Hero’s Path – Not for Self Alone

On October 7, 2009October 7, 2009 By Malcolm R. CampbellIn heropath2 Comments

“What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else.” –Joseph Campbell

This experience comes to each of us, I think, when we step forward on the highway of our life without worrying about where others are going or what others will say about where we are going–assuming we have a destination.

We can share what we know with others, of course, but cautiously, lest they take it as their own gospel. The only path we know is our own. We must have passion for it. But we cannot preach it so strongly that we influence others to copy our experience rather than discovering their own.

The hero on the path blazes his own trail, but never for selfish reasons. He is changed by the joys and perils of the journey. The “road” is a handy metaphor. But we really don’t want wide highways as much as we want an absence of them. Wide highways tell us where others have gone, while deep forests, uncharted waters and endless prairies open up an infinite number of unique possibilities for each of us.

You’ve heard the phrase, “Smooth seas don’t make good sailors.” I used a variant of this in my hero path novel The Sun Singer: “Small hills don’t make good mountain climbers.” Trials and tribulations bring us more opportunities for growth than easy walking. Couch potatoes usually don’t learn much.

The world benefits from the treasures the hero brings back home. S/he is not on the journey for self alone, but for everyone who comes into his or her sphere of friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and fellow seekers. We seek a journey that is ours and we seek a goal that is for everyone else.
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If you are interested in the concepts of the hero path, a good place to start looking is the Joseph Campbell Foundation. The foundation has active discussion forums and a lot of source material in addition to Campbell’s books.

Join us here on the Round Table when author Pat Bertram stops by on October 19th and 20th to talk about her new novel Daughter Am I which contains a strong quest story.

Malcolm

Glacier Park Centennial: Post Card Contest

On October 6, 2009October 6, 2009 By Malcolm R. CampbellIn Glacier National Park2 Comments

from NPS Glacier

Glacier National Park Invites Students to Celebrate, Inspire, and Engage Through Art for a Postcard Contest

Glacier National Park’s Education Program and the Glacier Association are again sponsoring a postcard contest for K-12 students. As Glacier approaches its 100th anniverary, the focus for this year’s contest relates to the Centennial themes of “Celebrate, Inspire, and Engage.” In particular, to “engagement” as the next 100 years of Glacier’s future depends on the participation of today’s youth in helping to protect and preserve park resources.

The purpose of the poscard contest is to promote learning and stewardship of Glacier National Park through the creation of messages from local students to future Glacier National Park visitors. First place winning entries in each category will be made into postcards to be given to the visiting public at Glacier Association bookstores throughout the park.

Winners will be announced by the end of November. The first place winning entry in each category will receive a Glacier Association gift certificate for $25 and be made into a free postcard to be handed out at Association sales areas. The second place winner will receive a $15 gift certificate. Third place and honorable mention entries in each category will receive a book from the Association.

The Glacier Association is a non-profit cooperating association of the National Park Service. Glacier Association helps to support Glacier National Park’s educational, interpretive, cultural and scientific program needs.

Deadline is October 31, 2009. Details and entry form here.
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Many Glacier Hotel Fans: My mountain adventure novel The Sun Singer is set in a fictionalized version of the hotel and Swiftcurrent Vally. The book’s action fits hand-in-glove into the park’s eastern-side environment where I climbed mountains, hiked and worked as a seasonal employee.

Coming Soon, a discussion with author Pat Bertram about gangsters, quests, and her new book Daughter Am I.

West Hollywood Book Fair: Volunteers set up and staffed my publisher’s (Vanilla Heart) booth even though most of the books and promotional items intended for display were stolen by burglars several days before the October 4th fair. See Jock Stewart’s commentary on this contemptible theft, Waking Up in LA.

Fortunately, a few copies of Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire escaped the thieves’ notice and made it to the booth!

Malcolm

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Congratulations Diana Gabaldon

On October 4, 2009 By Malcolm R. CampbellIn books2 Comments

While I’ve only met author Diana Gabaldon once, I feel like I’ve known her for years. During the past twenty years, I’ve been a member of the CompuServe Books and Writers forum where many people (including myself) have come and gone as newer venues like Twitter, MySpace and Facebook competed for our time. But during this entire time, Diana has not only been a faithful member of the forum, but a mentor to us as well.

She has posted her novels in progress for discussion. She has read our work (including my novel “The Sun Singer”) in progress and offered encouragement and suggestions. She has always been there with gracious and and detailed answers to our questions about writing, publishing, agents, research and anything else remotely related to reading and writing good books.

So, it pleases me no end to see that the latest novel in her Outlander Series is sitting at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list. If this weren’t another Dan Brown mega year, “Echo in the Bone” would be sitting at #1.

Beginning with “Outlander” in 1998, six novels in the series lead up to “Echo in the Bone.” And for those of us who have been avid readers, we understand that this novel isn’t the last one about Jamie and Claire and their wonderful saga through time and through history.

Malcolm

Selling Genesis with Cleavage

On October 3, 2009October 3, 2009 By Malcolm R. CampbellIn books4 Comments

Cleavage is all the rage these days from our favorite magazines to our favorite TV shows where women are wearing outfits to the office that would get them arrested in most jurisdictions.

Now, here comes Eve on the cover of The Book of Genesis Illustrated, an October release from W.W. Norton & Company. Artist R. Crumb could have wrapped Adam and Eve in animal skins as the Lord threw them out of the Garden.

But, a falling-open robe gets more buzz in the book store. Sadly, this book cover looks like the satirical book cover I expect to find on The Onion where it would be funny.

—Malcolm

Another Publishing Reality

On September 30, 2009October 31, 2021 By Malcolm R. CampbellIn books4 Comments

“All business and cultural successes spawn retroactive specious credit-taking. But because front-list publishing outcomes are so very unpredictable, the false and highly proliferative retroactive credit-taking in this enterprise can achieve a farcical if not surreal dimension, as it no doubt does in the other media, especially TV and movies. Sales departments will claim credit for dark-horse bestsellers that they miserably undersold when they made their initial sales calls. A publisher who didn’t want to acquire a book will often gladly accept and even court admiration if the acquisitions editor somehow overcame his or her resistance and the book was acquired and then worked. Publicity departments that didn’t bother to pitch a book with any conviction at all will run to get onboard when the train picks up speed and then say, out-of-breath though they may be, that they were onboard all along. This is all just human nature, but too often it dilutes the credit that should go to the persistent, passionate, long-suffering, and occupationally more and more vulnerable acquiring editors.” — Redactor Agonistes by Daniel Menaker

Now, let’s add to this the fact that writers are being told more and more often that they are 90% responsible for figuring out how to market the book. My goodness, I don’t have any money, much less any salesmen or a PR staff.

But I can read between the lines. The publishing experts have decided that while they don’t really understand why or how one book sells and another book doesn’t, they’re going to say that since writer is the star, he or she should figure out how to sell the thing. Right, Danny in Two Egg, Florida and Ethel in Hell, Michigan really know how to put their books on a map.

Should Danny and Ethel succeed, it appears that a lot of other people will be sitting with their thumbs up their asses waiting to take credit for the “amazing debut novel that comes out of nowhere.”

I feel warm and fuzzy after reading articles about the realities of publishing, don’t you?

—Malcolm

When Did the Realization “I Am an Author” Hit?

On September 29, 2009 By Malcolm R. CampbellIn books6 Comments

Author Pat Bertram (“More Deaths Than One” and “A Spark of Heavenly Fire”) wrote a post with this same title today. She’s been assisting her publisher, Second Wind, with projects while working on pre-publication publicity for “Daughter Am I” and on edits for “Light Bringer.” So today, the realization it: She feels like an author.

I left a comment on her post, saying that I felt more like a writer when I worked as a corporate communications director and a technical writer than I do now. Partly, that was because my work produced an income that made a difference to my family’s financial well being. Now, I can’t say that. On some days, I feel like writing is a very expensive hobby and I look at Pat Conroy who’s two years younger than I with another bestselling novel and I think, “there’s an author.” Most authors, though, remain obscure.

Many traditionally published books sell a thousand copies or less; most self-published books sell a hundred copies or less. The income produced is less than publicity costs. Hence, it becomes easy to say writing is a hobby–like having aquariums all over the house, a dozen stamp albums in the den, or a huge model train layout in the basement–because it uses up income while producing many interesting hours rather than paying the rent.

Yes, I am an author. Yes, I enjoy writing, planning novels, doing reviews, posting here on this web log, researching new project ideas, and keeping up with the profession. Yet, the reality of being an author is so much different than I expected when I looked ahead to my career when I was in high school. And, I think it’s probably a lot different than the public believes as well. For the public, if they’ve heard of you, you’re and author. If they haven’t, you’re not. The public is very blunt about whether one is or isn’t what he claims to be.

It comes down to self-satisfaction, then, being happy with what one is doing and feeling that the output, however obscure, is also what he is supposed to be doing. We all hope our books reach readers who will enjoy them and who might also derive value from them. But we’re seldom omniscient enough to know when and where that happens.

But we keep writing because–in our warped imagination–there’s no better way for us to spend our lives.

Malcolm

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Book Review: Pat Conroy’s ‘South of Broad’

On September 27, 2009September 27, 2009 By Malcolm R. CampbellIn books

South of Broad by Pat Conroy

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Pat Conroy’s “South of Broad” is a love song to Charleston with blood on the sheet music.

As he walks toward the Cooper River in 1990, six months after Hurricane Hugo tore into his beloved city, narrator Leo King ponders the city’s rebuilding and healing, and the coming spring: “Since the day I was born, I have been worried that heaven would never be half as beautiful as Charleston.”

Like his counterpart Tom Wingo in “The Prince of Tides” (1986), Leopold Bloom King is a psychologically wounded man. While Wingo’s issues focus on a brutal family secret, the death of an older brother, and a suicidal sister, King is haunted by the suicide of his older brother Steve. King worshipped that brother, the golden boy and their mother’s overt favorite. “Looking back,” King tells us, “I think the family suffered a collective nervous breakdown after we buried Steve.”

King drifted between that collective breakdown and 1969 when he found himself fulfilling the role of anchorman in a diverse group of high school seniors: Ike Jefferson, one of the first black students to play on the high school football team; Sheba and Trevor Poe, the dramatic and talented twins who live across the street with an alcoholic mother; the mountain-born orphans Starla and Niles Whitehead, who hope one day to be re-united with their mother; and from the aristocratic world South of Broad Street, Molly Huger and brother and sister Chad and Fraser Rutledge.

That these students appeared in King’s life on June 16—Bloomsday, for those who revere James Joyce—was to some extent orchestrated by his mother with the helping hand of fate. After all, his mother who was both the high school principal and a Joycean scholar named him after Leopold Bloom, Joyce’s protagonist in “Ulysses.” And after all, as King saw it, there are no coincidences; “fate comes at you cat-footed, unavoidable, and bloodthirsty.”

Conroy portrays the meeting and evolving relationships between King and this disparate collection of variously angry, snobbish, haunted and broken souls with humor and realism. Some commentators have panned Conroy’s dialogue as unnatural. Yet, one might ask what “normal” could possibly sound like for people weaned on tragedy and/or destined for it.

“The Prince of Tides” unfolds primarily in flashbacks. Though he’s looking back on his life, Leo King narrates “South of Broad” in a nonlinear sequence. Parts one and four are set in the late 1960s. Parts two, three and five are set in the late 1980s. While frustrating, this structure is not fatal. Yet, details about the characters’ maturation into adults is sketchy and the action screeches to halt before the climatic Part Five when Conroy pulls his readers back to the high school world of race and class tensions and football.

What worked to perfection in “The Prince of Tides” is a little dissonant in “South of Broad.” Conroy’s trademark soaring language develops a cohesive sense of place that wonderfully contrasts with and serves as a stable foundation for the nasty events and broken people. Yet some of the poetry is ponderous. The familiar storyline of dysfunctional people coping with a tragedies is again compelling. Yet it stumbles somewhat on the novel’s structure and melodramatic tendencies.

When Leopold Bloom King is nine years old, he finds a dead god named Stephen Daedalus King in a bathtub of bloody water. While the method behind the madness is a little tired and the music a little too much in a minor key, between Steve’s suicide and the novel’s last moments on a Bloomsday many years in the future, there is a still strong and memorable story.

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Guided Tour Along Montana’s Flathead River

On September 23, 2009September 24, 2009 By Malcolm R. CampbellIn environment, Glacier National Park2 Comments

from Flathead Valley Community College (FVCC)

The Crown of the Continent Lecture Series, which began with “Two Peoples, Two Countries, Three Voices” on September 15, will continue September 21 with “The Crown Region: Setting the Stage,” presented by Geography Department Chairman Dr. Jim Byrne of the University of Lethbridge. Byrne will establish the broader geographical elements that help define the Crown of the Continent.

On September 26, the series will offer a field trip adventure, “Along the Buffalo Cow Trail: History and Ecology of the Trans Boundary North Fork,” led by Thompson and Geologist and Glacier Institute co-founder Dr. Lex Blood. The trip will involve a hike along the North Fork of the Flathead River on the Kishenehn Trail, the same route the first people took on the 10,000-year-old trail. The cost of the trip is $65 per person and includes transportation. Space is limited, and advance registration is required. Participants also are required to have moderate hiking ability.

The series will resume September 29 with “Defining the Ecology of the Crown of the Continent,” delivered by Dr. Chris Servheen, adjunct research associate professor of wildlife conservation and grizzly bear recovery coordinator at The University of Montana. Servheen will provide an overview of the characteristics that distinguish the Crown of the Continent from neighboring and global ecosystems including the diversity of flora and fauna.

Author Jack Nisbet of “Sources of the River: Tracking David Thompson across Western North America” will conclude the series October 6 with his presentation, “Seeing Across the Rockies: Reaching for Montana 1787-1812.” Nisbet will reveal the relationship between Lewis and Clark, David Thompson and Thomas Jefferson and their involvement with the first accurate map of the Crown region.

All lectures are free and open to the public. Each lecture will take place at 7 p.m. in the large community meeting room inside the Arts and Technology Building on the FVCC campus at 777 Grandview Drive in Kalispell.

For more information or to register for the field trip, visit www.fvcc.edu, or contact the FVCC Continuing Education Center at 406-756-3832. This series is a part of the official Glacier National Park Centennial Program.

Glacier National Park is quickly approaching its 100th anniversary. The park has empowered a team of volunteers to help plan and implement a community-based Centennial Program to take place throughout the latter half of 2009 and run through the celebration year of 2010. For more information on the Centennial, please visit http://www.glaciercentennial.org.

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Around the Links

On September 20, 2009September 20, 2009 By Malcolm R. CampbellIn books

On this slow, lazy southern Saturday, I’m taking the easy way out by posting a few links to recent posts in my other blogs.

“The Apartment” to the rescue on Sun Singer’s Travels discusses my use of a reference to this old Billy Wilder movie to show how my protagonist Jock Stewart feels about himself on a down evening. I think the reference works even for readers who’ve never seen the film. Check out my “FriendFeed” while you’re here.

In Movie and Book References Help Define your Characters on Writer’s Notebook I suggest that while current popular culture references can date a book, mentioning older movies and books can add atmosphere and show what your characters are all about.

Eye Blink Fiction features a short excerpt from my novel “Garden of Heaven” about liberty in a 1960s sailor town.

Readers Looking for ‘The Lust Symbol’ Ravish Bookstore on Morning Satirical News is another off-the-wall satire about what happens when a bookstore owner gets the name of Dan Brown’s new novel wrong in his advertising.

When our water heater went out earlier this week, I wrote about it in The Water Heater on my MythRider weblog.

If you read book reviews on your quest for new books, I invite you to read take a look at Janice Harayda’s One-Minute Book Reviews and The Rose City Reader (out of Portland, Oregon). See also, Ms. Bookish – My life among books.

As always, I hope you’ll stop by my publisher, Vanilla Heart Publishing and take a look at their wonderful selection of books including “Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire.” If you’re a writer of poetry, essays/articles and short stories with a focus on the out doors, you might be interested in submitting a piece for the upcoming “Earth’s Gifts” anthology which will celebrate Earth Day 2010. The deadline is December 31, 2009.

Have an enjoyable weekend.

Malcolm

Book Review: ‘The Lost Symbol’

On September 18, 2009September 24, 2009 By Malcolm R. CampbellIn books4 Comments

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Now boarding on track 33, the Symbolism Express departing for the Freemasons, the Invisible College, the Office of Security, the SMSC, the Institute of Noetic Sciences and multiple points around the cryptic compass.

Your temporal destination, not Paris and London, but Washington, D.C.

Your conductor, Harvard symbiologist Robert Langdon, the Indiana Jones of the new age.

Tied to the tracks in the gathering darkness ahead and facing certain death, if not embarrassment, another keeper of the ancient mysteries including the wisdom of Solomon, not a man of the Louvre, but a man of the Smithsonian.

Traveling alone, an attractive female relative of the man lashed to the tracks, not agent and cryptologist Sophie Neveu, but Noetic scientist Dr Katherine Solomon.

Sitting in the engineer’s seat with a small stone pyramid rather than a chalice holding down the deadman’s pedal, a rogue and tattooed Mason in search of apotheosis replaces Silas, “The Da Vinci Code’s” rogue and scourged momk as our antagonist for the evening.

Hold on. It’s going to be another bumpy ride.

Dreams of déjà vu remind you what the journey will be like: short chapters, multiple points of view, conflicting agendas with something very large (yet unknown) at stake, the thrill of the chase, the almost-sexual tension of near-satisfaction again and again as answers appear and disappear, multiple station stops for arcane wisdom instruction, and a desperate-save-humanity-hunt for secrets you’ve stared at your entire life without comprehending.

By the end of the novel, you won’t be a 33rd Degree Mason and you won’t be like unto a god in any way you can quite wrap your mind around, but you will have experienced a high-adrenaline ride. This thrill is what the journey is all about. Perhaps reality lurks around the edge of the plot and theme and perhaps sacred messages lurk within the vast white spaces between the lines of black type, but that’s not why we’re turning the pages from 1 to 509.

Dan Brown has done it again, and upon reflection at the dawn’s first light, you’ll see that he knows how to pull the right strings and push the right buttons and sprinkle the right esoteric seasonings across his smorgasbord of mysteries from around the world to keep readers addicted for the trip. On the last page, you may well hope, along with Robert Langdon and Katherine Solomon that men and women will follow the ancient maps toward their true potential; but seriously, the novel’s destination really doesn’t matter, does it, because the ride was the peak experience you were seeking when you picked up “The Lost Symbol.”

All aboard.

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