlie was sure he’d spotted a tail in the six-month sonogram. Umbilical indeed! He’d kept a hard copy.)

“She doesn’t have a tail, Mr. Asher,” the nurse explained. “And it’s ten and ten, we’ve all checked. Perhaps you should go home and get some rest.”

“I’ll still love her, even with her extra finger.”

“She’s perfectly normal.”

“Or toe.”

“We really do know what we’re doing, Mr. Asher. She’s a beautiful, healthy, baby girl.”

“Or a tail.”

The nurse sighed. She was short, wide, and had a tattoo of snake up her right calf that showed through her white nurse stockings. She spent four hours of every work day massaging preemie babies, her hands threaded through ports in a Lucite incubator, like she was handling a radioactive spark in there. She talked to them, coaxed them, told them how special they were, and felt their hearts fluttering in chests no bigger than a balled-up pair of sweat socks. She cried over every one, and believed that her tears and touch poured a bit of her own life into the tiny bodies, which was just fine with her. She could spare it. She had been a neonatal nurse for twenty years and had never so much as raised her voice to a new father.

“There’s no goddamn tail, you doofus! Look!” She pulled down the blanket and aimed baby Sophie’s bottom at him like she might unleash a fusillade of weapons-grade poopage such as the guileless Beta Male had never seen. Charlie jumped back – a lean and nimble thirty, he was — then, once he realized that the baby wasn’t loaded, he straightened the lapels on his tweed jacket in a gesture of righteous indignation. “You could have removed her tail in the delivery room and we’d never know.” He didn’t know. He’d been asked to leave the delivery room, first by the OBGYN and finally by Rachel. (“Him or me,” Rachel said. “One of us has to go.”)

In Rachel’s room, Charlie said: “If they removed her tail, I want it. She’ll want it when she gets older.”

“Sophie, your Papa isn’t really insane. He just hasn’t slept for a couple of days.”

“She’s looking at me,” Charlie said. “She’s looking at me like I blew her college money at the track and now she’s going to have to turn tricks to get her MBA.”

Rachel took his hand. “Honey, I don’t think her eyes can even focus this early, and besides, she’s a little young to start worrying about her turning tricks to get her MFA.”

“MBA,” Charlie corrected. “They start very young these days. By the time I figure out how to get to the track she could be old enough. God, your parents are going to hate me.”

“And that would be different how?”

“New reasons, that’s how. Now I’ve made their granddaughter a shiksa.”

“She’s not a shiksa, Charlie. We’ve been through this. She’s my daughter, so she’s as Jewish as I am.”

Charlie went down on one knee next to the bed and took one of Sophie’s tiny hands between his fingers. “Daddy’s sorry he made you a shiksa.” He put his head down, buried his face in the crook where the baby met Rachel’s side. Rachel traced his hairline with her fingernail, describing a tight u-turn around his narrow forehead.

“You need to go home and get some sleep.”

Charlie mumbled something into the covers. When he looked up there were tears in his eyes. “She feels warm.”

“She is warm. She’s supposed to be. It’s a mammal thing. Goes with the breast feeding. Why are you crying?”

“You guys are so beautiful.” He began arranging Rachel’s dark hair across the pillow, brought a long lock down over Sophie’s head and started styling it into a baby hair piece.

“It will be okay if she can’t grow hair. There was that angry Irish singer who didn’t have any hair and she was attractive. If we had her tail we could transplant plugs from that.”

“Charlie! Go home!”

“Your parents will blame me. Their bald shiksa granddaughter turning tricks and getting a business degree – it will be all my fault.”

Rachel grabbed the buzzer from the blanket and held it up like it was wired to a bomb. “Charlie, if you don’t go home and get some sleep right now I swear I’ll buzz the nurse and have her throw you out.”

She sounded stern, but she was smiling. Charlie liked looking at her smile, always had; it felt like approval and permission at the same time. Permission to be Charlie Asher.

“Okay, I’ll go.” He reached to feel her forehead. “Do you have a fever? You look tired. ”

“I just gave birth, you squirrel!”

“I’m just concerned about you.” He was not a squirrel. She was blaming him for Sophie’s tail, that’s why she’d said squirrel, and not doofus like everyone else.

“Sweetie, go. Now. So I can get some rest.”

Charlie fluffed her pillows, checked her water pitcher, tucked in the blankets, kissed her forehead, kissed the baby’s head, fluffed the baby, then started to rearrange the flowers that his mother had sent, moving the big stargazer lily in the front, accenting it with a spray of baby’s breath –

“Charlie!”

“I’m going. Jeeze.” He checked the room, one last time, then backed toward the door.

“Can I bring you anything from home?”

“I’ll be fine. The ready kit you packed covered everything, I think. In fact, I may not even need the fire extinguisher.”

“Better to have it and not need it, than to need it—“

“Go! I’ll get some rest, the doctor will check Sophie out, and we’ll take her home in the morning.”

“That seems soon.”

“It’s standard.”

“Should I bring more propane for the camp stove?”

“We’ll try to make it last.”

“But—“

Rachel held up the buzzer, as if her demands were not met, the consequences could be dire. “Love you,” she said.

“Love you too,” Charlie said. “Both of you.”

“Bye Daddy.” Rachel puppeted Sophie’s little hand in a wave.

Charlie felt a lump rising in his throat. No one had ever called him Daddy before, not even a puppet. (He had once asked Rachel, “Who’s your Daddy?” during sex, to which she had replied, “Saul Goldstein,” thus rendering him impotent for a week and raising all kinds of issues that he didn’t really like to think about.)

He backed out of the room, palming the door shut as he went, then headed down the hall and past the desk where the neonatal nurse with the snake tattoo gave him a sideways smile as he went by.

Charlie drove a six-year old mini-van that he’d inherited from his father, along with the thrift store and the building that housed it. The mini-van always smelled faintly of dust, mothballs and body-odor, despite a forest of smell-good Christmas trees that Charlie had hung from every hook, knob, and protrusion. He opened the car door and the odor of the unwanted — the wares of the thrift-store owner — washed over him.

Before he even had the key in the ignition he noticed the Sarah McLaughlin CD lying on the passenger seat. Well Rachel was going to miss that. It was her favorite CD and there she was, recovering without it, and he could not have that. Charlie grabbed the CD, locked the van, and headed back up to Rachel’s room.

To his relief, the nurse had stepped away from the desk so he didn’t have to endure her frosty stare of accusation, or what he guessed would be her frosty stare of accusation. He’d mentally prepared a short speech about how being a good husband and father included anticipating the wants and needs of his wife and that included bringing her music – well, he could use the speech on the way out if she gave him the frosty stare.

He opened the door to Rachel’s room slowly, so as not to startle her — anticipating her warm smile of disapproval, but instead she appeared to be asleep and there was a very tall Black man dressed in mint green standing next to her bed.

“What are you doing here?”

The man in mint green turned, startled. “You can see me?” He gestured to his chocolate brown tie, and Charlie was reminded, just for a second, of those thin mints they put on the pillow in nicer hotels.

“Of course I can see you. What are you doing here?”

Charlie moved to Rachel’s beside, putting himself between the stranger and his family. Baby Sophie seemed fascinated by the tall black man.

“This is not good,” said Mint Green.

“You’re in the wrong room,” Charlie said. “You get out of here.” Charlie reached behind and patted Rachel’s hand.

“This is really, really not good.”

“Sir, my wife is trying to sleep and you’re in the wrong room. Now please go before…”

“She’s not sleeping,” said Mint Green. His voice was soft, and a little Southern. “I’m sorry.”

Charlie turned to look down at Rachel, expecting to see her smile, hear her tell him to calm down, but her eyes were closed and her head had lolled off the pillow.

“Honey?” Charlie dropped the CD he was carrying and shook her gently. “Honey?”

Baby Sophie began to cry. Charlie felt Rachel’s forehead, took her by the shoulders and shook her. “Honey, wake up. Rachel.” He put his ear to her heart and heard nothing. “Nurse!”

Charlie scrambled across the bed to grab the buzzer that had slipped from Rachel’s hand and lay on the blanket. “Nurse!” He pounded the button and turned to look at the man in mint green. “What happened…”

He was gone.

Charlie ran into the hall, but no one was out there. “Nurse!”

Twenty seconds later the nurse with the snake tattoo arrived, followed in another thirty seconds by a resuscitation team with a crash cart.

There was nothing they could do.

So there’s this crime show on CBS this season called NUMB3RS. In it, Rob Morrow (Northern Exposure) and David Krumholtz (the elf in the Santa Clause) play two brothers who solve crimes by applying mathematics. Morrow is an FBI agent, and Krumholtz is a genius math professor at Cal Sci (read that Cal Tech). No matter what kind of crime it is, Charlie, the mathematician, can reduce it to a set of numbers and equations, and solve the crime. There are a lot of scenes of him writing on big blackboards with fellow mathematician Peter MacNicol, inter-dispersed with scenes of Charlie condescending to some rough and tumble FBI agents who are just itching to get out there and trample someone’s Fourth Amendment rights. (Which they do nearly every week. Seems like you can’t get through an hour of crime TV without someone getting tortured or illegally searched. Who do they think they are, the President? ) Turns out, that no matter what happens, arson, murder, kidnapping, meth-cooking, 7-11 robbing, it can all be broken down to a complex equation and solved on a big blackboard. I feel much better, now, knowing that the toothless ice head who takes my car stereo graphs out the variables before he hurls a brick through my window.

So, with the sweet comfort of mathematics firmly in my grasp, I signed on to Amazon today, and noticed a new feature in the books section: Text stats. So I clicked.

Turns out that Amazon has analyzed nearly every book they sell by breaking down the numbers of the text. They categorize the books under the following criteria:

Concordance (the number of times certain words are used.

Readability (According to three indexes, Fog, which rates a book on grade level required to understand it, Flesch Index, with assigns a “readability number” with scores of 90-100 requiring a 6th grade education to understand, and scores of 0-30 requiring a college degree. And Flesch-Kincaid Index, which narrows down the Flesh index to a U.S. grade level. Yes, I think there should also be a Flesh index, for the number of times, on average, a reader becomes sexually aroused, but Amazon evidently isn’t ready to apply fluid dynamics mathematics to our books yet.)

Complexity, which covers complex words, syllables per word, and words per sentence.

Numbers of characters, words, and sentences.

And

Fun stats, which include words per dollar and words per ounce.

In short, fiction reduced to numbers.

This is not to say that these figures are all completely irrelevant. I have people ask me every day how long a novel should be. Well now you can look it up. And you can even run the fog index on your own work with many popular word processor programs.( For instance, according to MS Word, this blog entry has a Flesch index of 62, and a Flesch-Kinkaid of 8.9, so those of you with less than an eighth grade education, the secret is “bang the rocks together”)

So, because I had been thinking about numbers for several minutes, and I was becoming uncomfortable because I couldn’t see how any of that was about me, I looked up the text stats on some of my books. Turns out that if you have a seventh grade education, you can pretty-much enjoy my work without much sweat. Sure, with some of them you may have to wait until second semester, but with others, you can read them over summer vacation after sixth grade. The hardest, is Fluke, I presume because it has science and stuff in it, at 7.7. I think this also may explain why I am sometimes accused of having an adolescent sense of humor. I’m not immature, I am doing it for the children.

So, in the interest of solving crime and stuff, I decided to compare one of my books to a popular classic novel. (As well as a few others, but I’ll only cover one here.)

The Stupidest Angel http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/sitb-next/0060590254/ref=sbx_txt/104-5215418-2213534?%5Fencoding=UTF8#textstats

And

War and Peace http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/sitb-next/0140444173/ref=sbx_txt/102-3234692-4610521?%5Fencoding=UTF8#textstats

And here’s what I learned. The more education you have, the better chance you have of getting a good deal. Why?

Well, War and Peace came in with a Fog rating of 12.1, the highest of the books I sampled, so you have to have “some college” to enjoy it. Maybe a semester of junior college, but still. But here’s the rub, War and Peace is a total bargain at 51,705 words per dollar!

By contrast, my book, The Stupidest Angel, you can read at Christmastime as a 7th grader (Fog index 7.3 – and yes, I planned it for Christmastime), but you are only going to get 5,541 words per dollar. “ Gadzooks!” You say, “This is a colossal rip-off. I am being used because of my low academic standing and my weakness for doody and sex jokes.”

Well, yes, there is that, but I prefer to look at it on Moore’s Mac and Cheese index. Say you’d like a tasty dish of Macaroni and Cheese – you have several options. You can to the Soho Grand Hotel in New York, order the Mac and Cheese for lunch, pay 14.95 for a dish of it, and enjoy a delicious gourmet casserole of Mac and Cheese, brought to your table by someone who may, very probably be a vampire or a cyborg. Yes, fifteen bucks for some Mac and Cheese, but you’re enjoying it in the Post-Modern Industrial Chic environment seldom found outside of the movie Bladerunner. Option two, would be to go to the store and grab a package of Stouffer’s Mac and Cheese for about $3.00. Then you can take it home, pop it in the microwave, and enjoy a delicious dish of Mac and Cheese in a nearly cat-hair free environment. Finally, you can go to the store, get a box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese in the blue box, take it home, boil it up, add some butter and milk and the scrumptious cheese powder, which is lovingly hand-scraped off of Cheetos (the only place it appears in nature) by dedicated employees in East Jesus, Wisconsin, and enjoy a delicious dish of Mac and Cheese in your own studio apartment.

Assigned numberical values, the scale looks like this: SoHo Grand M&C 15 Stouffers M&C 10 Kraft M&C 5 *

So, you’re instincts might tell you that Tolstoy would be SoHo Grand M&C, and my books would be, say, Kraft Mac and Cheese, maybe with some weenies sliced in. But allow me to correct your misassumptions and draw figures furiously on a blackboard to show you just how wrong you are. My stuff, is, in fact, Stouffers Mac and Cheese – sure, it’s a little more expensive, but you only have to pop it in the microwave and remove a few cat hairs and it’s ready to go. While Tolstoy not only makes you add butter and milk, he makes you grow the wheat and raise the cow. Tolstoy comes in at a negative 5, below Kraft Mac and Cheese.

Consider this, if you will. (And you will, because, otherwise you have to do something useful.) If it cost’s $9000 a year to put a kid through public school, and Tolstoy’s book requires you to complete five more years of schooling than my book in order to enjoy it, then you are spending approximately $45,000 more to enjoy War and Peace, than you are for The Stupidest Angel. Using those figures, here’s the value of the respective works on the Moore Mac and Cheese Scale:

War and Peace $ .87 per word Stupidest Angel .06 per word

“Gadzooks!” you exclaim, “Tolstoy has been using me like the cheap whore that I am!”

And of course, you are right.

And that’s not even taking into account portability, which put’s Tolstoy firmly in the camp of “Won’t fit in the pocket on the seat back, but excellent if you need to mash a bug.” It garners a whopping 7.2 on the Moore Pocket Fisherman Portability and Utility Scale.

So, you see, it can all be broken down to numbers, just like on the TV show, and I think that we can see, after detailed analysis, why Charlie, the mathematician character in NUMB3RS, is never, ever going to get laid.

Feel free to do your own calculations.

*Home made Mac&Cheese is not included in the Moore Mac & Cheese scale because mothers may vary. For instance, your mother is so very ugly, that they press her face in dough to make gorilla cookies. Oh, he dinint… Oooo, snap! Dat bitch gotta be a 9 on the Yo Momma Uglability scale.

Monday, December 19th, 9PM Eastern

http://www.sff.net/people/pff/chatpages/SLCoLib.htm

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” – 1st Corinthians, 11:13

Somewhere along the line, while I was going from being a tiny child, to being a large, middle-aged child, I forgot to put away some childish things.

When I was a little kid in London, Ohio, I used to walk to school on old, sandstone sidewalks, which were very cracked, and some days, when I was thinking about it, I would be very careful not to step on a crack, lest I break my mother’s back. I realized even then, that there were times when I stepped all over the cracks when I wasn’t paying attention, but that wasn’t the same. You sort of had to be aware, or the back-breaking wouldn’t happen. (I think this attitude came from being cared for by a family of Catholics when my mother was at work, who imbued in me a sense that you were in a constant state of bargaining, wagering really, with God – like, “If I make this basket, my pal Murphy won’t be killed by bank robbers – Okay, if I make two in a row, Murphy is saved.” because God could read your thoughts and was always paying attention, but also that there was a certain dispensation for sins of omission. ie. “I didn’t realize that grandma was cleaning out the incinerator when I fired it up, so God’s cool with it.”) Well, obviously I grew up and when my mom didn’t end up in an iron lung, I let the step on a crack superstition go. As with many childhood notions, I grew out of it.

On the other hand, I realized just yesterday, when some minor exercise left me breathless, creaking, and complaining, that there were many childish notions that I hadn’t given up on, and I probably should – the most evident at the time, was that “if you practice, and really work hard, you will always get better”. I always cringe a little when I hear people in fitness ads say, “And I’m in the best shape of my life.” “How do you know?” I say. I’ve always known that at some point I’m going to really train hard, I’m going to get incredibly buff, eat nothing but salads and fish, and I’ll think nothing of running a marathon or bench-pressing 300 lbs. I’ve just never gotten to that point, you know, of starting the training, but it’s always been out there, ahead of me. (Never mind that I get winded walking over to turn on the Playstation.) Well, I’m thinking that it’s time I let go of some of these childish self-delusions. I mean, if I’m realistic, and look at my family history, I’m not only not going to be running a marathon any time soon, I should be getting my affairs in order and writing a funny eulogy for someone to read – maybe even making one of those creepy, “If you’re watching this, I’m already worm food,” video tapes. Okay, I get it. I probably won’t be that buff, marathon guy.

So, that said, I’m also starting to realize, that when I am sent back to Medieval times, I will not dazzle everyone with my amazing abilities, mainly because I now see that I really don’t know how to do shit. I mean, for my whole life, I’ve been the star in that show, the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and I’ve spent more time indulging in my fame and power in the twelfth century than I do spending my Power Ball Lotto money – which is not inconsiderable (You won’t laugh when I’m driving my luxery submarine to book signings.) But unless Sir Gawain is having trouble defragging his hard drive, or Guenivere is worried about how long to microwave a burrito, I’m am totally and utterly useless. If anyone pays attention to me at all, they are going to think I’m a total loon. I’m not going to have access to the guy who shovels the Camelot latrines, let alone talk to King Arthur about advanced warfare techniques. “No, Arthur, what you need to do here, is carpet bomb the guys on Devenshire plain, then spray some defoliant on Sherwood Forest so the fuckers have nowhere to hide.”

I can’t predict an eclipse, make gunpowder, construct a battery, formulate an antibiotic, or even explain how the clicky-part of a ball point pen works. And if I’m not hung immediately for being a heretic, I figure I have about a week to live before I’m overtaken by some disease caused by eating four day-old gruel and wiping your butt with leaves. I have to accept that I am not going to be the star of the twelfth century – neither am I going to warn Caesar about that whole Ides of March thing, because the only Latin word I know is Exit, and I’m most certainly not going to be able to convince Shaka Zulu that his best bet against the English would be to buy a half-dozen or so Apache attack helicopters from the U.S.

It is time I realize that I must put aside childish things. I must go forth with a grown-up’s sense of reality. I must quit preparing for the month when Benjamin Franklin shows up in my den and I get to show him television, ramen noodles, the electric can opener, and Hooters.

I’m so sorry Ben. Still, I don’t have much time left, and I’d like to thank you for bifocals and that whole kite, key, storm thing, which I am going to learn the specifics of as soon as I become an expert in American History.

Today I’ve been working on a new book called YOU SUCK: A Love story. It’s the sequel to my 1995 vampire story, Bloodsucking Fiends: A love Story. Since my first book, which I wrote back in 1990, all of my books have been written on computer, and therefore, over the years I’ve gotten used to having certain advantages to electronic text — one of them being searchability. So when I’m editing one of my books, I’ll wonder, “did I already use that line?” or “what the hell was that character’s last name” and a text search instantly tells me. This is also an invaluable research tool — for instance, when I was writing Lamb, and had to keep track of where everyone was in the King James’ Gospels, I had an e-text of the Bible, which I would run searches on. Likewise, if I want to look up some phrase in Shakespeare, I can search his complete works in about three seconds.

So, today, I was looking up something in Bloodsucking Fiends to make sure that I consistent with this new book. And my electronic text for Fiends is so old that it doesn’t even read on modern computers, so I couldn’t use my old files. (In those days, the computer I was using couldn’t handle a text file the size of an entire novel. You had to write each chapter as a file, then chain them together to print them. It’s been a long ten years.) I ended up looking through a copy of the book for about a half an hour. Later I was looking up a quote on Google — the one about love being the triumph of hope over reality or something like that, and Google offered me “book search”. Suddenly I was presented with the option to search about fifty specific books where those words appeared in context. I clicked on one, and ended up viewing a page of Jane Goodall’s biography.

So I’m wondering. And I enter the name of the character I’d been searching for earlier, which was Elijah Ben Sapir, the old vampire from Fiends, and “kazam!: Up pops page 225 of Bloodsucking Fiends, –the name in context, the entire passage I had been looking for. Google had stuff that I, the author, didn’t even have.

So I run the word “fucktard” through Google Book Search, and back comes The Stupidest Angel, which appears to be the only book that’s ever used that word.

Damn!

I don’t know how I feel about this. I mean, I’m not excited about hackers being able to write software so that people can download my books for free, because as much as I’d like everyone to be able to read my work, I’m sort of attached to the habits of eating and having shelter and not having to do real work for a living.

But in addition to that, I’m sort of freaked that this happened already. I mean, I remember in sixth grade, in your Weekly Reader, they’d say things like, in the future cars will look like this… And like twenty years later, out comes the Ford Probe, which was the car they showed. Now, they say, Google will someday be able to index — whoops, never mind, it’s already happened.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Google, I use the Google, constantly, but consequently, I can’t remember shit. Why should I? All I have to do is type a request into Google. I’m tempted to type in “where the hell did I put my phillips head screwdriver” except I’m afraid that Google would come back with, “it’s out in the garden shed, behind the wheelbarrow” – then I’d be offered links where I could buy a new wheelbarrow, a new tool shed, a new screwdriver, or subscribe to Phillips Head Monthly. The Google is starting to scare me a little.

I got the Desktop tool from Google, which will search your whole computer for stuff and come back with any file, in nearly any format, that uses nearly any combination of words, suffixes, etc. And this is the beta tool. Right next to it, are the links on the same subject returned from the web, and it will also find the links to anything that I’ve looked at on the web for the last couple of weeks. So if someone on the message board wrote a compelling post about cranberries ten days ago, I can enter “cranberries” and back it will come, along with links that will connect me to sites where I can buy, sell, or date cranberries. It’s disconcerting. I mean, they say that people can’t see in my computer — that this is sort of a one-way mirror, but how long? How long before Google goes:

“Hey, Kellogg’s, Chris Moore woke up this morning thinking about chocolate corn flakes, this would probably be a good time to send a guy over to his house with a cereal of the day subscription book.”

Or,

“Hey, General Motors, we’ve just scanned the brains of all the males in America and it turns out they’d like a monster truck that will blow them as they drive. And they’d like it in black.”

Sure, you laugh now, but they had to get the name Hummer from some kind of consumer research. Huh? Huh? Huh?

Wait until your neighbor, the father of four, is sitting out in his driveway behind the wheel with some babe astraddle him, going at him like a Pony Express rider, and he explains that it’s not another woman, it’s just that the airbag on his Hummer X7 “special birthday edition” deployed. And you’ll go, “Where did you get something like that? And he’ll say, “Don’t know, I was just looking for a mini-van on Google.”

Sure, Google is our pal. It’s just so useful and transparent and easy to use, but the more we depend on computer-based information, which for me, is a lot, the more Google has control of it. What if people like we have in the Bush administration got hold of Google. People who were only concerned with image, and felt that they knew better than we do what we need to know? What if they were able to silence critics, simply by engineering filtering software that

Chapter 1 – 2gether 4ever “You bitch, you killed me! You suck!” Tommy had just awakened for the first time as a vampire. He was nineteen, thin, and had spent his entire life between states of amazement and confusion.

“I wanted us to be together.” Jody: pale, pretty, long red hair hanging in her face, cute swoop of a nose in search of a lost spray of freckles, a big lipstick-smeared grin. She’d only been undead herself for a couple of months, and was still learning to be spooky.

“Yeah, that’s why you spent the night with him.” Tommy pointed across the loft to the life-sized bronze statue of a man in a tattered suit. Inside the bronze shell was the ancient vampire who had turned Jody. Another bronze of Jody stood next to him. When the two of them had gone out at sunrise, into the sleep of the dead, Tommy had taken them to the sculptors who lived on the ground floor of his building and had the vampires bronzed. He’d thought it would give him time to think of what to do, and keep Jody from running off with the old vampire. His mistake had been drilling ear holes in Jody’s sculpture so she could hear him. Somehow, during the night, the old vampire had taught her to turn to mist, and she’d streamed out of the ear holes into the room, and – well — here they were: dead, in love, and angry.

“I needed to know about what I am, Tommy. Who else was going to tell me if not him?”

“You should have asked me before you did that,” Tommy said. “You shouldn’t just kill a guy without asking. It’s inconsiderate.” Tommy was from Indiana, and his mother had raised him to have good manners and to be considerate of other people’s feelings.

“You had sex with me while I was unconscious,” Jody said.

“That’s not the same,” Tommy said. “I was just being friendly, like when you put a quarter in someone else’s parking meter when they aren’t there – you know they appreciate it later, even if they don’t thank you personally.”

“Yeah, wait until you go out in your jammies and wake up all sticky in a cheerleader outfit and see how grateful you are. You know, Tommy, when I’m out, technically, I’m dead. Guess what that makes you?”

“Well – uh— yeah, but you’re not even human. You’re just some foul dead thing.” Tommy immediately regretted saying it. It was hurtful and mean, and although Jody was, indeed, dead, he didn’t find her foul at all — in fact, he was pretty sure he was in love with her, he was just a little embarrassed about the whole necrophilia/cheerleader thing. Back in the Midwest people didn’t mention that sort of thing unless a dog dug up a pom pom in some guy’s back yard and the police eventually discovered the whole human pyramid buried under the swing set.

Jody sniffled, completely for effect. Actually she was relieved that Tommy was now on the defensive. “Well welcome to the foul, dead thing club, Mr. Flood.”

“Yeah, you drank my blood,” Tommy said. “A lot.”

Damn, she should have pretended to cry. “You let me.”

“Again, being considerate,” Tommy said. He stood up and shrugged.

“You just let me because of the sex.”

“That’s not true, it was because you needed me.” He was lying, it was because of the sex.

“Yes, I did,” Jody said. “I still do.” She held her arms out to him. “I really do.”

He walked into her arms and held her. She felt amazing, even more amazing than she had before. It was as if his nerves had been dialed up to eleven. “Okay, it was because of the sex.”

Great, she thought, in control once again. She kissed his neck. “How do you feel about it now?”

“Maybe in a minute, I’m starving.” He let go of her and stormed across the loft to the kitchen, where he pulled a burrito out of the freezer, threw it into the microwave, and hit the button, all in one smooth motion.

“You don’t want to eat that,” Jody said.

“Nonsense, it smells amazing. It’s like every little bean and pork piece is sending out it’s own delicious miasma of flavor vapor.” Tommy wanted to be a writer. That’s why he’d come to San Francisco in the first place – to take life in big bites and write about it. Oh, and to find a girlfriend.

“Put the burrito down, and back away Tommy,” Jody said. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“Ha, that’s cute.” He took a big bite and grinned at her as he chewed.

Five minutes later, because she felt responsible, Jody was helping him clean bits of masticated burrito off the kitchen wall and the front of the refrigerator. “It’s like every bean was storming the gates of repressive digestion to escape.”

“Yeah, well, being refried will do that to you,” Jody said, stroking his hair. “You okay.”

“I’m starving. I need to eat.”

“Not so much eat,” Jody said.

“Oh my God! It’s the hunger. I feel like my insides are caving in on themselves. You should have told me about this.”

She knew how he felt – actually, she had felt worse when it happened to her. At least he knew what was happening to him. “Yeah, sweetie, we’re going to have to make a few adjustments.”

“Well what do I do? What did you do?”

“I mostly fed off of you, remember?”

“You should have thought this through before you killed me. I’m fucked.”

“We’re fucked. Together. Like Romeo and Juliet, only we get to be in a sequel. Very literary, Tommy.”

“Oh, that’s a comfort. I can’t believe you just killed me like that.”

“And turned you into a super-being, thank you very much.” “Oh crap, there’s burrito spooge all over my new sneakers.”

“You can see in the dark,” Jody said cheerfully. “Wanna try it? I’ll get naked. You can look at me in the dark. You’ll like it.”

“Jody, I’m starving over here.”

She couldn’t believe that he didn’t respond to the naked persuasion. What kind of monster had she created? “Okay, I’ll find you a bug or something.”

“A bug?! A bug!? I’m not eating a bug.”

“I said there’d have to be some adjustments.” _______________________________________________________________________ Chris here. That’s not the whole chapter, just the first scene. You guys have any problem with the point of view shifts? We lose anyone? I haven’t even gone through this yet, so it’s likely it won’t end up the same in the finished book, but I thought you guys would enjoy a visit from old friends. _______________________________________________________________________

(Since some of you aren’t on the mailing list, here’s the note that went out today. )

Hey kids:

Happy almost holidays from the Author Guy, Christopher Moore. I know, I know, it’s that time again. Don’t blame me.

Since I won’t be touring for the release of The Stupidest Angel Version 2.0, I’ll again be offering signed, adhesive book plates that you can stick in your gift copies. Just send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to:

Christopher Moore P.O. Box 111 Kilauea, HI 96754

Enclose a very short note saying how many bookplates you’d like. (Limit 10 per 37 cent stamp.)The cut off this year will have to be December first, so get your envelopes in the mail.

The Stupidest Angel 2.0 is the same hardcover book as last year, (same low $14.95 cover price) with a spiffy red cover and a 32 page bonus chapter at the end. We’re recommending those of you who have already read it, buy a copy for a gift, read the bonus chapter, then pass on the joy. It’s like giving someone a box of chocolates, but eating your favorites first. (Which I always do.)

For book stores, send your requests by e-mail, along with your mailing address, well get your bookplates out ASAP.

Thanks again, kids. Have a great holiday season.

Your pal, Chris

PS. As before, there are no plans to release The Stupidest Angel in paperback, ever. We may have Version 10.0 in hardcover in a few years, but if you’re waiting for the paperback – well — get someone to buy it for you.

I got two (count ’em) two e-mails today from readers who objected to my use of bad language in my books. For perspective, I get about thirty to sixty e-mails a day from readers, all of which I try to answer, and in ten years of having my e-mail address on the books, I’ve gotten maybe seven or eight notes saying that the “bad words” in my books bothered people.

Okay, I understand that “foul language” bothers some people. In some contexts, it makes me uncomfortable as well, but for Christ’s sake, people, if you pick up a book with a naked girl on the cover, with a title that includes the phrase Sequined Love Nun, and portrays cannibalism, prostitution, murder, child abuse, hijacking, pyramid make-up sales, sex slavery, organ smuggling, and gangsters, should you really be all that surprised to find the F-word in the text? What, exactly, did you think you were getting into when you picked up the book with the naked girl on the cover? The untold story of Jesus?

Jeez, people.

Now, all that said, here’s a couple of nifty things about books: 1) You can close them at will. 2)You can skip words you find unpleasant. (I skip almost all italics, especially big-assed blocks of italics. And characters with Foreign names. I just go, “Oh, it’s the ‘C’ guy” a habit I picked up after trying to mentally pronounce some unpronounceable Celtic names in some Faerie and Unicorn book.) 3) Books will not chase you around the room and force you to hear their dirty, dirty language. 4)Books that you are reading cannot be changed, unless you, personally, go in and change them with a ball-point pen. They are in print. Often, they’ve been in print for many years, in many languages. There is nothing the author can do about the “bad words” at this point.

Are people under the impression that I will go back with a global search and replace command and make all the motherfuckers into fluffy bunnies? (Okay, actually, that might be pretty funny, but that’s not the point. I’m not going to do it.) I’m not going to have a religious awakening and suddenly be embarrassed by the language in my books. Know why? Jesus doesn’t care if you say motherfucker. He doesn’t care. I read the Gospels a bunch of times. No instructions on motherfucker. And Buddha would tell you that you just need to get over your fucking self and that you are a weak-assed little bitch if you let any word harsh your enlightenment. (The Buddah may not be buff, but he is no pussy. His kung-fu is strong.)

And if you don’t feel you can share the books with your kids, well good. Don’t do that. You are an adult, you can have cake for breakfast and tell everyone that George Bush sucks big, swinging donkey dicks without fear of punishment because you earned the right to do those things by being an adult. When your kid is an adult he can eat cake for breakfast, wash it down with bong-water, while watching turtle porn, and cursing whichever Bush is running the country then (in addition to starring in turtle porn), because he will have earned it. For now, he can’t read my books. That’s okay. He has an incentive to grow up besides an IPOD/PLAYSTATION that plugs into his neurons.

I’m just saying, people, have some sense. I’m not putting “bad language” in the books to shock or disturb, and I suspect that in 99% of the cases, it doesn’t shock or disturb anyone. But if you are shocked or disturbed by language you find offensive, for God’s sake, put the book down. Don’t write to me. Because even if I give you a polite and restrained response, what I’m thinking the whole time is, “Oh do fuck off, you wanker.”

Carry on.