Adam Reger | Freelance Writer

Philadelphia-based freelance writer

Category: Fiction

March 17, 2012

Lá Fhéile Pádraig Sona Daoibh

(That is, Happy St. Patrick’s Day!)

A pair of songs in honor of the day, both from The Pogues, one of my favorites. First, a nod to Irish folklore:

And next, an homage to the Irish immigrant experience (which I’d say St. Patrick’s Day is really about):

I find “Thousands Are Sailing” pretty powerful stuff. Particularly moving are the lines around the 4:28 mark: “Wherever we go, we celebrate / The land that makes us refugees / From fear of priests with empty plates / From guilt and weeping effigies.” It seems a nice summation of the Irish experience in leaving home for America.

Finally, name-checked in “Thousands Are Sailing” is the Irish writer Brendan Behan. (Pogues songs are fascinating to me in part because they are so densely referential; they could benefit from footnotes a lot of the time. Listen again to “The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn” and count all the names of people and places dropped in there. It’s staggering and adds a richness to the lyrics that more than offsets the occasional mystified feeling I get listening to the Pogues.) I’d thought Behan was an old-time Irish hero, a la Michael Collins or Wolfe Tone, but ah, not so. He’s a writer who wrote in English and Irish, and is the author, most famously, of Borstal Boy, a memoir.

I just started Borstal Boy yesterday, but man. It is already giving me chills. Here’s the opening:

Friday, in the evening, the landlady shouted up the stairs:

“Oh God, oh Jesus, oh Sacred Heart. Boy, there’s two gentlemen to see you.”

I knew by the screeches of her that these gentlemen were not calling to enquire after my health, or to know if I’d had a good trip. I grabbed my suitcase, containing Pot. Chlor, Sulph Ac, gelignite, detonators, electrical and ignition, and the rest of my Sinn Fein conjuror’s outfit, and carried it to the window. Then the gentlemen arrived.

Behan, 16, has just arrived in London with orders to carry out a terrorist bombing. He’s taken to prison, which is grim, and a lonely prospect for a 16-year-old:

As I stood, waiting over the lavatory, I heard a church bell peal in the frosty night, in some other part of the city. Cold and lonely it sounded, like the dreariest noise that ever defiled the ear of man. If you could call it a noise. It made misery mark time. (pg. 9)

Ah, there is nothing like Irish writing when it’s good. (On that point, see here.) I’m looking forward to the rest of the book more for the casual bits of poetic prose that are all but guaranteed, much more than the sure-to-be-dire story of Behan’s time in a “borstal”—an English reform school.

Anyway, Lá Fhéile Pádraig Sona Daoibh, everybody. Lá Fhéile Pádraig Sona Daoibh

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February 15, 2012

A bold reimagining of ghostwriting

Two of the more fun freelance writing projects I’ve done have been ghostwriting gigs. One was a novel and one was a children’s book, and in both cases I really enjoyed talking to the author, figuring out what he/she wanted, and then sitting down and delivering the product.

Periodically, I’ll seek out more ghostwriting work by looking around Craig’s List, sometimes advertising my services there, or doing a search for “ghostwriter” on Indeed.com, a job-listing aggregator that has saved me time before. The stuff you find in these places is, however, not often worth finding. At least on Indeed, a lot of it comes by way of elance and oDesk, marketplaces where writers (and others offering services) bid on the jobs posted. Finding an appealing job listed there is always an exercise in deflation, because the person offering the job, either from an understanding of how the marketplace works or from simple cheapness, doesn’t offer much money; the situation is worsened by the bidders, who undercut one another and drive the price down. I suppose it’s classic economics, but it’s always a tough thing to see. Invariably I end up thinking about how many books I could read in the time it would take me to write someone’s non-fiction book and be paid $300 for my trouble.

This is all background to introduce an ad I stumbled upon today, one that truly stood out from the crowd. While the job-poster gets points for forthrightness, surveying what I know about ghostwriting I must say that this is a new one on me:

“I want to buy your completed manuscript/novel” reads the headline; “You will sign over the publishing rights and will not be credited in the book. Essentially, you will become a ghostwriter for it. Once a relationship is established this could lead to more work with much higher pay.”

Yikes. I guess that constitutes a ghostwriting relationship. Except for the part where I wrote this novel for myself, to hopefully publish under my own name. You know, as part of my hopes and dreams. But I guess I could sell it to you and have you publish it under your or someone else’s name . . . I mean, that would at least spare me the hassle of wrangling with publishers and agents, right? Really, what’s the harm—and I’m sure it’s a decent wage, right? . . . The average bid is how much? $1,527? (as of publication time)

To be honest, I was intrigued by this proposal because I thought of the first two novels I wrote. Neither one has seen the light of day; neither friend nor literary agent has seen these bad boys. I’m not proud enough to send them out into the world under my own name. Why not unload them on this guy?

Because he/she wants the first three chapters for consideration, but “. . . be prepared to send over the entire MS on short notice if you make it to the next round.” Also, he ends the post with “Good luck!” So now it’s a contest? Where the prize is peanuts to take my novel and publish it under your own name?

The crazy thing is, I’m still not at all sure I won’t be doing this. If you opt to do it, fellow writers, good luck!

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December 31, 2011

Best of 2011

To mark the passing of another year, I’m going to present lists of the books and movies I most enjoyed this year. For now, the lists are without links and without (much) comment. The only eligibility criterion is that I read the book or saw the movie this year.

Favorite Books of 2011:

–Angle of Repose
by Wallace Stegner

–The Killer Inside Me
by Jim Thompson

–Abbott Awaits: A Novel
by Chris Bachelder

–Venus Drive: Stories
by Sam Lipsyte

–Volt: Stories
by Alan Heathcock

–A Visit from the Goon Squad
by Jennifer Egan

–The Ask
by Sam Lipsyte

–Ironweed
by William Kennedy

–The Sisters Brothers
by Patrick DeWitt

–Ablutions: Notes for a Novel
by Patrick DeWitt

–The Line of Beauty
by Alan Hollinghurst

–Born to Run
by Christopher McDougall

–Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World
by Donald Antrim

As is true of the movie list, there are lots of good books I didn’t quite like enough at the time to annotate with a red star. I remember also really liking John Brandon’s Citrus County, The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith, The Sea by John Banville, Tea Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife, Richard Price’s The Wanderers, and, most recently, Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams. For me the notable thing this year is discovering one writer I’d never previously heard of—Patrick DeWitt—who’s now a favorite, and breaking through with another writer—Sam Lipsyte—who I’d previously dismissed (based, I think, on his being represented in an anthology of younger American writers by the story “I’m Slavering,” which even on re-reading in Venus Drive didn’t do much for me).

Favorite Movies of 2011:

–Winter’s Bone

–The Warriors

–Candyman

–13 Assassins

–Tabloid

–Hobo With a Shotgun

–Drive

–Bridesmaids

–A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas

–Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol

Yikes! Not the most distinguished crop of films this year. I’m surprised, looking over the list, at the films I didn’t star (my notation for having liked a movie), especially compared to those that I did. I remember liking The Fighter, Cedar Rapids, Certified Copy, Hoosiers, Moonstruck, Paper Moon, Meek’s Cutoff, Submarine, The Town, and (since I saw it yesterday) War Horse
quite well. But I’m going to honor whatever I was thinking and feeling at the moment that I entered each of these titles into my list, and exclude top-10 fare like Submarine, War Horse, and Certified Copy even as Hobo with a Shotgun makes the list. What can I say? I’m large; I contain multitudes.

(This is the second year I’ve kept these lists and I’m somewhat pleased to note that this year saw fewer abandoned books. I don’t mind abandoning books I’m not enjoying (as mentioned here), but it’s nice to see that I liked most of these well enough to continue with.)

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August 30, 2011

What a Game of Eschaton Looks Like

I’ve remained on the fence way too long re: The Decemberists, the rock band that I should, on paper, like a lot more than I do. (They wrote a song about Myla Goldberg, author of Bee Season; they brought in Gillian Welch to sing on their most recent album; and they are generally pretty literary and wordy without being too unbearably pretentious about it (at least most of the time).)

This new video, for “Calamity Song,” has got to put them over the top with me. Directed by Michael Schur, who works on the fantastic Parks and Recreation, “Calamity Song” depicts a game of Eschaton from the David Foster Wallace novel Infinite Jest (which I’ve written about here). The New York Times wrote a piece giving the full background.

Eschaton is a game that the students in Infinite Jest‘s fictional Enfield Tennis Academy play on an expanse of multiple tennis courts, nets removed. It’s a game of apocalyptic global warfare, with students forming blocs like REDCHIN (Red China) and SOUTHAF (South Africa). They take turns lobbing tennis balls, representing so many megatons of explosives, across the court to hit targets in other nations. The accumulating damages, measured in military destruction and civilian casualties, are tallied by a student who works a computer on wheels, continuously calculating the effects of, say, a direct hit on a major metropolitan center in the middle of ONAN (Organization of North American Nations).

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August 25, 2011

Tom Scharpling on Doing the Work

This interview appeared some time ago, but I’ve been thinking about one of its main points over the last few weeks, and thought I’d share. The AV Club interviewed Tom Scharpling, host of the Best Show on WFMU. The whole thing is great and worth your time—even, I’d say, if you don’t know who Scharpling is.

But Tom was asked about the recurrent Best Show theme of “doing it”; i.e., putting in the work, paying dues, etc. To which he replied:

“You get so many people who talk about what they are going to do. I think they get the same kind of emotional, almost chemical, satisfaction out of when they say, ‘I’m gonna write this thing, and it’s gonna be like this, and this is gonna happen, then that’s gonna happen.’ They talk you through it, and they’re getting the same satisfaction from your reaction as if they actually did the thing. And that drives me up the wall. Then they never do it, because they’ve satisfied themselves by talking about doing it. I’ve known a bunch of people like that in life who start a thing, and they’ll talk all day long about the thing they’re gonna do, and how great it’s gonna be. But they’re not doing the thing.”

So good. So well put. Recently I’ve been reading books on investing in the stock market, and a similar point has come up: that investing ruins many investors because they don’t have the constitution for making an investment and sitting on it for years and years; once they’ve gone through the hunt of identifying a promising stock, putting in the research, and making the purchase, the entire chemical thrill of investing is over. When the stock’s price begins to slip, there’s no more satisfaction to be had in staying the course. So they sell, because selling gives them a portion of their money back, and they can go on to hunt down the next stock, and generate the next chemical thrill.

That connection’s a bit far afield, but I know what Tom is saying directly. I do this myself, launching new writing projects, thinking about how good they’re going to be, how well received they’ll be once they’re published, etc. Then I never go back to them.

More to the point, I’ve experienced this lately when working on something with another person. Too often, those talk sessions where you imagine the various jokes you can do, where you look down the road at subsequent ideas or projects you might explore together, prove totally sufficient for the other person’s creative desires.

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July 28, 2011

Review of “Abbott Awaits” at Hot Metal Bridge

I wrote a book review of Chris Bachelder’s Abbott Awaits and it’s up at Hot Metal Bridge (which is also up to lots this summer: you should check out the winners of their fiction and non-fiction contests).

Shorter review of Abbott Awaits: it’s good. Oh man, it is really good. Probably my favorite novel this year, and up there for the past five years. I like Bachelder’s stuff a lot: U.S.! and, to a lesser extent, Bear v. Shark, are precisely written, fun, and thoughtful books. But Abbott Awaits is a leap into a new category for Bachelder. I explain and justify all of this in the review, so rather than babbling more about how much I liked the book, go check it out.

(Also, just read as implied here notes of embarrassment and apology over having not updated the blog in about two months. As it happens, I’ve been busy, the sort of busy where there’s plenty to report but little time or inclination to report it. I wish I could say it will be the last time, but who knows. Anyway, look for more frequent dispatches in the near term.)

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May 25, 2011

First Draft: Done

Well, friends, this morning I finished the last remaining scene of the novel I’ve been working on since some time in January. (I don’t know offhand how long this took, but based on this blog post I’d guess I started around mid-January, and was definitely at work outlining the novel by then. Four to four-and-a-half months is pretty good, in my experience.)

I’m very lucky to be leaving, later today, for a long period of travel: Germany, then Italy, then Las Vegas. Lucky to be going at all, of course, but in particular I’m lucky to have a natural break come up, to not even have the option of peeking at this draft for almost two weeks. Further, I won’t be able to do more than some intermittent, notebook-in-coffee-shop(-or-beer-hall, as the case may be) writing during this time; in the past I’ve hamstrung myself a bit by starting other stuff during my “cooling off” period just after finishing a draft, and coming back to these messy drafts a little less interested and enthusiastic.

In terms of interest and enthusiasm, I’m still excited about the novel’s potential. It’s way too long (it’s somewhere around 115,000 words, which comes out to something like 400–450 pages), and a lot of the scenes will need to be made more scene-like. It’s full of places where I wrote notes in brackets like “[what is friend’s name?]” or “[confirm this later].” Sometimes I thought I had a great handle on the characters, they surprised me, and at others I felt I’d completely lost the thread.

But that’s the nature of writing a novel. Even if you hate Ernest Hemingway’s work, if you’re a writer you should appreciate his two semi-famous quotes (i.e., famous among writers and writing students) on first drafts: “The first draft of anything is shit”; and “The important thing about a first draft is finishing the damn thing.”

Apologies for the noodling, barely-veiled-triumphalist feel to this blog post (especially as it’s likely to be the last one for a while). One further note, towards making this post interesting and useful to anyone else, is that (as mentioned here, at the outset of the novel) I used Randy Ingermanson’s “Snowflake Method” of novel outlining, and it was really pretty helpful. The chronic problems of aimlessness and compulsory-feeling workdays didn’t disappear, but they were contained within each scene: I could make a character stare out a window, thinking, for a few paragraphs, but I knew that eventually he had to start walking again and proceed to point B. That was a big help in limiting the number of scenes that are themselves completely gratuitous and static (though given the length of this draft, I’m sure there are some of those, too). I had my reservations towards the Snowflake Method going in, but I found the questions it raised useful, and I expect a lot of the materials I generated—character sketches, brief and less-brief distillations of the novel’s overall trajectory—will be useful to refer back to, and probably amend, as I begin the long process of revision.

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May 3, 2011

On the angry post-rejection e-mail

I’ve never done it. Roxane Gay, editor of PANK, makes me glad I’ve resisted. Great piece that helps to put things in perspective. I’m simultaneously surprised to hear so many writers do this, and also not at all surprised. I recently strongly considered writing back to a journal, “Are you sure?” But that came more from a spirit of joking and wanting to see what, if anything, the editor would say, than from anger. Tucked within the piece is a lot of great, necessary advice for writers on how to deal with rejection. At one point, Gay cites her own rejection rate in Duotrope as being up around 78%. She makes her own point about it, but my first reaction was something like jealousy: surely mine is somewhere in the nineties. Point being, you’re succeeding as a writer if only eight out of ten submissions are rejected. As Gay notes, that’s just the nature of the game. The sooner you acclimate yourself to that, and make rejection the expected outcome of submitting, the better off you will be.

Update: Probably could have seen this coming, but the comments section under the above-referenced blog post has turned into something of a shit show, as they say. The person whose angry post-rejection e-mail to Roxane inspired the post has stepped forward in comments—though not really, as he’s writing under the name “Donny”—to reiterate his points. Which as you might guess, are pretty insipid. Read it if you like car wrecks and that sort of thing. I haven’t seen the comparison show up yet in the comments section, but the whole thing reminds me of this authorial flip-out, which I pontificated on here.

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April 15, 2011

New Stories at Used Furniture Review

I have not one but two flash-fiction pieces up at Used Furniture Review, a great and classy online lit mag that is worth your time. I’m pleased not only to publish them, but for them to appear together, as they’re both what we might call “math lit”: experiments with the number of words in a sentence and the number of sentences in a paragraph or section. It’s a fun limitation to play with, and these are the rare pieces where I was pleased with the result.

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April 12, 2011

Now It Can Be Told: My Book!

I’ve been holding off on saying much publicly, but as today is its release date, I’d like to announce that a book I worked on last summer—doing a lot of editing and a substantial amount of writing—is now out in the world.

It’s called U.S. Navy Pirate Combat Skills and the publisher is Lyons Press. It’s a humor book, taking public-domain military manuals and editing the text to create a manual on how to fight old-timey pirates (think Blackbeard, Captain Kidd, etc., not Somali pirates with motorboats and machine guns). It’s full of great, funny illustrations (that I thought up, so maybe some bias there) by David Cole Wheeler (who also illustrated U.S. Army Werewolf Sniper Manual and U.S. Army Werewolf Sniper Manual, predecessors to the pirate book, both edited/written by Cole Louison).

It was a lot of fun to work on last summer, and then to see the illustrations as they were produced, and, later, to answer copy editing queries about whether I perhaps meant “cutlass” instead of “dagger” on page 93, and if I could tweak the text of a figure caption to better match the image of hand-to-hand combat between a sailor and a crusty seadog. The staff at Lyons Press, in particular Keith Wallman and Ellen Urban, were terrific to work with.

The most fun of all, though, was writing prefatory materials for the book: a guest foreword by retired admiral I. I. Scuttle, commander of the most decorated anti-pirate fighting force in U.S. Navy history that includes “The Pirate Fighter’s Creed” and the lyrics of the sea-chantey “Pirate Slayers We.”

Below the fold, to give you a sense of what you’re getting yourself into by picking up this book, a few verses of that famous morale-boosting thumper, “Pirate Slayers We”:

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