Testcut​ is a pioneering “hashtag novel.” The impetus was the realization that I  find interest in very few of Tweets in my feed. I assume this is the same for many. 

Testcut will begin on Twitter. These pieces will eventually be rearranged, moved to Facebook (as paragraphs), Medium (as chapters).

Eventually a digital map of the book as it developed will be created — kind of like watching Shakespeare write a play in real time, or Van Gogh paint stroke by stroke (got the idea from a Hockney iPad artwork that captured each stroke as part of a digital continuum).

This is probably the first time such an undertaking has been attempted in writing, taking advantage of current technologies to provide a field day for literary forensics types.

Several cuts are already up under the hashtag #testcut on Twitter. A rather pulse-racing story is developing. A Facebook page compiles the cuts and makes life very easy for completists.

#testcut is not Banksy, not quite. It is the audacious notion that a novel will be hashtagged to the reading public in real time, as it is created. It is maybe the first hashtag novel,* the equivalent of the David Hockney piece that he recorded stroke by stroke on his iPad until it was complete. (This was one of my favorite pieces in de Young's A Bigger Exhibition). The idea that we can watch the act of creation and revision, again and again, in its entirety.** 

#testcut  is immediacy in writing beyond anything possible until recently. If Dickens released his work in installments and Andy Weir (the Martian) in blogposts - Keroac on an onionskin loop -  this is something even more free flowing, conversational. Yet cut up, as the title implies. A Tarantino-Lynch-Pynchon linearity maps its course. 

Test Cut, an alternate title for Arisugawa Park, now given its rightful place in the sun as an original work. Each 10 tweets a unit, like movie cuts, but taken from throughout a novel that I have not yet mapped. Subconscious meanderings that eventually thicken, cohere. Or not - this is the high-wire writing, without a net. 

The book actually began two weeks ago in a muddle of Tweets that did not know they had a theme. Here, for clarity, the gestation phase:

Mar 11

First there were skirmishes, then there were wars. Then an uneasy peace pervaded the place. Only the place had ceased to exist. #pitmad

To a place where time, if not exactly still, is very nearly silent. #earthfabric

Mar 14

When procrastination is not an option, empty your mind & begin without aim. Themes will sort themselves out. #endurancewriter

One to admire, one to cast aside. One for the road. #endurancepose

Faced with a decision, circumspect. Timed release, I'll be out of the room by the time––

Amiable, egalitarian, her hair glinted in a certain light. Foggy.

Truth twisted with a hint of rye. I took the news straight. #notcircumspect

Circumstances dictate that I write this on this on toilet paper, in lemon ink. You will know why when I escape. #hethought

You will never know the ways I tried to find a place that we two could share. Hopeless. #shethought

Crisp, her eyes shone in the light. How do we stay afloat? #notyet


Mar 16

When the world catches up, it is time to move on.


* If my literary forensics research is correct, Twitter novels have been in existence since 2011, taking form 140 words at a time. Micro novels are particularly popular in Japan, presumably written on crowded commute trains where there is just room to maneuver a cell phone (a phenomenon I know well). 

I do not find direct parallels to a hashtag novel, grouped around a specific hashtag that is non-platform dependent. If Test Cut begins with sketched sentences, ideas on Twitter, it will be molded, refined on a platform that allows paragraphs (Facebook?) and perhaps take chapter-level form on one that enables longform content (Medium). 

** At some point the novel will be presented in a streaming form for academic literary forensics sorts to puzzle through and gain greater insight into one writer's technique and sensibility. 

I  peeked under tightly pulled sheets,
to see what items lay there for my acceptance, removal. 
The contents were the same, no matter how many 
layers I peeled. 

Then I opened my eyes and everything changed. 

The single viewpoint is not certain––
the multitude are waiting to be uncovered.
Push against the idea that an algorithm
will decide who goes forward.

Sense of smell came later and was intoxicating.

Four walls, inert, unless you push 
with unceasing labor 
and work your way out 

Touch, the most far reaching of the senses––intimations of death.

I heard the laboring in my mother’s womb,
I sensed the grandness of what lay beyond,
I wept and wept when I heard that song 
and still it did not hear me. 

Life and forgotten breath. 
With listening comes––

Las Vegas Strip 3:45 am

The Strip never quite sleeps––even at that moment when movement wanes and those tipsy sorts not enclosed in all-night wombs have departed in cabs, the neon lights and video towers flicker out ultra-luxe lifestyles at a bargain. The bridges that crisscross an otherwise pedestrian-hostile desert are empty except for the odd vagrant too out of his head to make it to the shelter of darker rock and scrub––the vacant expanses that hint at hard times only minutes from the glitter. The plexiglass on the overpasses, designed to halt the fall of brawlers and losers on the felt flickers a hundred fuck-me colors––stimulating aural intimations that one has come to a place where money spent is just a color form, unfocused.

The form sprawled against the plexiglass was in a half-upright posture exactly mimicking the sort of gone person who would continue to sit in that position, staring epically at the sun, well after the midmorning pavement was baked. His skin would be burnt leather, in a month or two he would be dead––leaving Las Vegas a vacant myth, the same as thousands of others too broke to do anything but die by degrees. 

It was not until the sun ran across the Bellagio moat and the rays radiated on the metallic surface of the Aria, creating a vaporous orange taffy, that the cleaning lady noticed him. The older Asian woman had been assiduously avoiding the man’s slumped form for some time, wiping down the rails and scrubbing plexiglass into some semblance of transparency. The moment she noticed, she was still with soapy bucket respectfully avoiding his patch. But a sudden reflection of light off the Paris hot air balloon, as thin and pointed as that which guided hobbits into Smaug’s lair, etched a frozen turbulence, a moment of impact––when the blood trickled from the cranium faster than the body sank and smeared a crimson wash down the smooth surface behind his shoulders. She took a single step forward, enough to see the unending night in his eyes, and screamed. 

“Thank god for barriers,” the junior officer thought, angling a toothpick between teeth. The height and pattern of the blood spatter on the plexiglass indicated that the body would have otherwise fallen off the overpass onto the Las Vegas Strip, pancaked on a 2 am asphalt crawling with taxis. Instead, the body had been nicely framed, left until the morning for proper inspection. The body was in good enough condition––forensics would blast through it in half a day, the junior officer thought. He almost recognized what remained of the face––had maybe sat with him at a late-night table once or twice, at the Orleans or the Nugget. 

Stumbled on an interesting blog Brain Pickings by Maria Popova and an article about Henry David Thoreau's early publishing struggles. Exhibit A––Thoreau's journal entry referencing his self-published volume A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers*,  written as an elegy for his brother John.

"For a year or two past, my publisher, falsely so called, has been writing from time to time to ask what disposition should be made of the copies of “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” still on hand, and at last suggesting that he had use for the room they occupied in his cellar. So I had them all sent to me here, and they have arrived to-day by express, filling the man’s wagon, — 706 copies out of an edition of 1000 which I bought of Munroe four years ago and have been ever since paying for, and have not quite paid for yet."

"They are something more substantial than fame, as my back knows, which has borne them up two flights of stairs to a place similar to that to which they trace their origin. Of the remaining two hundred and ninety and odd, seventy-five were given away, the rest sold. I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself."

This makes my experience having 100 copies of Earth Fabric printed (and failing to make a single sale) seem very lightweight, almost comical. Some things never change. Naturally, sales were never the aim –– but would be nice if so-called bookstores in the SF Bay Area took a close look at non-traditionally published works. Oh I know, bookstores are dinosaurs, just struggling to survive. Maybe this is why.


January 12th
Raleigh, North Carolina

Cycling through Raleigh, I found myself falling into familiar rhythms. It was winter, the leaves were off the trees and the effect was more Stephen King than Maybury. A feeling of eerie emptiness pervaded the gentle urban folds. History stills hangs heavy on Raleigh, the mists of the Civil War have not quite departed, despite an influx of entrepreneurial hipsters and Research Triangle technologists. 

Amid this almost eery stillness, I began to look back at the past year, certainly one of the oddest chapters of my life.I had spent five months in Las Vegas––way too long, any way I looked at it. Enough time in the SF Bay Area to realize I would never be able to afford it. A stranger everywhere I went, divorced from the predominant currents of American life.

I was acutely aware that in any era but my own, 2014 would have been enough. This experiment in coming halfway-out-of-the-writerly-shell to meet the imperatives of self promotion 2.0 had been shredded by the great leveler, Buzzfeed Nation. Leave your brain at the door. Content must fit one, fit all. Bouyah. A belief in my talent had left me with a distinct lack of money, a feeling of pinch.

The issue, as I saw it, was that very few seem to be actively seeking out well-constructed writing. Had the quick-fire cry and response of the Internet age upset the brain chemistry of entire swathes of our population? Campus torchbearers of envelope-pushing discourse  metamorphosed into hipster pablum? Those who once explored the intellectual outer limits, now wrapped in a vortex of device. Reaction to others' devices is not community, it is void.

In some ways my irascible father is right. We have succumbed. There is a definite lack of quality in music, writing, art. All the best original impulses fractured, the old rewards for honest effort vastly diminished. What is encouraged by those inclined to "break shit" seems close to drivel. Coding is binary, engineered systems coherent in a way that a life set down accurately on paper can never be. 

A beautiful mess on the page is no easy feat. And those who decide what is administered to readers through feeds, platforms, search engine bumps have decided not to pay real writers.* What we have now reads like Dilbert––square and oppressively correct. Hyper-inflated headlines, underperforming logic. Clicks, likes. All in the service of the idiotic zeitgeist. 

There was a time when those who defined the conversation did not bow to the whiplash velocities of twitter-framed opinion. When trolls lived strictly under bridges. Such meta-level influencers (once known as  lions) are not easy to come by these days. The ability to dodge bullets and slow time, while doing the old aerial 360º, is exceedingly rare. Yet it is absolutely necessary in an environment where reputation has become a form of high-frequency trading. There are bullets to dodge from all directions. Gaining readers and viewers is a huge double-edged sword. You will get your head chopped off unless you are quick on your feet and have a thick shell to retreat into. Viva la Energizer tortuga.

Despite all this agony (and yes, I do take joy in kvetching), I was not completely dissatisfied with the trajectory 2014 took. Sometimes  clusters of events occur that convince you there is a reason for it all. The highly improbable one-two punch of a Guinness Record poker tournament and securing a literary agent put me on the map. New acquaintances now fought their initial urge to take the piss when I spoke passionately of being a novelist. My aging father railed less often about a career at the post office being the proper setting for my minuscule intellectual capacities. External validation provided the lubricant that acres of self-belief never had. 

I was free to roam, by the skin of my teeth.  Endurance artist––so qualified by a willingness to live a mendicant existence (ala Henry Miller, carefree and careworn in Depression-era Paris. Entranced with the cavernous excesses of his throbbing mind). As are all followers of good writing, I suppose. Sharers, aficionados, tapers, traders. Everything connected through––what? To use a dated phrase, the collective consciousness. Not quite that. Earth Fabric is my reality and mission. A platform built by writers, artists, that will respect them and not the idiot zeitgeist. 

And what of my muse? It had not departed. I had been home in my words like never before and was longing to get back. Deep in a nest of feathered prose. Bending words to meet neural meanderings. Fine-tuning sentences, paragraphs, pages. A perfect run of sounds. Tension shift. Release. Creation, shimmering oases and chasms.

Every evening I heard the train whistle through the heart of a small, no longer time-removed Southern city. It was time to take that train south to Miami Beach. And from there––wherever the cheapest airplane ticket would vault me out of the United States. 

* The harsh realities I face I'm certain are not unique. I created a hashtag to express my dismay (#authorsnotcontent).

"Brand New Second Hand" is a work in progress, forged in the very public workshop of the EnduranceWriter blog.  I have promised myself an existence in 2015 more close to my character––creative license to roam free from Internet  deadlines, with full access to coastal sunsets. Not a stitch of clothing for weeks on end, a beautiful smile to match my own. Tribal flute playing at rooftop house events, creating the #fluteguy legend. Conversation with amigos, con leche. Let's see how it goes.

In his recent article in The Stranger (February, 2015) “Things I Can Say About MFA Writing Programs Now That I No Longer Teach in One,” Ryan Boudinot speaks frankly about what makes some writers shine and others not so much. As a creative writer on the cusp, I have a few thoughts on his pointed, provocatively titled piece.

Boudinot begins by asserting “writers are born with talent.” I am not so sure about this––certainly, at some level, the brain chemistry must be there to grasp sounds and murmured intimations from mother and other influencers. However, I am a firm believer that talent isn’t innate––personal evolution as we grow is too complex, talent too static a construct. 

Talent seems to me related to how much thought and effort one puts into any endeavor. Moreover, it has to do with whether the palette of vocabulary and experience at hand is sufficient to convincingly capture flitting thoughts. There is an element of play to good writing, of catching oneself off guard––once a certain competency has been reached, the reins should be lax and ego should not appear unless beckoned. 

My novel Arisugawa Park has been ten years in the making. Talent, insofar as it shines through on the page, has largely involved a willingness to put in the time and effort to make my characters and setting as real as possible––days and weeks spent meticulously daydreaming, puzzling out. The words have been molded and remolded until they captured the exact mood and pace I was aiming for. All of this work has not been for nothing, exactly. The manuscript has garnered a respected agent and is about to be shopped to the NY publishers.

Boudinot opines “if you didn't decide to take writing seriously by the time you were a teenager, you're probably not going to make it"
 (noted exception, Haruki Murakami). This statement seems both true and obvious. The necessity of even mentioning an early love for literature as prerequisite for being a decent writer probably has to do with the phenomenon of Baby Boomers (with more time on their hands than talent) entering the creative writing/MFA sphere in droves. 

Familiarity with the constructs of classic literature is a given among high-level writers, even if the well-worn tropes are to be deconstructed. Miles Davis knew the bop canon inside and out before he created modal jazz. Having pioneered the latter form, he was in a nice position to deconstruct further and invent fusion. The former intern with my agency (now an assistant editor with HarperCollins) mentioned that she believed my classic style allowed me to “get away with a lot” in terms of narrative (de)construction. I’ll go with what she said, although I had no idea my style was classic. 

“If you aren't a serious reader, don't expect anyone to read what you write.” Amen to that, with reservations. I think a lengthy apprenticeship of serious reading should be followed by a lifetime of reading purely for fun. I have a hodge-podge approach to reading and take a month or more to finish most books. I digest a little each day, mulling as I go. If “taking literature seriously” is a no brainer, akin to holding your breath as you jump off the deep end, not taking literature seriously is equally as important. I no longer read anything with explicit aim (unless researching specific background materials). Catching myself off-guard as a reader is the only way I know of  growing as a writer.

 I just read Dashiell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon for the first time. It really blew me away––pitch perfect descriptions of San Francisco, perhaps the first truly unreliable narrator (Sam Spade) and the debut of the femme fatale. I’m now winding my way through Louis de Berniere’s The War For Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts. Pure Marquezian fable, written at a time when magical realism was all the rage. I find myself intrigued by the idea of how a story could be effectively crafted from a dog’s perspective, so will probably read Jack London’s Call of the Wild next. I am really looking forward to perusing William H. Prescott’s The History of the Conquest of Mexico, a 19th century text about Cortez and Montezuma that details tragedies and social occurrences in the places I may or may not travel along the Yucatan peninsula. The common thread linking these books is that they came to me by chance, at hostels in San Francisco, Miami Beach, and Playa del Carmen.

Boudinot’s most withering scorn is reserved for those MFA students who complain about not having enough time to read. He suggests rather unkindly that they should “do us both a favor and drop out.” I am so far out of the MFA loop that I have nothing to say about this. I do know that I was not accepted into the UC Santa Cruz creative writing program during my tender college years and wear this as a badge of pride. Even then, I realized that the best route toward really having something worthwhile to say involved experiencing life first hand. And it worked––I think I am in, by the skin of my teeth, at age 40. Young for a first-time novelist, even. If I had spent a lifetime coaching writers I considered inferior, I would probably have much the same view as Boudinot––a sheen of bitterness, an instinct to bite the hand that feeds you.

Boudinot goes on to note “No one cares about your problems if you're a shitty writer.” This is a truism if I have ever heard one. A shitty writer by definition produces unloved writing. Other than its snarky tone, the thing I object to most in this assertion is the implication that putting personal issues on the page and being a "shitty writer" are intrinsically linked. Admittedly, many pick up the pen as a form of therapy, but Boudinot crosses the line in saying “just because you were abused as a child does not make your inability to stick with the same verb tense for more than two sentences any more bearable. In fact, having to slog through 500 pages of your error-riddled student memoir makes me wish you had suffered more.” 

There is an element of truth to Boudinot's contorted attempt at wit. Self-effacement and restraint will get you far.  In Arisugawa Park, I have woven composite fabric from hundreds, probably thousands, of people I have known. I’ve got 99 problems and my own are not among them––on the page at least. 

Turning to the emergent Kindle/e-book/self-publishing sphere, Boudinot asserts “You don't need my help to get published.” He talks with apparent glee about the New York publishing industry sliding into cultural irrelevance. Yet, as one commenter astutely pointed out, Boudinot has apparently achieved low Amazon sales of his own (highly reviewed) volumes. Having done my homework, I will say that I do think that the literary agent is not outmoded and agree with the late PD James, who said in a 2013 BBC interview: “It is much easier now to produce a manuscript with all the modern technology. It is probably a greater advantage now, more than ever before, to have an agent between you and the publisher.”

I do return to wholehearted agreement with Boudinot on his final assertion that “It's important to woodshed.” His point is so well put that I take the liberty of quoting the entire last paragraph:

"We've been trained to turn to our phones to inform our followers of our somewhat witty observations. I think the instant validation of our apps is an enemy to producing the kind of writing that takes years to complete. That's why I advise anyone serious about writing books to spend at least a few years keeping it secret. If you're able to continue writing while embracing the assumption that no one will ever read your work, it will reward you in ways you never imagined."

This relates to my concept of writing as an unglamorous, hidden, long-slog activity, which I have gone so far as to enshrine as a motivating principal of the EnduranceWriter blog. Now, back to the hard work of creating words and sentences composed of exactly 26 letters. 

Viva la tortuga.