Yesterday was fun! Let’s try another Objectino!*
Dinnertime. An earnest seven-year-old is attempting to tell a joke:
BOY: Okay. Two cannibals are eating a clown. What does one cannibal say to the other?
BOY’S MOTHER: I don’t know, what?
BOY: “Does this taste funny?”
BOY’S MOTHER: Why are two cannonballs eating a clown?
Introducing…the Objectino!*
Overheard at an office meeting:
WOMAN 1: I’ve always had this thing for the days of real glamour. You know, like the Fifties and Sixties, when women had style. I was born at the wrong time! I could see myself as an Audrey Hepburn…or a Jackie O…
WOMAN 2: There’s a potato chip on your boob.
We’ve spent Thanksgiving week giving thanks to the Kids, the Elders, and Life’s Sweet Partners. That covers most ground (sorry friends, coworkers, and facebook people I’m pretending to recall better than I actually do – maybe next year!). Or at least it covers most ground personally.
Professionally, I still owe someone special. My enormous debt of gratitude, and my undying thanks, go to a larger community. Continue reading
Oh, here we go! We’ve taken a look at the youth and the elders in my life (or at least the fictionalized version of it). How about Life’s Sweet Partner! Who else could travel through the world with Jacke at her side. That’s not easy! Deserving of all my gratitude and then some.
I like the way the relationship is portrayed in my book The Race. But for the handful of you who do not own a copy of that massive runaway bestseller (sarcasm), here’s a free story. A ghost story of sorts, in which a very fictionalized significant other has a prominent role. (Really, when life is this absurd, it’s better not to go through it alone!)
A History of Jacke in 100 Objects #22 – The Sound:
I fall asleep with my hand on my girlfriend’s hip. I awake with her hand squeezing my throat.
“Jesus!” I gasp after I finally pry her fingers from my neck. “What are you doing?”
She blinks, still in a fog, halfway between sleep and madness. “Huh? What…?” She shakes her head, coming awake. “Oh, sorry… ” she says. “I was dreaming that I was choking you to death.”
“Nice dream,” I say.
Her eyes drift shut. “It’s the SOUND…” she murmurs. “It’s making me…INSANE…”
I cannot blame her. My dreams are just as bad. Monkeys howling, trains derailing, slaughterhouses at night…
“One more day,” I say.
The sound is still there, encasing us. My throat tingles. With one hand I grip her arm; with the other I wrap my pillow around my head.
It does not matter. The sound pierces through.
Oh boy. I’m really having a good time with Thanksgiving this year, but that’s no surprise. It’s my favorite holiday. Since yesterday was our day of giving thanks to the kids, let’s take things old school and bestow some gratitude on our elders.
Here are a few excerpts from stories about the generations above me. My big sister, my older cousin, my old boss, and of course, my father and grandfather. Formative influences on me, but don’t blame them for that! All life errors are my own.
(Seriously – my thanks to all of them. Enjoy the stories!)
I’ve got a big December planned here on the Jacke Blog. So I’m taking a breath and celebrating my favorite week of the year. Thanksgiving! Time to bring in the harvest, start up a fire, watch a little football, and keep the kitchen bustling.
So today I’m giving thanks for children, who make all this work more fun. I love putting together a big Thanksgiving feast while the boys and their cousins are watching movies and playing video games. So awesome.
Enjoy the week of holidays, kids!
And here are a few stories to remind us all of the glory of kids: Continue reading
ONE…ONE ONE…ONE ONE… IT’S THE JACKE WILSON SHOW!!!!!
Oh, people! Episode 3 of THE JACKE WILSON SHOW is now available! This one is full of heartbreak and agony. Yes, that’s right, it’s The Worst Thing I Ever Did… confessions of real-life people as submitted by you, the readers. Also includes A History of Jacke in 100 Objects #15, The Coffepot, about what might be the worst thing I ever did. Let’s share the pain!
(We ran out of room on this one, so we had to stop. Plenty more worst things coming in Part Two. It seems our cup overfloweth with longing and regret here at the Jacke Blog.)
Oh, and I have a happy story sprinkled into the mix. We needed something to cut the misery!
Do you have a Worst Thing I Ever Did to share? Let us know! You can leave a comment or send me an email at jackewilsonauthor@gmail.com. Anonymity strictly preserved. (Read more about our call for The Worst Thing I Ever Did at our previous post. We’re not just going for confessions – we’re exploring why we think these are the worst.)
Enjoy the show!
Download the mp3 file: The Jacke Wilson Show 1.3 – The Worst Thing I Ever Did (Part One)
Getting better, I hope! You can also find previous episodes at our Podcast page.
And subscribe to the whole series at iTunes by following this link:
SUBSCRIBE TO THE JACKE WILSON SHOW ON ITUNES
Let me know what you think! Thank you for listening! Continue reading
And then something happened that changed everything.
I wish I could start the story that way, because that’s how it felt when it happened: startling, vivid, breathtakingly transformative. Even now it makes my heart race, the moment when I looked down and saw what I saw on our front porch, and the follow-up moment when I pulled the car out of the garage and saw what was there. But you can’t be jolted out of a world without there being a world to be jolted out of. That’s an awkward way of saying it, but I’m a storyteller, not an expert in metaphysics. Bear with me.
And then something happened that changed everything.
We’ll get to the something. But first, you have to know what the everything was.
#
We were renting a house on a cul-de-sac in northern Virginia. The purplest part of a purple state, in the section of territory that, viewed on a map, looks like it was carved out of D.C. Someone probably fought a war over this patch of land, once upon a time. Historic battlefields were everywhere, replaced now by highway interchanges and big-box stores. Progress marched along. Even decent old brick houses like ours were being torn down in favor of ersatz palaces with fake-stone facades, their walls rising up from the very edges of the small-sized lots.
One nice thing about living in a purple state was that my vote mattered. What was less nice was that my next-door neighbors put up an Obama sign and the kids who lived across the street shot it up with their BB guns.
We had left New York City so that our toddlers could play in a backyard. And now this? Young political activists? With guns?
I had not moved to the suburbs so my kids could be caught in the crossfire.
But we had signed a twelve-month lease, so what could we do? We settled in and kept the blinds pulled. Our kids could play in the backyard. Away from stray bullets.
Since we were renting, there were a few things we had to do to convert the house to something suitable for our family. We took down a hammock after it caused too many problems. (Hammocks are lovely for grownups. They can propel small children halfway across a backyard.) We drained the hot tub on the back deck out of similar safety concerns.
Inside, there was a pull-down ladder to the attic. I loved the attic: it was huge and roomy, and we could stash plenty of clutter up there. The one downside was that the owners had left a few things of their own: a metal rack holding some coats, a letter jacket, and a wedding dress in plastic, and four or five boxes of trophies and other knickknacks. I knew I should have been grateful that they had not left those things in the house itself. Instead I was irritated and tempted to throw it all out.
What were we paying for? Dammit, we were renting a house. We were not renting a storage unit.
It was an unreasonable position, but there it was. Those items were a reminder that we did not own this house, and I did not like how that made me feel.
It was frustrating, for example, that the owners had not trusted us with the remote control to the automatic garage door opener. Every time we entered or exited the garage, we had to park the car, get out, punch buttons on a key pad, and get back in the car. In rain. In snow. In wind. With the kids asleep. With the kids screaming. Every single time it was a pain, and every single time I thought about how temporary and transient our lives were.
Twenty addresses in twelve years. It’s one thing to live like that when you’re poor and living in dirty old apartments. The life of the struggling writer. Paycheck to paycheck, meal to meal, crummy surroundings, cold nights spent under the covers on a hand-me-down futon. It’s living! It’s living free! Hello, Bohemia! But this? Rent at this place was a sizable expenditure, and it was for a house, with a finished basement and a backyard. This was a place for grownups to live in.
And we were grownups, whether we liked it or not, because parents have to be. Granted, I was a baffled, confused parent, a father with no idea what fatherhood meant or how to handle it, with zero strategy other than the single tactic that as a 35-year-old man, I could present what seemed to small children like wisdom and authority. Eventually they would figure me out. For now, I faked being an adult. And it worked: faced with a three-year-old and a one-year-old who believed in me just as they believed in Santa, their optimism and expectations overcoming what was in front of their very eyes, I pulled off a great con, day after day after day. I bluffed them.
So then: a grownup I was, or appeared to be, most of the time. But this house did not make me feel like a grownup. It felt as if the real grownups – the ones with the stuff in the attic, and the ones in possession of the automatic garage door opener – had gone somewhere and left us in charge.
#
On a morning that spring I went to retrieve the kids, who were playing next door at the neighbors—the Obama-sign neighbors, not the camouflage-wearing junior soldiers of fortune. I left via our back door, walked across the deck, and headed for the gate that separated our two yards. Even from here I could admire their house, built to appear in Architectural Digest, which was literally the wife’s dream, or perhaps I should say vision. She had acquired two dogs, not because she wanted dogs particularly, but because their butterscotch coats matched the house and would look fantastic in the photo spread.
Her husband had told me this one day with a heavy sigh. I nodded as if I understood, but I felt like I was from another planet. Our house had two rooms that had no furniture at all, and a third that only had two beanbag chairs. Maybe Architectural Digest would have a Minimalist issue we could get in on.
I hopped down the steps and walked around the waterfall that no longer worked, hopefully through nothing my kids had done. And then, as I passed the back of the hot tub, I heard something strange. It sounded like growling.
I stopped in place, afraid to move until I heard what it was.
More growling. Like someone’s loud stomach, except more feral. It was an animal sound, there under our deck, behind the lattice woodwork.
On Tuesday I launched into yet another high-flying ode to creative freedom and the indie spirit. I railed against the curtailing powers-that-be, those nattering nabobs of negativism, wherever they may reside. I talked about my own experiences with indie publishing, and I cited the example of Martin Short and Harry Shearer, who found the freedom to create the all-time classic Men’s Synchronized Swimming sketch (“I’m not that strong a swimmer” and “I know you, I know you”) when SNL just let them go shoot the damn thing (which Harry contrasted with the rounds of meetings that had marked his experience in L.A.).
And then…a surprise! The comedy god and national treasure Harry Shearer stopped by! And he tweeted this helpful reminder: Continue reading
My name is Jacke Wilson, and I’m an indie author.
Yes, there’s a stigma attached to this. All those people saying: “Who do you think you are, Jacke Wilson?” and “There is no check on quality anymore! You can’t just SAY you’re a writer.” and “The self-publishing world is like an agent’s slushpile times a zillion!”
I’ve gotten over it. Mainly for the same reasons I gave in my support of NaNoWriMo. What’s the harm to you, Madame Slushpile? Who are you to stop me from writing and publishing what I want?
And also…I do have eyes, people. I’ve been to Barnes & Noble. I’ve seen what the gatekeepers have let through. If anyone think they provide a check on quality, as opposed to marketability…well, I don’t know what to say.
When I first cranked up this blog I posted several tributes to what I called the indie spirit. These were links to people – famous people, celebrated authors or artists – who took things into their own hands. Ezra Pound. Dr. Johnson. Stéphane Mallarmé. Marcel Proust. I had others as well – ten or twelve, I would guess. Some were people who adapted to technology before the rest of the field. Or who wrote a book that was claimed to be “unsellable” or “unpublishable,” but who found a way to sidestep the naysayers and get their voice heard somehow.
I posted a lot of these because I was trying to talk myself into why self-publishing was a good idea. Every success story heartened me; I drank them in, in the way someone afraid of flying might stop off at the airport bar for “shots of courage.”
Now that I’m on the other side (two books, a podcast, a blog, and lots more on the way), I consider my efforts a success. Success on a tiny scale, sure. But tens of thousands of readers and listeners is far more than I ever expected. Frankly, it’s more than most of my friends who have published with traditional publishers have. That’s the dirty little secret of literary fiction: A few Mobys. Lots of minnows.
And my experience has been better than theirs! Most of them hate their publisher: hate the contract, hate the lack of support they received, hate the cover of their book, hate the changes they were forced to make.
I am responsible to no one. I rise and fall with my own decisions. It’s liberating. It feels creative. It feels artistic.
Everywhere else in my life I’m governed by forces out of my control. But in this realm, where freedom is everything, I have it.
My friends have been told that their lack of success on the first book means that publishers won’t want to see their second. Does this have anything to do with quality? Is this how we encourage artists and writers in today’s world? It’s a ridiculous premise.
Most of my friends are so dispirited they’re ready to give up. I’m just getting started!
But set aside all that highfalutin’ puffery. Save that for the intellekshuls, as my beloved Flannery might say.
The main difference between the old way and the new way is this: I was getting nowhere the old way.
I had an idea for a novella-length piece of work. Ready to go! Fresh paper in front of me! Blue pen all revved up! Just a quick run to the agent websites to see where I’ll be aiming this when I’m finished…
Wait, what? A novella? About a hundred pages? You’re telling me not to bother? Nobody wants them? Publishers won’t look at them? Agents laugh behind your back for being so naive?
But…I like reading them. Don’t others like short novels? People are busy, no one has time for a novel…Wait, why the hell are you getting in our way?
Writers! Readers! The decision to connect or not should be their decision, not yours.
Because, Jacke. Just…because.
So then what? Set down my pen? Or decide to bring it out myself?
And whatever you think about its quality, I think you would have to agree that it’s a better outcome than setting down my blue pen altogether. (If you can’t even meet me that far, if you’re going to tell me that I should not even bother writing anything if it’s a length that traditional publishers don’t want to sell, then we’re just not going to agree. Thanks for stopping by. You can go work out your daddy issues or whatever is forcing you into the comfortable thought that People In Charge Know What’s Best For Us. I’ll side with the artists, and the people, and the barbaric desire to create, every time.)
Here’s where Martin Short and Harry Shearer come in. Remember the Men’s Synchronized Swimming sketch? It struck the young me like a hurricane. I did not think I had ever seen anything this funny before.
I hope you’ve seen it. If you’re over forty, you probably have. If you’re a comedy fan, you probably have too. It makes it onto a lot of lists. In any case, it’s here if you want to take a look.
Here’s Martin Short describing his first year of SNL and the short films in particular:
I remember after we shot synchronized swimming, I said to Harry, What do you think we have here? Do you think these pieces are any good? And he said, “I don’t know, but all I know is that in L.A. I would have had two potential meetings about an idea and here at least we’re shooting stuff.” So he was thrilled about that, I remember.
Yes! Yes! And to that I can say, “Stigma? All I know is that in the past I’d have spent a hundred hours writing synopses and cover letters to agents and this way at least I have actual readers.”
So who cares if Grandma’s memoirs go online? Let’s let freedom ring! Let’s let creativity rule! Let’s seize the power! And the day! And the reins! Let’s seize whatever we can get our grubby little artistic hands on!
You’re telling me that books can’t make it in the world without the stamp of someone official? That the author’s imprimatur is insufficient? I refute it thus, Madame Slushpile!
Onward and upward, people!
Jacke Wilson 