A Silicon Valley Writer

J.K. Rowling’s newest novel, “The Casual Vacancy,” has received mixed reviews. Mostly because it’s not a Harry Potter novel and has very naughty words that you don’t expect a children author to use. Never mind that the new novel is for adults, read by adults, and spoken by adults who tend to use very naughty words when they don’t think the kids are around (“Oh, fudgemuffian!”). The real issue is that Rowling’s has a second novel problem.

Wait a minute! Didn’t the Harry Potter series have seven books?

Yes. Seven books in one series. Obviously, Rowling got over the second novel problem in the Harry Potter series. If the second book wasn’t published, books three through seven wouldn’t exist, the movies wouldn’t be made, and we fanboys wouldn’t be ogling Emma “Hermione” Watson on the October 2012 cover of Glamour magazine.

However, if you view Harry Potter as being one massive novel, than “The Causal Vacancy” becomes the second novel. Like any author who has a wildly successful first novel, the high expectations for the second novel will determine if Rowling has a successful writing career after Harry Potter.

If the new “adult” novel sells out the two million copy print run, she can continue to write more novels and put Harry Potter on the shelf for good.

If the print run ends up on the remainder table at bookstores, she will have two options: keep writing what she wants to write but not publishing it, or return the world of Harry Potter like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did after killing off and bringing back Sherlock Holmes from the literary graveyard to satisfy popular demand.

I suspect Rowling will become the next Stephen King and write whatever she wants. God knows that King had put out a lot of fudgemuffian in between his more notable novels over the years. The forward momentum from his past successes guarantees some success for his newest novel. Even though his once formidable audience has dwindled away as he went from horror meister to literary master in honing his craft and staying fresh. A day may come when he too might continue to write but not publish.

Then again, even King went back to his Dark Tower series to add an eighth novel, “The Wind Through The Keyhole,” to his seven-novel magnum opus. Not as the sequel to the old series and the beginning of a new series, but a new story among the stories already told. I wouldn’t be surprised if Rowling does the same with Harry Potter. Someday.

Like many teenagers in the early 1980′s, I fell in loved with Molly Ringwald in “Sixteen Candles” and “The Breakfast Club”. Six years ago she appeared in “Sweet Charity” at the San Jose Center of Performing Arts, giving an excellent performance of a dance hall girl with an endless string of boyfriends. Although still working as an actress, she has a new career as a literary novelist with the recent release of her first novel, “When It Happens to You.”

Ringwald explains in an interview for The New York Times that acting and writing went hand in hand when growing up as a child. Her literary pedigree is impressive.

Q. Who are some of the writers you most admire or feel inspired or influenced by?

A. The writers that inspired me the most as a young person are the same writers that resonate with me today. I discovered Raymond Carver as a teenager, and although I don’t think you would necessarily be able to see his influence in my writing, he has always moved me and deeply inspired me as a writer — the same with Joan Didion, Philip Roth, Lorrie Moore, Toni Morrison, Leo Tolstoy, Gustave Flaubert and Georges Perec. In the past decade, I’ve come to admire Carol Shields, Doris Lessing, Jonathan Franzen, Robin Black, Lauren Groff and most recently Jami Attenberg, whose [upcoming] “The Middlesteins” is a marvel. I have always believed that the only way to be a good writer is to be a great reader.

I’m looking forward to reading her novel. I just hope it doesn’t put me to sleep, as so many literary novels tend to do. Beautiful language about ordinary life can sometimes be very boring, which is why I don’t write literary short stories. I keep the language plain and simple, but add a speculative element to spice up the ordinary life that I often find twisted and absurd.

21 August 2012 Update — An opinion piece in The New York Times by Ringwald, “Acting Like A Writer,” explains how acting and writing are closely related to each other. I find that interesting. I consider writing and web comics are closely related to each other in terms of production (read my review of “A Drifting Life” by Yoshihiro Tatsumi).

No sooner than a gunman got finished shooting a crowded Colorado movie theater straight to hell, the societal blame game started. With guns involved, no one was going to blame the current state of gun control. Not that it didn’t prevent ABCNews from initially blaming the Tea Party or Micheal Bloomburg from making an attempt. With the biggest summer movie premier of the summer involved, Batman—both the current movie and the cultural icon—would get the blame.

The Washington Examiner went one step further by tying a scene from ”Batman: The Dark Knight Returns,” a graphic novel by Frank Miller, to the shooting, where a disgruntled man, angry at the pervasiveness of heavy metal music and pornography, sits down in a porno theater and pulls out a gun. The last panel shows a news anchor announcing the shooting with details coming up next. Was this life intimating art or vice versa?

Unless a copy of the graphic novel shows up in the shooter’s possession, I’m not sure if such a question can ever be answered. The shooter—like any American-grown terrorist—may have been drawn by the outsized publicity for the movie and the huge crowd gathering at the midnight showing to find an audience for his violence. Killing 12 and wounding 58 people will get his name—which I’m not using in this blog post—a quick ticket into the history book. The next nut job will have to do something even more brazen to get attention.

Sometimes a violent shooting does intimate art. After several high school shooters had reportedly read or were in possession of “The Rage” by Stephen King (originally published under the Richard Bachman pen name), a novel about a teenager who shoots the teacher dead and takes over classroom at gunpoint, King ordered the publisher to declare the book out of print. He wrote the novel while was still in high school, where his pain and anger at society was still raw, becoming something of a how-to manual for teenage readers who had easy access to guns and a deep-seated grudge to bear.

As a short story writer who writes mostly horror, does the Batman shooting inspires me to write something as equally horrifying or more so? No, not yet.

I’m always amazed that real life incidents are more gruesome than anything I can think up with my imagination. Although a weird incident can prompt a 500-word flash story, something this serious should sink into the subconscious before bubbling up after a long time in a story somewhere. Eleven years after the World Trade Center attack, I’m only now becoming receptive to writing a 9/11 story. Because I waited to let everyone write their stories in the aftermath, the story I write will be my own zeitgeist that stands apart from crowd.

Meanwhile, I’m working on my non-speculative short stories this weekend. The horror of the real world and my imagination is something I don’t want to deal with. I’m no longer dying to see the new Batman movie. Maybe next weekend.

Pineapple Has No Sleeves (New York State Education Department)

You’re nonsensical writer if you sell a nonsensical short story to an educational testing board that turns it into a nonsensical multiple choice question for an eighth grade English exam. Something that Daniel Pinkwater, a popular children book author, is finding out this week as the state commissioner for the New York State Department pulls the “Pineapple Has No Sleeves” story out of the standardized test.

The crux of the passage is that the pineapple challenges the hare to a race, and the other animals are convinced the pineapple must have a trick up its sleeve and will win. When the pineapple stands still, the animals eat it. The moral of the story: “Pineapples don’t have sleeves.”

One of the disputed questions asked, essentially, which was the wisest animal. Some students said that none of the animals seemed very bright, but that a likely answer was the owl, because it was the one that uttered the moral.

Others worried that the owl was a distraction, because owls are supposed to be wise, so it would be the wrong answer.

The other tough question was why the animals ate the pineapple. Students were torn between two of the four choices: they were annoyed or they were hungry; either one seemed to work.

As Daniel Pinkwater mentions on his website:

OK, here is the deal. There are these companies that make up tests and various reading materials, and sell them to state departments of education for vast sums of money. One of the things they do is purchase rights from authors to use excerpts from books. For these they pay the authors non-vast sums of money. Then they edit the passages according to….I have no idea what perceived requirements.

The moral of this story: kids are smarter than adults when it comes to critical thinking skills, especially when a sleeveless pineapple gets involve.