The CS in CS Lewis?

Clive Staples.

Clive.

I like it.  Almost as awesome as Clyde.  And Floyd.  And Doyle.

Maybe I just like the letter Y as a mid-name hinge.

Lloyd.  Boyd.  Hmmm.

Anyway, yeah, Clive Staples Lewis.  Haven't read much of him yet, but I'm looking at The Great Divorce right now.  I hear good things.  From a most trusted source.

My friend Tom is writing a novel, and, apparently, when you're writing a novel, you also do things like interview your friends about their early stage startup projects and send the results to the editors of socially responsible travel sites.

Late last night, Tom published the first ever article about The Carrot Project. 

And, speaking of first evers, in 2006, the same Tom invited me to make my first ever blog post.  And, still speaking of first evers, one year ago, the same Tom made the first ever comment on A More Perfect Market.

Hopefully, when the time comes, I can read fast enough to write him his first ever book review.

Just got this from my sister.  She says it reminds her of Mimi, our granny, who died last January.  It's from The Velveteen Rabbit.

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

Wisdom and inspiration come from unexpected places.  Glad Giuls is always on the lookout.

Read this article this afternoon.  By Michael Lewis, author of Liar's Poker.  About Wall St., subprime mortgages, and what Lewis hopes is the beginning of the end of what has been an outrageously long period of frustrating and fascinating financial madness.

It's by far the most gripping and well-crafted explanation of bad lending I've ever read.

And I think it's noteworthy for another reason as well.

Lewis writes:

I had no great agenda, apart from telling what I took to be a remarkable tale, but if you got a few drinks in me and then asked what effect I thought my book would have on the world, I might have said something like, "I hope that college students trying to figure out what to do with their lives will read it and decide that it's silly to phony it up and abandon their passions to become financiers." I hoped that some bright kid at, say, Ohio State University who really wanted to be an oceanographer would read my book, spurn the offer from Morgan Stanley, and set out to sea.

Somehow that message failed to come across. Six months after Liar's Poker was published, I was knee-deep in letters from students at Ohio State who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to share about Wall Street. They'd read my book as a how-to manual.

That's crazy.  And scary.  And reason to think long and hard before you publish. 

Or, better, reason to remain engaged with your audience.  Don't tell a story and walk away.  Stay for follow up questions.  Give everyone your contact info.  And check back in from time to time, just to make sure. 

In other, smaller, and probably more immediately practical words, respond to the comments people leave on your blog.

In fourth and fifth grade, I refused to read books.  Almost without exception (I think I might have half-assedly skimmed a Matt Christopher novel or two).  Every book report type assignment was a work of imagination and imagination alone.  I'd look at the picture on a book's front cover.  I'd read the notes on the back cover.  I'd flip through and remember chapter titles.  I'd read the first and last few pages.  And I'd make the rest up.

I think.  That's how I remember it anyway.  Which also might be a work of my imagination.

But, regardless, in sixth grade, everything, whatever that was, changed.

I read Jurassic Park, on my own, for fun, and I loved every word of it.

I loved it so much I started reading.  I think Andromeda Strain came next.  Then maybe Rising Sun.  And Sphere.  And The Great Train Robbery. 

And books by other authors as well.  Catch-22, eventually.  Then it was ON.  I'd had my next big reading epiphany: that the best literature didn't have to connect in some way to dinosaurs. 

And then came the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test epiphany: that journalism could be literature. 

And then Ken Kesey.  And Borges.  And Vonnegut.  And Hunter S. Thompson.  And Baldwin.  And Nabokov.  And now Steinbeck.  Epiphanies every one of them.  Epiphanies tracing back to Jurassic Park.

Michael Crichton was a strange and controversial and fascinating guy.  And he died day before yesterday. 

He taught me to read, and I wish I could have thanked him in person for that.

Tom asked me today what I do when a book that a don't want to end ends.

I told him I sometimes go back and read the beginning again. We always miss things in the beginning. Its fun to go back and see what they were.

He asked me what I do after that.

I said sometimes I read the end again, see if there's anything I missed there, anything else I should be thinking about as the story drifts from my mind.

What then, he asked.

I guess then I move on to the next book, I said.

Yeah, he said, that's what you have to do. It's a bummer, but you can't stay there forever.

He said that's one of the big things with which the main character in his book is struggling: the ability to walk away from those elevated moments, the ability to recognize when it's time to move on to the next thing, even if it's not at that same level, the ability to accept that it's ok that we don't always live like that, in those states, at those levels, that it's ok to come down and experience imperfection again. And not just ok. Good. Necessary. What makes it possible to elevate again, whenever that might be. 

Spending the next five days with my friend Tom. The man's a writer. A real writer. Books not blogs. And that's awesome. A decision I very much respect. Been an excellent first few hours. Lot of talk and thinking about writing and stories. Can't get enough.

When I mention a book in a blog post, the first place I go to find a link to the book is Swaptree, a used literature (and music and film) barter marketplace.  I think it's a very cool concept, and, since I (inexcusably) don't read enough books these days to support it as an active swapper, I figure referring business is the next best thing I can offer.

There something about the site's design, however, that drives me a little bit crazy.

There is no book search function on swaptree.com, no way to perform the core functionality of the tool from its front page.  To get to a page from which a user can search for books or post books up for swapping, she has to click an "Enter the Site" button.

I guess the rationale is to make sure new users read a bit about the site and try to understand it before diving in and getting confused, but, man, talk about an unnecessary barrier to entry. 

Anyway, I just tried to let Swaptree know what I'm thinking by posting to their discussion board.  We'll see if anything comes of it.

Just read a book review:

http://greenskeptic.blogspot.com/2008/07/review-where-wild-things-were-by.html

The reviewer, Scott Edward Anderson, made a bold statement:

Until you've experienced the fear, adrenaline rush, and deep respect you feel in close proximity with a large predator, you haven't really lived.

I can't say I'm a big fan of "until you've done X, you haven't really lived" statements, but I do kind of like this one.  I think there really truly might be something a little bit different about life after thinking you're about to get eaten by something big and maybe hungry. 

I had a couple of shark moments and a couple of croc moments while working on Big Mama, and it is true that surviving gives you some new appreciation for existence.  Nothing like a good scare to yank you right back into the moment and remind you you're breathing and thinking and enjoying all your senses.

Plus, no better stories to tell than shark and crocodile stories.  Heaps of space for your audience's imagination.  Heaps of opportunity to angle it in wild directions.